After Ceyx’s death in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Alcyone and her deceased husband transform into birds: “And at last, through the pity of the gods, both changed to birds. Though thus they suffered the same fate, still even thus their love remained, nor were their conjugal bonds loosened because of their feathered shape. Still do they mate and rear their young; and for seven peaceful days in the winter season Alcyone broods upon her nest floating upon the surface of the waters” (173). The transformation reunites the married couple and provides them with a life after death. It thus turns a story about unbearable loss into a consoling tale. In The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer does not include the consoling transformation of Ceyx and Alcyone. Following the husband’s death, Alcyone simply dies of grief: “‘Alas!’ she said for sorrow, and died within the third morning” (2).  There is no suggestion of an afterlife, of a realm in which her sorrow will be appeased. And yet the birds, so notably absent from Chaucer’s story, appear in a new context, as the narrator dreams of being awakened by song: “I was waked by a great heap of small birds that had startled me out of my sleep through the sound and sweetness of their song” (3). Perhaps the transformative power of the birds is here transposed onto the Dreamer, a melancholy character in need of a cure.