Cuckoo, cuckoo, what do you do?

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Cuckoo, cuckoo, what do you do? is an English nursery rhyme . He describes the life of a cuckoo from the beginning to the end of summer. The poem probably originated at the end of the 18th or beginning of the 19th century and still appears in many English children's poetry collections today. His setting by Benjamin Britten also gained fame .

origin

Mostly the English poet Jane Taylor (1783-1824) is given as the author. In the volume of The Folk-Lore Record published in 1879, however, the work The Book of the Seasons by the writer William Howitt is named as the source, who in turn published the poem without citing the source.

text

Howitt reports the poem as follows:

In April the cuckoo shows his bill;
In May he sings both night and day;
In June he altereth his tune;
In July away he'll fly;
In August go he must.

There are also numerous regional variants and extensions of the poem to include the month of September.

The version attributed to Jane Taylor can be recited as a question-and-answer game:

A: "Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo!
What do you do? ”

B:“ In April
I open my bill;
In May
I sing night and day;
In June
I change my tune;
In July
Far - far I fly;
In August
Away I must. "

Reception history

Benjamin Britten set this latter version to music as a choral work for children under the name Cuckoo! in his Friday Afternoons collection published in 1935 .

Paul Simon used a variant of Reims for every other line of his song April Come She Will , that on his solo album in 1965 The Paul Simon Songbook was released and soon after of Art Garfunkel for Simon - & - Garfunkel album Sounds of Silence newly added has been.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Boris Ford: Benjamin Britten's Poets. The Poetry He Set to Music. Carcanet, Manchester 1996, ISBN 1-85754-240-1 , p. 35.
  2. ↑ Information on Benjamin Britten's setting in ClassicalArchives
  3. ^ A b James Hardy: Popular History of the Cuckoo. In: The Folk-Lore Record. No. 2, 1879, ISSN  1744-1994 , pp. 47-91 ( digitized version ).
  4. ^ A b William Howitt : The Book of Seasons, or: The Calendar of Nature. London 1831, p. 180 ( digitized ).
  5. ↑ Friday Afternoons at Allmusic (English). Retrieved February 15, 2014.
  6. ↑ The Paul Simon Songbook at Allmusic (English). Retrieved February 15, 2014.
  7. ↑ Sounds of Silence at Allmusic (English). Retrieved February 15, 2014.