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.  

Sumer Is Icumen In 
by Anonymous

Sumer is icumen in, 
Lhude sing cuccu! 
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med 
And springþ þe wde nu, 
Sing cuccu! 
Awe bleteþ after lomb, 
Lhouþ after calue cu. 
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ, 
Murie sing cuccu! 
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu, cuccu; 
Ne swik þu nauer nu. 
Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu. 
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu! 

Translation: 

Summer is a-coming in, 
Loudly sing cuckoo!  
Groweth seed and bloweth mead 
And spring the wood anew.  
Sing, cuckoo!  
Ewe bleateth after lamb, 
Loweth after calf the cow, 
Bullock starteth, buck-goat farteth, 
Merrily sing cuckoo!  
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well singest thou, cuckoo.  
Never stop thou, cuckoo!  
Sing, cuckoo now. Sing, cuckoo. 
Sing, cuckoo. Sing, cuckoo, now!

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.