Once an Iowan, Always an Iowan

I’ve decided that starting today, I am going begin a daily series of posts that highlights something cool/interesting/surprising that I have learned or read that day.

(The idea here is that, presumably, I will actually be working and thus I will, in fact, have learned or read something. Really, this is an accountability measure, and I expect all of you to hold me accountable.)

Here’s a fantastic passage I read yesterday from (for those of you who aren’t familiar) the late fourteenth-century Northern English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I’ll post from the excellent translation by Marie Borroff, because the particular dialect of Middle English in which it’s written is difficult. But Borroff does a masterful job of preserving the alliterative style and overall flavor of the poem:

And so this Yule to the young year yielded place,
And each season ensued at its set time;
After Christmas there came the cold cheer of Lent,
When with fish and plainer fare our flesh we reprove;
But then the world’s weather with winter contends;
The keen cold lessens, the low clouds lift;
Fresh falls the rain in fostering showers
On the face of the fields; flowers appear.
The ground and the groves wear gowns of green;
Birds build their nests, and blithely sing
That solace of all sorrow with summer comes
ere long.
And blossoms day by day
Bloom rich and rife in throng;
Then every grove so gay
Of the greenwood rings with song.

And then the season of summer with the soft winds,
When Zephyr sighs low over seeds and shoots;
Glad is the green plant growing abroad,
When the dew at dawn drops from the leaves,
To get a gracious glance from the golden sun.
But harvest with harsher winds follows hard after,
Warns him to ripen well ere winter comes;
Drives forth the dust in the droughty season,
From the face of the fields to fly high in air.
Wroth winds in the welkin wrestle with the sun,
The leaves launch from the linden and light on the ground,
And the grass turns to gray, that once grew green.
Then all ripens and rots that rose up at first,
And so the year moves on in yesterdays many,
And winter once more, by the world’s law,
draws nigh.
At Michaelmas the moon
Hangs wintry pale in sky;
Sir Gawain girds him soon
For travails yet to try.

Magnificent.