Friday Poetry: Thomas Dekker

Happy Friday!

Dare I say “Pinch punch first of the month”. I know it doesn’t feel like it because everything is merging into one but it is a new month. I was meant to be conducting my band for a massive VE Day Concert today, feels very strange to not be doing band rehearsals or concerts at the moment. So here is the poem by Thomas Dekker who was an Elizabethan and Jacobean era writer, poet and playwright.

 

The Merry Month of May

O! the month of May, the merry month of May,

So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!

O! and then did I unto my true Love say,

Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer’s Queen.

 

Now the nightingale, the pretty nightingale,

The sweetest singer in all the forest choir,

Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love’s tale:

Lo! yonder she sitteth, her breast against a briar.

 

But O! I spy the cuckoo, the cuckoo, the cuckoo;

See where she sitteth; come away, my joy:

Come away, I prithee, I do not like the cuckoo

Should sing where my Peggy and I kiss and toy.

 

O! the month of May, the merry month of May,

So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!

And then did I unto my true Love say,

Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer’s Queen.

 

Thomas Dekker