Verses of Death
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Helinand of Froidmont's Old French Les Vers de la Mort ("Verses of Death") (1194 -1197) is a poem on the Triumph of Death. In fifty stanzas, Helinand asks Death to call upon his best friends and exhort them to abandon the world. Each stanza contains twelve octosyllabic lines; the rhyme scheme is aab aab bba bba. This form was imitated by later poets and is called by critics the "helinandian stanza." In this poem, Death appears as a ubiquitous and hyperactive agent. Helinand does not use macabre elements, except in the title, which puns on the homonymy between "vers" (worms) and "vers" (verses). His lyrical sermon uses various tropes such as anaphora, metaphor, and adnominatio to great effect. Through this unique witness of his poetic talent as a trouvère, Helinand appears as a precursor of Villon, Chastelain, and other French poets of the fifteenth century.