His own _Book of the Duchesse_ uses the same magazine of courtly love: rehearsal of a tale of Ovid, May-morning dream-vision, “love’s servant” in “complaint,” praise of the lady, tapestry description, couplet of facile fluency. How much poetry could still be conveyed through these symbols he showed later in the pageant prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_. Kittredge[25] finds the conventional dream manipulated in the _Book of the Duchesse_ to give some sense of actual dreaming. Every attentive reader has been relieved by the realism of the half-grown, unbroken dog, A whelp that fauned me as I stood, That hadde y-folowed, and coude no good. Hit com and creep to me as lowe, Right as hit hadde me y-knowe, Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres, And leyde al smothe doun his heres. 389-394.[26] The touch of individualizing stands out, indeed, because most of the description is conventionally generalized and decorative; but it may be significant as forecasting Chaucer’s later use of gesture, and as a means of transition. There is an attempt at variety in the punctuation of the long praise of the lady by dialogue; and the closing dialogue is really rapid. An expert metrist in conventional modes, with originality enough for pleasing variations—we can hardly read more of Chaucer into the _Book of the Duchesse_. The Ovidian thin lucidity of narrative, the usual aggregation, the involution, above all the stalling for description, show that he was not yet giving his mind to narrative composition. He was spurred to explore narrative by the timely stimulus of Italy. First of English artists to learn there, he was among the most responsive. The _Parlement of Foules_ shows immediate artistic development and promises more. The verse is enriched. The five-stress line, so near the beginning of its long English history, is realized not only for variety, but for flexibility to the mood of speech. Most of its typical variations, shift of cæsura, syncope, doubling of the unstress as in anapest or dactyl, close on stress or on unstress, are here. Though there is not yet that narrative fluency which makes the verse constantly further the story, there is narrative stanza. Stanza, of course, was no innovation. Such set lyric forms as _balade_ and _rondel_, which were to hold their popularity into the sixteenth century, were exploring the technic of refrain. Linking refrain, used simply in verse narrative,[27] was carried in _Pearl_ to intricate harmonies. In French and in English, stanza was an assured technic. But its narrative development owes much to Chaucer. His adaptation of the Italian stanza in the _Parlement of Foules_ opened the way toward that technical mastery which is one of the characteristic achievements of his narrative.