Poem of the week: Cuckoo Song by anonymous

Summer is coming in! Today is the start of a new season, and the year’s longest day. With the cycle of nature in mind, I’ve been thinking about Tennyson.

He was last seen in mid-air somewhere over Algeria, but vanished in May, almost certainly owing to battery problems. You see, the electronic tag he was fitted with in Thetford Forest had been playing up. Not Tennyson the poet, of course. Tennyson the cuckoo.

On the website of the British Trust for Ornithology (bto.org), you can follow the migratory patterns of individual, named cuckoos on a satellite map, as they make their journey to Britain for the summer. The UK’s cuckoo numbers have halved in the past 20 years, and experts are not sure why. I do hope Tennyson is all right.

The cuckoo’s song inspired this week’s lyric poem. It’s a poem for several voices, the earliest surviving example of a six-part round song in English. A note on the 13th-century manuscript says it should be sung by at least three “companions” (or “socii”), each taking up the tune at staggered intervals. You might want to try it with your own companions – over Zoom, if need be.

The debate about whether song lyrics are poetry never seems to go away. It even made the headlines when Bob Dylan became the second songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (after Rabindranath Tagore). It’s a complex question, but my view on it has always been that every song is a kind of poetry, inasmuch as every film is a kind of photography. Whether or not you think it is poetry, song undeniably has a central place in the poetic tradition; verses were sung or chanted long before they were written down.

You’ll find the “Cuckoo Song” on the very first page of The Oxford Book of English Verse. My old, battered copy of that book, from which this slightly modernised text comes, helpfully glosses “lhude” (loud), “awe” (ewe), “lhouth” (loweth), “sterteth” (leaps) and “swike” (cease), but bashfully avoids “verteth”.

More recent editions, and the British Library, will tell you “verteth” is the first recorded instance in English of the verb “to fart”. Farting bucks, leaping bulls, the singing cuckoo – all just part of summer’s rambunctious, irrepressible life.

Cuckoo Song

Sumer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu!

Groweth sed, and bloweth med,

And springth the wude nu –   

Sing cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb,

Lhouth after calve cu;

Bulluc sterteth, bucks verteth,

Murie sing cuccu!

Cuccu, cuccu, well singes thu, cuccu:

Ne swike thu naver nu;

Sing cuccu, nu, sing cuccu,

Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!