explanation (razo):

This is the third of several troubadour love poems written for my good friend Benefse al-Rashida. The idea behind these poems was to write standard troubadour poems but basing their imagery on Arabic love poetry from the same timeframe; a number of studies in the past fifty years have suggested that the earliest troubadours (like William of Aquitaine) were influenced by eastern music and poetry - most especially that the 'unattainable' women in troubadour poems could refer to Muslim women that would be socially untouchable by the troubadours, on both sides of the equation.My first exposure to this idea was in Lynn Ramey's Christian, Saracen, and Genre in Medieval French Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001) though the idea has been proposed by various scholars for several decades (along with the notion that the 'lady' in troubadour love poetry is just an allegory for salvation in the Holy Land or a quest to discover one's own self).

An interesting aspect of this poem is that its rhyme scheme suddenly changes in the third stanza, and I cannot for the life of me explain why. Some poems (particularily in the German minnesinger repertoires) utilize the 'bar' stanzaic/metrical form, labeled 'AAB' - the first two parts of the poem have the same rhythm/melody and then the third part of the poem has a different melody/structure. It's not really the same here, but I don't know why I did this. I'll have to look into the extant troubadour stanza structures and try to remember my rationale. A slightly Middle English-icized version of the poem exists in a 15th c. (or so) book I made as Long wert thogh hene I saw afer.