ABSTRACT
At the time when Alysoun was written it had become fashionable to begin a poem with a spring opening. In Alysoun the spring opening is organically incorporated into the structure of the stanza. Alysoun is a continuation of the French name Aeliz, which was commonly used in the burdens of simple, popular carols. The other details of the descriptio pulchritudinis in Alysoun, however, are conventional: like countless other beautiful women in medieval literature Alysoun is provided with a slender waist and a swan-white neck. The symptoms of the love-sickness as described in Alysoun are well known from other medieval love-lyrics : the lover is sleepless, wan, weary, etc. In Alysoun, then, the conventions of the Continental courtly love-lyric are modified by means of native literary techniques and it is, above all, the use of the various possibilities offered by alliterative technique which play a central part in this process of anglicization.
