ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most useful description of the style of the Book qf the Duchess is that of Wolfgang Clemen (Clemen 1964, 62-65). Throughout the poem, he observes, flights of rhetoric wrought to "the pitch of exaggeration" alternate, not always gracefully, with colloquial passages full of "sudden cries and pious ejaculations," vows, protestations, asides, and an elliptical syntax where relatives are "'swallowed' as it were, in the hasty and emotional pressure of the narrative:'! Chaucer's versification is experimental in a complementary way: bold, pungent, and aiming always at "variety and urgency:' Unlike the subtle fluency of Gower, whose dialogue preserves its animation without requiring us to supply so much as an exclamation point, reading aloud a Chaucerian passage like that which reveals the fact of the lady's death (ED 1298-1310) can leave one breathless.
