The spirit of Scipio Africanus comes to the dreaming poet and offers to reward his study of Macrobius with a vision of his own. He takes the dreamer through the gates of a beautiful garden filled with allegorical figures related to courtly values and love. The other birds weigh in with their advice.
Nature asks the formel to choose, and the formel asks leave to wait a year.
Nature agrees, and the birds sing a carol to celebrate Nature's goodness, singing so loudly on their departure that they awaken the dreamer and the poem ends. See especially his playful appeal to the authority of the classics and his willingness to involve himself as a character in some particularly hapless attempts at interpretation. The beautiful place of the vision's forest, and the enclosed garden about Venus' court, both are highly suggestive symbols for medieval readers. To return to such perfection implies that the dream's content is somehow purified, abstracted from reality's trivial details. The allegory gives Chaucer a vocabulary of ideas in images with which he can comment on his world.