‘It was a lover and his lass’ from As You Like It
It was a lover and his lass
With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green cornfield did pass
In springtime, the only pretty ring-time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding
Sweet lovers love the spring.
Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would lie
In springtime…etc.
This carol they began that hour
With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
How that life was but a flower
In springtime…etc.
And therefore take the present time
With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
For love is crowned with the prime
In springtime…etc.
If you’re reading this on a sunny morning, open the window and listen to the birds singing. They will be telling you that if you are young, and it is springtime, and you are not in love, then you are absurd. A bit of requiting’s always nice but even a hopeless passion will do – just so long as you’ve got more on your mind than the new tax year once the blossom begins to bud.
Ah, I think I see faithful reader Atticus2 heading straight to the comments box. Quite right. What could be more ‘absurd’ than all this trite ‘hey nonino’ rubbish? I think Blackadder has something similar to say in the episode with the drinking contest. This language has certainly not aged well. I think many of us, like Lucky Jim in Kingsley Amis’s novel of the same name, see a taste for Elizabethan madrigals as the last word in pretentious nonsense.
But nonsense isn’t always such a bad thing. Edward Lear’s verse entertains just because it’s all rhyme and little reason. Elizabethan songs and ballads are full of these phrases which look like filler to make up the length of the tune. But another way to think of them is as an added bonus – a surplus of expression which just has to be let out once everything that needs to be said has been said. And what, in fact, could be more reasonable in the circumstances than this unreasonable nonsense? When spring pours petals on the earth, is spring reasonable? Is love reasonable? Is youth (tell me, parents of teenagers) reasonable?
If there is sense to nonsense then there is also variety in repetition. Love is about obsession, spring is about rebirth. But neither are unchanging. Whilst a child expects a thousand Christmases each like the last, every meeting of lovers comes wrapped in a million new intensities, and every spring passes us by with a drop more urgency than the last.
So although Shakespeare’s song is built around a recurring chorus about ‘springtime, the only pretty ring-time’, the mood changes each time. After the first verse it seems carefree, after the second bawdy (what are the lovers lying down to do whilst the birds sing)? The third verse is melancholy; ‘life is but a flower’, and the joys of spring now seem poignant. But after the fourth they are defiant. ‘And therefore take the present time’ – Carpe diem! ‘Therefore’ is the key word. Let’s love, as Marvell tells his coy mistress, because we are poor naked creatures shivering on the edge of eternity. And damn eternity.
That indeed is ‘sweet’ – a word that can stand for just about any other positive term in the English language but which never quite becomes detached from the idea of physical appetite. Lovers are ‘sweet’ to each other because they want to gobble each other up. The world reflects their hunger back to them. It feeds their senses. Corn and rye are edible, flowers look and smell delicious, birdsong ravishes the ears. Lovers are at home in the spring because that is the time of the year when the earth seems determined to have a really good go at making us physically comfortable. When we love we recognise that we are desiring animals and spring is a good time of year to be little creatures looking for warmth.
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