A Song of the Weather
January brings the snow
Makes your feet and fingers glow
February's Ice and sleet
Freeze the toes right off your feet
Welcome March with wintry wind
Would thou wer't not so unkind
April brings the sweet spring showers
On and on for hours and hours
Farmers fear unkindly May
Frost by night and hail by day
June just rains and never stops
Thirty days and spoils the crops
In July the sun is hot
Is it shining? No, it's not
August cold, and dank, and wet
Brings more rain than any yet
Bleak September's mist and mud
Is enough to chill the blood
Then October adds a gale
Wind and slush and rain and hail
Dark November brings the fog
Should not do it to a dog
Freezing wet December then:
Bloody January again!
(January brings the snow
Makes your feet and fingers glow).
Commentary
The aforementioned Irresistible Followup…
“Oh, to be in England, now that April…” - no, wait a minute, May - um, no, June? July? Ah, wotthehell - I’m glad I’m not there <g>. No particular comment on this amusing catalogue of the seasons - perhaps someone more local would care to comment on its accuracy?
Like Tom Lehrer on the other side of the Atlantic, Flanders and Swann wrote and recorded a disappointingly small set of songs, but what’s there is all brilliant. I’ve contemplated running some of my personal favourites, like ‘Misalliance’, ‘A Transport of Delight’ and ‘Madeira M’Dear’, but held off due to a reluctance to run song lyrics without the music on which they depend. Still, like Gilbert before him, Flanders’ lyrics are clever enough (and funny enough) to stand on their own. This is particularly true since, again like Gilbert, he revels in complicated rhyme schemes and metrical patterns, and at times the most deliciously contrived of rhymes. (Sadly, today’s piece is not representative of the latter tendencies).
Links
There's a biography at
[broken link] http://members.tripod.com/~TimothyPlatypus/FaS/biography.html
From the excellent F&S site at
http://timothyplatypus.tripod.com/FaS/index.html
This was an Irresistible Followup to Goulder’s ‘The January Man’, poem #648
Other songwriters in the same vein include Tom Lehrer and W. S. Gilbert, both of whom have featured on Minstrels before. See www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index_poet.html
And finally
Many thanks to Ch’kai for introducing me to Flanders and Swann in the first place.
— Martin