Spring, the sweet spring Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king,
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
The palm and may make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,
And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,
In every street these tunes our ears do greet:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo!
Spring, the sweet spring!
Thomas Nashe (1567 – c. 1601)
This week’s poem is a charming springtime piece by Thomas Nashe. It moves from the allegorical and more common tropes of poetry – the image of the ‘king’ in the first stanza, for example – towards the more local, the more acutely-observed; those fields ‘breath[ing] sweet’, the ‘old wives’ toasting themselves in the sun. It is a springtime which sweetly infects the indoors; country houses gather may and palm; and the streets themselves are alive with the sound of birds. There is no distinction to be drawn between the outdoors and the inside – just as the outward joy of spring seeps into the poet with the exuberant refrain of birdcall.
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