The Book of the Duchess
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The Book of the Duchess is a dream vision narrative written by Geoffrey Chaucer circa 1368/9.
It tells the story of a man who has lost something significant yet unspecified: perhaps his beloved, perhaps his capacity to love or to grieve, perhaps his certainty of his reality, and has been suffering from insomnia and melancholia for eight years. In an attempt to alleviate these symptoms, the narrator reads Ovid's Story of Ceyx and Alcyone (from Metamorphoses), in a version in which Chaucer has excised the lovers' saving metamorphosis and allowed the lady Alcyone to die when she learns Ceyx has drowned. This inspires the narrator, however, not to grieve but to make a pact with Morpheus and Juno, so that he can fall asleep: the point may be that letting go of objective reality and reason and having a dream may get one closer to whatever one has lost than simply repeating a story that has the gloss of easy closure.
In the dream, the narrator awakes in a bedroom decorated with the plots of poems, from which he rides out to watch from afar an imperial hunt for a hart (a pun on heart), but is diverted by a playful young and as yet untrained "whelp" hunting hound, who leads him by a little used path and suddenly leaves him alone to discover a man dressed in black and lamenting in not very good verse under an oak tree in this fantastical forest.
At the insistent questioning of the dreamer, the Black Knight tells in halting degrees of slowly increasing clarity the story of his passion for his beloved Lady White (allegorically the Duchess Blance of Lancaster), and in doing so brings the narrator to recognize the reality of the man in black's grief; whether listening to him, or composing a poem recounting this dream, has a therapeutic effect on the narrator or the reader is indeterminable. It is an undeniable possiblity that remains elusive, for the narrator may have lost something quite different from a lady. The first 43 lines of the poem, in which he describes his symptoms, are both a defensive refusal to report any clear sympptom, and an excruciatingly precise articulation of inner chaos. Individual readers really must make their own readings of the dream and the symbols and conversation within it.
The poem is an allegory of John of Gaunt and his deceased first wife Blanche ("blanche" being Old French for "white"); Gaunt was Chaucer's patron at the time, which has not stopped Chaucer from including comedic bits in this often deeply felt elegy.
This article was revised by Jazzbojackson 06:58, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC).