Jules Laforgue's Complaintes collection transforms the medieval genre of lamentation into a vehicle for modern irony and self-pity, mixing philosophical despair with comic bathos in a style that influenced both French and English modernism; The medieval complainte tradition is exemplified by Rutebeuf's "Complainte Rutebeuf," where the poet laments his poverty, illness, and social misfortune in a tone that oscillates between genuine distress and performative self-dramatization; Christine de Pizan's complaintes mourning the death of her husband demonstrate how the genre accommodated genuine autobiographical grief within its formal conventions, anticipating the modern lyric of personal loss; A student composing a complainte might lament a contemporary loss, a friendship ended by distance, the closure of a beloved bookshop, or the passing of summer, using the genre's tradition of formal lamentation to elevate personal sorrow into aesthetic expression; Apollinaire's "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" contains passages in the complainte register, lamenting a failed love affair in a mixture of lyric intensity and bitter humor that updates the medieval form for modern sensibility; The complainte's characteristic feature, the refrain that returns after each stanza, creates a ritual quality of obsessive return that mirrors the psychological reality of grief, where the same painful thought recurs regardless of the mind's attempts to move beyond it.