Mirie It Is While Sumer Ylast (Merry It Is While Summer Lasts)

DESCRIPTION: Early Middle English: "Mirie it is whil somer ylast, With fughles song." Merry it is while summer lasts, With fowls' song, But now nigh winter's blast, And weather strong. Ei! Ei! What, this night is long, And I, from much wrong, sorrow, mourn, and fast
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: c.1225? (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Rawlinson G.22)
KEYWORDS: hardtimes bird MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN: Britain(England)
REFERENCES (14 citations):
Stevick-OneHundredMiddleEnglishLyrics 2, "(Myrie it is whil somer ylast)" (1 text)
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics I, p. 1, "(no title)" (1 text)
Hirsh-MedievalLyric-MiddleEnglishLyricsBalladsCarols, #2, ("Mirie it is while sumer i-last)" (1 text)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #2163
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #3486.5
ADDITIONAL: Carleton Brown, editor, _English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century_, Oxford University Press, 1932, p. 14, "Now Comes the Blast of Winter" (1 text)
Reginald Nettel, _Seven Centuries of Popular Song_, Phoenix House, 1956, p. 13, "(no title)" (1 short text)
R. T. Davies, editor, _Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology_, 1963, #2, p. 51, "How Long This Night Is" (1 text)
Maxwell S. Luria & Richard Hoffman, _Middle English Lyrics_, a Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1974, p. 7, #5 (no title) (1 text)
Celia and Kenneth Sisam, _The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse_, Oxford University Press, 1970; corrected edition 1973, #3, p. 5, "Winterfall" (1 text)
Karin Boklund-Lagopolou, _I have a yong suster: Popular song and Middle English lyric_, Four Courts Press, 2002, p. 42, "(no title)" (1 text)
Bruce Dickins & R. M. Wilson, editors, _Early Middle English Texts_, 1951; revised edition 1952, #XXV, p. 118, "Winter Comes" (1 text)
Arthur K. Moore, _The Secular Lyric in Middle English_, University of Kentucky Press, 1951, p. 29, "(Mirie it is while sumer ilast" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Rawlinson G.22 (Bodleian 14755), folio 1. With music.
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Judas" [Child 23] (subject: The Earliest English Ballad) and references there
NOTES [182 words]: Mark this down as yet another instance of a claimed "earliest known ballad." Nettel, p. 13, offers it as his first popular piece. The idea seems to predate him; Brown, p. xiv, reports "E. W. B. Nicholson, sometime Bodley's librarian, dated [this] 'about 1225' and pronounced [it] to be 'the oldest known song in the English language.'"
I doubt it truly qualifies for that description, but it is an early English piece with music, so I'm putting it in here just because we try to list all the claimed "earliest ballads." At least it has a tune in the manuscript, as most of the other candidates do not.
Hirsch-MedievalLyric says, "The powm has been discussed widely, including Raymond Oliver, Poems WIthout Names: The English Lyric, 1200-1550 (1970) and Edmund Reiss, The Art of the Middle English Lyric: Essays in Criticism (1972), but retains its mystery."
Apparently this poem was not originally meant to be part of MS. Rawlinson G.22 (which is mostly classical material); it was a sheet that was stuck into the volume. It is apparently the only Middle English poem in the manuscript. - RBW
Bibliography

Brown: Carleton Brown, editor, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, Oxford University Press, 1932 (I use the 1962 reprint)
Nettel: Reginald Nettel, Seven Centuries of Popular Song, Phoenix House, 1956

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