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Concept
Envoi
Summary
Envoi or envoy in poetry is used to describe:
A short stanza at the end of a poem such as a ballad, used either to address an imagined or actual person or to comment on the preceding body of the poem.
A dedicatory poem about sending the book out to readers, a postscript.
Any poem of farewell, including a farewell to life.
The word envoy or l'envoy comes from the Old French, where it means '[the] sending forth'. Originally it was a stanza at the end of a longer poem, which included a dedication to a patron or individual, similar to a tornada. More recent examples are dedicatory poems as part of a collection, or an individual poem about farewell or moving on. Envoi is both a type of poem, and is often used as a title.
The envoi is relatively fluid in form. In ballades and chant royal, envois have fewer lines than the main stanzas of the poem. They may also repeat the rhyme words or sounds used in the main body of the poem, or even whole lines. The envoi can also be a short lyric poem of any form, usually placed at the end of a poetry collection.
The envoi first appears in medieval French, in the songs of the trouvères and troubadours. It developed as an address to the poet's beloved or to a friend or patron, and typically expresses the poet's hope that the poem may bring them some benefit (the beloved's favours, increased patronage, and so on).
In the 14th century, the two main forms used in the new literary French poetry were the ballade, which employed a refrain at first but evolved to include an envoi, and the chant royal, which used an envoi from the beginning. The main exponents of these forms were Christine de Pizan and Charles d'Orléans. In the work of these poets, the nature of the envoi changed significantly. They occasionally retained the invocation of the Prince or abstract entities such as Hope or Love as a cryptonym for an authority figure the protagonists(s) of the poem could appeal to, or, in the some poems by d'Orléans, to address actual royalty.
Official source
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