Songs to Thaw the Winter Heart
By Doug Talley

Continuing a tradition already alive for centuries, Shakespeare in the late 1500’s inserted in his comedy As You Like It a love song ending with the line “Sweet lovers love the spring.”  Perhaps no literary genre matches the springtime love lyric for sheer compulsiveness and zest for life:

It was a lover and his lass,
   With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn field did pass
   In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding.
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Between the acres of the rye,
   With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would lie,
   In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding.
Sweet lovers love the spring.         

This carol they began that hour,
   With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that a life was but a flower,
   In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding.
Sweet lovers love the spring.

And therefore take the present time,
   With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
For love is crownéd with the prime,
   In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding.
Sweet lovers love the spring.

After listening to this song, the character Touchstone scoffs:

TOUCHSTONE:  Truly, young gentlemen, though there was no great matter in the ditty, yet the note was very untunable.

1^st PAGE:  You are deceived, sir.  We kept time, we lost not our time.

TOUCHSTONE:  By my troth, yes.  I count it but time lost to hear such a foolish song.  God buy you and God mend your voices!  [Act V, Scene III, ll. 16-40]

Secret to the liveliness of any good lyric is its melody.  Read the poem again out loud and you cannot help but break into song.  Touchstone’s view notwithstanding, even the spoken words sound a note which is anything but “untunable”.  If there is “no great matter” here, there is music surely.  These are words written to be sung, and even without the musical arrangement the tune is heard.

Early Songs of Spring

Well before Shakespeare’s time, the bonding of spring and love into song had already evolved into refined art.  Arguably the greatest contribution to this literary type was the discovery of the Carmina Burana in the early 19^th century.  This manuscript was found in the Hof-Bibliothek at Munich, which had inherited it after dissolution of the Benedictbeuern monastery in Upper Bavaria.  The handwriting of the manuscript is 13^th century, and the poems, 43 of which were noted to be sung, derive from a time earlier still.  They are proof enough the Middle Ages were joyful and lively and anything but dark. 

George Wicher in his book, The Goliard Poets, noted:

As the scholar Helen Waddell observed, the anonymous poets of these lyrics were “young, as Keats and Shelley and Swinburne never were young, with the youth of wavering branches and running water.”  Their songs of spring love are unmatched both for vigor and virtuosity.  They are also virtually untranslatable.  When springtime melts into love and both melt into song, it is all of one piece, and the original Latin of these songs, like “water in water”, cannot be parsed.  A translator might capture melody, but lose economy and power of metaphor.  If meaning is captured, urgency and passion are lost.  What follows is at best an awkward stab at two stanzas of an eight stanza poem:

Tempus est iocundum                Now’s the time for pleasure
O virgines,                                 O maidens fair.
Modo congaudete                       Come rejoice together
Vos iuvenes!                             Young men everywhere!
O, O, totus floreo,                      O, O, I am all aflower.
Iam amore virginali                     With a maiden’s love I burn
Totus ardeo.                              To nothing in an hour.
Novus, novus amor                    Wondrous, wondrous is this love
Est quo pereo                            That drains me of all power.

Flos est puellarum                     Flower of all women
Quam diligo.                              Is she whom I desire,
Et rosa rosarum                         Rose of all the roses,
Quam saepe video                     The one that I admire.
O, O, totus floreo,                      O, O, I am all aflower.
Iam amore virginali                     With a maiden’s love I burn
Totus ardeo.                              To nothing in an hour.
Novus, novus amor                    Wondrous, wondrous is this love
Est quo pereo                            That drains me of all power.

The following translation of another anonymous lyric fares no better.  Forgive the clumsy English, clapping as it does to the Latin, syllable by syllable, but try instead to soak in the music.  It may be a secret, ancient song will echo in the heart after long hibernation:

Omnia sol temperat                    Sunshine warms the wide wide world
Purus et subtilis.                       Purely and serenely.
Novo mundo reserat                   April’s new face is unfurled
Faciem Aprilis.                          On the earth completely.
Ad amorem properat                   All to love the heart is hurled,
Animus herilis                            Man to woman sweetly,
Et iocundis imperat                    And the boy god rules as lord
Deus puerilis.                            Every lover keenly.

Ama me fideliter!                       Love me, love me faithfully!
Fidem meam nota                      Feel my pure devotion.
De corde totaliter                       All my heart and mind are fully
Et ex mente tota.                       Bound to one emotion.
Sum presentialiter                      I am always present truly,          
Absens in remota.                     Though distant as an ocean.
Quisquis amat taliter                  Those condemned to love will cruelly
Volvitur in rota!                          Know the rack’s fell motion!

In the free verse of most contemporary poetry, little place is found for the literary technique of shaping words into melody.  The contemporary poet may strive for a “voice”, for an emphatic rhythm that imposes itself on the reader with such force it reads one way only, but few, if any, strive for real music, for words that break into singing.  A lyric with that quality sounds too artificial, too contrived, for the modern ear.  As a result, there seems to be now days, for better or for worse, a complete separation of poem and song. 

Spring and Song Will Always Return

Fashion may change, however.  A friend once remarked that the modern poet might return to rhyme, if only to increase the chances of being remembered.  Certainly, the tunes of the Carmina Burana are unforgettable, surviving even a dead language.  They are irrepressible, as love and spring are irrepressible.  Every year spring returns, and so does love, and sooner or later so will song, because there is something inextricably bound up in these pleasures which makes life tolerable.  You might hear it some day in the gossip of mourning doves lamenting one to the other on a telephone wire –

1st:       Who needs a song?
             I’d rather be in love,
             in love, in love . . . .

2nd:      When I’m in love
            any song sounds good,
            sounds good, sounds good . . . .