The ballade ascribed to “Perseverance” in Chartier's “Le Breviaire des Nobles” (1416–26), contains a passage which might provide a starting point for a discussion of poetic closure (which has been disputed) in the poet's verse:

Chartier seems, in these lines, to endorse artistic closure, based on the premise that a work, once begun, must at some point be ended by the author.

In this article I intend to examine the concept of artistic closure in Chartier's poetry, arguing that the poet subverts some medieval theories of literary “ending.” What results in his work is a discernible tension between closure and open-endedness, a tension which is characteristic of medieval debate poetry. A certain vocabulary of closure, which Chartier employs, links his poetry to the semantic reservoir of terms expressing closure drawn upon by other poets, among them Christine de Pizan, his literary predecessor. Primarily, I will locate elements of symmetry, continuity, and fracture to be found in Chartier's verse, relating these disparate factors to an “aesthetics of irresolution” which he shared with his contemporaries.

The literary device of bilateral symmetry, whose origins lie in medieval and classical treatises on style, supposes that the poet creates an intimate connection between the beginning and end of a text and hence imposes structure on the literary work, reinforced in fixed form poetry by an arrangement of metrical and rhythmic constraints.