Falquet de Romans, “Ma bella dompna, per vos dei esser gais” (BdT 156.8)

“Ma bella dompna per vos dei esser gais” by Falquet de Romans has been taken for a courtly song for a long time. However, the poem’s metrical form is derived directly from that of the epic, as illustrated by the use of monorhymed ‘décasyllabes’ with non-systematic epic caesura and the presence of a ‘petit vers’ at the end of each stanza. The poem may thus be defined as stanzaic but not lyric because its versification is that of the chanson de geste and its music must be that of an epic chant. Moreover, its content reflects the rhetorical structure of the ‘salut d’amor’, an epistolary genre in which the lover sends a letter to his lady asking her to respond to his love. Thus, “Ma bella dompna” should be considered a formal hybrid between ‘salut d’amor’ and ‘chanson de geste’; in this sense it is to be compared to those few compositions of an epistolary nature that employ epic form, such as Raimbaut de Vaqueiras’ famous letter to the Marquis Boniface of Monferrato, which is probably the prototype of this poetic experiment, along with two pairs of ‘laisses’ exchanged between Gui de Cavaillon and Bertran Folco d’Avignon.