The Book of the Duchess
A narrator who has not slept properly for eight years reads himself drowsy on the tale of a drowned king and the wife who will not stop waiting, then dreams himself into a May morning and a hunt he quickly loses track of. A knight dressed in black is sitting alone under an oak making a complaint to nobody, and the dreamer keeps asking questions whose answers he seems unable to hear. Chaucer's earliest long poem was written for John of Gaunt after his first wife died in the plague year.
Open The Book of the Duchess in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.
Lineage
- alludes to ↑ Metamorphoses
- influenced by ↑ The Romance of the Rose
Attributes
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Mode / tone
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 59% · 10 shared
- 58% · 14 shared
- 55% · 13 shared
- 55% · 12 shared
- 51% · 11 shared
- 51% · 9 shared