| MAY is Mary’s month, and I | |
| Muse at that and wonder why: | |
| Her feasts follow reason, | |
| Dated due to season— | |
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| Candlemas, Lady Day; | |
| But the Lady Month, May, | |
| Why fasten that upon her, | |
| With a feasting in her honour? | |
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| Is it only its being brighter | |
| Than the most are must delight her? | |
| Is it opportunest | |
| And flowers finds soonest? | |
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| Ask of her, the mighty mother: | |
| Her reply puts this other | |
| Question: What is Spring?— | |
| Growth in every thing— | |
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| Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, | |
| Grass and greenworld all together; | |
| Star-eyed strawberry-breasted | |
| Throstle above her nested | |
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| Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin | |
| Forms and warms the life within; | |
| And bird and blossom swell | |
| In sod or sheath or shell. | |
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| All things rising, all things sizing | |
| Mary sees, sympathising | |
| With that world of good, | |
| Nature’s motherhood. | |
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| Their magnifying of each its kind | |
| With delight calls to mind | |
| How she did in her stored | |
| Magnify the Lord. | |
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| Well but there was more than this: | |
| Spring’s universal bliss | |
| Much, had much to say | |
| To offering Mary May. | |
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| When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple | |
| Bloom lights the orchard-apple | |
| And thicket and thorp are merry | |
| With silver-surfèd cherry | |
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| And azuring-over greybell makes | |
| Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes | |
| And magic cuckoocall | |
| Caps, clears, and clinches all— | |
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| This ecstasy all through mothering earth | |
| Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth | |
| To remember and exultation | |
| In God who was her salvation. |
