That was it. That was May, the month that invariably lets us down. Perhaps one May in ten nearly lives up to its reputation, but for the most part, May dismays, writes Kevin Myers.
That is its nature, as it is in man's nature to be incorrigibly optimistic about a month whose real duty is to teach us lessons rather than to please.
May is named after Maia, the Greek goddess, but for Christians, it has traditionally been the month of Mary, though it actually begins with the feast day of St Joseph, her carpenter husband: May day is not a socialist invention but an ecclesiastical one. And the entire month of May was once spent in preparation for the feast that is today's, that of Our Lady, Queen of All Saints, Mediatress of All Graces, Mother of All Love, as the Catholic Church once termed her.
In that distant time when the Catholic Church still recognised the power of beauty of the word, it taught its children beautiful language. "Alleluia, alleluia. Show me thy face, let thy voice sound in my ears; sweet is thy voice, fair thy face," they would declare in the Mass for Mary's day.
"Alleluia. From thy lips is dripping the honeycomb, honey and milk are beneath thy tongue, and thy raiment is fragrant with the odour of frankincense." As the tide of Catholicism has receded, it has left behind it vast sandbanks of agnosticism on which rests residual rituals of meaningless First Communions, a pagan mumbo-jumbo of fake tans, ruinously lavish dresses and salon-concocted curls. And along with almost any sense of what Communion is about, those receding waters of faith have taken with them the incredibly powerful reverence that was once felt for the Virgin Mary at this time of year. Barely a child in Ireland now could conceive of what today once was, a day of flower-bedecked parades through every town and village, with large statues being borne on the shoulders of pious young men, and choirs singing the many anthems in Mary's honour.
There are no parades any more, nor any pious young men either, and most of the choirs are gone silent; but equally there are no orphanages and laundries which are whited sepulchres of abuse. For the world turns and values change, but in its essence May does not. May is the month of regeneration, which explains why May is also the month of murder, when the feeding competition among animals moves into a killing frenzy. It is the month when magpies and cats stalk the hedgerows massacring helpless fledglings by the thousand. It is the season when animal-parents' feeding duties are almost incessant through the long hours of daylight, so making themselves vulnerable to the compelling needs of other parents, other broods. May is truly the month of Creation's final law, of nature, red in tooth and claw.
Through the long dark nights of winter, we dream of May and its equally long days and its returning flocks of birds, home at last from beyond the Congo. Fixed somewhere in our collective memory is a notion of a mythic May of dancing maidens and lusty youths, and spring bursting through the warming soil. But May seldom is as we remember it, and certainly never as our collective memory recalls it. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations lists 21 references to May, but only seven to the next most cited month, December, and six to March (apparently no one has uttered a quotable word about poor virginal January). In that list, few enough poets depict it accurately, though Shakespeare does of course - "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May" - and so does the forgotten American poet James Russell Lowell: "May is a pious fraud of the almanac."
And he's right. May is a pious fraud. May is a time of east winds, of sudden, fatal frosts, and this year, even stout gales from the Atlantic. It is the season which kills Aesop's hasty swallow, when one hangs up the heavy coat in the wardrobe one day, and takes it out a couple of days later. It is the season when the growing grass cannot be cut because it is too wet. Most of all, it is the season that is more representative of life than any other month: for its essence is disappointment. It will almost never live up to expectations, and at its end, we invariably say: "Is that it?" A couple of years ago, one rare May evening when it was warm enough to sit out, we were enjoying the setting sun, listening to the songs of a pair of blackbirds, a hen and a cock, perched on a tree beside our westerly terrace. The hen alighted to fly to another branch and gone about a foot when she was taken on the wing and instantly killed by a plummeting hen sparrowhawk, which fluttered into a neighbouring bush to eat her prey.
After a while, the cock began to sing for his mate, but of course, her destiny now was to live on in the lives of sparrowhawks. Still he called, evening after evening, and for the rest of the spring. He did so again for the spring which followed, whistling for his mate on his high branch in long, melancholy melodies. He has done so again this year, his forlorn song ringing through the twilight air, as he patiently and vainly awaits her return. May is a truly terrible month, a harbinger of our universal mortality, and yes, that was it.