A Dark Stain and a Non-Encounter

I want to write about Alcyone’s dream because it’s fascinated me for so long, but the pages of my Riverside Chaucer won’t stay open at The Book of the Duchess, so I bend back the spine and put my left palm down firmly on the gutter, but it’s as if the book is resisting my desire to read, which annoys me because I’m excited to work out why I find her dream so dark. I know that the trigger will be certain enigmatic words that tease me or some other text that swims into my head as I’m reading. I don’t know exactly what that will be, though I remember that the word “derk” is there in the poem somewhere. Now I’m skimming the opening lines, trying to take it in slowly, how the dark dream is introduced, but my eye is racing ahead, anticipating “derk,” and although I want this experience to be frictionless, I’m stopping and starting, trying to find a rhythm for my reading, seizing at words and images and dropping them or busily storing them for future recall, and then there it is! Morpheus’s cave is “derk as helle-pit.” I slow down. Here’s the dream. It’s as odd as I remember it.