If April is the cruellest month, May is sunshine and spring, hope and flowers, and quite often the subject of a poet's celebratory observations.
Here's my problem with poems about May: They're so often sappy. Flowers and birds in rhyming couplets. Don't get me wrong, I love flowers and birds and I'm not against the occasional rhyming couplet but it gets repetitious. I skipped over a lot of May poems that were a little too hop-te-skippety for my taste. And so, so many are named "May". So many.
You're getting some birds and flowers and spring. I also had to include "May 1968" by Sharon Olds, which isn't about the month at all but about events in May, and "May 1972" by James Schuyler, which is as timely now as it was when he wrote it.
"May and the Poets" by James Henry Leigh Hunt
May's in all the Italian books:—
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves,
"May Day" by Sara Teasdale
For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?
"In the Month of May" by Robert Bly
In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things
lean on each other, how the bees work,
the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.
"May" by Jonathan Galassi
Ivy from last summer clogs the pool,
brewing a loamy, wormy, tea-leaf mulch
soft to the touch
and rank with interface of rut and rot.
The month after the month they say is cruel
is and is not.
"May Day" by Tess Taylor
white lilacs curdle in pre-summer heat.
The parade I barely noticed was beginning
is already halfway down the street.
"May to April" by Philip Frenau
Without your showers, I breed no flowers,
Each field a barren waste appears;
If you don't weep, my blossoms sleep,
They take such pleasures in your tears.
As your decay made room for May,
So I must part with all that’s mine:
My balmy breeze, my blooming trees
To torrid suns their sweets resign!
"Under the Willows [May is a pious fraud of the almanac]" by James Russell Lowell
May is a pious fraud of the almanac,
A ghastly parody of real Spring
Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind;
Or if, o'er-confident, she trust the date,
And, with her handful of anemones,
Herself as shivery, steal into the sun,
The season need but turn his hourglass round,
"Song on May Morning" by John Milton
Now the bright morning Star, Dayes harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The Flowry May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow Cowslip, and the pale Primrose.
"The Month of May" by Wendy Cope
So carpe diem, gather buds, make hay.
The world is glorious. Compare, contrast
December with the merry month of May.
Now is the time, now is the time to play.
"For a Day in May" by Ruth Earnshaw
Shadow of white lilac
cast by May moonlight,
fettering me, dancing
in the dew-cold grass
never let me go.
"To this May" by W.S. Merwin
it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time
"May 1968" by Sharon Olds
When the Dean said we could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,
we lay down, in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
over us.
"May 1972" by James Schuyler
Soft May mists are here again.
There, the war goes on.
Beside the privet the creamy
white tulips are extra
fine this year. There,
foliage curls blackened back:
A Year of Poems
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