User:ElenaDela/"The Book of the Duchess" by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Book of the Duchess
Geoffrey Chaucer is an infamous early fourteenth-century poet. His works of medieval English poetry are taught around the world. Such works as the marriage tales discuss Chaucer's take on the topic through his characters. The Book of the Duchess is a poem that begins Chaucer's collection of poetry in his book: "Dream Visions and Other Poems". The Book of the Duchess features the narrative of a dreamer, Chaucer himself, as he enters the dreamscape to a cemetery and meets a knight, a man in black, mourning the loss of his wife. The tale follows the dreamer as he questions the knight on his grief. As the knight divulges his experience with loss the dreamer comes to understand grief, an emotional state the dreamer expresses to be as elusive to the man in his waking days as in his dream state.

= Geoffrey Chaucer = Geoffrey Chaucer was an English author and poet born in London in the early fourteenth century. Born the son of a wine merchant, Chaucer grew to become a part of his father's business, later taking it over himself. Chaucer began to publish his works after establishing himself in his trade in his late twenties. After his marriage to Philippa Roet in 1346, Chaucer began to write more extensively on love and marriage in his tales.

Dream Visions and Other Poems
Chaucer published collections of poems and tales discussing the topics of marriage, life, and love, which were later published under the title "Dream Visions and Other Poems", in 2007. Written in medieval english before the vowel shift, Dream Visions and other Poems offer translated footnotes of the original medieval english text. In the collection, Chaucer's most famous works include "The Legend of Good Women", "The Parliament of Fowls", and "The House of Fame". Chaucer's tales explore the topic of marriage with respect to the social, political, and economic roles between wives and husbands in marraige. Chaucer's work is well known to navigate marriage with sarcasm and irony, including moments of satire in the works. The Book of the Duchess, however, is a more serious tale, differing from Chaucer's usual touches of irony and humour.

Characters

 * The dreamer
 * The man in black (the knight) who mourns his late wife within the dream
 * [not present] the deceased wife; the third character whom the dreamer and knight discuss

The Sequence
In The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer, as the dreamer, navigates the issue of grief that is so foreign of a concept to him, in a hazy sleep-deprived dreamscape. The tale is a first-person narration by the dreamer. It is comprised of three sections; the first, before the dreamer is asleep, grappling in his confusion to find the reason behind grief. The second, or middle section, is during the dream as the dreamer enters the dreamscape and engages with the man in black on his loss. Thirdly, the end is marked by the dreamer awakening with the understanding of loss and how one is afflicted by their grief.

The beginning of The Book of the Duchess begins with the dreamer confiding to the reader that he suffers from the inability to sleep. After describing his being plagued by the issue of not being able to fall asleep for many weeks, the dreamer's thoughts on marriage and grief turn deeper, leading him in his confused state in his sleep to haze-like dreamscape. Prior to the dreamer falling asleep and entering the dreamscape, he ponders the loss of something he could not comprehend losing. The narrator's sleep deprivation has rendered him confused. His unable to employ proper faculties of thought and is stuck on the issue of grief. The dreamer questions his own being and how he is to know between life and death. He falls asleep wondering how he is to feel loss of not living when he can not feel living in his state.

The Dreamer
In this dreamscape, the dreamer wakes to a man in black standing over a grave in a meadow. The dreamer then begins to question the man in black on his loss, to which he responds by describing his wife in great detail. The man in black reveals himself to be a knight of high standing. The narrator begins questioning the knight of his life and purpose for being with him in the dream. The knight responds with self-revelatory accounts of his life and that of his wife. After telling the dreamer how he had met and won his wife, the dreamer relents a great love is an immense loss. The knight conveys to the dreamer that he does not know of true loss, that he has lost more than the other man could conceive.

Once the dreamer seems to comprehend the man's grief to some extent, the knight rides off on horseback away from the meadow, leaving all the dreamer has learned and felt to stay with him in the meadow. Shortly after, the dreamer wakes from his dream back in his bed and realizes his vision of the man in black had been a dreamed personification of mourning, for his subconscious to allow the dreamer to better understand grief.

= References =


 * 1) Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Kathryn L. Lynch. Dream Visions and Other Poems: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism. New York City, W.W. Norton, 2007.
 * 2) Geoffrey Chaucer Biography, Biography.com Editors, April 2, 2014, https://www.biography.com/writer/geoffrey-chaucer.