"Ae Fond Kiss" is written in the tradition of the aubade, a type of poem written from the perspective of one lover leaving another. Traditional aubades have an even more specific focus, centering around a person departing from their lover at dawn. However, poets have been inspired by that traditional form to write more expansively on the topics of parting and farewells. Similarly, writers have interpreted the tonal possibilities of the aubade flexibly: some aubades are playful and sweet, others serious and tragic. The aubade form dates to the twelfth century in Europe, but the universality of the situations and emotions it can be used to express have allowed it to remain popular over hundreds of years, and to spread far beyond its European origins. While Burns' "Ae Fond Kiss" includes no mention of sunrise, its description of the transition between love and loneliness—represented in this case by a kiss rather than a sunrise—is indebted to the aubade tradition.
The aubade describes a liminal moment: the shift from the intimacy of darkness to the exposure and busyness of daytime. In fact, though the word "aubade" is French, it originally comes from the Spanish "Alba," or sunrise—a moment of transition between night and day. Originating in France, aubades made their earliest recorded English appearance with Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde." In that work, the two eponymous lovers each deliver an aubade addressed to the other. Criseyde, hearing a rooster's crow, laments, "Myn hertes lyf, my trist and my plesaunce/That I was born, allas! what me is wo,/That day of us mot make disseveraunce!" In other words, she addresses her lover as her "heart's life," but quickly describes her woe at realizing that the daytime hours will divide them. Chaucer's contrast of loving intimacy and jarring separation, within a few short lines, is typical of the aubade form, which tends to derive tension and momentum from that very contrast. However, Troilus and Criseyde's love ends in tragedy, their playfully hyperbolic aubades foreshadowing their unhappy ending.
Perhaps the most famous example of the aubade in English is John Donne's "The Sun Rising." Donne was what is now known as a metaphysical poet—a group of seventeenth-century English writers who embraced whimsical, witty, or ingenious conceits. "The Sun Rising" does so by addressing, not a lover, but the sun itself in scolding tones. "Busy old fool, unruly sun,/Why dost thou thus,/Through windows, and through curtains call on us?" chides Donne's speaker. The speaker negatively compares the sun to himself and his lover, telling it that it will never be as happy as the two of them. This poem's tone is not lamenting, even playfully so. Rather, it is swaggering and triumphant, asserting that the speaker's love is strong enough to overpower even the sun itself. Indeed, the speaker never actually gets out of bed and leaves his lover, subverting the aubade form as well as the conventions of time itself.
In another overturning of aubade convention, Philip Larkin's "Aubade" dispenses with the lover entirely. Larkin, a twentieth-century poet, describes a speaker noting the sun's rise with fear because it evokes "Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,/Making all thought impossible but how/And where and when I shall myself die." His poem's tone is far more somber and stark than those of Donne, Chaucer, and indeed even Burns. Yet in a sense, Larkin's "Aubade" is an attempt to capture the core feelings of the form, a goal reflected in the simple boldness of his title. Every aubade is after all a description of the isolation, loneliness, and emptiness brought on by time's unstoppable passage. Larkin cuts out the middleman, focusing directly on those emotions and on the transition between life and death.
Contemporary poets, meanwhile, have reinterpreted this form in new ways of their own. Some, like Camille Rankine's "Aubade," follow Larkin's footsteps and cut out the presence of a lover while focusing on the transitional experience of sunrise, in Rankine's case through a lens of American racial conflict. Kevin Young's light, flirtatious "aubade" dwells on the lover's physical characteristics: "the small/of yr back, your thick/bottom/lip stuck out." Emily Skaja's "Aubade With Attention to Pathos," like Burns's "Ae Fond Kiss," speaks not about the end of a night but about the end of a relationship—in this case by divorce—doing away with references to morning or the sun. If anything is constant across these many poems, it is an attention to the contrast between togetherness and isolation, and to the moments where one turns into the other.
