A Bonnetful of Bees

When we were very small, in the late 1940s, at Pukeoware Primary School, we learned by heart the poetry of the great masters, and one afternoon a week we stood at the front of the room for a few stage-frightful minutes and recited what we had learned. These poems stayed with me right through my MA degree in English, and they are still there for the most part sixty years after I learned them.

Brownings “Oh to be in England, now that April’s there” was right up front, long before I had any idea that the April he was talking about might be totally irrelevant down here.

Later, at university, it was A.E. Housman, who captured me forever with:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

I was thinking about all of this when I was walking through Rautawhiri Park at Helensville this afternoon, or rather, the words of Housman’s poem began running through my head and I realised they’d been triggered by our own gift to April and to Easter, the houhere, in full flower just up ahead.

There are parts of the Waitakeres where these grow thick along the track – Piha Valley Track is one – where you couldn’t walk under these trees right now without collecting a stray blossom or two on its way to the ground, every bit as joyous as a cherry in springtime.

Of Housman’s fifty years, I have about three left, but I reckon to be round for something longer than that and certainly if the houhere is as beautiful as it was in the late afternoon sun today, if I’m not, it won’t be for want of trying.

(Postscript:  As a matter of interest, the date of Easter was determined at the Council of Nicaea to be the Sunday which follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox. If full moon happens to fall on Sunday, Easter is celebrated the following Sunday. Furthermore, it fixed the vernal equinox to be 21 March.

Admittedly, this took place before anybody had thought as far as the possibility of their being a southern hemisphere with different seasons.  The word vernal, however, means spring, so we are talking about Easter in the netherworld being correctly celebrated in September/October.  Just a thought.)