Quote of the Day (Robert Burns, on ‘Youthfu' May Its Bloom Renew'd’)

“O were my love yon Lilac fair,
Wi' purple blossoms to the Spring,
And I, a bird to shelter there,
When wearied on my little wing!
How I wad mourn when it was torn
By Autumn wild, and Winter rude!
But I wad sing on wanton wing,
When youthfu' May its bloom renew'd.”—Scottish Romantic poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), “O Were My Love Yon Lilac Fair” (1793), in The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (2000)
 
(I came upon this poem on an episode of Parks and Recreation, in which Ron Swanson—sitting on a gloriously green hillside in Scotland—reads this poem and is unexpectedly moved to tears.)

Photo of the Day: A Product of ‘Long'd for May’)

“Now doe a quire of chirping Minstrels bring
In tryumph to the world, the youthfull Spring.
The Vallies, hills, and woods, in rich araye,
Welcome the comming of the long'd for May.”—English poet Thomas Carew (1595?-1639?), “The Spring,” in Restoration and Augustan Poets: Milton to Goldsmith, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (1965)
 
It might be hard to believe, but I came across this blooming bit of flora outside a building in a bustling Bergen County, NJ suburb this week.
 
It was a far different environment from the one in which Thomas Carew wrote his poem. 

When he wasn’t busy serving as ”sewer in ordinary” (i.e., the guy who tasted the royal food first before passing it on, thus preventing the possibility of poison) to King Charles I or leading the “Cavalier poets” who supported the monarch in the tumult leading up to and through the English Civil War, he was also pursuing a variety of ladies.
 
And so, lest you think that “The Spring” is some sort of ancestor of Wordsworth in its ecstatic embrace of Nature, it is really Carew’s attempt to woo a woman keeping him at bay—a lady with “June in her eyes, in her heart January.”

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on May)

“May with its light behaving
Stirs vessel, eye and limb,
The singular and sad
Are willing to recover,
And to each swan-delighting river
The careless picnics come
In living white and red.”—English poet, playwright and critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “May,” originally published in 1934, reprinted in Collected Poems of W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson (1991)
 
I took the image accompanying this post in May 2014, at New York’s Central Park.

Quote of the Day (Sir Thomas Malory, on ‘That Lusty Month of May’)

“The month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom, and to bring forth fruit; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in like wise every lusty heart that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May, in something to constrain him to some manner of thing more in that month than in any other month, for divers causes.”—Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)

For some people—especially politicians!—every day is part of  “that lusty month of May.”

(The image here is The Beguiling of Merlin—part, of course, of the Arthurian legends recounted by Sir Thomas Malory—an oil-on-canvas painting by Edward Burne-Jones, 1874.)