Chanson

This poem, sometimes referred to as Chanson Innocence (song of innocence) is both pastoral and anti-pastoral since it speaks of eternal youth and the blissful world of play free of care at the same time as it defines that world as temporal.

Stabroek News 2009

"Chanson," written about 1170, is at Oxford, where it was found in our century.

A Literary History of the English People From the Origins to the Renaissance Jean Jules Jusserand

The crusading spirit, already noticeable in the "Chanson", is still more marked in the German poem.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 8: Infamy-Lapparent 1840-1916 1913

Probably there was never a day, certainly never a week, during several centuries, when portions of the "Chanson" were not sung, or recited, at the Mount, and if there was one room where it was most at home, this one, supposing it to be the old refectory, claims to be the place.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Henry Adams 1878

Not one man in a hundred thousand could now feel what the eleventh century felt in these verses of the "Chanson," and there is no reason for trying to do so, but there is a certain use in trying for once to understand not so much the feeling as the meaning.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Henry Adams 1878

All this preamble leads only to unite the "Chanson" with the architecture of the Mount, by means of Duke William and his Breton campaign of 1058.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Henry Adams 1878

Without the "Chanson," one cannot approach the feeling which the eleventh century built into the Archangel's church.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Henry Adams 1878

Milton's language was indeed more or less archaic and Biblical; it was a Puritan affectation; but the "Chanson" in the refectory actually reflected, repeated, echoed, the piers and arches of the

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Henry Adams 1878

The "Chanson" is in poetry what the Mount is in architecture.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Henry Adams 1878

The most unlikely part of the tale was, after all, not the singing of the "Chanson," but the prayer of Taillefer to the Duke: --

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Henry Adams 1878