THE PRIMARY MODE of discourse in the Book of the Duchess is conversation; the poem takes conversation as its model for the relationship between author and reading audience. The poem comments on both terms in this hermeneutically rich analogy, showing that not only are relationships between authors and distant audiences problematic, but those between interlocutors who are face to face are problematic, too. In the Book of the Duchess, interlocutors are often alienated from one another. Every example of conversation emphasizes the difficulties of communication by casting doubts on the ability of the one who is addressed to respond correctly, or even to respond at all. The poem contains speech addressed to a woman who, in dying of a broken heart, seems to have willfully misinterpreted a truthful message, to a god who may not exist, to a knight who may be a projection of the speaker's imagination, and to Death, who does not answer. The woman, Alcyone, is a character in a tale in a book, a fixed form not responsive to its audience, and the mourned White, the topic of conversation between the narrator and the Black Knight, is one of the many medieval examples of women who are important because they are absent. In each case, communication seems to be stymied.

The poem can be seen as a description of the insoluble problem of the isolation of the self, or of successful communication between the narrator and the Black Knight, or of the formation of a new relationship in which two selves mutually influence each other, forming a unit or system larger than either of them alone.