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