Preciosity and artificiality reach their height in Arnaut’s poems, which are, for that reason, excessively difficult.  Enigmatic constructions, word-plays, words used in forced senses, continual alliteration and difficult rimes produced elaborate form and great obscurity of meaning.  The following stanza may serve as an example—­

L’aur’ amara fa.ls bruels brancutz clarzir que.l dons espeys’ ab fuelhs, e.ls letz becxs dels auzels ramencx te balbs e mutz pars e non pars. per qu’ieu m’esfortz de far e dir plazers A manhs? per ley qui m’a virat has d’aut, don tern morir si.ls afans no.m asoma.

“The bitter breeze makes light the bosky boughs which the gentle breeze [57] makes thick with leaves, and the joyous beaks of the birds in the branches it keeps silent and dumb, paired and not paired.  Wherefore do I strive to say and do what is pleasing to many?  For her, who has cast me down from on high, for which I fear to die, if she does not end the sorrow for me.”

The answers to the seventeen rime-words which occur in this stanza do not appear till the following stanza, the same rimes being kept throughout the six stanzas of the poem.  To rest the listener’s ear, while he waited for the answering rimes, Arnaut used light assonances which almost amount to rime in some cases.  The Monk of Montaudon in his satirical sirventes says of Arnaut:  “He has sung nothing all his life, except a few foolish verses which no one understands”; and we may reasonably suppose that Arnaut’s poetry was as obscure to many of his contemporaries as it is to us.

Dante placed Bertran de Born in hell, as a sower of strife between father and son, and there is no need to describe his picture of the troubadour—­

  “Who held the severed member lanternwise
  And said, Ah me!” (Inf. xxviii. 119-142.)

The genius of Dante, and the poetical fame of Bertran himself, have given him a more important position in history than is, perhaps, [58] entirely his due.  Jaufre, the prior of Vigeois, an abbey of Saint-Martial of Limoges, is the only chronicler during the reigns of Henry II. and Richard Coeur de Lion who mentions Bertran’s name.  The razos prefixed to some of his poems by way of explanation are the work of an anonymous troubadour (possibly Uc de Saint-Cire); they constantly misinterpret the poems they attempt to explain, confuse names and events, and rather exaggerate the part played by Bertran himself.  Besides these sources we have the cartulary of Dalon, or rather the extracts made from it by Guignieres in 1680 (the original has been lost), which give us information about Bertran’s family and possessions.  From these materials, and from forty-four or forty-five poems which have come down to us, the poet’s life can be reconstructed.