Blog Post #11: Troubadours and Lyric Poetry

Blog Post #11:

                Troubadour poetry is quite distinct from the classical lyric poetry associated with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Lyric poetry focuses on using song to express a vast range of emotions, all while accompanied by the lyre. The use of the instrument combines with song is supposed to enhance the emotions being portrayed. In troubadour poetry, Bernart de Ventadorn’s You’ve Asked, My Lords, for Song and Arnaut Daniel’s I’ll Make a Song illustrate these more lyrical characteristics.

                You’ve asked, my lords, for song:

                I sing for my reply

                Yet never sing for long –

                I’ve lost the heart to try.

                How should a troubadour

                Sing when his luck’s run dry? (Bernart de Ventadorn, You’ve Asked, My Lords, for Song, lines 1-6)

                Bernart uses song to enhance the depiction of his internal strife with continuing his profession as a troubadour. The phrase, “lost the heart to try”, implies an emotional loss of love to be the root cause of his inability to continue his profession. His livelihood is tied to his desires for this particular love. The idea that his “luck’s run dry” implies that there is little hope for things to change. There is an implication of the love’s finite end. Here, singing enhances the value of his words. The need for him to “sing for [his] reply” expresses the necessity to use song to express his thoughts. Bernart requires song similarly to the way the lyric poets did when performing their craft.

                I’ll make a song`                with exquisite

                Clear words, for buds are blowing sweet

Where the sprays meet,

And flowers don

Their bold blazon

Where leafage springeth greenly

O’ershadowing

The birds that sing

And cry in coppice seemly (Arnaut Daniel, I’ll Make a Song, lines 1-9)

For Arnaut, the use of song is essential to construe his references to spring time. The descriptions of the song as being “blowing sweet” and “leafage springeth greenly” clearly ties the words to onset of spring. The association with “birds that sing” would be much weaker without the use of song to express the poems association with spring time. Like the lyric poets before him, Arnaut uses song to establish his words and fill them with colorful meaning. Both poets exceptionally use song to enhance the meaning of their words in a way that almost acts like homage to the great poetry that proceeded the troubadour era.