Guillaume de Machaut - Poetry

Poetry

Guillaume de Machaut's lyric output comprises around 400 poems, including 235 ballades, 76 rondeaux, 39 virelais, 24 lais, 10 complaintes, and 7 chansons royales, and Machaut did much to perfect and codify these fixed forms. Some of his lyric output is inserted in his narrative poems or "dits", such as Le remède de fortune ("The Cure of Ill Fortune") which includes one of each genre of lyric poetry, and Le voir dit ("A True Story"), but most are included in a separate, unordered section entitled Les loanges des dames. That the majority of his lyrics are not set to music (in manuscripts, music and non-music sections are separate) suggests that he normally wrote the text before setting some to music.

Other than his Latin motets of a religious nature and some poems invoking the horrors of war and captivity, the vast majority of Machaut's lyric poems partake of the conventions of courtly love and involve statements of service to a lady and the poet's pleasure and pains. In technical terms, Machaut was a master of elaborate rhyme schemes, and this concern makes him a precursor to the Grands Rhétoriqueurs of the 15th century.

Guillaume de Machaut's narrative output is dominated by the "dit" (literally "spoken", i.e. a poem not meant to be sung). These first-person narrative poems (all but one are written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, like the romance, or "roman" of the same period) follow many of the conventions of the Roman de la rose, including the use of allegorical dreams (songes), allegorical characters, and the situation of the narrator-lover attempting to return toward or satisfy his lady.

Machaut is also responsible for a poetic chronicle the chivalric deeds of Peter I of Cyprus (the Prise d'Alexandrie) and for poetic works of consolation and moral philosophy. His unusual self-reflective usage of himself (as his lyrical persona) as the narrator of his dits gleans some personal philosophical insights as well.

At the end of his life, Machaut wrote a poetic treatise on his craft (his Prologue). This reflects on his conception of the organization of poetry into set genres and rhyme schemes, and the ordering of these genres into distinct sections of manuscripts. This pre-occupation in ordering his oeuvre is reflected in an index to MS A entitled "Vesci l'ordenance que G. de Machau wet qu'il ait en son livre" ("Here is the order that G. de Machaut wants his book to have").

Machaut's poetry had a direct effect on the works of Eustache Deschamps, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, René of Anjou and Geoffrey Chaucer, among many others.