The end of the merry month

The merry month of May” has a nice poetic ring to it. Paintings, poetry, songs, even a novel have been written around the phrase or having the phrase for a title. And always these have reference to love, love lost, and oh yes, flowers.

As in a poem by Thomas Dekker:

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 Queen.

Or the more contemporary piece by one Barbara Allen:

Twas in the merry month of May

When green buds all were swelling

Sweet William on his death bed lay

For love of Barbara Allen

They are lyrics to a song by the popular group Blackmores Night. If you should ever want to see the full text it’s easy to find in the Net. But it seems the merry month of May is some sort of planetary phenomenon. And so it follows we would also imbue the merry month with our own peculiar meaning. It is related here to fiestas and the angels of Flores de Mayo.

The angels line up bearing placards to spell out Ave Maria. Children of all ages bear flowers to the altar as a ritual offering of praise and thanksgiving. And if there is a lack of things to be thankful for one might always consider this is also the height of summer and summer festivities. Good food. Dancing. Those are always things to be thankful for. Does it seem such an ironic twist that the height of the season should come so close to its end?

You could offer a poetic reading to this. It is life itself. Summer starts as if it were endless. And then without warning one is left with only a thought. How fast time truly flies. Endless days become days one can count with  the fingers of one hand. And then it is gone.

It is the month when summer ends. It is the month for huge mood-swings in the weather. If there had been any lack for April showers through the hot and dry days then it is now when that lack is fully compensated for in the nicest way. This is why the flowers bloom the brightest at this time.

And if one found romance in the summer months, found for one’s self a Sweet Peg or a William or even a Barbara Allen, then now is the time for waking up and wondering if it will last. It is also the month for packing up, for going away or for returning to somewhere.

And so it is a month of disparate moods and feelings. It is a time when sadness shares a bed with euphoria and forgetfulness. Yes. That does equate in the sense of mathematics to a menage a trois. But laugh at the risk of crying. There are only a few days left of the merry month. And yet, we would waste them by mourning. It is better by far to drink it like good wine, down to its last and littlest wet drop. After that to put the glass down and think:

In the drinking of good wine it is not entirely how the taste of it enters your mouth. Or lingers there. The other half of the pleasure comes also in how the taste of it leaves you. Ever so softly as a gentle wave of memory slipping away into forgetfulness.