After Holofernes, Nathaniel, and the remaining cast of the Nine Worthies pageant perform a song about spring, they follow it with a short song about winter. Like the spring song, the winter song is full of evocative images, both sonic and visual:
WINTER
[...] When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl
“Tu-whit to-who.” A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
The song opens, like the spring song, with a series of images typical of the season (icicles, milk frozen from the cold, men carrying in firewood). The second stanza, above, continues the theme, adding rich sonic imagery into the mix. The reader hears the loud blowing of the wind, the coughing that drowns out Sunday sermons, and the sizzle of hot crab apples thrown into a bowl of ale. A bird’s call functions as the chorus, as the men imitate the sound of an owl in winter (“Tu-whit, tu-who”). In combination with this is the recurring image of tired women, possibly housewives. Marian’s nose is “red and raw” from the weather; Joan is literally sweating over a stove.
Even Armado comments on the harshness of this second song (“The words of Mercury are harsh”), and it looks exceptionally dour next to the softness and prettiness of the spring song. Where the spring song plays on ideas of young, unmarried, or extramarital love, the winter song is a song of domesticity and difficulty. The imagery is distinctly unglamorous, playing on the physical flaws of the housewife characters in it. The sounds are equally quotidian and unromantic, focusing on the sounds of illness and rough weather. The spring song portrays a playful ideal of love, while the winter song depicts the difficult realities of long-term commitment.
The imagery in the winter song offers a necessary and timely reality check, as the characters move from the romance of their comedy to the hard realities of their lives. The characters present in this scene are either in mourning nor preparing to go into isolation to wait for their future wives. In this sense, this song’s unglamorous imagery helps shift the mood as the characters each prepare to go from their collective celebration of love into their own private worlds.
At the play’s end, Holofernes, Nathaniel, and the remaining cast of the Nine Worthies pageant perform two songs about spring and winter from the perspective of an owl and a cuckoo. The verses are full of visual and sonic imagery:
When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
"Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!" O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.
The spring song recounts how flowers bloom in the springtime as the cuckoo sings. The “cuckoo” call here is a pun on “cuckhold” (hence, the birdsong is “unpleasing” to married listeners). The spring song goes on to list other specific images and references to spring (girls dyeing their dresses, piping shepherds, singing birds, mating turtledoves) and concludes with a reprisal of the “Cuckoo” refrain. The vivid image of blue violets, white lady-smocks, and yellow buds “painting” the meadows in spring represent some of the strongest images in the play. The “cuckoo” refrain imitates the sound of bird call, which is performed in mocking imitation of the cuckoo by the “owl,” the representation of winter.
The droll sonic and visual imagery in the song represent the last few minutes of mirth and fantasy before the French women and the noblemen must part ways. After this song and its counterpart are performed, the French women must return to court to mourn, and the men must decide whether to wait a year (in solitude in Ferdinand’s case) for their return. The brightness of the spring song reflects the last few moments of playfulness before they turn from courtship to the seriousness of commitment, from comedy to life. It is timed at the end of the play, before the audience too must return to reality and work.
The brightness and buoyancy of the song’s imagery also reflects the joy of love outside or before marriage, as the song continually references youthful affairs and young girls preparing for the springtime. The lightness is complemented by the more somber winter song, which focuses on difficult domestic scenes.
