This May Morning

The latest best thing about my part-time job driving a truck is going out upon the land and seeing May arrive in the fields and small towns of Ohio and Indiana and Kentucky and Tennessee and Michigan.

I imagine that we all have our own particular favorite articulation of the meaning of May deep within our souls, but one of my own is e. e. cummings' “I Thank You God For Most This Amazing Day.” There is a reading of the poem by cummings himself on youtube, and it has been put to music, as a hymn. But here is a reading of it that I'm sure he would have enjoyed:

Wordsworth's exuberance about May in the Ode is always with me, too, especially the bit about lambs in spring, and this:

     Oh evil day! If I were sullen

     While Earth herself is adorning

     This sweet May morning...

I see that cummings loved that Ode and read it aloud in its entirety in one of his six non-lectures at Harvard, prefacing the reading by saying that his mother wrote it out by hand and kept it always near her.

*      *      *