Shakespeare's springtime song is full of flowers and one nervous husband
Daisies, violets and silver-white lady-smocks paint the fields, larks wake the ploughmen, and girls lay out their summer linen. Then a single bird ruins the mood. In Shakespeare's song Spring, the cuckoo's call rings from every tree as a jeer aimed squarely at married men.
The poem is built like a song, with two stanzas that share an identical refrain. Each stanza spends its first four lines on pleasant rural detail before the cuckoo interrupts. The contrast is the joke: the countryside is gorgeous, and the one voice rising above it is mocking.
The first stanza is all colour. Pied daisies, blue violets, white lady-smocks and yellow cuckoo-buds decorate the meadows, a painter's palette laid out in four lines. The second stanza turns to sound and work. Shepherds play pipes made of oat straw, cheerful larks serve as alarm clocks for ploughmen, birds pair off, and young women bleach their smocks for the warm months.
Into both scenes the cuckoo drops its call, which the speaker names a word of fear that sounds unwelcome to a married ear. The song never explains why. It trusts the audience to catch the insinuation and laugh, and the repetition of the bird's cry, typed out three times in each refrain, turns the tune into a playground taunt. Spring's fertility, by this logic, is good news for everyone except husbands with reason to worry.
The playful tone suits a writer whose early work leaned towards comedies and histories before a run of tragedies ending around 1608, including Hamlet and King Lear, and late romances such as The Tempest. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, aged 49, and died three years later. In 1623 two actor friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, gathered 36 of his plays into the First Folio, prefaced by Ben Jonson's tribute calling him a writer for all time rather than one age.
Source: PoetryDB — Spring · Public domain (GB: author died 1616, life+70 expired; US: author died 1616, so every lifetime publication is from 1930 or earlier)
