longer regularly set to music but became a purely literary form, and its structural variety proliferated. The 17th-century prosodist Père Mourgues defined what he called the virelai ancien in a way that has little in common with the musical virelais of the 14th and 15th centuries. His virelai ancien is a structure without a refrain and with an interlocking rhyme scheme between the stanzas: in the first stanza, the rhymes are AAB AAB AAB, with the B lines shorter than the A lines. In the second stanza, the B rhymes are shifted to the longer verses, and a new C rhyme is introduced for the shorter ones (BBC BBC BBC), and so on. Another form described by Père Mourgues is the virelai nouveau, which has a two-line refrain at the beginning, with each stanza ending with a repetition of either the first or the second refrain verse in alternation, and the last stanza ending in both refrain verses in reversed order. These forms have occasionally been reproduced in later English poetry, e.g. by John Payne ("Spring Sadness", a virelai ancien), and Henry Austin Dobson ("July", a virelai nouveau). See also List of virelais by Guillaume de Machaut References Further reading French poetry Western medieval lyric forms Medieval music genres Renaissance music