LYRIC FORMS FROM FRANCE THEIR HISTORY AND USE I INTRODUCTION Those who make a practice of reading poetry, even in a desultory way, are likely to be able to identify at least one fixed verse form. That a sonnet has fourteen lines is a matter of common knowledge to many people, even though they may ignore its elaborate rhyme system. The sonnet, coming originally from Italy, is the most frequent of all fixed verse forms in English, but the ballade and the rondeau have in the last fifty years become increasingly familiar. The poems that belong to what might be called the ballade and the rondeau families, and the lyric that is known as a villanelle, originated in France, the sestina in Provence. To the ballade family belong the ballade itself, the chant royal, the ballade à double refrain, and the double ballade. Of the rondeau family, the triolet is the earliest ancestor known, and from it have developed in more or less chronological order the rondel, the rondeau, and the rondeau redoublé. All of these forms are characterized by a refrain, a group of lines, a single line, or a phrase, recurring at regular intervals. The villanelle, likewise, which belongs to a much later literary generation, is a refrain poem. The sestina is built up, also, on the principle of repetition in the verse pattern, but in the case of the Provençal form it is a matter of the repetition of single words in an intricate scheme, rather than of the recurrence of an easily recognized refrain. 3 The reader with a taste for poetry who is interested also in the drama, remembering Rostand's play of Cyrano de Bergerac, may recall that Cyrano fights a duel, at one point in the action, with the foppish and foolish Vicomte de Valvert, who has assailed Cyrano's ears with the contemptuous epithet of poet, and that Cyrano responds by admitting, forsooth, that he is a poet, but that he is also a fighter and that in order to uphold both of his claims he will engage the Vicomte in a duel, the while he times his sword thrusts to an impromptu ballade; and how Cyrano pleasingly suggests that the Vicomte does not know what a ballade is, anyway, but that a ballade in truth is composed of three stanzas of eight lines and an envoy of four, and that it is necessary for Cyrano to take great care in choosing the rhymes in advance, because no new rhymes can be introduced after the three appearing in the first stanza have been settled upon, and that the words which he announces, amusingly enough, for the refrain of his impromptu ballade, are, "At the last line of the envoy I shall break through your guard and pink you," or, as the line runs in French, "Qu'à la fin de l'envoy je touche." John McCrae's In Flanders Fields, the most frequently quoted and widely known of all the poems produced during the Great War, is a rondeau. The features of the rondeau were once enumerated by the seventeenth century poet Voiture in the form itself, and it is this poem which Austin Dobson has imitated in the following lines: You bid me try, blue eyes, to write Still, there are five lines-ranged aright. My easy Muse. They did till you— You bid me try! This makes them nine. The port's in sight; Now, just a pair to end with 'oo' When maids command, what can't we do? It is quite possible for the apprentice in poetry, after consulting a handbook of poetics or a treatise on the mechanics of French or English verse, to use the ballade and the rondeau, which have become poetic patterns for both French and English versifiers, as mere metrical exercises. The very rigidity of the rules that prescribe their structure makes them attractive alike to poet and poetaster. But these forms are, after all, most significant to the student of literary history, be he poet or critic, to whom the group of French fixed verse forms suggest the high romance and glamorous enchantment of a colorful and picturesque state of society. In the literature of the Middle Ages, the poet frequently represented himself as rapt from consciousness by a vision of other worlds and of events, past and future. Dante, to name the most illustrious example, employed his vision to interpret the universe. If the author of the most casual and commonplace experiments in the ballade or rondeau should, in the fashion of the Middle Ages, conceive himself as beholding in a dream the fair past of these forms, the vision might outline itself in this summary fashion: Before his eyes, turned back to medieval France, would tower the gray battlements of a castle rising from green fields—“an outpost of winter" in a world of spring-arched over by a deep blue sky, outlined against a background of fragrant fruit trees in blossom, the rough walls echoing to the sound of bird song mingling with the music of viol and lute. And this setting might be peopled, still in the dream, by multicolored groups of men and women, kindled by spring magic to engage once more in the games and rites of the season. And these ceremonies would assume the guise of dances, and every time, as the same evolution in the pattern of the dance repeated itself, would come the same strain of music and the same phrase of song. But a vision of this sort, after all, would not go to the root of the matter. The dreamer might well be rudely roused from his picture world by the rumbling of a heavy truck, or the bleating echo of an automobile horn, before he had had a chance, like the central figure in the Divine Comedy, to evolve a cosmos, or, smaller enterprise, to penetrate in his dream, the origins of refrain poetry, in general, or the connection of fixed verse forms such as the ballade and the rondeau with the spring rites of the early folk of France. The beginnings of refrain poetry is an interesting subject for speculation. By and large, it is true that the refrain in the literature of any language goes back to a far earlier stage of civilization than is represented by the most hoary of written records. The refrain, like so many persistent survivals in modern life and literature, is a relic of a folk still applying primitive methods to agriculture and industry, still under the spell of a primitive religion. The medieval ladies and gentlemen, emerging in the poet's vision from their gray castle on to the greensward to circle about in the spring sunshine, are by many stages removed from the state of society in which the simple folk of a countryside assembled at crossroads or market place to make the best possible terms at the beginning of summer, with the gods of life and fertility. The choral song of these assemblies is the very earliest form of all poetry. If we |