The bearded fox is yelping, yelp, yelping through the glades;
Woe to the foreign rabbits! His eyes are two keen blades.

His teeth are keen; his feet are swift; his nails are red with blood.
Alain the fox is yelping war: yelp, yelping in the wood.

The Bretons making sharp their arms of terror I did see,
It was on cuirasses of Gaul, not stones of Brittany.

The Bretons reaping did I see, upon the fields of war;
It was not notched reaping-hooks, but swords of steel they bore.

They reapt no wheat of our own land, they reaped not our rye;
But the beardless ears, the beardless ears of Gaul and Saxony.

I saw upon the threshing-floor the Bretons threshing corn:
I saw the beaten chaff fly out from beardless ears offtorn.

It was not with their wooden flails the Bretons thresht the wheat;
But with their iron boar-spears and with their horses' feet.

I heard the cry when threshing's done, the joy-cry onward borne
Far, far from Mont-Saint-Michel to the valleys of Elorn:

From the abbey of Saint Gildas far on to the Land's-End rocks.
In Brittany's four corners give a glory to the Fox!

From age to age give glory to the Fox a thousand times!
But weep ye for the rhymer, though he recollect his rhymes!

For he that sang this song the first since then hath never sung:
Ah me, alas! Unhappy man! The Gauls cut out his tongue.

But though no more he hath a tongue, a heart is always his:
He has both hand and heart to shoot his arrowy melodies.