Originally a term applied to a lyric by Stesichorus (early 6th C.B.C. ), in which he recanted his earlier attack upon Helen as the baneful cause of the Trojan War—hence any poem or song of retraction. The p. as a theme, or a conceit, in lit. has been common in love poetry since Ovid’s Remedia amoris, supposedly written to retract his Ars amatoria. It appears in medieval lit. in The Romance of the Rose and in courtly love poetry. Chaucer uses it as a device throughout his poems and as the reason for his Legend of Good Women, written to retract the effect of Troilus and Criseyde. The notion of recantation also underlies the palinodic form, wherein two metrically corresponding members (e.g. strophe and antistrophe) are interrupted by another pair of similarly corresponding members. Thus the strophes are arranged in the pattern , with a b the “ode” and a and a’ are strophe and antistrophe and b and b’ are the second strophe and antistrophe. The term is now used of any such arrangement in any poetry and may also be applied to single lines in such a pattern.
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