then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse.  A poem so distinguished is, for example, A Luve Ron (A Love Counsel), by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which recalls the French poet Villon’s Balade of Dead Ladies, with its refrain—­

Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan? 
“Where are the snows of yester year?”

Where is Paris and Heleyne
  That weren so bright and fair of blee[1]
Amadas, Tristan, and Ideyne
  Yseude and alle the,[2]
Hector with his sharpe main,
  And Caesar rich in worldes fee? 
They beth ygliden out of the reign[3]
  As the shaft is of the clee.[4]

A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of mention, among others, The Owl and the Nightingale, generally assigned to the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an estrif, or dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale the aesthetic view of life.  The debate is conducted with much animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. The Land of Cokaygne is an amusing little poem of some two hundred lines, belonging to the class of fabliaux, short humorous tales or satirical pieces in verse.  It describes a lubber-land, or fool’s paradise, where the geese fly down all roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in their bills for their dressing, and where there is a nunnery upon a river of sweet milk, and an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls, like the hall of little King Pepin, are “of pie-crust and pastry crust,” with flouren cakes for the shingles and fat puddings for the pins.

There are a few songs dating from about 1300, and mostly found in a single collection (Harl.  MS., 2253), which are almost the only English verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear.  They are written in French strophic forms in the southern dialect, and sometimes have an intermixture of French and Latin lines.  They are musical, fresh, simple, and many of them very pretty.  They celebrate the gladness of spring with its cuckoos and throstle-cocks, its daisies and woodruff.

[Footnote 1:  Hue.] [Footnote 2:  Those.] [Footnote 3:  Realm.] [Footnote 4:  Bowstring.]

  When the nightingale sings the woodes waxen green;
  Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween,
  And love is to my herte gone with a spear so keen,
  Night and day my blood it drinks, my herte doth me tene.[5]

Others are love plaints to “Alysoun” or some other lady whose “name is in a note of the nightingale;” whose eyes are as gray as glass, and her skin as “red as rose on ris.” [6] Some employ a burden or refrain.

  Blow, northern wind,
  Blow thou me my sweeting,
  Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!