(also called fatrasie, fratrasie, resverie ). An irrational or obscure piece of verse, which originated in the Middle Ages. It is generally lively and joyous in style, full of word-play, ridiculous associations of ideas, and deliberate nonsense. Langlois defines two forms: the f. possible , which offers a coherent text, and the f. impossible , which, like the later coq-à-l’âne (q.v.), seems to make no sense at all. Qua genre, however, it is not the incoherence of content that constitutes the f. but its very special form: a strophe of 11 lines, the first and last of which form a distich placed at the beginning as the theme of the composition. This is known as the f. simple . The f. double is formed from this by “restating the initial [distich] in reverse order, and adding a second strophe of ten lines ending with an 11th, a restatement of line one of the [distich].” Porter distinguishes between the fratrasie and the f., a later (14th-c.?) devel. The former is invariably composed of a single strophe of 11 lines, and its content is always irrational; in the f. the opening distich introduces the next 11 lines, serving as their first and last line and imparting a uniform rhythm to the whole poem.
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