Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing.
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

These lines are from the spring song in Thomas Nashe’s Elizabethan stage entertainment *Summer’s Last Will and Testament* (first performed in the early 1590s, printed 1600). The piece is a seasonal allegory in which personified seasons and attendant figures debate, celebrate, and lament the turning of the year. Nashe’s lyric appears as a light, popular-style interlude: a vivid, communal picture of springtime—flowers, dancing, birdsong—set against the broader work’s awareness that summer passes and decline follows. The onomatopoeic bird-cries imitate contemporary “cuckoo” and nightingale refrains familiar from Tudor song culture.

The stanza crowns spring as the “pleasant king” of the year, presenting it as a brief reign of ease in which cold loses its power and the natural world and human society revive together. The repeated “then” creates a rhythmic sense of inevitability and abundance: everything blooms; young women dance; birds sing. The refrain of invented syllables (“Cuckoo, jug-jug…”) is not mere nonsense but a stylized attempt to render birdsong in human language, emphasizing immediacy and sensory delight. In the larger seasonal allegory, the lyric’s exuberance also carries an implicit poignancy: spring’s sweetness is intense precisely because it is transient.