The first is, that when English poetry awoke, long after the Conquest (or, as I should prefer to put it, after the Crusades) it awoke a new thing; in its vocabulary as much like Anglo-Saxon poetry as ever you will, but in metre, rhythm, lilt—­and more, in style, feeling, imaginative play—­and yet more again, in knowledge of what it aimed to be, in the essentials, in the qualities that make Poetry Poetry—­as different from Anglo-Saxon poetry as cheese is from chalk, and as much more nutritious.  Listen to this—­

     Bytuene Mershe ant Averil
     When spray biginnith to spring,
     The lutel foul hath hire wyl
     On hire lud to synge: 
     Ich libbe in love-longinge
     For semlokest of alle thynge,
     He may me blisse bringe,
     Icham in hire bandoun. 
       An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent,
       Ichot from hevene it is me sent,
       From alle wymmen my love is lent,
         And lyht on Alisoun.

Here you have alliteration in plenty; you even have what some hold to be the pattern of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (though in practice disregarded, may be, as often as not), the chosen initial used twice in the first line and once at least in the second: 

From alle wymmen my love is lent,
And lyht on A_l_isoun.

But if a man cannot see a difference infinitely deeper than any similarity between this song of Alison and the old Anglo-Saxon verse—­a difference of nature—­I must despair of his literary sense.

What has happened?  Well, in Normandy, too, and in another tongue, men are singing much the same thing in the same way: 

     A la fontenelle
     Qui sort seur l’araine,
     Trouvai pastorella
     Qui n’iert pas vilaine... 
       Merci, merci, douce Marote,
       N’ociez pas vostre ami doux,

and this Norman and the Englishman were singing to a new tune, which was yet an old tune re-set to Europe by the Provence, the Roman Province; by the troubadours—­Pons de Capdeuil, Bernard de Ventadour, Bertrand de Born, Pierre Vidal, and the rest, with William of Poitou, William of Poitiers.  Read and compare; you will perceive that the note then set persists and has never perished.  Take Giraud de Borneil—­

     Bel companhos, si dormetz o velhatz
     Non dortmatz plus, qu’el jorn es apropchatz—­

and set it beside a lyric of our day, written without a thought of Giraud de Borneil—­

     Heigh!  Brother mine, art a-waking or a-sleeping: 
     Mind’st thou the merry moon a many summers fled? 
     Mind’st thou the green and the dancing and the leaping? 
     Mind’st thou the haycocks and the moon above them creeping?...

Or take Bernard de Ventadour’s—­

     Quand erba vertz, e fuelha par
     E’l flor brotonon per verjan,
     E’l rossinhols autet e clar
     Leva sa votz e mov son chan,
     Joy ai de luy, e joy ai de la flor,
     Joy ai de me, e de me dons maior.