This rapid, sparkling song is one of the finest and most buoyantly pleasing of the 153 songs left by Francis Poulenc (1899 - 1963). Poulenc is one of history's great art song composers, arguably comparable in French chanson literature to Fauré and Debussy.

One of his hallmarks is brevity. Songs of over three minutes in his oeuvre are quite rare, and lengths of something over a minute are common; even lengths of under a minute are not scarce.

He decided early in his career to focus his interest in potential poetic texts for his songs on poets who were his contemporaries—frequently his friends and associates. He did not hew fixedly to this idea (in fact, he set several poems by Guillaume Apollinaire [1880 - 1918]). One of the poets whose name is most often found on Poulenc's songs was Paul Éluard (Eugène Grindel, 1895 - 1952), who inspired some of his greatest songs and song cycles.

Éluard was initially an early member of the surrealist movement. He joined the Communist party and eventually took a more populist approach in his texts, but retained a fondness for quick, disparate images. During World War II he was a leader of Resistance efforts among the intellectuals of Paris.

Without seeming political content, Éluard's poem "La Main le coeur l'oiseau" (The hand the heart the bird), appeared in a volume that appeared in 1942, called Poésie et vérité (Poetry and truth).

Poulenc does not tell us when he selected the poem for a song or when he started work on it, but his invaluable book Journal de mes melodies reveals that the song came to be as many of them did: Bit by bit, almost at random, the music for a line or two would come to mind and he wrote it down.

The poem is mirror shaped, in stanzas of three, four, four, and three lines each. There is a definite change of imagery, style, and mood in the middle of the poem, which Poulenc's setting follows. The first set of seven lines exquisitely uses the images of hand, heart, lion, bird, and cloud (and then back to "hand") and makes an arch. The other set of seven lines concerns the emotional condition that reflects the visual elements of the opening set.

In both cases Poulenc makes an arch of key changes starting and ending in C and reaching D as the harmonically most distant part. Poulenc points out that he always kept each of the fragments of music that occurred to him in his songs in the original key, so that "my modulations [smooth key-changes] pass at times through a mouse-hole." Here he used these modulations to give extra power to the words.

Éluard proposed that Poulenc call the song "La gamme" (The Gamut) to reflect this passage of keys and images, but Poulenc thought this too arcane for the public. Poulenc's title, which means "Hand Ruled by the Heart," is simply the first line of the poem.

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