planh

[plah-ny^uh]

noun

1. a Provençal elegiac poem.

Word History and Origins

Origin of planh¹

1835–45; < Provençal < Latin planctus a striking, beating, lamentation. See plaint

Example Sentences

The planh or Complaint was a dirge or funeral song written generally in decasyllabics.

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The most distinctive forms of the lyric poetry were probably the dirge or planh; the contention or tenson, a poem in which two or more persons maintain an argument on questions of love, or chivalry, etc., each using stanzas terminating in similar rhymes, somewhat like the style of poem long after known in Scottish literature as a "flyting;" and the satiric poem or pasquinade, the sirvente, often a fierce war song in which the poet lashed his foes and urged his men on to battle.

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"I scent the raw stuff of a Planh," the Queen observed; "benedicite! it was ever your way, my friend, to love a woman chiefly for the verses she inspired."

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A complete prosody of the language of canso and sirvente, of vers and cobla, of planh, tenso, tornejamens, balada, retroensa, and the rest, would take more room than can be spared here, and would hardly be in place if it were otherwise.

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The Oriental mourning song became the Planh, or dirge.

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