May fills all the world with flowers, May will give my love to me.
May is pre-eminently the bridal month in Greece; a strange contradiction to the prejudice against May marriages that prevails in most parts of Europe. "Marry in May, rue for aye." The Romans have been held responsible for this superstition. They kept their festival of the dead during May, and while it lasted other forms of worship were suspended. To contract marriage would have been to defy the fates. Traces of a spring feast of souls survive in France, where, on Palm Sunday, Pâques fleuries as it is called, it is customary to set the first fresh flowers of the year upon the graves. Nor is it by any means uninteresting to note that in one great empire far outside of the Roman world the fête des morts is assigned not to the quiet close of the year but to the delightful spring. The Chinese festival of Clear Weather which falls in April is the chosen time for worshipping at the family tombs.
The marriage of Mary Queen of Scots and James Bothwell was celebrated on the 16th of May; an unknown hand wrote upon the gate of Holyrood Palace Ovid's warning:
Si te proverbia tangunt,
Mense malas Maio nubere vulgus ait.
Of English songs treating of that "observance" or "rite" of May to which Chaucer and Shakespeare bear witness, there are unfortunately few. The old nursery rhyme:
Here we go a-piping,
First in spring and then in May,
tells the usual story of house-to-house visiting and expected largess. In Devonshire, children used to take round a richly-dressed doll; such a doll is still borne in triumph by the children of Great Missenden, Bucks, where a doggerel is sung, of which these are the concluding verses:
A branch of May I have you brought,