On the Coming of Arthur
By ways unknown, unseen,
The summer makes things green,
The pastures and the boughs
Wherein birds house.
Summer will come again,
For sick things become sane,
And dead things fat the root
That brings forth fruit.
Arthur, like summer, waits,
For Wit and Will are gates,
Like those the summers pass
To green earth’s grass.
Arthur will come like June,
Full meadow and full moon,
With roses up above
As red as love,
And may-bloom down below,
As white as fallen snow,
And no least linnet dumb;
O Arthur, come.
From Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse, by John Masefield, 1928.
Last year when I came to Ireland the May-bloom had already passed. There were still a few hawthorn trees blooming, but they were well past their peak. This year we arrived while they are still in their glory – covered with white and pale pink blossoms that signal May and the coming of summer.
The poem above isn’t Irish, but it is one of my favorites. It speaks to the mystery of summer, Arthur, and all that flowers. I’ve puzzled over this line for years: “For wit and will are gates like those the summers pass to green earth’s grass”. I feel that I know what it means, but that I could never put it into words or intellectualize it.
Guinevere, Arthur’s queen, was known as the Queen of the May. Blodeuwedd and Olwen were both flower maidens from Welsh myth. Blodeuwedd was made from flowers and wherever Olwen stepped she left white flowers, like hawthorn blooms, in her track. To find her all you had to do was follow the path of flowers. In Irish myth, Bláthnat was the flower maiden, abducted by Cu Roi and rescued by Cuchulainn who was killed for his trouble.
Death often accompanies the flower maiden. She is spring, possessed by winter and rescued by summer. Summer in turn must die to give way to winter so the whole cycle may repeat. Arthur was winter, Lancelot was summer, and Guinevere mediated between the two.
My partner in music and story, John Good, and I have been working up a version of Thomas the Rhymer. It’s a famous Scottish ballad about a man who meets the Fairy Queen while sitting under a hawthorn (eildon) tree. Once he kisses her lips, he is bound to serve her for seven years. Some people say that Thomas is still there in the Otherworld, a guide for mystics and seekers.
That’s just the kind of thing that can happen when you take your rest beneath a hawthorn tree, especially one in full bloom.
