Troubadour and lyric poetry

Lyric poetry is formed as a genre in ancient Greece, where poets wrote poems sung by choruses accompanied by music played by lyres. Roman poets, inspired by Greek tradition, extended the notion of music in their poems even without the presence of lyre. In the middle ages, Troubadours from South France started again to write words to music that spread from village to village. The term Troubadour means finder or maker--of songs. Troubadour poetry is characterized by pleasing melodies and intricate stanza patterns. Although the melodies are lost, we can observe distinctive metric patterns in Troubadour poems. For example, looking at "The Skylark" by Bernart de Ventadorn, we can see that the first stanza establishes the structure of ending sounds of each line which all following stanzas follow precisely. This untypical rhyme scheme from a modern ear is something unique for the lyric tradition of Troubadour poems. Arnaut Deniel, who is considered the master of Troubadour poems, takes the intricacy of rhyme scheme to a new level. In "Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra", Arnaut recombines the ending words "enters", "nail", "soul", "rod", "uncle" and room with an interweaving pattern that produces a sense of obsession with the courtly love, to his aunt. The rhythmic and musical features of the forms of troubadour poems, as well as the lost melodies, make Troubadour an important part of the development of lyric poetry.