Few female poets were published during the ages after Sappho; Marie de France -- a pseudonym -- was one of the first poets to write controversial, secular works about love in all its forms, including extramarital and adulterous relationships, in the form of lais. Her works, all in rhyming couplets, includes "Bisclaveret," about a nobleman who is both a cuckold and a werewolf -- thus preceding Stephanie Meyer in theme and genre -- and "Chaitivel," in which a woman, unable to decide on a lover, scandalously plays four men against each other.
Lais found their way to England, where Geoffrey Chaucer, in "Canterbury Tales," satirized their romantic eight-syllable form in "The Franklin's Tale." Chaucer adds gentle irony as he tells of a married woman who promises to wed a wizard if he can magically remove the danger to her husband's voyage. A lay would have ended tragically, but Chaucer's wizard cancels the deal when he realizes the couple's true love; the irony is an uncharacteristic happy ending. Another irony is that Chaucer's work is extant; the poems he satirizes are not.
The most impressive lay poem still in print is undoubtedly Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," a lengthy work entirely in octosyllabic rhyming couplets and divided into an introduction and six cantos. Perhaps its greatest claim to fame is the quote beginning Canto Six: "Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, 'This is my own, my native land!'" Politicians and statesmen, who repeat the quote to this day, are probably not aware that they're quoting a French-influenced British lay.
Lais as format poems declined around the 15th century, when poets began to add repeating end lines to their structure. Thus one poetic form gave birth to another, as lais became ballads, narrative poems distinguished not by polysyllabic patterns but by refrains. Ballads are the root forms of virtually all popular songs today, particularly country-western works, which, like the lais of Marie de France, tell love stories of every shade.