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in the case of Chaucer's poem, or to ascribe precise
reference to some statements of both the poems.
They are not very similar on first reading. Their poetic
form is quite different. Trohetsvisan is composed of
a series of two-part stanzas rhyming AAB, CCB,3 and
similar two-part verses elsewhere in Old Swedish, in Latin,
and in a distant example from fourteenth-century Flanders
suggest that the form derived from the ubiquitous Latin
sequence in its later development where the second half
offers an antiphonal echo to the first half. 4 Chaucer's
poem, of course, is written as a ballade, a form which
undoubtedly came to him on a secular and vernacular
route. This form, we remember, was highly-contrived.
At its most rigid it had three stanzas and an envoi, each
verse ended with a refrain and its rhyme-scheme was
complicated. Only one set of rhyme-sounds was used for
the entire poem so that any line rhymes not only with
certain other lines in its own stanza but with the corresponding
lines in other stanzas. Unlike some of Chaucer's
other ballades" the Lak of Stedfastnesse agrees with the
ideal form as it was developed in the puys of thirteenthcentury
France and as it is widely illustrated within the
works of fourteenth-century French writers such as
Deschamps, Machaut and Graunson." This information
is recalled to emphasise that Chaucer knew the conventions
of the ballade since this may have a bearing on our
understanding of the poem's content. In The Complaint
3 See Appendix A for an example verse.
• Karl-Ivar Hildeman, Medeltid pd uers (1958), 62-64.
5 Gentilesse, To Rosemounde, the dubious Against }Vomell Unconstant, and
the ballade in The Legend of Good Women, Prologue (F 249-269, G 203-223),
have no envoi. The dubious A Balade of Complaint lacks an envoi and a
common rhyme-scheme for all verses. The envoi to The Complaint of Chaucer
to his Purse has a different rhyme-scheme from the other three verses. Fortune
(Balades de Visage sanz Peinturei and the so-named The Complaint of Venus
are composed as three separate three-verse ballades each with a common
rhyme-scheme for the verses, but there is one envoi in a distinct rhyme-scheme
for the whole poems. See H. L. Cohen, The Ballade (1915), passim on the
development of the ballade, and 233-252 on Chaucer.
6 See generally Miss Cohen's chapter II, "The Ballade in France', and turn
the pages of e.g, (Euures completes de Eustace Deschamps, ed. Ie Marquis de
Queux de Saint-Hilaire (S.A.T.F., 1878-93).