'When winter first begins to bite -- Echoes and Re-echoes of Chaucer at FR 2.iii.273

In The Road to Middle-earth Tom Shippey argues (184-85) that the poem Bilbo recites to Frodo in The Ring Goes South 'in rhythm and theme ... echoes the magnificent coda to Love's Labour's Lost' :

When winter first begins to bite
and stones crack in the frosty night,
when pools are black and trees are bare,
'tis evil in the Wild to fare;

(FR 2.iii.273) 

When icicles hang by the wall
 And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,

(LLL 5.2) 

As far as rhythm and theme go there can be little argument, but I would suggest that we can say more here. For the words of Bilbo's poem echo the opening lines of þe Clerkes Compleinte, Tolkien's little known parody of the opening lines of Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Tolkien's Middle English original is followed by my rendering into Modern English:

þe Clerkes Compleinte 

Whanne þat Octobre mid his schoures derke
Þe erþe haþ dreint, and wetė windes cherke
& swoghe in naked braunches colde and bare,
& þ’oldė sonne is hennes longe yfare; 

The Clerk's Complaint 

When October with his showers dark
The earth has drowned, and wet winds creak
And sigh in naked branches cold and bare,

And the old sun has from here far fared;

The dark waters, the cracking stone and the creaking, naked branches, the cold of winter, the rhyme of bare and yfare tell the tale plainly: in composing Bilbo's verse Tolkien echoes his own echoes of Chaucer.* 

* þe Clerkes Compleinte is most easily found in J. Fitzgerald's A "Clerkes Compleinte": Tolkien and the Division of Lit. and Lang. Tolkien Studies 6 (2009) 41-57.

I have not yet completed my research on this connection yet, so I am unsure whether someone else has already noted it. Even so, I believe it is interesting enough to mention.