reverdie

   Specifically, a reverdie was a late medieval dance song that welcomed the coming of spring. The form of the song was generally the same as a chanson (or CANSO): five or six stanzas with no refrain. A reverdie might express joy at the newly growing buds and flowers, the singing of the returning birds, and the rekindling of thoughts of love associated with the spring.

   Later reverdies in German, Latin, and Provençal extended the praise of spring’s rebirth of natural life to praise of the Easter season and the rebirth of spiritual life. Other TROUBADOURS used the form of the reverdie to praise other seasons as well as spring. The term reverdie is also sometimes broadened to refer to any poetic passage celebrating the return of spring. Thus a large number of medieval love poems in the COURTLY LOVE tradition begin with a reverdie, putting the speaker’s love in the context of the joy in the natural world’s renewal. Sometimes the speaker’s love is in concord with this rebirth, as in these lines from the troubadour BERNART DE VENTADORN:

   When the new grass and the leaves come forth

   and the flower burgeons on the branch,

   and the nightingale lifts its high

   pure voice and begins its song,

   I have joy in it, and joy in the flower,

   and joy in myself, and in my lady most of all;

   (Goldin 1973, 137–39, ll. 1–6)

   At other times, the speaker’s love is unrequited, or causes him pain, and so the new season only depresses him, as it does the speaker of these lines from RAIMBAUT DE VAQUEIRAS, separated from his beloved:

   I have no pleasure in winter or spring,

   the season of brightness, the oak leaf,

   my advancement seems like my undoing,

   and my greatest joy my grief.

   (Goldin 1973, 269, ll. 1–4)

   But perhaps the best known reverdie in all medieval poetry occurs in the opening lines of Geoffrey CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY TALES:

   Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

   The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

   And bathed every veyne in swich licour

   Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

   Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

   Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

   The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

   Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,

   And smale foweles maken melodye,

   That slepen al the nyght with open ye

   (So Priketh hem Nature in hir corages),

   Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgr images,

   (Benson 1987, 23, ll. 1–12)

   Chaucer was certainly thinking about the centuries of poets that had used the introductory spring celebration to introduce love poems, but gives the reverdie a twist in the end by relating it to spiritual regeneration.However, as has been noted above, this was not atypical of reverdies in other languages.

   Bibliography

   ■ Benson, Larry, et al., eds. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987.

   ■ Diehl, Patrick S. The Medieval European Religious Lyric: An Ars Poetica. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

   ■ Goldin, Frederick, ed. and trans. Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973.