"CUCKOOS!"
"Cuckoo cherrytree, catch a bird
And give it to me."[G]
The people of the Oral and Tula Governments, especially the maidens, christen the cuckoo "gossip darlings!"
In one of the Lithuanian districts the girls sing—
"Sister, dear,
Mottled cuckoo!
Thou who feedest
The horses of thy brother,
Thou who spinnest silken threads,
Sing, O cuckoo,
Shall I soon be married?"
In Love's Labour's Lost a passage occurs where the two seasons, Spring and Winter, vie with each other in extolling the cuckoo and the owl.
Spring.
"When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men, for thus sings he—
Cuckoo!
Cuckoo! cuckoo!
O word of fear,
Unpleasing to the married ear!"
Thus is cuckoo gossip perpetuated in rhyme and song; but an old belief in the mysteriously disappearing bird gave an opportunity to children to await its return in the early summer, and then address to it all kinds of ridiculous questions.
"How many years have I to live?" is a favourite query. The other like that of the Lithuanian maid, "Shall I soon be married?" meets with favour amongst single girls.
A German song, entitled "The Shepherd Maiden," indicates this custom. The words being—
"A shepherd maiden, one fine day,
Two lambs to pasture led,
To verdant fields where daisies grew,
And bloomed the clover red;
There spied she in a hedge close by
A cuckoo, call with merry cry,
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!"
After chasing the immortal bird from tree to tree to have her question, "Shall I soon be married?" answered, the song concludes with this taunting refrain—
"Two hundred then she counted o'er,
The cuckoo still cried as before,
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!"
In our earliest published song, words and music composed by John of Forsete, monk of Reading Abbey, date 1225, and entitled "Sumer is icumen in," the cuckoo is also extolled—
"Summer is a-coming in, loudly sing, cuckoo;
Groweth the seed, bloweth the mead, and springeth wood anew.
Sing, cuckoo! Merry sing, cuckoo,
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!"
The peasantry of Russia, India, and Germany contribute to the collection of cuckoo-lore. Grimm mentions a Cuckoo Hill in Gauchsberg. The cuckoo and not the hill may have had the mystic sense.
Identical with this Cuckoo Hill, in its solemn significance, there occurs a passage in the game of Hot Cockles, played formerly at Yorkshire funerals.
"Where is the poor man to go?"
the friends whine, and the mutes who are in readiness to follow the coffin beat their knees with open hands and reply—
"Over the Cuckoo Hill, I oh!"
The association of ideas about the prophetic notes of the cuckoo's mocking voice—in matters of marriage and death—are pretty general, and there are still further many points of identity in the tales told by the children of India and Southern Russia. Like the Phœnix idea amongst the people of Egypt, Persia, and India, these traditions allegorise the soul's immortality.