Blog Post #10 - Courtly Love

Blog Post #10:

“Fin’ Amor” or courtly love is most noted for its constant association with suffering and the agonies associated with love. In Bernart Ventadorn’s, Farewell to Ventadorn, he exclaims: “my Lady does not love me; it’s right that I should nevermore return when she grows heartless” (93). He identifies that he must forever be banished due to the fact that his significant other is no longer in love with him. The inability to “nevermore return” and leave his friends and life is symbolic of the type of agony that is often associated with courtly love. Similarly, Bernart de Born’s poem, Lady, Since You Care Nothing for Me, describes the similar emotional tortures associated with this form of passion. When speaking to his love he states how “since you care nothing for me, and since you have shut me away from you causelessly, I know not where to go seeking” (151). Again, there is the description of a high degree of desperation after a lover has scorned a poet. When Bernart de Born states that he knows “not where to go seeking” exemplifies the influence this woman has on his life. Similarly to Ventadorn, he is also lost once his lover renounces him. There is a constant theme of poets longing and being entirely without purpose after their women stop loving them. Interestingly enough, from the other perspective, Monge de Montaudon describes the ideal male lover. She states how she loves a man who “doesn’t want to pick a fight, but my good name is quickly defended” (185). She exemplifies qualities of a man that are similar to the woes described by both Bernart Ventadorn and Bernart de Born. These men describe how much they still desire and would defend the name of their women long after they have left, and this is similar to what Monge de Montaudon describes she desires in a male lover. It would seem that overall, there is much anguish within “Fin’ Amor” due to an overall lack of communication between the sexes.