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Elizabeth Barrett
The “may” in “May” had another meaning for Elizabeth Barrett, who wrote to Robert Browning from her invalid’s bed during the “implacable weather” of March that “April is coming. There will be both a May & a June if we live to see such things, & perhaps, after all, we may.”
She wasn’t only speaking of better weather coming: since they began to write each other in January they had spoken of meeting in person for the first time—he especially—but she, without refusing, had put him off, excusing herself as “a recluse, with nerves that have been all broken on the rack, & now hang loosely.”
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May Days
May is blooming and fertile, spring in its full flower. Unlike the storms of March and the “uncertain glory” of April, Shakespeare’s May, with its “darling buds,” is always sweet, and ever the month for love.
Traditionally—before the international labor movement claimed May 1s...
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90 reads
Janet Hobhouse
When the mother in The Furies, Janet Hobhouse’s fictional memoir of a life caught up in isolated family dependence, chooses Memorial Day to end her own life, her daughter mournfully riffs on May in an overdetermined frenzy of meaning: “month of mothers, month of Mary, month of heroes, the beg...
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
The mother of them all, the Virgin Mary, was celebrated for centuries as the Queen of May, and in “The May Magnificat” Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us that “May is Mary’s month,” and asks why. “All things rising,” he answers, “all things sizing / Mary sees, sympathizing / with that world of ...
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Thomas Hardy & Anna Jarvis
It’s on a May Day that Thomas Hardy, always attuned to ancient rites, introduces Tess Durbeyfield, whose “bouncing handsome womanliness” among the country girls “under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm” still reveals flashes of the child she recently was.
May has ...
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56 reads
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