When the nightingalë sings the woodës waxen green;
Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween,
And love is to my hertë gone with a spear so keen,
Night and day my blood it drinks, my hertë 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!

Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter.

Winter wakeneth all my care
Now these leavës waxeth bare,
Oft I sigh and mournë sare
When it cometh in my thought
Of this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought.

Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in
the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united
with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry, and
the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had
made this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the end of the 13th
century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English _Golden
Legend_, was prepared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on