Irony and the Age of Gold in the Book of the Duchess

RONSARD'S couplet recalls a theme common enough in classical and medieval poetry: that the Golden Age, man's brief happy spring on earth, was a time when Love ruled human relations, and love's fulfillment was to be had for the asking. To the mind of the moralist our Fall, from Arcadia or from Eden, has one cause and symptom: "love is falle into discord"2; wars displace peaceful friendliness. The amorist's private passion is as much affected by the world's decline: eros joins amicitia and caritas in a general decay, when innocence becomes duplicity and contentment lapses into unsatisfiable longing. This essay argues that Chaucer drawing on his French contemporaries and on Ovid uses primitivistic myth to console John of Gaunt for the death of his first wife. The consolation, such as it is, proves to be secular, not Christian. Nature teaches the poet her law, and she forces the modern lover to come to terms with the golden past. The narrator's characterization of himself is at the heart of the poem. His interpretation of his experience shapes ours, though not always in the way he intends; his part in the action of his dream makes possible its resolution. He is an unhappy lover whose portrait Chaucer takes, almost word for word, from the opening of Froissart's Paradys d'Amours: