My mouth laughs and my thoughts weep

We all like a good pop song and one of the most popular of Renaissance pop songs, apparently, was Ockeghem's Ma bouche rit et ma pensée pleure ('My mouth laughs and my thoughts weep') - a song of unrequited love. Must have had all the lads sighing and the lasses weeping.

It's a chanson for three voices, with the two upper parts singing the text and the low voice (or instrument) playing a line without words. The song's verse form is that a virelai, where the last word of each stanza is rhymed with by the first line of the next stanza. This convention in the verse form is echoed by a different convention in the musical form, where the structure of the song is almost always ABBA or, as here (as the first verse is re-set), ABBAA - meaning that the first, fourth and fifth stanzas are all set to identical music, and the second and third stanzas are both set to their own different but identical music. 

A. Ma bouche rit et ma pensée pleure,
Mon oeul s’esjoye et et mon cuer mauldit l’eure
Qu’il eut le bien qui sa sancté dechasse,
Et le plaisir qui la mort luy pourchasse,
Sans reconfort qui m’ayde ne sequeure.

B. Ha! cuer pervers, faulsaire et mensongier,
Dictes comment avés osé songier
De ainsi faulser ce que m’avés promis.

B. Puisqu’en ce point vous vous volés vengier,
Pensés bientost de ma vie abregier:
Vivre ne puis au point ou m’avez mis.

A. Vostre rigeur veult donques que je meure,
Mais pitié veult que vivant je demeure,
Ainsi meurs vif et vivant trepasse.
Mais pour celer le mal qui ne se passe
Et pour couvrir le deul ou je labeure,

A. Ma bouche rit et ma pensée pleure,
Mon oeul s’esjoye et et mon cuer mauldit l’eure
Qu’il eut le bien qui sa sancté dechasse,
Et le plaisir qui la mort luy pourchasse,
Sans reconfort qui m’ayde ne sequeure.

My mouth laughs and my thoughts weep,
My eye is happy and my heart curses the hour
When it had the good which drives away its health
And the pleasure which brings it death,
Without comfort that might aid or succour me.
Ah! perverse heart, false and deceiving,
Tell how you have dared to dream
Of breaking the promise you made to me.
Since you will avenge yourself to that degree,
Consider soon cutting short my life:
I cannot live in the plight in which you’ve placed me.
Your sternness, then, wants me to die,
But pity wants me to survive,
So alive I die, and living, pass away.
But, to hide the ill which has no end
And to conceal the grief in which I struggle,
My mouth laughs and my thoughts weep…

It's a lovely song.