La chanson de la Bretagne

In peril on the sea by Montague T. Hainsselin is a poetry collection written in the late 19th century. The work dwells on the Breton coast and its people, blending seafaring life with Celtic legend and Catholic devotion in an elegiac, sea‑swept atmosphere. A nostalgic, exiled narrator evokes fishermen, islanders, and coastal women against winds, tides, chapels, and myths. Readers who enjoy maritime mood, folklore, and lyrical regional portraiture will be at home here. The opening of this work begins with a prologue that lets the “Breton soul” sing through an exile’s voice, invoking saints Jeune and Envel and lamenting a homeland that feels close to silence. It then unfurls vivid lyric tableaux: seaweed‑gathering girls on stormy shores, an enchanted spring of Brocéliande, the harsh land of Armor reborn in spring, wrecks washing in with winter seas, and gulls threading estuaries into quiet, grey towns. Catholic rites (May devotions, Noël, Easter, Saint Yves) mingle with Celtic memory—the drowned city of Ys, the siren Ahès, winds and rocks that speak—while ports like Paimpol, Tréguier, and Quimperlé frame departures, vigils, and the ache of shipwreck. Love and loss recur in brief ballads (a leper set apart, a washerwoman’s despair, doomed young lovers beneath the pines), alongside reflections on exile and the fading of oral song. This is only a summary of the beginning, which establishes a maritime, folkloric, and mournfully tender tone. (This is an automatically generated summary.)