A Dance Before It Was a Poem

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The rondeau's refrain, the opening words of the poem returning twice more before the end, reads on the page as a purely literary device, a rhetorical hinge a poet chooses to build a stanza around. It began as something more physical. Thirteenth-century trouveres sang rondeaux to accompany round dances, and the refrain that now looks like ornament was, in that setting, the point where the dancers' own circle came back around, words and choreography moving together. The thirteenth-century poet-composer Adam de la Halle left the earliest surviving polyphonic settings of the form, evidence the music came first or at least came inseparably. Only across the fifteenth century, as courtly written verse and courtly sung verse gradually split into separate practices, did the rondeau's refrain stop marking a dancer's turn and start marking, purely, a reader's, a shift completed in the hands of poets like Christine de Pizan and Charles d'Orleans, who wrote fully literary, unset rondeaux even as sung settings of the form continued alongside them through the same century.