Few love poems as brief as J. M. Synge’s “In May” manage to sound at once like a folk song, a private joke, and a tiny piece of theatre. Synge is best known as a dramatist of the Irish Literary Revival, the author of plays such as *The Playboy of the Western World* and *Riders to the Sea*. His lyric poems are less often read, but “In May” shows the same ear for living speech. It comes from the small body of lyric poems published around his death in 1909, at the age of thirty-seven, and many of his last lyrics carry the shadow of illness and of his love for the actress Molly Allgood. That context gives the poem’s lightness a quiet poignancy.
The scene is deliberately small: two lovers lie “in a nook / That opened south,” sheltered and sun-warmed, in the month of May. There is no grand landscape, only an intimate corner where “You and I / Lay mouth to mouth.” Their privacy is interrupted by two birds, “A snowy gull / And sooty daw,” which come and stare “with many a caw.” The speaker then makes the poem’s witty turn, saying, “Such … Are I and you, / When you’ve kissed me / Black and blue!” On the surface it is a joke about how love marks us. The gull and the daw, one white and one black, become a comic mirror for the couple: desire is both bright and dark, tender and rough. The central idea emerges through that playfulness—love is never just one thing. Even in a sunny May nook, it has teeth, noise, and the power to bruise.
The poem’s construction is as compact as its setting. Three quatrains of very short, often two-beat lines create a hushed, almost nursery-rhyme rhythm. The even-numbered lines rhyme lightly: “south” with “mouth,” “daw” with “caw,” “you” with “blue.” Those pairings feel inevitable, as if the poem itself is closing small doors. Synge wastes no words. “Nook” suggests both shelter and secrecy; “opened south” quietly explains why the spot is warm. “Lay mouth to mouth” is bluntly physical but softened by the song-like metre. In the second stanza, the birds enter as characters. “Snowy” and “sooty” are vivid adjectives that carry the whole colour contrast, while “caw” works both as rhyme and as onomatopoeia, letting the reader hear the interruption. The final “black and blue” flips a cliché about bruises into something half-comic, half-serious. The lover’s kisses sound so forceful that they leave the speaker marked; yet the tone is not complaint but affectionate teasing.
What makes “In May” significant is how much Synge achieves through restraint. He turns a tiny observed moment into a miniature drama, complete with actors, audience, and punchline. The birds are not decorative; they look, caw, and judge, like a country chorus. The poem also belongs to the Irish Revival’s interest in folk speech and the natural world, but it avoids romantic cliché by letting the speaker mock himself. Its music is simple without being childish, and its humour has an underside. A love poem that could have been merely pretty becomes instead something stranger and more honest: a sunlit nook where a kiss can leave a mark, and where a sooty daw and a snowy gull are as good witnesses as any. That odd, wry balance—tenderness with a bruise—keeps the poem alive long after its few short lines are read.