Ferrari’s Controversial Electric Luce Fetches $40 Million At Auction
By ROSS ANDERSON
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This thirteenth-century Middle English composition is a lyric in the sense of being, actually, the words to a song. Its lines were written to be sung and heard, not read or even recited.
Today’s Poem of the Day, celebrating the coming of summer, also celebrates the overlap between poetry and song. This thirteenth-century Middle English composition is a lyric in the sense of being, actually, the words to a song. Its lines were written 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 a parody of that music.
The oldest known example of six-part polyphony, “Sumer Is Icumen In” is a rota, a form of the round. In the rota, voices overlap in the verses, in the way we all know from singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” or “Dona Nobis Pacem,” 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 in a modern arrangement which highlights the Middle English pronunciation.
But “Sumer Is Icumen In” is also a lyric in the sense of the lyric poem, focused not on a narrative but on an intensity of experience. The poem 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.
By ROSS ANDERSON
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By JULIE BURCHILL
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By MATTHEW RICE
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By JOSEPH CURL
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By DAVID JONES
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By MICHAEL BARONE
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By SALENA ZITO
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By JOSEPH CURL
|Today’s Poem of the Day, celebrating the coming of summer, also celebrates the overlap between poetry and song. This thirteenth-century Middle English composition is a lyric in the sense of being, actually, the words to a song. Its lines were written 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 a parody of that music.
The oldest known example of six-part polyphony, “Sumer Is Icumen In” is a rota, a form of the round. In the rota, voices overlap in the verses, in the way we all know from singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” or “Dona Nobis Pacem,” 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 in a modern arrangement which highlights the Middle English pronunciation.
But “Sumer Is Icumen In” is also a lyric in the sense of the lyric poem, focused not on a narrative but on an intensity of experience. The poem 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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