jokes, verses, and stories; some sources style him a reckless, violent, sarcastic infidel who
earned his excommunication.
Eleven songs survive, one of doubtful attribution. Though often seeming to parody or
recast a preexisting tradition, Guilhem’s work lays the foundation for later troubadour
song, including the love lyric, satire, and pastorela; the figures of warrior and lover,
boasting and humility, ribaldry and nascent courtliness are all represented. Three songs
addressed to his “companions” jocularly compare women to property (horses, fishing
holes, woodlands), subject to legal disputes; in three more, the poet, disguised as a fool or
madman, claims prowess in both word games and sexual games. Four meditate more
soberly on love, using feudal and natural metaphors; these inaugurate in Occitan the
vocabulary and topoi of fin’amors, among them the nature introduction, with woods and
birdsongs inspiring the poet and the paradoxical joy that cures the sick and drives wise
men insane. Natural imagery is not confined to the exordium: in a middle strophe,
Guilhem compares fragile love to a hawthorn branch that trembles at night in the freezing
rain, then gleams with sunlight the next day. The same poem includes indoor, domestic
scenes. Recalling a “battle” with his lady that ended in mutual desire, he concludes that
words are cheap: “Let others brag of love; we have the bread and the knife.” A final
farewell song recants his youthful frivolity and impiety; throwing off his furs, he
relinquishes Poitiers to the care of his old enemy Foulques of Anjou.
Researches into Guilhem’s sources of inspiration involve the origins of troubadour
poetry itself. In the pastorela-like “poem of the red cat” (Farai un vers, pos mi sonelh),
whose hero feigns muteness (or foreignness) to fool two ladies who abduct him for an
eight-day orgy, the words babariol, babarian have suggested to some a possible
Andalusian-Arabic influence. Guilhem’s range of registers is interpreted sometimes as
schizophrenia (was he two poets?), sometimes as a progression that invents courtliness in
moving from bawdy to idealistic views of love. If his Farai un vers de dreit nien mocks
distant love:
Anc non la vi ez am la fort;...
Quan no la vei, be m’en deport,
No•m prez un jau:.../No sai lo luec ves on s’esta
(“I’ve never seen her and I love her a lot./...When I don’t see her, I’m quite happy; /I
don’t care a rooster./ ... I don’t know where she lives”), then what was its antecedent?
This and the “red cat” song were, he claims, composed while sleeping; the two poems
thus suggest dream visions. Guilhem’s verse often uses long lines of eleven, twelve, or
fourteen syllables (with internal rhyme)—lines seldom used by later troubadours. Studies
of his verse forms suggest connections with Latin poetry, the liturgy, the popular round
dance, and even epic measures. A fragment of his music is preserved as a contrafactum in
the 14th-century Jeu de sainte Agnès; though doubtless adapted, it shows the melody’s
filiation with monastic music.
Amelia E.Van Vleck
[See also: JOUFROI DE POITIERS; REALISTIC ROMANCES; TROUBADOUR
POETRY]
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 812