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This harsh-voiced bird reaches our shores in May, and it was on the last of that month that I lately heard its rasping note in a quiet park not a mile out of a busy market town on the Welsh border, and forgave its monotone because, more emphatically than even the cuckoo's dissyllable, it announced that, at last, "summer was icumen in."
The work is illustrated with several specimens of the early style of writing music, the first being an illuminated engraving and fac-simile of the song, "Sumer is icumen in," the earliest secular composition, in parts, known to exist in any country, its origin being traced back to 1250.
There was something wrong, all right. And why from the end of the act? Another act to come? Something more to happen? The clock will go round till another time comes. Watch the clock, the absolutely cuckoo clock, which ticked as things happened that made almost no sense and yet had sense hidden in their works. The good old Keku clock. Somewhere is icumen in, lewdly sing Keku.
The only piece of music I know for which it is claimed that it leaped to light suddenly perfect, like Minerva from Jupiter's skull, is "Sumer is icumen in," and almost as many authors have been found for it as there are historians. This is platitudinous, but it needs to be borne in mind.
It was the very year after peace to call it that had been forced on prostrate Carthage; and you might think an exhausted Rome would have welcomed a breathing time, even at the expense of losing her annual outing. And so indeed the people were inclined to do. But the summer was icumen in; and what were consuls and Senate for? Should they be as these irresponsibles of the comitia?
This is doubtless why Lucretius, first of all the Romans, could in his prooemium bring back to nature that sensuousness which through the songs of the troubadours has become the central theme of romantic poetry even to our day. It is, of course, the theme of "Sumer is icumen in."
Sometimes this freshness seems due in part to the poet's early place in the development of his national literature: he has had, as it were, the first chance at his particular subject. There were countless springs, of course, before a nameless poet, about 1250, wrote one of the first English lyrics for which we have a contemporary musical score: "Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu."
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