Madrigals, holiday poetry and music format?

[quasimodo1]

XXI. I Soung sometimes my thoughts and fancies pleasure.
I soung sometimes my thoughts and fancies pleasure,
Wher then I list, or time be seru'd best and leasure,
While Daphne did inuite mee,
To supper once, and dranck to mee to spite mee.
I smild: yet still did doubt her,
And dranck wher shee had drank before, to flout hir.
But o while I did eie hir,
Myne eyes dranck Loue, my lips dranck burning fier.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=890097 Audio of madrigals, of a seasonal nature. quasimodo1

[Dark Muse]

Can you imagine the days when people really would have gatherd around the piano and song these for entertinament during the holidays. I rather enjoy madrigals.

[quasimodo1]

Madrigal: "This Life Which Seems So Fair"

THIS life, which seems so fair,
Is like a bubble blown up in the air
By sporting children's breath,
Who chase it everywhere,
And strive who can most motion it bequeath:
And though it sometime seem of its own might,
Like to an eye of gold, to be fixed there,
And firm to hover in that empty height,
That only is because it is so light.
But in that pomp it doth not long appear;
For even when most admired, it in a thought,
As swelled from nothing, doth dissolve in nought.

William Drummond of Hawthornden

[AuntShecky]

here's another poem by W. Drummond. The madrigal form is
9 lines
with this kind of rhyme scheme: aabcbacbdd

http://www.bartleby.com/106/43.html

here is the description as a musical form:

as musical form:
http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/g_madrigal.html