The available historical evidence suggests that Guillaume de Machaut wrote most of his numerous rondeau considerably later than his excellent ballades, and around the same time as his mass. This means that by the time he came to use the rondeau form, his skills in composing polyphonic song were very highly developed indeed. It's therefore not surprising that the rondeaux are some of the finest and most forward-looking examples of his music. Puis qu'en oubli is one of these, set with a fairly low tessitura with very tight musical content that essentially consists of two brief parts that return in an oddly fascinating—even slightly hypnotizing—pattern: AbaAAbAB, the lower case letters here represent music repeated with a different line of text. The A music is a minor-tinted, sorrowful, and folk-like tune that deftly plays between syllabic and melismatic settings of the words. The B material is essentially the A material varied in minor, cleverly distinguishing ways. Machaut builds thus a tiny structure of great unity with the flavor of a dark, quiet riddle that, like his other rondeaux, gains much in harmoniousness for having none of the dissonance between cantus and tenor found in his ballades. The text of the piece hints at a possible connection to Machaut's life. As well as being the top French composer of his century, he was a renowned poet. As late as his sixties, Machaut earnestly courted a young lady and seems to have sincerely believed she was interested in him, not merely his works and fame. The scenario that Puis qu'en oubli describes sounds very much like it could have had biographical relevancy. The narrator declares that since her trusted beloved will have no more of her love, she will join the celibate clergy, thereby fulfilling his promise that she would "never have any other lover." As Machaut himself took a canonry in 1339, aged about 40, and composed his great autobiographical poem of love and loss, "Le livre du voir dit," around that time, and since Puis qu'en oubli was written later on when he'd had time to reflect on his failed courtship, it's easy to project the historical man onto the narrator of this poem. It seems that in a moment of poetic cross-dressing, Machaut switched roles, imagining his own sorrows in the heart of the young woman.

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