Planh
Quick answer: The planh was the troubadours' funeral lament, mourning a patron, friend or lover in song. Learn its structure and what modern elegy inherits from it.
A planh is the troubadour poem of mourning: a formal lament, usually for a dead patron, prince or fellow poet, occasionally for a lover, composed in Occitania in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The word comes from the Latin planctus, a beating of the breast. Structurally it followed the troubadour norm of matched stanzas set to music, and its content ran a recognisable course: announcement of the death, praise of the dead, the grief of the world, and a prayer commending the soul.
The planh is the missing link between ancient funeral song and the modern elegy. Its conventions, cataloguing the dead person's virtues, claiming that joy itself has died, calling on lands and seasons to mourn, flow straight into the English elegiac tradition, from medieval laments through Milton's Lycidas to the memorial poems written today. Anyone who writes about loss is working, knowingly or not, with tools this genre sharpened.
How It Works
The classic planh moves through set stations. It names the loss plainly, often claiming the singer can barely sing. It praises the dead in superlatives: most generous, most valiant, flower of courtesy. It widens the grief outward, so that courts, countries and even the weather share the bereavement. It often closes with commendation of the soul and a tornada addressed to God or to the survivors. Sincerity varied, since many planhs mourned patrons whose deaths threatened the poet's livelihood, but the best transcend the payroll.
An original miniature in the mode: 'Put out the lamps along the river road; / the hand that filled our cups has left the table. / Teach the young vines his name, for he was able / to make a stranger's welcome feel like home.'
History and Key Figures
Around forty Occitan planhs survive. The most celebrated is the lament attributed to Gaucelm Faidit for Richard the Lionheart, dead in 1199, mourning the king as the crown of courtly virtue. Bertran de Born, better known for war songs, composed a planh for the Young King Henry, son of Henry II, that many rank among the genre's peaks. Cerverí de Girona and others carried the form to the end of the troubadour era. Its ancestors include the Latin planctus of the monasteries and, further back, the laments of scripture; its descendants include the Middle English elegy, the pastoral elegies of the Renaissance, and every state funeral ode since.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
The planh's station-by-station structure remains one of the most reliable scaffolds for an elegy: name the loss, praise the person through specifics, let the world register the absence, then turn toward release, blessing or address. Modern taste swaps superlatives for particulars, so instead of most generous of men, show the Tuesday he drove two hours to fix your boiler and would not stay for tea.
The convention of universal mourning still works if you scale it honestly: not kingdoms grieving, but the allotment nobody waters now, the dog still waiting at the gate at five. Grief poems are among the most common contest entries Writory's judges read, and the ones that score are almost always planh-like in this way, built from evidence rather than adjectives.
What poets can take from this
- Structure the lament in stations: the loss, the praise, the world's grief, the letting go.
- Replace superlatives with specific remembered acts; evidence mourns better than adjectives.
- Scale the world's mourning honestly, through the small places that register the absence.
- Address someone in the closing lines, the dead, the living or the divine, to give grief a direction.
- Write a planh for a public figure you never met, and notice what the distance clarifies.
Try it yourself
Write a planh for a place that has died, a closed cinema, a demolished market, a filled-in pool. Follow the old stations: announce the loss, praise the place through three remembered specifics, show who and what still grieves it, and end by commending it somewhere.
Questions
What is a planh in troubadour poetry?
A formal funeral lament, usually mourning a patron, ruler or fellow poet, sung in matched stanzas. It announced the death, praised the dead, extended grief to the whole world and commended the soul.
How is a planh different from an elegy?
The planh is a specific medieval Occitan genre with musical performance and set conventions; the elegy is the broader ongoing tradition of poems of mourning. The planh is effectively one of the elegy's direct ancestors.
Are any famous planhs still read?
Yes. Gaucelm Faidit's lament for Richard the Lionheart and Bertran de Born's planh for the Young King Henry are the standard anthology pieces, still studied for their blend of public ceremony and personal grief.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.