I thought this week’s poem, offering as it does a window on summers long past, would be a good way to say farewell to what this year at least has been a rather erratic season. George Peele (1556-1596) was an Elizabethan translator, poet and dramatist who may or may not have collaborated with Shakespeare on ‘Titus Andronicus’ but is now chiefly remembered for a handful of songs from his own plays. I’m not sure the Elizabethan Church would have approved of this incitement to amorous dalliances in the cornfields, but faced with so charming a piece what can one say but ‘Go for it, George!’.I do find the second line a bit problematic, however. It appears that ‘chop-cherry’ was a game, also known as cherry-bob, that involved trying to catch a cherry suspended on a string with one’s teeth. I don’t quite get the picture here. ‘Ripe within’ – within what? The rye? Are we to imagine lovers crawling about in the rye playing games with cherries on bits of string? I suspect there is a bit of euphemism at work here, and this seems to be borne out by another poem of the time by Robert Herrick, with a verse suggesting that this was indeed a pastime with erotic overtones:

‘But I shall ne’er forget
    How, for to make thee merry,
Thou mad’st me chop, but yet
    Another snapp’d the cherry’.

Historical note: the combination of strawberries and cream is said to have been the creation of Thomas Wolsey in the court of Henry VIII. The modern strawberry, big, juicy but often disappointingly tasteless, is a creation of the eighteen century, so the ones in the poem might have been closer to the wild strawberry, Fragaria vesca, smaller but sweetly flavorous.

The Impatient Maid

When as the rye reach’d to the chin,
And chop-cherry, chop-cherry ripe within,
Strawberries swimming in the cream,
And schoolboys playing in the stream;
Then O, then O, then O, my true love said,
Till that time come again
She could not live a maid!

George Peele