Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres wedres overshake.

These lines come from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English dream-vision poem commonly known as The Parliament of Fowls (also spelled Foules), generally dated to the 1380s. The poem opens with a springtime awakening: after reading, the narrator falls asleep and is led into a garden associated with love and renewal. Chaucer uses the conventional medieval “reverdie” (spring-opening) to mark a shift from winter’s hardship to the soft warmth of summer, setting an auspicious seasonal frame for the poem’s central scene—an assembly of birds on St Valentine’s Day to choose mates.

The speaker greets summer as a benevolent force whose gentle sun has “overshaken” (shaken off) winter’s storms. Beyond simple description, the welcome functions as a thematic threshold: warmth and light stand for renewed life, fertility, and the reawakening of love after dormancy. In "The Parlement of Foules," this seasonal change prepares the reader for a debate about choosing partners—suggesting that love, like the seasons, is both natural and cyclical, yet also subject to choice and contention. The archaic diction (“somer,” “sonne softe,” “wedres”) heightens the ceremonial tone of the invocation.