Tis the Merry Month of May

Despite the fact that May is my birth month I have always loved this spring month best of all.  Lily of the Valley is traditionally the flower associated with the month of May and is also one of my favourite flowers.  I learnt just recently from my mother that on the day that I was born at a country cottage hospital my father brought her a big bunch of lilac to the hospital and a couple of days after I was born walking in the grounds to the hospital there was a big patch of lily of the valley growing there.  Mum picked a bunch.  It is such a lovely flower.

Tis the month when everything starts to spring into life, the blossom on the bushes giving the gift of beauty and of perfume, the month that traditionally says goodbye to winter - thank goodness.  But it is also Beltaine - another click in the wheel and she has moved yet again - ever forward taking us on a journey to our destiny our fate.  It is the journey that we learn most from.  The Celebration of the green and of the Green Man and a celebration of country law and magic - the wheel moves ever onwards.

I have been reading a lot more poetry of late - its a passion I picked up as a child and I have come across this poem which for me sums up so much of our past and of a much gentler way of life and of course it is olde englishe.  I hope you like it too.

THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY
by: Thomas Dekker

THE month of May, the merry month of May,

So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!

O, and then did I unto my true love say,

Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer's Queen.

 

Now the nightingale, the pretty nightingale,

The sweetest singer in all the forest quire,

Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love's tale:

Lo, yonder she sitteth, her breast against a brier.

 

But O, I spy the cuckoo, the cuckoo, the cuckoo;

See where she sitteth; come away, my joy:

Come away, I prithee, I do not like the cuckoo

Should sing where my Peggy and I kiss and toy.

 

O, the month of May, the merry month of May,

So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green;

And then did I unto my true love say,

Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer's Queen.