Today’s Poem: Sumer Is Icumen In

The cacophony of summertime

Jacob van Maerlant, Cuculus, circa 1345 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, on the last day of May, celebrates the coming of summer. It also celebrates the overlap between poetry and song. This Middle English composition, tentatively attributed to the composer and copyist W. de Wycombe (late-13th century), is a lyric in the most common contemporary sense: It’s actually the words to a song. Its lines were composed to be sung and heard, not read or even recited. Still, when we silently read them or speak them aloud, we can hear and delight in their music. Or, like Ezra Pound (1885–1972), we can delight in the music —and have fun with it, too.

The oldest known example of six-part polyphony, “Sumer Is Icumen In” is a rota, a form of the round or canon. In a round, voices overlap in the verses to create waves of sound, as we all know from singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” or “Dona Nobis Pacem,” or the “Tallis Canon,” or Michael Praetorius’s beautiful “Jubilate Deo.” But the rota differs from …