Pretty Primulas

Not having television at the click of a switch (excepting excellent I-player, of course) fosters the habit of reading.  So at the close of Christmas Day I took out The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse and fled to a pastoral scene of nymphs and shepherds; Chloris and Doris, Colin and Cynthia.

The shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night (concerning whom I have heard at least two sermons this month) are recorded in Scripture, but alas, Chloris, Doris and their crew live where no topographer can trace them, in Arcadia.

I left Spenser and Sidney to their courtly devices and chose to spend some time with the poems of John Skelton (c.1460-1529).  And if you can find it, read his address To Mistress Margery Wentworth.

Here is the second stanza:

 Plainly, I cannot glose

Ye be, as I divine,

The pretty primerose,

The goodly columbine.

Off to the allotment the following morning and there were my pretty primulas, under the big apple tree, full of promising buds, yellow petals beginning to open out.   And there was the robin, not as familiar as Skelton's Philip Sparrow but equally adept at seeking small worms, eyeing me from the low branches.