The poem is divided into three stanzas in the style of an English sestet—a 6-line stanza with the rhyme pattern A-B-A-B-C-C. Iambic pentameter is used in the verse. The meter follows this pattern: Iambic pentameter has five pairs of syllables per line, which means that each line must have an even number of words. On Monsieur's departure was written by Paul Émile Boutroue in 1866. The poem is based on a French historical event from 1554 when Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, withdrew to his palace at El Escorial near Madrid after hearing that his army had been defeated by the Spanish under Francis I at Mézières. Boutroue was a prominent poet and playwright of his time. He was also one of the founders of the modern French language theatre movement. This poem is often included in textbooks about famous poems because it is one of the most popular poems in France. It has been translated into many languages including German, Spanish, and English. The first two lines of the poem form an inverted pyramid since they start out with the word only (mon only). This means that the last line of each stanza should contain all the information given in the first line of the poem.