Courtly Love

Within The Golden Age of troubadour poetry, poets examine love, longing, lust, and desire. All these emotions culminate within the overarching theme of courtly love, which is the idea of a man idealizing a woman, for whom he can never obtain, for she is either above his status, married, or resident of some far off land. Regardless of the reason, it is this unobtainability around which the poems hinge. Without that distance, be it physical or emotional, the poets would have nothing to write about. Thus their poetry would cease to exist. While the Troubador poets express courtly love in different ways, there remain similarities between the theme’s developments. The poetd often represents courtly love as a dichotomy, for it lends a man a feeling of both intense pleasure and paint. The troubadour poets, Arnaut Daniel, Reimbaut de vaquieras , and Gavaudan, , examine the dichotomy, and idealization of courtly love.

            In I Never Had It But it Holds Me, Daniels describes the juxtaposition between pleasure and pain in courtly love. He emphasizes his dichotomous emotions by saying,

My heart burns/ but my eyes are fed,/because only / seeing her / has been left to me. / You see what keps me alive! (28-33)

By describing his heart as burning, Daniels parallels the burned heart to how his love has caused him pain. Heat can both sustain and comfort man. It can soothe aching muscles, and warm chilled limbs. However, when the heat becomes too intense, man is burned. Similarly, to heat, his love both sustains him, and causes him great pain. The sight of his beloved keeps him sustained, but the inability to touch her burns his heart to a crisp.

            Vaquieres’s poem Lady, so much I have endeared you exemplifies the adoring idealization the troubadour poets impose upon their beloved. In the third stanza, Vaquieres details all the lady’s virtues. He deems her “Kind and Wise, / merry and valiant and learned”(31-33). It remains possible that this lady could embody all these qualities. However, it is much more likely that the poet merely exercises the characteristic idealization of the Troubadors. To be successful at their craft, the poets need to write a poem filled with heartfelt longing, and in order to desrve such a emotionally wraught poem, the women must exemplify all qualities that men of the times would value. Therefore, many times, the poets take a real woman as a model, but embellish their characters to achieve that ideal embodiment of man’s desire.

            Interestingly, In Gauvudan’s poem, I am not like the other troubadors, Gauvudan recognizes the common tactic of idealizating woman and warns against it. he exclaims, “for imagining makes the wise fall / if sense doesn’t enlighten him”(17-18). Here, Gauvudan recognizes the trappings of courtly love. He explains that if a man meets a woman, and builds her up to a fantastic status, he will surely be disappointed. No woman, nor man for that matter, if perfect. Therefore, by imagining them as so, they will only ever disappoint you. This idealization, however, forms the backbone of Troubador poetry. Therefore, because Gauvudan revolts against this idealization, it makes sense that he asserts his desire to be disassociated with the troubadors.