I walked through the wood with my partner and my Dad. The beech trees glowed with young green leaves and the forest floor was carpeted in the fragrant, morning-mist-blue of bluebells.
My Dad took a breath and spoke,
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains,
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”
If this sounds far-fetched, you don’t know my Dad.
It was a poem he learned as a teenager, John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale.
We had just been standing beside an enormous bramble bush watching a little fawn and rust coloured bird singing. A nightingale, telling the forest he had arrived.
It’s a strange thing, this song that has inspired so much art and legend, more like a collection of interesting sounds than a song. There is no tune you can hum. But, to stand in a late April woodland and hear a sound that kisses your skin with a soft summer evening, there’s a magic in that.
And, perhaps, that’s what May brings too, a passing through the showers and cold winds of April, and into all the promise of summer.
As Keats goes on to say:
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer
Eves.”
Here’s what May promises for me.
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