In his position as a poet-composer working under royal patronage, Guillaume de Machaut not only met the requirements of his employers, but also seemingly allowed his courtly surroundings to inspire him artistically. While he was in the service of the itinerant John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, Machaut became acquainted with John's daughter, Bonne of Luxembourg, for whom it is believed he wrote his verse narrative poem with lyric insertions, the Remede de Fortune. Among the nine lyric poems of different forms inserted with musical settings into the Remede is the virelai (a genre Machaut preferred to call chanson ballade) "Dame, a vous sans retollir." The narrative of the Remede clarifies the generic history of the virelai as a dance lyric, and Machaut's jaunty musical setting of "Dame, a vous sans retollir" places this now elevated, courtly virelai in the tradition of the dance.

The Remede de Fortune charts the course of a young man's maturity in the rarefied sphere of courtly love. The general progression of the lyric insertions from the archaic lai to the more "modern" formes fixes musically reflects the young man's gradual understanding of love and integration into the society of his lady over the course of the narrative. Each of the nine lyric interpolations with musical settings is issued in response to some aspect of the situation in the narrative leading up to it: in the lai the young man expresses his innocent optimism and the joy of loving his lady, and later utters in a complainte his reactions to the joys and sorrows created by the allegorical figures Love and Fortune. Hope and Love accompany the young man to his lady's castle when en route he finds her amidst dancing and great festivities. She invites him to join the dancing, and asks him to contribute a song. The virelai, or chanson ballade (a term that Machaut preferred to use to describe lyrics in the form of the virelai—AbbaA, in which "A" is a refrain—and that implies a song intended for dancing), is the lover's response to his lady's request for a dance song.

Although monophonic, the musical setting of "Dame, a vous sans retollir" illustrates many levels of musical sensitivity. Machaut uses the protean rhythmic implications of imperfect tempus with major prolation to full effect, veiling the metric and rhythmic regularity traditionally reserved for popular dance music with unexpected syncopations and points of emphasis: this is now stylized dance music. Subphrases of unequal length underlie the balanced structure of the refrain. The single melody clearly delineates the firm "tonal" center on F, beginning on A and resting twice on G before concluding the refrain on F. The "B" section is five tempora in length and, constructed as two plus three tempora, continues the motif of unequal phrase lengths. Here Machaut emphasizes the home pitch F by beginning on the upper octave F (the registral high point of the song) and descending ultimately to a C, which forges a smooth "tonal" connection with the beginning of the refrain.

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