ANON.
Anon. is a poet without dates, parents or gender. Anon. appears in the fourteenth and in the twentieth centuries, in Britain and Australia and Africa, always with a song in the heart. Often the song is sad, as though something important—perhaps the author’s identity—has been lost. “Reverdie” is Anon.’s, subtitled “Rondel.” Two lines precede it:
Sing cuccu nu! Sing cuccu!
Sing cuccu! Sing cuccu nu!
“Rondel” means round in form; the poem circles back on itself with a refrain, like a cuckoo’s woodland repetitions. The poem feels like a fragment of a longer piece:
Summer is icumen in,
Lhudè sing cuccu;
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wodè nu.
Sing cuccu!
Awè bleteth after lomb,
Lowth after calvè cu;
Bulluc sterteth, buckè verteth;
Merie sing cuccu.
Cuccu, cuccu,
Wel singès thu, cuccu,
Ne swik thu never nu.
That’s all there is. The language isn’t hard if you listen: Summer is coming in, the cuckoo sings loudly. The seed grows, the mead blows and the wood springs anew. Sing, cuckoo. The ewe bleats after the lamb, the cow lows after the calf, the bullock leaps, the buck—verteth? has it something to do with green, the vert that the French brought with them? Or is the v pronounced f as in German, and is the buck making another sort of sound?—sing merrily cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, you sing well cuckoo; then the sting of the poem, that word “swik” which means cease or give up—never stop singing.
It celebrates, like the opening of the Canterbury Tales, a change for the better; knowing that spring gives way to summer, autumn to winter, it asks—it prays—to the cuckoo, spirit of the wood, that this new beginning remain new, that the cuckoo never cease its song. Modernized, the poem evaporates, but the original, with strange accent and vocabulary, is necessary, full of feeling. It’s small, whole and complex. This ancient piece moves us the way a good song does. After the immense allegories of Gower and Langland and the hectic world of Chaucer, this strikes us with the freshness of nursery rhyme and goes straight into memory. Artful it is, not artificial. It isn’t trying to be anything but itself. Who wrote it? It was copied in the margin of a manuscript, which is how it survives. Was Anon. man or woman? Our instinct is to call the medieval Anon. “him.” Perhaps the name is forgotten because Anon. was a woman, and the society of poets was virtually all male at the time.
How many poems of this virtue got lost because people didn’t value their own language? Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish, Cornish and Manx, all the little languages on which English played the colonial trick, had such verse. Some survives, though the language of power prevails, and if power stays in place for a few centuries, summer will never icum in again on a rural tongue. A surviving poem from Ireland, not in Irish, is in love with its land and its saints:
Icam of Irlaunde,
Ant of the holy londe
Of Irlande.
Gode sire, pray ich the,
For of saynte charitè,
Come ant daunce wyt me
In Irlaunde.
Behind strange spellings our language is thinly veiled: I am of Ireland, and of the holy land of Ireland. Good sir, I pray you, for the sake of holy charity, come and dance with me in Ireland. Said like that it flows away like sand through the fingers: what holds it, all that can hold it, is its original sounds, which are inseparable not from the sense but from the experience of that sense.
Here is another poem by Anon. What does it do to us, with four little lines?
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
The copyist can standardize spelling—the poem does not depend on quaintness. It strikes us as more “modern,” despite a folk feeling. It is not about our experience. It is about open space, longing and love, with an oath that is at once a prayer.
Anon. is the greatest of the neglected English poets.