Poetic Insomnia: The Book of the Duchess, part 1

Week two of the Chaucer Reading Challenge

Chaucer Asleep, by Edward Burne-Jones

I hope that you enjoyed working your way through this Chaucerian dream vision. If you have read The Canterbury Tales, then you probably felt that this was in a different literary register. While this early poem is certainly different, we might recognize a few markers that we could consider Chaucerian. First of all, like the Tales, this is a frame narrative, or a story that is contained within another story. In the Tales, the frame is the pilgrims' tale-telling contest, and the inset narratives are the tales themselves; in The Book of the Duchess, the frame is the narrator’s reading of a book in order to get to sleep, and the inset narrative is the dream. (Actually, there is a second inset narrative in the Ovidian story of Ceyx and Alcione, contained within the book that the narrator reads.)

The other significant "Chaucerian" marker is the presentation of the narrator, but we need to work our way through part of the poem before this may become evident. Our narrator begins by conveying his amazement concerning how he has been able to carry on without sleep, in a state of dazed apathy for so long: "For I have feeling in nothing, / But as it were a mazed thing / Alway in point to falle adoun" (lines 11-13). To modern readers, this may sound a lot like what we would call clinical depression.

What has brought him to this state? He does not know, unless it is a certain illness that has afflicted him for the past eight years, "And yet my boote [cure] is never the neer; / For ther is physicien but oon" (lines 38-39). If you are familiar with Shakespeare's Sonnet 147, then this is a familiar trope: "My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease." Or for pop-music enthusiasts, we have the immortal words of Robert Palmer: "Doctor, doctor, give me the news, / I've got a bad case of lovin' you."

This is lovesickness, and Chaucer here is setting certain expectations for the kind of poem that this will be. Chaucer's immediate models, the French poets Machaut, Froissart, and Deschamps, had all written dits amoureux, or highly stylized poems of love, in which the focus is almost entirely on the frustrated desire of the male lover—a mode also familiar from about a million pop songs. ("Every Breath You Take," anyone?)

In Chaucer's variation, he calls for a book that he might read to pass the time. The volume that he ends up with is Ovid, or perhaps a French translation or reworking of Ovid, and the particular narrative that he lands on is the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, a tale originally told in the Metamorphoses. In the tale, King Ceyx goes on a journey and is drowned at sea. His wife, Alcyone, in despair over his long absence, prays to the goddess Juno for news. In response, Juno sends a messenger to awaken Morpheus, the god of sleep, who reanimates the watery corpse of Ceyx and brings him to Alcyone to announce his death to her. She then dies of a broken heart.¹

From an early fifteenth-century manuscript, showing Ceyx saying farewell to Alcyone as he departs.

This is pretty grim stuff and may seem especially harsh as a consolatory poem, which it appears to be. (See the introduction, from last week.) This is especially the case when we consider that Chaucer omits Ovid's consolatory ending, in which the gods transform the two lovers into birds, and in this form they may continue their life together. This is, after all, a story from Metamorphoses, but Chaucer leaves out the transformation.

Why does Chaucer omit this ending? This is unclear, but I may have an idea to offer when we come to his poem's conclusion.

But meanwhile, there is that Chaucerian narrator: how does he respond to this devastating tale? Does he weep over the sorrow of Alcyone? Does he quake with horror at the zombie-like return of Ceyx? Does he reflect on the hopelessness of his own love?

No.

Instead, he expresses astonishment that there is a god of sleep, because he thought that there was only one god. If a god like this were able to help him sleep, he would gladly give him the gift of a luxurious feather bed.

Here we first encounter that famous Chaucerian irony—the effect of an intentionally naive first-person narrator set against a poet who is clearly immensely learned and sophisticated. It is in that distance between poet and narrator that Chaucer creates his ironic effects. Furthermore, the poet trusts his reader to be sharp enough to detect this ironic distance. We know, along with the poet, that Ovidian stories are from Classical, pre-Christian Rome and feature multiple gods, as opposed to the one Christian God. The narrator, however, seems ignorant of this schoolboy fact. We might compare this moment to the Chaucerian narrator's claim in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales that he is really quite stupid and can't understand much. (“My wit is short,” line 746.)

In any case, the narrator's prayer for sleep is answered, because, like many an avid reader on many a night, he falls asleep right there on his book.

The remainder of the poem is his dream, which is where we will pick up in this weekend’s post.

Meanwhile, here are some questions to consider:

• Why do you think Chaucer omits the conclusion of Ovid's tale?

• What is the effect of the narrator's lack of historical understanding of what he is reading?

• The narrator tells us that he will come back to the subject of his illness later, but he never does. Do you think that this omission is intentional? Why or why not?

I'd love to know your thoughts. I'll be back tomorrow. Meanwhile, thanks for reading, from my fancy internet bedtime reading to yours.

Photo by Klim Sergeev on Unsplash

1. We might pause for a moment to appreciate the moment in which Chaucer demonstrates how difficult it is to wake up the god of sleep, as the messenger has to blow a horn in his ear, in response to which Morpheus opens just one eye: “‘Awake!’ quod he, ‘Who is lith there?’ / And blew his Horne right in hir ere / And cried ‘awaketh!’ wonder hye” (lines 181-183).