Crossword-Solution: ICUMEN 6 letters, 3 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

There were countless springs, of course, before a nameless poet, about 1250, wrote one of the first English lyrics for which we have a contemporary musical score: "Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu." But the words thrill the reader, even now, as he hears in fancy that cuckoo's song, "Breaking the silence of the seas Beyond the farthest Hebrides." Or, the lyric poet may have the luck to write at a period when settled, stilted forms of poetical expression are suddenly done away with.

Here Lucrece says she will 'bear the diapason' with deep groans, _i.e._, 'hum' a 'burden' or drone an octave lower than the nightingale's 'descant.' The earliest 'burden' known is that in the ancient Round 'Sumer is icumen in,' of the 13th century.

Here four voices sing the real music in canon to these words-- 'Sumer is icumen in, Lhudè sing Cuccu, Groweth seed and bloweth mead and springth the wdè nu, Sing Cuccu, Awè bleteth after lomb, lhouth after calvè cu, Bulluc sterteth, Buckè verteth, murie sing cuccu, Cuccu, Cuccu, Wel singès thu cuccu, ne swik thu naver nu.'-- while all the time two other voices of lower pitch sing a monotonous refrain, 'Sing cuccu nu, Sing cuccu,' which they repeat _ad infinitum_ till the four who sing the Round are tired.

The English Round or Catch, mentioned above, 'Sumer is icumen in,' is most probably of the 13th century, and that alone would be sufficient to characterise the popular vocal music of that day.

This harsh-voiced bird reaches our shores in May, and it was on the last of that month that I lately heard its rasping note in a quiet park not a mile out of a busy market town on the Welsh border, and forgave its monotone because, more emphatically than even the cuckoo's dissyllable, it announced that, at last, "summer was icumen in." This feeble-looking but indomitable traveller is closely associated during its visit with the resident partridge.