Billy Mills 

Poster poems: May

Billy Mills: Traditionally a season of poles and ribbons, May can be merry and romantic, or the month when 'love that smiled in April' turns false. We invite you, garlanded or otherwise, to post your poems
  
  

Celebrating the new month round the Maypole
May Day... a pole in Bedfordshire evokes a magic than even a cynic like Swift managed to write about happily, albeit with an ulterior motive. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

Well, here we are in the fifth month of our poetic year. Here in Ireland, May is officially the first month of summer, although the chilly north winds and showers currently rolling in off the Atlantic would make you wonder. Given the accompanying lack of growth in the garden, it's almost paradoxical to recall that the name derives from Maia, a Roman fertility goddess.

In The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser's May sets out as if it's going to mark the fertile bounty of the month, but rapidly descends into a narrowly sectarian attack on the Catholic clergy and their flocks. It's not one of the poet's finer moments, it must be said. Much more to my taste is Raimbaut de Vaqueiras' magnificent Kalenda Maya (see here for a translation). Raimbaut's eye and mind are firmly set on the month's fabled fecundity, both in the world of nature and in his beloved, the fair Beatrice.

The joyful dancing skip that characterises Kalenda Maya is also found in two May poems by Robert Herrick. The first of these, Corinna's Going A-Maying, celebrates the old English custom of young couples marking May Day by going out into the fields and woods around their villages, excursions that frequently ended up in marriages. Herrick's Corinna is portrayed as a latter-day Flora, goddess of flowers, spring and fertility, whose mere passing causes the village streets to turn to fields of blossom.

My second Herrick poem is The May-Pole, which marks another old English custom, the erecting of somewhat phallic poles on village greens for the local maidens to dance around. The implicit connection with fertility is made explicit in the final line of the poem, when Herrick calls on the dancers, once they wed, to "multiply all, like to fishes". The magic of Maypoles is clearly potent; even an old cynic like Swift managed to write about them happily, albeit with the ulterior motive of mocking the Cromwellian interregnum and delighting in the restoration of church, king and the old customs.

All in all, poets seem to agree that May is a merry month. Indeed, the phrase "the merry month of May", which may possibly originate from Thomas Dekker's poem of that name, has become almost a commonplace, and appears in countless poems and folk songs including the well-known and extremely widespread Barbara Allen. The folk tradition being what it is, these songs are often less than merry, and the epithet can be bitterly ironic; love kills cruel Barbara's young man.

Barbara Allen servers as a salutary reminder amid all this Maytide revelry; love may be born in May, but it may die then too. This is the heart of Sara Teasdale's poem called, simply, May. The speaker is surrounded by signs of incipient summer, but is walking a "wintery way" owing to the passing of her April love. It's a fine contrast to Herrick's lusty verses and chimes with the anonymous Harley lyric that begins 'In may hit murgeþ when hit dawes' (very loosely translated as number 90 here).

The May poems I've been looking at so far have all been bound up with an essentially pagan view of the month; fertility and physical love abound. However, we should not forget that for Christians May is the month of Mary, a connection that lies behind one of the finest of all May poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins' The May Magnificat, a poem that bridges the theological and pagan worlds with an elegant span.

And so I invite you all to post your May poems here. You may be wrapped up in the month's bounteous fertility, its reputation as the season of love. Perhaps, like Teasdale, you have found winter in May's spring. Or possibly May means something entirely different to you. One way or another, it's time to get posting those poems.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*