Sumer came in several weeks ago

In my choir's forthcoming concert we will be singing 

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

 

But this, the first recorded song to be sung in parts, is not – as is sometimes mistakenly thought – ...

<example>
On BBC Radio 3's Breakfast programme on 21 June 2022 this song was presented to mark the summer solstice.

In the days before I had sworn off Twitter (to give it the name that I still insist on using, for reasons given here – in short, the reference to birds makes the expression 'A little bird told me...' pleasingly appropriate) I tweeted thus:

I'm sure this wasn't a unique error, and that it has been, and will be, repeated as long as this delightful song is sung.
</example>

.. a paean to the coming of summer. I've written about this before, here:

<prescript> 

In  The Stories of English David Crystal says

Reading Abbey did not have a scriptorium, so the manuscript was probably copied at Oxford.

... But why Sumer? [And] isn't it the wrong bird? The cuckoo arrives in Britain in April. Crystal gives the answer:

There was no contradiction, because in Middle English sumer was the only word available to describe the period between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The word spring to refer to the season is not recorded in English until the mid-sixteenth century.  

The Stories of English

 </prescript>

So the song, the cuckoo, the wude springing nu, the lombs and their bleating mothers, the methane-related bullock action, and all the rest of it, refers ŧo the coming of spring not summer.

AOB

 <autobiographical-note>
The England Women's cricket series against Pakistan fired off a distant memory of a... not exactly playmate I had when I was 10 or 11; he was the youngest son of a tenant in the downstairs flat, with very little English (mostly 'I am', used to mean 'I <any-verb-in-any-tense>.  Heidar taught me the numbers from 1 to 10 in his mother tongue (possibly Farsi, as he was Iraqi).

In this cricket match, Akhtar was bowling, and the commentators always referred to her by her given name, 'Waheeda'. This, except for the final vowel, and allowing for the tricks of memory and L1 interference as we used to say in the language teaching  trade...

<parenthesis>
L1 interference is the influence a mother tongue has on the way a language learner processes information and examples in a second language; for example, an Anglophone speaker of English will hear the French oui as 'we', although both the onset (the rounding of the lips) and the final vowel are very different.
</parenthesis>

 ... was not unlike the word for 'one', as I remember it, in Heidar's language . And while 'One' is not a girl's name, 'Una' is. I wondered, hearing that commentator, whether 'Waheeda' was like that. or whether this was just a coincidence with no relevance in unrelated languages.
</autobiographical-note>

Speaking of coincidences, I stumbled on an extraordinary (but totally inconsequential) one the other day. It started with a crossword clue, whose answer was 'stannic'. Out of idle interest I looked up the etymology of the word, which told me that the first recorded use was in 1790. The dictionary then pointed me to a site that promised to list other words first used in 1790: this site deserves a nomination for this year's TEZZY (Time-wasting Site of the Year Award). Among the words whose first appearance in print was in 1790...

<tangent>
 (think of it: with the French Revolution in full swing,  the appearance in print of the word guillotine is hardly surprising, but what of aside from, laughing hyena, prearrange, scrunch...?) Anyway, the point is (if it can be deemed so consequential as to have a point) that...
</tangent>

... one of the newly printed words was horseweed – a word that had escaped my notice for the last 73¾ years until last week (when I asked PlantNet to identify a newcomer to what MrsK and I, with laughable optimism, refer to as 'the wild garden').

b

Update: 2024.05.28.12:50 – Added PS

At our 15 June concert we'll be singing John Rutter's collection. The Sprig of Thyme. One of the songs in this collection is  Afton Water ...

<tangent>
(which with supreme irrelevance reminded of the old Passing Clouds cigarette packet; I never did: see what justufucation [or even just reasom] there was for quoting the poem on that pink packet.)
</tangent>

... whose tune reminds me of Ye Banks and Braes, which we sang at St  Gregory's Primary School ...

<rant type="potential, nipped in the bud, but still...">
(in the days when primary schools dealt in education rather than the extrusion of an endless supply of potential wage slaves who know the 3Rs but little else)
</rant>

.... And at last, about 65 years after the question formed in my young mind, I realized just why Burns asked the aforementioned topological features How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?, and then went on to ask the birds How can ye chaunt? He's feeling a close relation of the Pathetic Fallacy (or maybe it just is the Pathetic Fallacy: it depends how you define it.)

<definiton>
An author who uses the Pathetic Fallacy makes nature reflect the feelings of the characters or the narrative: a distant clap of thunder portends a misfortune, when a couple make up after an argument the rain stops and the sun comes out, when the villain enters clouds gather.... Expressions like 'a sunny disposition' , or 'casting a clouid over...' are shorthand versions of the Pathetic Fallacy.
</definiton>

As a poet, Burns knows how to use the Pathetic Fallacy. But, more than that, he feels when it's the right time to use it. So, in Ye Banks and Braes the spurned lover expects nature to reflect his feelings: 'How can you be so lovely and fruitful when I'm so miserable [full o' care]? So this close relation of the Pathetic Fallacy is when the poet expects nature to reflect his mood and nature doesn't play bell – pretty subtle: no wonder I didn't get  it back at St Gregory's.