lycanthropia

I think I finally found something on which I can actually concentrate. I haven’t picked up my Riverside Chaucer since I was in grad school in Britain, but its comforting lump rode in my bicycle basket for two years and now I turn to the big blue paperback’s dream poems and find them compact and modest and companionable. All this time I have been angry at myself for being unable to finish voluminous nineteenth-century novels, when it was just that I needed to be reading poems. I feel giddy with relief.

§

I have gret wonder, be this lyte,
How that I lyve, for day ne nyght
I may nat slepe wel nygh noght;
I have so many an ydel thoght
Purely for defaute of slep
That, by my trouthe, I take no kep
Of nothing, how hyt cometh or gooth,
Ne me nys nothyns leef nor looth.
Al is ylyche good to me—
Joye or sorowe, wherso hyt be—
For I have felynge in nothyng,
But as yr were a mased thyng,
Alway in poynt to falle a-doun;
For sorwful ymagynacioun
Ys alway hooly in my mynde.

And wel ye woot, agaynes kynde
Hyr were to lyven in thys wyse,
For nature wolde nat suffyse
To noon erthly creature
Nat longe tyme to endure
Withoute slep and be in sorwe.
And I ne may, ne nyght ne morwe,
slepe; and thus melancholye
And drede I have for to dye.
Defaute of slep and hevynesse
Hath sleyn my spirit of quyknesse
That I have lost al lustyhede.
Suche fantasies ben in myn hede
So I not what is best to doo.

So whan I saw I might not slepe
Til now late this other night,
Upon my bed I sat upright
And bad oon reche me a book,
A romaunce, and he it me tok
To rede and drive the night away….

{The Book of the Duchess}