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An earlier form of the chanso was known as the vers; it seems to have been in closer relation to the popular poetry than the more artificial chanso, and to have had shorter stanzas and lines; but the distinction is not clear.
The description of the seasons of the year as impelling the troubadour to song was, or became, an entirely conventional and expected opening to a chanso; but in Bernard's case these descriptions were marked by the observation and feeling of one who had a real love for the country and for nature, and the contrast or comparison between the season of the year and his own feelings is of real lyrical value.
A further and possibly an earlier cause of obscurity in expression was the fact that the chanso was a love song addressed to a married lady; and though in many cases it was the fact that the poem embodied compliments purely conventional, however exaggerated to our ideas, yet the further fact remains that the sentiments expressed might as easily be those of veritable passion, and, in view of a husband's existence, obscurity had a utility of its own.
The meaning of the term is unknown; some say that it originally implied a poem composed by "servants," poets in the service of an overlord; others, that it was a poem composed to the tune of a chanso which it thus imitated in a "servile" manner. From the chanso the sirventes is distinguished by its subject matter; it was the vehicle for satire, moral reproof or political lampooning.
These latter were no longer the gross and coarse songs of the earlier mountebank age, which Alcuin characterised as turpissima and vanissima, but the grave and artificially wrought stanzas of the troubadour chanso. Secondly, it has been felt that some explanation is required to account for the extreme complexity and artificiality of troubadour poetry in its most highly developed stage.
Reference has already been made to the chanso. A poetical form of much importance was the sirventes, which outwardly was indistinguishable from the chanso.
The society offered an annual prize of a golden violet for the best chanso; other prizes were added at a later date for the best dance song and the best sirventes. Competitors found that songs to the Virgin were given the preference and she eventually became the one subject of these prize competitions.
A further step towards the provision of closer unity between the separate stanzas was the chanso redonda, which was composed of coblas estrampas, the rime order of the second stanza being an inversion of the rime order of the first; the tendency reaches its highest point in the sestina, which retained the characteristic of the chanso redonda, namely, that the last rime of one stanza should correspond with the first rime of the following stanza, but with the additional improvement that every rime started a stanza in turn, whereas, in the chanso redonda the same rime continually recurred at the beginning of every other stanza.
From Geoffrey to Boileau and the latter's lacy ruffles how many a rude Norman epic was acted out, here in the valley, beneath the soaring spires, before the Homeric combat was turned into the verse of a chanso de geste, a Roman de Rou, or a Latrin!
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