Trobar clus or closed form, was a complex and obscure style of poetry used by troubadour

Troubadour

A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....

s for their more discerning audiences, and it was only truly appreciated by an elite few. It was developed extensively by Marcabru

Marcabru

Marcabru is one of the earliest troubadours whose poems are known. There is no certain information about him; the two vidas attached to his poems tell different stories, and both are evidently built on hints in the poems, not on independent information.According to the brief life in MS...

, but by 1200 its inaccessibility led to its disappearance. Among the imitators of Marcabru were Alegret

Alegret

Alegret was a Gascon troubadour, one of the earliest lyric satirists in the Occitan tongue, and a contemporary of Marcabru . One sirventes and one canso survive of his poems. Nonetheless, his reputation was high enough that he found his way into the poetry of Bernart de Ventadorn and Raimbaut...

 and Marcoat

Marcoat

Marcoat was a minor Gascon troubadour and joglar who flourished in the mid twelfth century. He is often cited in connexion with Eleanor of Aquitaine and is placed in a hypothetical "school" of poetry which includes Bernart de Ventadorn, Marcabru, Cercamon, Jaufre Rudel, Peire Rogier, and Peire de...

, who claimed himself to write vers contradizentz (contradictory verses), indicative of the incomprehensibility of the trobar clus style. Below is a sample of the style from Marcoat's sirventes

Sirventes

The sirventes or serventes is a genre of Occitan lyric poetry used by the troubadours. In early Catalan it became a sirventesch and was imported into that language in the fourteenth century, where it developed into a unique didactic/moralistic type...

Mentre m'obri eis huisel, wherein the poet himself remarks on his moz clus (closed words):

Mon serventes no val plus,

que faitz es de bos moz clus

apren lo, Domeing Sarena.

Among the late twelfth-century practitionars of trobar clus was Peire d'Alvernhe

Peire d'Alvernhe

Peire d'Alvernhe or d'Alvernha was an Auvergnat troubadour with twenty-one or twenty-four surviving works. He composed in an "esoteric" and "formally complex" style known as the trobar clus...

, an imitator of Marcabru, while Raimbaut d'Aurenga of the trobar ric

Trobar ric

The trobar ric , or rich form of poetry, was a trobadour style.It was distinguished by its verbal gymnastics; its best exponent was Arnaut Daniel. Despite the fact that it outlasted trobar clus it always played a secondary role to trobar leu....

style was influenced by Marcoat. The only trobairitz

Trobairitz

The trobairitz were Occitan female troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries, active from around 1170 to approximately 1260. The word trobairitz was first used in the 13th-century romance Flamenca. It comes from the Provençal word trobar, the literal meaning of which is "to find", and the...

 (female troubadour) to use the trobar clus with mastery was Lombarda

Lombarda

Lombarda was an early 13th-century trobairitz from Toulouse known only from her vida and a short tenso. Though her name has been taken to imply that she was from Lombardy, it rather indicates that she was from a banking or merchant family, since "Lombard" was used throughout western Europe in...

around 1216.