ABSTRACT
The Book of the Duchess centres upon the death of a beautiful woman, and upon the mourning of a man dressed in black. The dreamer in the Book of the Duchess, however, goes well beyond a temporary wakefulness and exists in a state of insomnia so profound that he wonders how he can carry on living. The tale takes up almost two hundred lines of the Book of the Duchess, though Geoffrey Chaucer alters his source significantly in places. The classical tale of Ceyx and Alcyone would have been well-known to Chaucer’s audience. In the version by Ovid, the couple are devoted to one another, but then Ceyx is drowned in a shipwreck. The tale of Ceyx and Alcyone has shown us that death is indeed death, and whatever happens thereafter, our loved ones will no longer be as we have known them: they cannot come back.
