Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

His first great original work was produced in 1369, when John of Gaunt’s beautiful and charming young wife died. The Book of the Duchesse makes no pretence to originality of treatment. The poet, after a conventional lament over the conventional hard-heartedness of his mistress, falls into a conventional slumber in the course of which he has a conventional dream that he is following a conventional hunt in a conventional forest. Here he meets a handsome young man

Of the age of four and twenty yeer
·····
And he was clothed al in blakke.

The young man is complaining to himself most piteously:—

Hit was gret wonder that nature
Might suffre(n) any creature
To have swich sorwe and be not deed.

The poet is touched by his sorrow, and since they have evidently lost the hunt, he begs the mourner to tell him of “his sorwes smerte.” This opens the way for a long, rambling lament, full of allusions to classical mythology. So involved is it, that the poet finds some difficulty in grasping the point, and cuts into a description of the lady’s charms with a puzzled,—

Sir ... wher is she now?

The brief answer—

I have lost more than thou wenest
·····
She is deed—

strikes a note of tragedy which is beyond the scope of the youthful poet as yet, and the elegy ends abruptly with

Is that your los? by god hit is routhe.[37]