THE OLD weather rhyme “Never cast a clout till May is out” was thoroughly vindicated in 1955 when, during the early hours of May 17th, the month’s heaviest snowfall in a century descended on southern England.
The Methuen Book of Poems for Every Day marks the event with an older verse by Robert Bridges, London Snow: “All night it fell, and when full inches seven/ It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,/ The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;/ And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness/ Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare.”
In 1868, and somewhat less poetically, a 24-year-old Gerard Manley Hopkins noted in his diary for May 5th: “Cold. Resolved to be religious.” The prosaic note was apt, because his resolution extended to a self-imposed ban on writing poetry, which he feared was interfering with his priestly vocation. It was not until 1875 that the church authorities persuaded him to take up literature again.
The aforementioned examples are exceptions to a general rule, however – which is that the onset of May traditionally guarantees both warmer weather and an upsurge in the productivity of poets.
It cannot have hindered the month’s obvious popularity with verse writers that its name is so much easier to rhyme than April. But the sap rises in humans and plants alike around now. And the conditions for which May is better known are those that inspired another Bridges poem, Nightingales: “Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men/ We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then/ As night is withdrawn/ From those sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,/ Dream, while the innumerable choir of day/ Welcome the dawn.”
May 1st is of course the date when workers of the world unite. But it was once notorious for an even older form of union: the one that often resulted from the outdoor ceremonies of May Eve, when young people went into the woods on the night of April 30th to collect flowers, and did not come back until morning.
The old children’s rhyme “Here we go gathering nuts in May” is, as Brewer’s Dictionary notes, a corruption – there being no nuts to gather at this time. “Knots of may” (hawthorn), in fact, are what used to be collected. And that many a baby was collected in the process is witnessed by the special names once given to children conceived around this time – including Jackson, Hodson, and Robinson – co-called after sprites and other mythical figures supposed to frequent the woods.
Ben Jonson suggested in passing that the frolicsome origins influenced their subsequent behaviour. “Out of my doors, you sons of noise and tumult, begot on an ill May-day,” he wrote in The Silent Woman.
Despite the weather warning, this is by tradition a month for those who work in the open air to rejoice. May is usually said to be “merry”, as is the ploughman in the title of Robert Burns’s verse: “As I was a-wand’ring ae morning in spring,/ I heard a young ploughman sae sweetly to sing;/ And as he was singin’, thir words he did say –/ There’s nae life like the ploughman’s in the month of sweet May.”
Just as merry were Christopher Marlowe’s shepherds – a view of whose frolics is one of many fringe benefits he promises his beloved in Come Live With Me: “The shepherd swains shall dance and sing/ For thy delight each May-morning:/ If these delights thy mind may move/ Then live with me and be my love.”
Some winters are worse than others, of course, and some Mays come as more of a relief. In his sombre poem Midnight: May 7th 1945, Patric Dickinson records the eve of VE day: “Thunder gathers all the sky,/ Tomorrow night a war will end/ Men their natural deaths may die/ And Cain shall be his brother’s friend.”
And sometimes there is no sign of winter ending now, as in Charlotte Mew’s May 1915. Perhaps the poem was coloured by Mew’s own grim life, blighted by family tragedy and unrequited love. But events in Europe were the keynote: “Let us remember Spring will come again/ To the scorched, blackened woods, where the wounded trees/ Wait with their wise old patience for the heavenly rain.”
Despite all its associations with youth and sex and the origins of life, this month has inspired classic reflections on death as well. In mellower mood than when he was ordering its offspring out of the house, Ben Jonson uses May as a metaphor for the virtues of a well-lived life over mere longevity in The Noble Nature: “It is not growing like a tree/ In bulk, doth make man better be;/ Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,/ To fall at last dry, bald, and sere:/ A lily of a day/ Is fairer far in May/ Although it fall and die that night–/ It was the plant and flower of Light./In small proportions we just beauties see: and in short measures life may perfect be.”
This is a point arguably illustrated by John Keats. In his last May but one, at the age of 24, he wrote his famous ode to a nightingale that had nested near where he was staying. And although he had not yet developed tuberculosis, the poet imagines his death – “to cease upon the midnight with no pain” – accompanied by the bird’s ecstatic song, even as he is surrounded by new life: “White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;/ Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves/ And mid-May’s eldest child/ The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,/ The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”