e this for nothing more than it pretends to be--a
conjecture, a suggestion. I will follow it up with two statements of
fact, neither doubtful nor disputable.

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 _l_ove is _l_ent,
And _l_yht 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 o