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An aubade is a poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn.
Aubades were in the repertory of Troubadors in Europe in the Middle Ages. An early English example is in Book III of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. The love poetry of the 16th century dealt mostly with unsatisfied love, so the aubade was not a major genre in Elizabethan lyric. This changed with the advent of the metaphysical fashion; Donne's poem "The Sunne Rising" is one of the finest examples of the aubade in English. Aubades were written from time to time in the 18th and 19th century, none of them quite up to the Metaphysical standards.
There have been several notable aubades in the 20th century, as well as a major poem titled "Aubade" by Philip Larkin in which the lover is life.
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