Spring poems usually fill the page with blossom and birdsong and stop there. Helen Hunt Jackson's May sonnet begins in that mood, with "O Month when they who love must love and wed!", and then drifts away from youth altogether, ending on old people dozing in the sun. The journey from that first line to the last is the real subject. What does May mean, and who is best placed to say?
The poem sets itself a puzzle. Imagine travelling to "worlds where May is naught" and trying to describe the month to people who have never known it. Which memory would you carry? The speaker admits "I know not" and offers three candidates: the "rosy showers shed / From apple-boughs," the "soft green wrought / In fields," and the "robin's call." Between them they cover colour, texture and sound, yet the speaker chooses none. That refusal is deliberate. It makes the answer in the last four lines feel like a discovery rather than a decree.
The form supports this. The octave follows the Petrarchan pattern, abba abba, with only two rhyme sounds, -ed and -ought, ringing through eight lines. The -ought words (naught, brought, wrought, fraught) are heavy and slightly weathered. "Brought" and "fraught" both belong to the language of cargo, of things carried a long way, which suits the imagined traveller hauling memories between worlds. Even the robin's call is "fraught" with delight, as if loaded like a ship. "Wrought" makes the green fields sound hand-made, as though May were a craftsman at work. The sestet, rhyming cdcdee, brings a change of sound: "say," "day," "old" and "unfold" are long and open after the clipped -ought, and the poem seems to exhale.
The turn comes slightly early and slightly untidily, which is part of its charm. "Perhaps" arrives mid-line 8, and the sentence runs across the break between octave and sestet ("Perhaps they read / Thee best"). The thought spills over the formal boundary just as the speaker's certainty begins to shift. The meter is a steady iambic pentameter, easy to hear, so the opening "O Month," with two stresses almost side by side, lands like a real exclamation.
The answer is that the ancients read May best, those who called it "the sacred month unto the old." The colon at the end of line 10 is the hinge. "The old" can mean people of long ago, but the word echoes forward into "aged hearts," and by the end the two senses blur. Those who knew May earliest and those who have known it longest become the same company.
The final claim is the most surprising: "No blossom blooms upon thy brightest day / So subtly sweet as memories which unfold." The verb "unfold" is borrowed from flowers, so memory becomes a second kind of blossom, one that opens in the mind rather than on the bough. "Subtly" matters too. It praises a sweetness that is quiet and easy to miss, unlike the showy apple-blossom of the octave.
The closing couplet is plain and gentle. The old hearts "in thy sunshine lie, / To sun themselves once more before they die." "Sun themselves" turns a noun into a homely verb, the way a cat settles on a warm windowsill. "Once more" carries the poignancy. Death is named flatly in the last word, and "lie" and "die" rhyme as though resting and ending were neighbours. Yet the tone stays warm, because the sunshine does the consoling. Reading backwards, the opening "worlds where May is naught" may quietly foreshadow death, so the traveller carrying memories to a place without May could be the old person at the poem's end. That is an inference from the imagery rather than something the poem states.
The poem's significance lies in this reversal. The title, "A Calendar of Sonnets," suggests one poem in a month-by-month sequence, and May is the month most easily reduced to cheerful scenery. Jackson instead treats it as a season that lasts longest in memory. The poem suggests that spring is not only what happens outside the window. It is also what we keep, and what warms us when the years have run short.