Despite his cloth—Machaut was given a canonry at Rheims in 1339—he overwhelmingly favored secular music and his career seems to epitomize the slide in French music away from the sacred toward the secular. By the fifteenth century, secular music—in particular the formes fixes such as ballades, rondeaux, and virelai—were at the forefront of French compositional practice. The example set by Machaut's excellence in every genre certainly accelerated this process and it was in his monophonic virelai and lais that he worked to establish the basis of his melodic style. It shouldn't be assumed that because He! dame is monophonic it will lack emotional appeal. With only a single line, Machaut is able to express the urgency implied in the text, an urgency immediately witnessedin the attention-grabbing cry of "He!" in the title. The narrator goes on from the first line to assert that he will serve her ever in loyalty, despite the torment that her fine beauty and sweetness cause him. The syncopations certainly add a lot to this; with the dance of the triple time, it becomes even slightly cathartic, as if the "He!" is as much about casting something out as catching the lady's attention. His virelai, unsurprisingly, grew more modern as time went on. This is one of the earlier ones, so its style is fairly medieval, as its triple meter implies. As a slight advance on the lais, however, the melodic line carries across the poetic enjambments, creating a stronger through-line that removes any quaintness the lais to have. The melodic strength of this piece, as with the other virelai, comes from Machaut's way of building long phrases by stringing together short, bright motifs. The lines become clear, narrow trajectories mined with sharp rhetorical twists that injure in the sweetest possible way.

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