The Book of the Duchess

by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Book of the Duchess

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Medieval, Fiction, Literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, College

Nook

First published January 1, 1368

About the author

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts. As scholar Bruce Holsinger has argued, charting Chaucer's life and work comes with many challenges related to the "difficult disjunction between the written record of his public and private life and the literary corpus he left behind". His recorded works and his life show many personas that are "ironic, mysterious, elusive [or] cagey" in nature, ever-changing with new discoveries.

Reviews

[Adi]

embodying Chaucer by falling asleep while reading this

[mia :•) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Take a shot every time Chaucer says 'shortly, what shal y more seye?' and then writes another 500 lines

[Ygraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

where house of fame i found vast and exhausting ego and perhaps even vaster and more exhausting cynicism, book of the duchess, although an earlier and maybe clumsier attempt at constructing a dream vision, contains some note of optimism that i cling to. it's a tale that is structured around struggling towards knowledge - chaucer's retelling of alcyone and ceyx centres on her desire to know her husband's fate but her fixation on learning the truth blinds her to the truth juno offers her through her dead husband's mouth, and likewise the poet's desire to know the cause of the black knight's sorrow blinds him to the answer again and again. and yet, through perseverance, an understanding is reached, the knight's sorrow is released through telling his tale and the scales are stripped from the poet's eyes and ultimately, both have grown.

[Maan Kawas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A masterpiece dream poem by Geoffrey Chaucer that is filled with an enchanting world. I loved its unique structure and stories, more particularly the dreams and visions. I loved the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, and the words the dead Ceyx, sent through Juno’s assistance to his mourning wife three hours before the dawn, said to his wife were so moving and sad. I loved the images depicted by the poet, such as the chamber with the stained glass windows, the sad knight in black, and the game of chess. The poem reflects’ Chaucer’s knowledge of classical literature, for instance, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, and his mentioning of the “Romance of the Rose” encourages me to read that work too.

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

lucy can confirm how hard i laughed reading this

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dream vision of love and mourning. Urbane, playful, charming, and yet genuinely moving.

[Shreya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel a bit bad for the knight - all that talk of his true love and she turns him down with a singular word 😭 quite funny though…

[kaitlin b · Rating 5 out of 5]

chaucer you are so hilarious i love you... the failure of language and the ends of grief and the inadequacy of mourning and the defeat of masculinity.. playing chess with fortune...

"I can not now wel counterfete
Hir wordes, but this was the grete
Of hir answere; she said, ‘nay’
Alle outerly. Allas! that day
The sorwe I suffred, and the wo!
That trewly Cassandra, that so
Bewailed the destruccioun
Of Troye and of Ilion,
Had never swich sorwe as I tho."

[Kayleigh Baetens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely not my favourite. I screamed at Chaucer’s character’s incompetence to listen and understand when talking to the Black Knight, but in the end he finally got there.

Also, he is the master of saying: allas, there is no more to seye, and what more can I seye? and then going on another tirade for 500 lines

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

This booke hath slayn my spirit of quiknesse and replayced al my lustihede for melancolye. I drede to rede the werk of Chaucer.

Middle English is excruciating. I did enjoy Chaucer’s initial descriptions of insomnia.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this a lot more than I expected and I really like the dream poem imagery!

[Markus J · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This ys my peyne wythoute red,
Alway deynge and be not ded."

[Kara Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poem is heartbreak and grief put into words. I have tried many times to describe this feeling, and Chaucer did so effortlessly. His words broke my heart all over again while reminding me why we love in the first place. The Book of the Duchess is pure art.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in the Riverside Chaucer but wasn't able to mark as read the entire riverside chaucer--it's massive. Anyways, this poem is a wild ride, and I really enjoyed it.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The unnamed narrator is an insomniac and has been suffering of an unnamed melancholy of eight years. One night, he attempts to pass the time by reading a books of fables, possibly Ovid's Metamorphoses or something like it. While reading, he is struck by the tragic story of Cyex and Alcyone, in which Alcyone dies of grief after the death of her husband, King Cyex, at sea. In the dream, Alcyone begs Juno to send her a sign as to whether her husband is alive or dead. Juno sends her messenger to Morpheus, asking the former to ask the latter to inhabit Cyex's body, go to Alyson, and tell her that he is dead. The narrator finishes reading and is most taken by the figure of Morpheus. Very tired and exhausted, he prays that Morpheus brings him sleep and he soon falls asleep. He "wakes up" in his bed chamber with epic stories imprinted on the glass of his windows. Outside is a hunt. Octavian and his men are out hunting a hart. The dreamer follows them until he is distracted by a puppy who leads him to a mourning man in black. The man in black (who stands in for John of Gaunt) is in distress. His wife, a paragon of beauty who stands in for Blanche of Lancaster, has died. He writes poetry to help him cope with her loss. The dreamer tries to console him. When he wakes up, he vows to write a poem about all he has experienced.

[Eva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chaucer, are you familiar with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams?

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poem has an unusual structure and I like its atypical (for poetry) conclusion where the knight is suffering because his wife died and not due to unrequited love or something more common for the era. I can't give it 5 stars because it is a bit meandering and not Chaucer's best (of what I have read so far).

[jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

homeboy performed a whole soliloquy for the love of his life, and ALL SHE SAYS IN RETURN IS "Nay." he's so much braver than me i would never have recovered from that

[Delanie Dooms · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story begins with a insomniac unable to sleep. He reads a book of stories. Finally, he is able to sleep, and he dreams of a Black Knight in deep mourning. Soon, we figure out that this man was in love with someone, and that this love is now causing him pain. We get a long description of his woman. Soon, we are able to read that their love was completely reciprocal, and that their lives were truly as one, until her untimely death. All the narrator has to say to him after his story is that his he suffered a great loss, and, thereupon, the King begins his hunting again. One wonders if the first attempt (which got nothing) is repeated in the second.

The story seems to be about the unviability of happiness: all life's pleasures will eventually end.

[Ollie Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

what a lovely tale about grief. Goodness! so much nostalgia for English A-Level. I really was a bit of an expert back then. Chaucer's style of writing feels exceedingly fantastical, and with the content obviously also being fantastical, one can often find themselves seamlessly immersed in a time period so unique. He offers something you can't get anywhere else. I find this effect is amplified if you read it out loud. The image in my head of Chaucer's world, in terms of characters, setting, etc, is more lucid than it is with any other's writing. I read this just before I went to sleep and suddenly found myself lying in the dark talking and thinking in rhyme. How fun! I always forget how awe-inducing chaucer is. A genius.

[˗ ˏ ˋ Lili ˎ ˊ ˗ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first dream vision i've ever read, and perhaps it was not the best place to start (because it doesn't strictly follow the conventions of the genre). Since it was meant to be a commissioned elegy as well, there were so many lines for praising the dead, which were kind of boring. And perhaps because it was one of the earlier works of Chaucer, it didn't make me stop and think that much (like his other works do with their complex themes).
Nonetheless, it was a quick and enjoyable read. I loved how Chaucer approached death as a natural stage of life, and advised the reader to accept it as such.

[Theo Chen · Rating 2 out of 5]

ok reading Middle English is hard… and yes I am counting books read for uni as goodreads books because otherwise I will never log anything here.

As someone who loves to dream, and dissect my dreams and share this with my friends, I actually liked this! The sad knight was a bit too glum, and he spent way too fkn long describing how beautiful the woman he “loves” is but otherwise the verse and description is pretty nice? also why does he spend so long saying how sad he is about her but uses one sentence to explain that she died. And we don’t even get reasons why. Smh.

[William_Furneaux · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not even sure how to go about rating this. Like, was it good compared to what I normally read? Was the plot well-developed by modern standards? Not really? Was it a riotous laugh because of unique spelling and word choice? Absolutely. So basically. If you have to read Chaucer, just like. Go into it with one singular expectation, which should be "ah yes the man who thinks the pinnacle of female beauty is a neck without collarbones."

So yeah I gave this four stars because a bro who has been dead 620 years has no business making me laugh so hard.

[jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this on a whim because i was down an indefensible wikipedia rabbit hole about john of gaunt for normal guy reasons. anyway this is not my scholarly area so i don't have smart thoughts but this was quite lovely and poignant in some places. love a depressed insomniac narrator curing his woes by reading classic literature. me too man

[Jennifer Irving · Rating 3 out of 5]

and it was all a dream .

[Jasmine · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was okay, reading this for my Chaucer course but still getting used to the language and all that jazz.

[Leyla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chaucer attempts to cure depression via ASMR dream

[Clifton Knox · Rating 5 out of 5]

A moving tale indeed

I was enthralled by Chaucer’s tale of the sorrowful knight. After reading it I understand why he is considered the father of English literature.

[Shaw Worth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent if you want to expand your deer vocabulary (ll. 429-442)

[Daisy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Plot was a bit all over the place.