Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

These lines are Ezra Pound’s deliberately coarse, mock-medieval riff on the famous Middle English rota “Sumer is icumen in.” Pound, who made translation and adaptation of early poetry central to his modernist program, often reworked older forms to jolt contemporary readers and to satirize sentimentality. Here he inverts the original springtime celebration into a bleak winter scene, exaggerating the alliteration and archaic diction (“icumen,” “lhude”) while inserting the shocking refrain “Goddamm.” The piece is typically read as a parody/pastiche rather than a faithful translation, using the prestige of medieval lyric to stage a modern, anti-idyllic complaint.

Pound turns a canonical song of renewal into an anti-carol: winter arrives not with communal joy but with mud, cold rain, and a profane chorus. The humor comes from the collision of registers—antique spelling and sing-song rhythm paired with blunt modern anger. The refrain functions like a grotesque “burden” in a medieval song, suggesting that what modern life most readily supplies is not piety or harmony but irritation and curse. More broadly, it exemplifies Pound’s modernist method: reanimating the past through aggressive remake, exposing how inherited literary forms can be repurposed to express disillusion rather than pastoral comfort.