“Plight of the Troubadour”by Billy Collins employs a light-hearted series of images to question the clichés often spoken about poetry’s ability to communicate across cultures, and to confer immortality.
Langue d’oc and langue d’oeuil
The poem purports to be spoken by a troubadour singing a series of “lays”, or sung poems, to a woman who he has realised does not speak his language. Though iconic figures in European culture, the troudabours spoke “langue d’oc” the language of Provence and the South of France, rather than the northern langue “d’oil”, which is what the woman speaks (“an odd Picard dialect at that”) Though elements of “langue d’oc” remain in the dialects of the South, modern French is based upon its rival “langue ‘d’oil.”
Collins' Imagery
This language barrier between the singer and his listener is emblematic of the more general barrier which time will bring down between the troubadour and those who hear his work. As langue d’oc dwindles, the poet fears “I will be lost in an anthology/ and poets will no longer wear hats like mine”. Provence, the area whose feudal courts supported many of the famous troubadours, will “be nothing more/ than a pink hue on a map or an answer on a test”. Hats and schools are amongst Collins’ favourite images, he employs them in “Schoolsville”, “Candle Hat”, “American Sonnet”, “The Death of the Hat”, “The Lesson”, “Nostalgia”, “The History Teacher”, to mention only a handful.
The familiar images are deployed here with a sense of unease, however. The listening woman who “has not caught a word” ends the poem “feigning a look of sisterly understanding” whilst the poet considers how he will be lost in the oblivion of “literature”, rather than living poetry.
There is a hint of this concern in the opening of the second stanza; “The European love lyric is flourishing/ with every tremor of my voice” The poet’s song is figured as part of a general literary movement, like “Occitan poetry” or “the nineteenth century novel”, and such labels are usually only applied in retrospect by critics and historians. By locating the “lay” within such a neat critical term, the poet is already robbed of any chance for his song to be a communication between him and his listener.
A betrayal of cultural history?
That “feigned look of sisterly understanding” is a striking image for Collins to end the poem with, since it suggests not only incomprehension, but dishonesty. Though the woman is possibly trying to be kind, there is a touch of betrayal in the tone, as if the troubadour resents this patronising attempt. If that is the case, it seems difficult to avoid concluding that Collins is criticising in some way the easy packaging of “European culture” and our own poetic history, as well as our arrogant assumption that we can understand it.
