Lenten ys come with love to toune

The nightingales, song thrushes and wild drakes call, the moon shines and animals make merry.

[5] "Lenten ys come with love to toune" is an anonymous poem, thought to have been composed in the late 13th or early 14th century.

[9] The manuscript was later owned by the 17th-century antiquary John Battely, from whose heirs it was purchased in 1723 by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer.

[19] As a reverdie, a poem celebrating springtime bird-song and flowers, "Lenten ys come with love to toune" bears a resemblance to French lyric poems, but its diction and alliteration are typically English,[20] drawing on an English tradition of earlier songs and dances which celebrate the coming of spring.

[21] Examples of Middle English lyrics on similar themes include "Bytuene Mersh ant Averil", "As dew in Aprille",[22] "Sumer is icumen in" and "Foweles in the frith".

[25] "Lenten"'s references to daisies, roses, lilies and the moon recall the use of these images in evocations of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, and are perhaps intended to suggest the purity of the natural world.

[32] Sacred and Profane (1975), Benjamin Britten's cantata for unaccompanied voices, sets St. Godric's "Sainte Marye Virgine" and the anonymous "Foweles in the frith", "Lenten ys come with love to toune", "Mirie it is while sumer ilast", "Whanne ic se on Rode", "Maiden in the mor lay", "Ye that pasen by the weiye" and "Wanne mine eyhen misten".

[33] The Mediæval Bæbes' album The Huntress begins with a setting of "Lenten" by Katharine Blake and Kavus Torabi.