Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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*The Book of the Duchess* is a Middle English dream vision poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, written in the tradition of French courtly love allegory. The narrator, suffering from an eight-year illness of sleeplessness and emotional numbness (likely a metaphor for unrequited love), reads a tale from Ovid about King Ceyx and Queen Alcyone: Ceyx drowns at sea, and the god Morpheus animates his corpse to appear to the grieving Alcyone in a dream and announce his death, after which she dies of sorrow. The narrator, charmed by this story of the sleep gods, promises lavish gifts to Morpheus if he will grant rest, and promptly falls asleep over his book. His resulting dream — which the excerpt begins to describe — places him in a richly decorated chamber covered in Trojan War imagery and the *Romance of the Rose*, then draws him outdoors on a hunt. Distinctively, Chaucer frames serious grief (almost certainly an elegy for Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster) through layers of literary artifice: a narrator too numb to feel, a tale-within-a-tale, and a dream that distances raw mourning behind elaborate, beautiful fiction. The poem is an early and characteristic example of Chaucer's use of the dream frame to explore loss and consolation while showcasing his debt to classical and French sources.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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