I Want My Maypole
May Day in New England is when the world finally, irrevocably turns green – the rich, luminescent green of freshly uncorked leaves. Winter dogs New Englanders through March and into April, gray days and mitten weather lasting past exasperation and Easter, but by the start of May it’s as inarguable as the Baltimore oriole that arrives in my neighbor’s tree every year on the morning of the 1st or 2nd. Hear that whistle? Spring is here.
In my childhood, as in many people’s childhoods, May Day was a school occasion, girls and boys pouring out of the classrooms onto the playing fields or into the gym to re-enact the rites of the season. Specifically, the May Dance, in which small children in their Sunday best circled in and around each other while holding brightly colored ribbons attached to the top of a pole. If all went well and no missteps occurred – a big if when you’re talking about eight-year-olds – something magical happened: this Busby Berkeley chrysanthemum of ribbons weaved itself into a rainbow braid tightly wound around the pole and, when the dance reversed, unweaved back into a chrysanthemum again. From entropy to order to entropy to order … we knew the dance had to stop after a while, but we also sensed, even as children, that it could and maybe did go on forever.
Who told us to do this? The teachers. Who told them? Custom, tradition, pagan whisperings in the ear. Just as Easter is a festival of the earth’s annual renewal that goes back to our proto-human beginnings and only in recent history has become associated with Jesus and Peeps, so May Day celebrates older gods than we care to acknowledge. Does the maypole signify Yggdrasil, the giant tree at the center of the universe in Norse mythology? Is it a phallic symbol? (Sigmund Freud thought so.) (Of course he did.) Is the maypole dance descended from pre-Christian spring rituals dedicated to the goddess Freya? Does it go back to the Roman Maiuma that celebrated the union of Dionysus and Aphrodite? Or even further, to the first prehistoric steps invented to solemnify and revel in the world’s rebirth – and through those steps ensure that the world would be reborn again next year, after its inevitable, cyclical death?
This winding and unwinding is exactly the subject of “The Wheel and the Maypole,” a song by the late, lamented rock group XTC. The final song, actually, since it’s the last track on the band’s last album, the 2000 release “Wasp Star,” which with its immediate predecessor “Apple Venus” (1999) is unavailable on Spotify and other streaming music platforms because the band owns the rights to those albums and leader Andy Partridge thinks the economics of streaming are despicable. (He is correct.) But you can find both albums and their songs on YouTube, and so, in honor of the day, I am able to present you with “The Wheel and the Maypole.”
It is, without question, one of the most ingeniously structured pop songs in the history of the form, a two-part affair whose first half traffics in folkloric metaphors of rebirth, new growth, the ever-turning wheel of the seasons that brings us spring. In the second half – which feels like an entirely different song – Partridge reverses course and revs the tempo to acknowledge that “everything decays/Pyramids and palaces to dust … Wedding cake begins to must and molder.” All that stuff that grew? It's all going to die. And finally – here’s where things get spooky – the two halves of the song come together, melodies and countermelodies, order and entropy, weaving in and out of each other like – well, like a maypole dance. It’s the damnedest thing you’ve ever heard: A pagan ritual from our primeval beginnings recreated in modern digital sound. Give it a listen on headphones and have a happy May Day.
I've got the plow if you've got the furrow
I've got the rabbit if you've his burrow home
I've got the pen if you've got the paper
Time is but clay I'll see you and the wheel turn
You and the wheel turn
And if the pot won't hold our love
If the pot won't hold our love
If the pot won't hold our love
Then we'll dash it to the ground
And if the pot won't hold our love
If the pot won't hold our love
If the pot won't hold our love
We'll build one bigger all around
Goes the wheel
I've got the seed if you've got the valley
I've got the big stick if you've Aunt Sally's head
I've got the time if you've got the motion
Time is but clay I'll see you and the wheel turn
You and the wheel turn
And if the pot won't hold our love
If the pot won't hold our love
If the pot won't hold our love
Then we'll dash it to the ground
And if the pot won't hold our love
If the pot won't hold our love
If the pot won't hold our love
We'll build one bigger all around
Goes the wheel
Maypole
Maypole
Maypole you've spun me round and knocked me off my Axis Mundi
Maypole
Maypole
Maypole the ties that bind you will unwind to free me one day
And everything decays
Yes, everything decays
Forest tumbles down to make the soil
Planets fall apart
Just to feed the stars and stuff their larder
And what made me think we're any better
And what made me think we'd last forever
Was I so naive?
Of course it all unweaves
Maypole
Maypole
Maypole you've spun me round and knocked me off my Axis Mundi
Maypole
Maypole
Maypole the ties that bind you will unwind to free me one day
And everything decays
Pyramids and palaces to dust
Empires crumbling
Wedding cake begins to must and molder
And what made me think we're any better
And what made me think we'd last forever
Was I so naive?
Failing to perceive
Maypole (round goes the wheel)
Maypole (round goes the wheel)
Maypole (the ties that bind you will unwind to free me one day)
Maypole (if the pot won't hold our love)
Thoughts? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.
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