explanation (razo):
The “envoy” is a type of poem encountered numerous times in the study of Geoffrey Chaucer; often, the envoy is addressed like a letter to a specific audience and means to impart just as specific a message to that audience. Sometimes, the envoy was treated as a final stanza to drive home whatever important statement or witticism the poet wished his work to display.
A few poems by Chaucer are directly titled as envoys, such as “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton” and “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” the latter of which is the most direct influence to this poem (more below). Other short poems - generally noted by Chaucer as either balades or complaintes - possess a final “envoy”, often as the fourth stanza that follows the three-stanza body of the poem. One poem utilizes an envoy after three series of three-stanza balades.(1)
In all but one of these poems,(2) the stanza form is ABABBCC with ten syllables in each line that often, but do not always, resemble iambic pentameter.
In “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” Chaucer offers a friendly reprimand to Scogan for getting in an argument with (and apparently abandoning) his lady at Michaelmas. Because of that, Chaucer argues, Venus and Cupid have refused to help men gain any more paramours, and Heaven itself has crumbled due to Scogan’s unkind words. Chaucer then states he cannot (and will not) write any more poetry after such devastation – ironic because his message comes in the form of a poem!
This poem, then, works as an homage and parody of the envoy to Scogan. James, my very good friend (in whose company I am unworthy of acknowledgment), has often stated his lack of poetic skill or talent. My message to him is that if he does not attempt to write poetry – which, thanks to his virtues, shall be just as virtuous and honorable – then the only poems ever to exist will be the crude, vile writings of lechers such as myself. Such a fate no one wants to see come to fruition.
(1) Chaucer’s “Fortune: Balades de Visage sanz Peinture” has an envoy appear after the statement/response/counter-response from what seems to be Chaucer’s own “self” replying to the personified figures of Fortune and a fictional court’s Pleintif.
(2) The only poem that does not utilize 7-line stanzas is one of the explicitly-named envoy poems: “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton”, which uses 8-line stanzas of ABABBCBC.