II.

Poetry

Although Machaut wrote during the terrible events of the Hundred Years’ War, he would not have considered the war a proper subject for poetry. Instead, like his poet contemporaries, he wrote in the tradition of Le Roman de la Rose: allegories, moralizing dissertations, fabulous dreams, love ballads, and evocations of Venus, the goddess of Love. Unlike his contemporaries, he was capable of great originality, notably in his handling of metrical forms (see Versification). He established the musical and poetic rules for the lai, the virelai, the chant royal, the rondeau, and the ballade, all forms which survived robustly into the next century and beyond, finding their highest expression in the works of the 15th-century poet François Villon.

An interesting example of Machaut’s metrical innovation can be found in Le Remède de Fortune, a didactic poem of over 4,000 lines, into which are inserted lyrical interludes, set to music by the poet. One such insertion, a ballade sung by Hope, to comfort the poet, is in 12-lined verses (itself an innovation, much copied by later poets) with a mixture of lines of 3 and 7 syllables. Centuries later, the poet Paul Verlaine made this uneven-syllabled line a striking feature of his poetic manifesto. Marchaut’s ballade, with its simple but ingenious use of only two rhymes and its gentle refrain “un coeur d’ami, un coeur d’amie” (“the heart of a lover, the heart of his love”), reveals the poet at his most charmingly musical. Indeed, although his contemporaries acknowledged his supremacy as a poet, it is as a musician that he is now largely honoured.