The interest of these details lies not in the scholarship or the historical truth or even the local colour, so much as in the art. The naivete of the thought is repeated by the simplicity of the verse. Word and thought are equally monosyllabic. Nothing ever matched it. The words bubble like a stream in the woods:-- Co sent Rollanz de sun tens ni ad plus. Try and put them into modern French, and see what will happen:-- Que jo ai fait des l'ure que nez fui. The words may remain exactly the same, but the poetry will have gone out of them. Five hundred years later, even the English critics had so far lost their sense for military poetry that they professed to be shocked by Milton's monosyllables:-- Whereat he inly raged, and, as they talked, Smote him into the midriff with a stone That beat out life. 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 Abbey Church just rising above. The verse is built up. The qualities of the architecture reproduce themselves in the song: the same directness, simplicity, absence of self-consciousness; the same intensity of purpose; even the same material; the prayer is granite:-- Guaris de mei l'anme de tuz perils Pur les pecchiez que en ma vie fisi The action of dying is felt, like the dropping of a keystone into the vault, and if the Romanesque arches in the church, which are within hearing, could speak, they would describe what they are doing in the precise words of the poem:-- Desur sun braz teneit Ie chief enclin Juintes ses mains est alez a sa fin. Upon their shoulders have their heads inclined, Folded their hands, and sunken to their rest.