This folk of which I telle you so
Upon a carole wenten tho;
A lady caroled hem, that highte
Gladnesse the blisful the lighte;
Wel coude she singe and lustily,
Non half so wel and semely,
And make in song swich refreininge
It sat her wonder wel to singe.
The dream, the May morning, the garden, the fair company, the carole all were repeated for three hundred years by poets of every degree, who drew from the Romaunt of the Rose unsparingly, as from a perennial fountain. The writers whom one would expect to be impatient with all things conventional, Chaucer and Sir David Lyndsay, give no sign that the May of the old French poet has lost its charm for them; though each on one occasion, Chaucer in the Hous of Fame and Lyndsay in the Dreme, with a definite purpose changes the time to winter. With both, the May comes back again, in the Legend of Good Women and in the Monarchy.
Even Petrarch, the first of the moderns to think contemptuously of the Middle Ages, uses the form of the Dream in his Trionfi—he lies down and sleeps on the grass at Vaucluse, and the vision follows, of the Triumph of Love.