Summer has come in

　　Loudly sings the cuckoo

　　The seed grows, the meadow blows,

　　and the wood springs anew

　　Sing cuckoo!

　　The ewe bleats after her lamb,

　　The calf lows after the cow,

　　The bullock starts, the buck farts,

　　Merry sing cuckoo!

　　Some explanations. The cuckoo is a bird which comes to Britain in the summer. It sings like this – CUCKOO – hence its name. In summer too the seeds grow and the grass and flowers in the meadows blow in the wind. The woods spring to life again (“anew”). A ewe is a mother sheep, and bleating is the sound it makes. A calf is a very young cow or bull, and the sound it makes is called lowing. A bullock is a young bull. It “starts”, which means that it moves suddenly if it is alarmed (look up the word “startle” in a dictionary – if I am “startled”, I make a sudden jumping movement when someone surprises me.) A buck is a deer. You had better look up fart in a dictionary – I am not going to explain it here! It is of course not very polite in modern society to talk about farting – but in 13th century England people probably spoke more directly about such things! They knew that, in spring and summer, there is lots of young, new grass for the deer to eat, and that this makes deer fart a lot! To them, this was simply a happy sound of summer.