Consolation in the Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer

Medieval Institute Publications. Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints. Kalamazoo, Mich: Medieval Institute Publications, College of Arts & Sciences, Western Michigan University, 2004. Print.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Works Consulted Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. 1814. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

1; pg. 1, 26 pgs Rigby, Stephen Henry. (2000). The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Case for Women. Chaucer Review, (pgs 133-165) Stanbury, Sarah.

Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004. Print. Lindberg-Seyersted, Brita. "Sylvia Plath's Psychic Landscapes." English Studies 71.6 (1990): 509-22.

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(1995). Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House. Vanhoozer, K. J. (Ed.). (2008).

Once readers analyze the distracted behaviors of both characters as well as the parallel language of Poe, they will realize that Usher and the narrator accuse their peers of their own flaws because they are truly unaware of their own weaknesses. It becomes clear that both character’s hypersensitivities cause them to be overly distracted by their surroundings; and they are therefore too distracted to recognize their own faults. Usher’s inability to perform basic human functions gives evidence to the magnitude with which his hypersensitivity disrupts his daily life. Similarly, the narrator in TTH’s obsession with the old man’s eye distracts him from thinking rationally. The narrator’s distracted state causes him to rationalize his crime, rather than recognizing his responsible for the murder.

After a catalogue of metaphors during which Keats’s narrator fails escape through each, the miserable man comes to the conclusion that escape from his life is impossible, and transcendence is a horizon reached only by the song of birds. Beginning his poem with "My heart aches" (Line 1), Keats delves immediately into the melancholy of his narrator. Feeling lethargic and downtrodden, the speaker describes that he feels as if “of hemlock [he] had drunk” (Line 2). Plagued by a dullness of sense, this man makes clear that it is not envy that he feels toward this bird, “But being too happy in thine happiness” (Line 6). His aching heart imagines this “Dryad of the trees” (Line 7) singing of the coming summer without a care in the world and no knowledge of the suffering of despondent mortals.

New York: Ballantine, 1995. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Two Towers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Tolkien, J.R.R.

New York: Scribner, 1984. 273-287. Kalechofsky, Roberta. George Orwell. Boston: Twayne, 1987.