May-day

May-day is a poem written by J.R.R. Tolkien in October 1914.

Poem excerpt

Come away to the woods! Come and dance, ye grey folk!
Come hatless, for tearful pale April is fled:
Come happy, come careless, and carry no cloak,
For May doth not weep, though pale April be dead.
The chestnut is waking its leaves, and the oak,
Old sluggard, is blushing a smoky bud-red;
And the hawthorn is up: it is weeks since she woke
When she saw the green spark that the meadow-grass fed.

Background

May Day in a Backward Year

Sometime in the middle of October of the year 1914, Tolkien wrote a considerably developed but unnamed first version of the poem in pencil on the manuscript of The Story of Kullervo.

On April 20th and 21st of 1915, Tolkien heavily rewrote the unnamed poem, entitling it May Day. Soon afterwards, Tolkien revised it again into a new manuscript, renaming it May Day in a Backward Year and Þæt Ȝear Onȝinneþ Síðor Spréotan in Old English. Tolkien had a typescript of this version made sometime in the middle or late May.

Further revisions

Sometime in 1923, Tolkien rewrote May Day in a Backward Year as May-day. Tolkien also shortened the Old English name Þæt Ȝear Onȝinneþ Spréotan ("The Year Begins to Sprout") for this version. Tolkien considered the name Mayday at one point in a poem list, but ultimately rejected it for May-day.

In September 2024, the poem was published for the first time as entry 26 in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.