Spring in February

The "dredful joye" of Valentine's Day

In its conception, Valentine's Day was for the birds.  In his poem "Parlement of Foules," written in the early 1380s, Geoffrey Chaucer invented the image of the day of St. Valentine, the fourteenth of February, as an occasion for birds (foules, fowls) to meet, match, and mate:

For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,

Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,

Of every kinde, that men thynke may;

And that so huge a noyse gan they make,

That erthe and see, and tree, and every lake

So ful was, that unnethe was ther space

There does not seem to have been any tradition associating St. Valentine with spring and sex before Chaucer's poem.  February is a challenging commencement of spring; and Chaucer does suggest that, even as birds take wing and frolic, harder times are ahead.  In the poem, the passage through the Temple of Venus is difficult if ultimately fruitful:  "Derk was that place, but afterward lightnesse."  Love, in the poem, is a "dredful joye."

Yet it would not have been so strange for the English, in the fourteenth century, to think of spring in February.  The calendar familiar to us had not yet been established.  Tradition held that winter ended when Pisces began.  February was indeed the time when some birds presented themselves, sang, and mated.  It was also when farmers began to work in the fields and orchards: according to the calendars used at the time, to prune, graft, and begin plowing and planting.

We may think of mid-February as winter, but the holiday we celebrate today is obviously one of spring, if an early and hopeful spring.  Chaucer's Valentine poem brings to my mind a popular song, associated with winter, that is also about the turning of the seasons towards life.  The "Carol of the Bells," for Americans a Christmas song, is in fact a Ukrainian folk song about spring.  The Ukrainian song "Shchedryk" is about the new year, but in the same traditional sense that Chaucer's poem is: not the Christian year that begins on the first of January, but the farmer's year that begins with labor and hope.  "Shchedryk" is a song of encouragement.

A tradition going back to Pliny and the first century at least, and surely known to Chaucer, associates the swallow with February and with spring.  In the Ukrainian song "Shchedryk," a swallow appears at a farmer's house to speak to him of the bounty to come.  The signs are good: healthy lambs have just been born (lambing is indeed in February), the livestock is healthy, the harvest will be fine.  And, adds the swallow for good measure, you have a sexy wife.  (In the modern Ukrainian arrangement of "Shchedryk," composed by Mykola Leontovych, the bit about the beautiful spouse is sung right where Americans would be doing "merry merry merry merry Christmas.")

The song closes where it opened: the swallow has arrived and alighted.  By the end of the song, we know what that means: good tidings, warmth despite cold, love despite difficulty.  The birds in Chaucer's poem have much the same to say.  The February sun is still soft, but it is enough to drive away the bleak nights:

            Ful blisful may they singen whan they wake;

            Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,

            That hast this wintres weders over-shake,

            And driven away the longe nightes blake.

Vulnerable as they still are to frost and famine in February, the birds have the courage to summon summer. 

I know exactly why I am thinking about Chaucer and his birds this February day.  Nora Krug is publishing and illustrating wonderful juxtaposed diaries of a Russian and a Ukrainian during this war. The Ukrainian, the journalist K., watches birds.  They figure gently in her pained recollections of her work at the frontline, and of her moves around Europe to see her family.  I have just read week forty-nine of the diaries, which brings me (her? us?) into February, and so into the domain of St. Valentine.

Valentine's Day, poetic invention though it is, rests in a western Christian observance of a saint's day.  Eastern Christians (such as most Ukrainian Christians) venerate the various Sts. Valentine (there are a few) on various days, none of them February 14th.  Chaucer has little to say to us of Ukraine: the knight in his "Canterbury Tales" crusaded in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included at the time much of what is now Ukraine ("Ruce" in the poem); but that is nothing more than a gesture at an exotic orient.  It takes just a nudge, though, to see what Chaucer had in mind with his Valentine's Day, and for me that came from K’s wartime birdwatching, which recalled the swallow in "Shchedryk" that call the farmer forward into spring.

"Valentine" was thought to be a beautiful name by the Romans and by Romance cultures after the Romans.  The name has to do with strength, as in "valor."  In this last year, reading Ukrainians has certainly been a source of strength for me, and not only in the sense of admiring valor on the battlefield.  What was strengthened me has been the attachment to "common heritage," as K. also puts it in her diary, and the determination to see that heritage through to the future -- which means continuing to create, all the time, despite everything.  It means chronicling war's winter without forgetting spring.

Chaucer and "Shchedryk" can be brought together, as part of that common heritage; and when we have them together, we just might have a fresh and correct thought about this particular holiday, which is perhaps not so trivial as we make it out to be.  The seasons do turn, but what comes next is up to us, and we have to act more quickly than we think.  Much depends on our encouraging one another in all of the different kinds of love. Since Valentine's Day is for the birds, then perhaps we should hear their song: love is more courage than certainty.

PS:  If you wish to support Ukrainian journalists, artists, and others chronicling the war, consider a donation to Documenting Ukraine.  The December 2022 performance of Shchedryk in Carnegie Hall, which put much of this in mind was a fundraiser for Razom, which is doing an excellent job with humanitarian assistance.  If you would simply like to choose to send gifts to Ukrainian soldiers yourself, this can be done.  And if you find yourself thinking of supporting animals in Ukraine, that too is possible.

14 February 2023

Sources:

Chaucer, "Parlement of Foules," 1381 or 1382.

Chaucer, "Canterbury Tales," 1387.

Jack B. Oruch, "St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February," Speculum, Vol. 56, No. 3 July 1981,  pp. 534-565.