Winter has left us no pleasure at all; Leafage and heather have fled with the fall, Bare is the forest and dumb as a thrall; If the girls by the roadside were tossing the ball, I could prick up my ears for the singing-birds' call![4]
[2] The first stanza in the original will show the structure of this true "ballad" in the primitive sense of a dance-song. There are five of these stanzas, carrying the same rhymes throughout:--
A l'entrada del temps clar,--eya,-- Per joja recomençar,--eya,-- E per jelos irritar,--eya,-- Vol la regina mostrar Qu' el' est si amoroza.
Alavi', alavia, jelos, laissaz nos, laissaz nos ballar entre nos, entre nos!
[3] Games and songs of children are still to be found which preserve many of the features of these old dance-songs. The dramatic traits met with in the games point back now to the choral poetry of pagan times, when perhaps a bit of myth was enacted, now to the communal dance where the stealing of a bride may have been imitated.
[4] Unless otherwise credited, translations are by the writer.
That is, "if spring were here, and the girls were going to the village dance"; for ball-playing was not only a rival of the dance, but was often combined with it. Walther's dactyls are one in spirit with the fragments of communal lyric which have been preserved for us by song-loving "clerks" or theological students, those intellectual tramps of the Middle Ages, who often wrote down such a merry song of May and then turned it more or less freely into their barbarous but not unattractive Latin. For example:--
Now is time for holiday! Let our singing greet the May: Flowers in the breezes play, Every holt and heath is gay.
Let us dance and let us spring With merry song and crying! Joy befits the lusty May: Set the ball a-flying! If I woo my lady-love, Will she be denying?[5]
[5] From 'Carmina Burana,' a collection of these songs in Latin and German preserved in a MS. of the thirteenth century; edited by J. A. Schmeller, Breslau, 1883. This song is page 181 ff., in German, 'Nu Suln Wir Alle Fröude Hân.'
The steps of the dance are not remote; and the same echo haunts another song of the sort:--
Dance we now the measure, Dance, lady mine! May, the month of pleasure, Comes with sweet sunshine.