The Book Duchess Poem Analysis

Chaucer wrote of The Book Duchess as an eulogy for Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of his friend, patron and employer John of Gaunt. The poem is organized as a dream vision and as such is build in circles that are closed and interlinked with around each other. At the core of the poem is the Man in Black’s lament for his queen and on the most outer circle is the poet, tormented by a personal loss, that remains unexplained within the text. While the Knight is entirely overcome with his grief and unable, even refusing to perceive consolation, we see the poet fervently wishing for sleep and ready to pay a high price for a relieve of his mental, and as a consequence physical suffering. The poem’s approach to sorrow and the nature of the consolation …show more content…
As critics have argued (e.g. Morse, Carson), this is one of Chaucer’s most important methods, through which he allows the Knight, to talk through his sorrow, whether it is done purposefully or not. The Knight’s lament gains the dreamer’s attention first through his esthetic appeal. As Johnson states, the dreamer's wonder at the stranger is what establishes the initiation of his relationship with The Black Knight and “the mutual inter-play of antagonism and sympathy between the Dreamer and the Knight, the potent alchemical solution that will eventually crystallize into humanistic consolation”(55). The dreamer is astonished by the extent of sorrow, expressed by the knight: “It was a great wonder that Nature / Might suffer any creature / To have such sorrow and not be dead. (Chaucer 467-469)” His wonder shows his own inexperience with grief and personal loss, which will complicate the communication between him and the grieving stranger, but also reveals his immediate sympathy and explains his desire to start that communication. The use of courtly language of the Knight’s lament makes for a beautiful expression of his sorrow and draws the dreamer towards him, but as Phillip C. Boardman points out the ideal of courtly love is so controversial, it also pre-defines the dreamer’s inability to understand the knight. The beauty of the knight’s story allows for Blanche’s …show more content…
Guillemette Bolens and Paul Beekman Taylor argue that the Dreamer’s correction is the key to the poem’s resolution. The Black Knight’s metaphor is intentionally mistaken. Naturally the Dreamer is confused, which allows him to be a judge and provide consolation. The specific focus on the rules of the game, as they were in Chaucer’s time and the exploration of what his knowledge of the game provide further insight in the way the consolation is achieved. While in the actual game the fers is supposed to protect the king, the Man in Black misinterprets its the role and said he was mated because he failed to protect it. In reality, however this reveals his guilty conscious, for not being able to save his queen. A further confusion comes from the fact that his queen is white and hence they would be opposing in the game (Bolens and Taylor). The dreamer then is accurately questioning and correcting the Knight and through that, helps him free his consciousness from the guilt and prepare himself for the journey to consolation. He finally is forced to express the source of his sorrow in a plain short statement, which is both impossible for his listener to misunderstand and a starting point of his journey to self-discovery, which will help him achieve consolation: “‘She is dead’” (Chaucer 1309). In order