T'étends avec ton amant

First, a note: this was the very first poem I attempted to write in French. Looking back on it, I can spot numerous errors but I wanted to present it as an example of what is important: the attempt. I've presented it to demonstrate the evolution (I hope it's been an evolution, anyway) of my poetic abilities. Below are the notes I included with the poem when I initially composed it.

This poem is a rondeau in the tradition of the 12-13 th century troubadours and trouveres, especially those written in the voice of a male lover to his lady. The direct inspiration for this piece was a rondeau by Adam de la Halle entitled “Fi! maris, de vostre amour.”[1] The idea of speaking as a man calling his lover (back) to bed seemed to fit naturally among the love song canon of the trouveres, and the structure and rhyme scheme of “Fi! maris, de vostre amour” was fairly easy to work off of, especially considering at least one-fourth of Adam’s rondeaux seem to fall under this type.[2] The rhyme uses two endings, A and B, that create the following structure: ABAAABAB. Every A line has 7 syllables, and every B line has 4, with the last two lines repeating the first two, and the fourth line repeating the first.[3]

My understanding of French, unfortunately, is not very great – and it is very possible that the French grammar may be incorrect at some parts. Feel free to chalk up any poor French to my limited understanding of it or to some scribe who copied the “manuscript” with the poem incorrectly (or did so based on his own lack of French knowledge).

[1] Available in numerous sources, including: de la Halle, Adam. Œuvres Complètes. ed. Pierre-Yves Badel. Lettres Gothiques (Le Livre de Poche), 1995. p. 188.

[2] See the above work for several examples of the 8-line rondeau of this structure.

[3] For a more detailed explanation of the rondeau’s form and meter, see: Seay, Albert. Music in the Medieval World. 2 nd ed. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1991. p. 65.