Envoi or envoy in poetry is used to describe:
- A short stanza at the end of a poem such as a ballad, used either to address an imagined or actual person or to comment on the preceding body of the poem.
- A dedicatory poem about sending the book out to readers, a postscript.
- Any poem of farewell, including a farewell to life.
The word envoy or l'envoy comes from the Old French, where it means '[the] sending forth'. Ezra Pound's 'Envoi' to his longer poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) begins "Go, dumb-born book", and thus explicitly gives the 'Envoi' title to the long-standing genre of writing a farewell poem addressed to the book of poems itself, previously used for example by Edmund Spenser in The Shepheardes Calender (1579) or Anne Bradstreet in 'The Author to Her Book' (1650s). Later writers such as William Meredith and Meg Bateman have also written envois of this kind.
The envoi is also often written as a postscript or farewell from the poet as they face death, even if that death might be some distance away. Poets who have written envois in this style include Rudyard Kipling, Willa Cather, James McAuley, the suffragist Emily Davison, and Wyn Griffith.
See also
- Tornada (Occitan literary term)
- Waka (classical Japanese poetry)