When the Italian Renaissance arrived in England in the 1530s via the works of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, it encouraged a newfound appreciation of nature as a storehouse of imagery. Nevertheless, readers should not presume Howard's sonnet records a first-hand encounter with the environment; a translation of Petrarch's Rime 310, it presents, like much Renaissance pastoral, a mediated literary landscape. Moreover, as in Shakespeare's Sonnets 98 and 99 and Thomas Lodge's “The earth late choked with showers,” the closing couplet registers an intensification of inwardness that alienates the human subject from the rhythms of the seasons (it may even have been written while Howard was in prison). Significantly, however, Howard replaces several of Petrarch's classical allusions with English fauna, thus imbuing the poem with an earthier feel and adapting it to match the local environment. In this regard it is noteworthy that the title (following Petrarch) names the season as spring while the poem identifies it as summer. This confusion reflects the looser usage of the two terms in early modern England, when summer officially began not on the solstice (then called Midsummer) but on 1 May. Rather than hail spring or summer, English poets often praise May as the ideal compound of both, so it was in effect a season of its own, while the annual tradition (which came under assault after the Reformation) of gathering greenery and dancing round the maypole on May Day encouraged human communities to participate in the drama of biological renewal (see Dekker's “Merry Month of May” and Herrick's “Corinna's Going A-Maying”).

Source: Songs and Sonnets (1557), A2v.