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 the standard round in that its voices converge to sing the refrain (or “pes”) in unison. In this case, the unison refrain is the speaker’s exhortation to the cuckoo to keep singing. Here is the song performed with attention to recreating it as it would have been sung in its period. As this arranger-performer notes, the “pes,” sung by two voices, constitutes the medieval approximation of a bass line, or drone, beneath the overlapping strands of the melody. 

“Sumer Is Icumen In” is additionally a lyric in the sense of the lyric poem, focused not on a narrative but on an intensity of experience. The poem, in a Wessex dialect of Middle English, recreates the exuberant cacophony of summertime, exploding with life (sometimes rudely, as in the case of the flatulent billy goat). We offer it here in both its original form and in a translation that seeks to preserve the original’s rhymed tetrameter and trimeter rhythms.  

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Sumer Is Icumen In 

attributed to W. de Wycombe

Sumer is icumen in, 
Lhude sing cuccu! 
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med 
And springþ þe wde nu, 
Sing cuccu! 
Awe bleteþ after lomb, 
Lhouþ after calue cu. 
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ, 
Murie sing cuccu! 
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu, cuccu; 
Ne swik þu nauer nu. 
Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu. 
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu! 

Translation: 

Summer is a-coming in, 
Loudly sing cuckoo!  
Groweth seed and bloweth mead 
And spring the wood anew.  
Sing, cuckoo!  
Ewe bleateth after lamb, 
Loweth after calf the cow, 
Bullock starteth, buck-goat farteth, 
Merrily sing cuckoo!  
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well singest thou, cuckoo.  
Never stop thou, cuckoo!  
Sing, cuckoo now. Sing, cuckoo. 
Sing, cuckoo. Sing, cuckoo, now!

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