The rondeau, like its cousin the triolet, originated in the poems and songs of French troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries. In the 14th century, poet-composer Guillame de Machaut popularized the literary rondeau, which evolved toward use of a shorter repeated refrain than the earlier songs.
As it is used in modern English, the rondeau is a poem of 8 lines of seven to eight syllables arranged in two stanzas —each stanza is four lines (quatrain). The first part of the first line becomes the rondeau’s rentrement(refrain) when it is repeated as the last line of the succeeding stanza. Aside from the rentrement, which obviously rhymes because it is the same repeated words, only two rhymes are used in the entire poem. The entire scheme looks like this (with “R” used to indicate the rentrement):
a Jenny kissed me when we met,
b Jumping from the chair she sat in;
a Time, you thief, who loves to get
b Sweet into your list, put that in!a Say I’m weary, say I’m sad
b Say that health and wealth have missed me
a Say I’m growing old, but add
b(R) Jenny kissed me.
James Henry Leigh Hunt
