May Day!—the word brings back all sorts of Tudor memories when it was alleged England was truly merrie, though, perhaps, if it were possible to be translated back to those times, it might be found that these glad days were after all not really so bright. The idea is very much the same as the continual saying by so many people that their school days were the really happy time in their life. Almost invariably the school boy does not share that opinion. Today, a few centuries ago, all classes of people would go a'pleasuring, up with the dawn end into the woods to bring back branches of trees, and flowers in triumph to the villages and towns, the procession being led by the bearers of the Maypole who would set it up for dancing throughout the day. That was one of the many things that the Puritans could not possibly bear, John Stubbes in the "Anatomy of Abuses" speaks of them as stinckyng idols" about which people "leave and dance, as the heathen did." Your Puritan, as Macauley points out, delighted in sonorous psalmody in which the nasal tones predominated. It was a sad pleasure but the Puritans loved it and scorned the lighter enjoyment of the nimble lads and lasses as they danced round the Maypole.
It is an interesting fact that the unco guids managed to have rheic way and succeeded in putting a measure through Parliament forbidding the erection of maypoles. That in 1644, but when the Restoration came the "stinckyng idols" were replaced. The last to be put up was in the Strand, where under the supervision of James LI, then Duke of York, twelve British sailors set up a cedar pole 134ft. high somewhere near the site of the present St, Mary's-in-the-Strand. It stood there for fifty-six years, being taken down in 1717, and conveyed to Wanstead Park in Essex, where Sir Isaac Newton fixed it up as part support for a large telescope jresented to the Royal Society by a French astronomer. There were other permanent maypoles in London notably one in the east of the City, where the name, St. Mary-under-Shaft recalls the permanent pole near the church around which generations of young Londoners danced out their May Day festivals, And so today, "Spring's last-born darling clear-eyed, sweet, pauses a moment with white, twinkling feet." Perhaps on some village greens the Jassies did dance barefooted, but most likely in London which was not even then any too clean the feet twinkled in good solid sheen.. One thing which puzz'cs the average reader of the poets is the fact that they do not appear to have agreed upon the sex of personified May. A generality of opinion seems to suggest that May is a female. Milton plumps for that idea and so do many others, but one Bayard Taylor ge: s himself inextricably mixed up in two verses of the same poem "When May, with cowslip-braided locks Walks through the land in green attire, And burns in meadow-grass the phlox His torch of purple fire And when the punctual May arrives With cowslip-garland on her brow, We know what once she gate our lives, And cannot give us now.
The irreverent might suggest that this particular ' poet considered the month as being some of the nature of what the sailors call an "harumfrodite" as something between female spring and masculine summer.
The idea seems particularly applicable to the daylight saving schemes adopted in so many parts of the world-now. There is no need for the exhortation to mother dear to be called early in order to be Queen o' the May, because everyone now seems to have attained that high distinction by the mere fact of early rising. For any single young woman to be Queen o' the May nowadays she would have to rise even earlier than before, making inroads into beauty sleep and consequently wreaking some damage to the regal complexion and the brightness of the queenlike eye. Doubtless, for it is so difficult to get away from this war,—Mussolini will be celebrating the Italian victory over Greece which the German armies secured for him, by cavorting round a maypole arrayed in toga and a laurel wreath, another opportunity of demonstrating his agility, which he did so splendidly on horseback last year with the tail of his shirt hanging out.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.