Summer

Summer is the season of flourishing and renewed affection in the romance’s reflection on love. In May, trees and herbs bear fruit, and lovers are urged to revive old gentleness and service; set against winter’s erasure, summer becomes a measure of whether love can endure or will fade through fickleness.

Seasonal Image and Renewal

The passage places the return of May after the interval from Candlemas until after Easter. This season’s growth supplies its central comparison: as plants flower and fruit, a lover’s heart can blossom into generous deeds. May does not merely describe pleasant weather; it gives lovers courage to act and calls them back to kindness and service that negligence has allowed them to forget.

That renewal is vulnerable. Winter’s harshness erases the green of summer, just as instability can efface love that has cost much to establish. The contrast makes the seasons more than a decorative analogy: flourishing represents fidelity maintained through action, while winter figures the abrupt abandonment of a bond for little or nothing.

Love, Fidelity, and Honour

The account condemns a love that becomes quickly heated and just as quickly cools. It contrasts this haste with the old pattern of lovers remaining faithful for seven years without pursuing wanton satisfaction. The difference is not simply duration: enduring love demonstrates constancy and restraint, whereas quickly satisfied desire loses its warmth almost as soon as it is agreed upon.

The passage makes love part of honourable conduct. A person of worship should direct the heart first to God and then to the joy of the one to whom faith has been pledged; prowess in arms must likewise reserve honour to God, and a worthy quarrel must arise from the lover’s lady. The seasonal image thus joins inward constancy to public conduct: love is virtuous when it sustains service, faith, and honour rather than appetite alone.

Guenever and the Seasonal Lesson

Queen Guenever is named as an example of a true lover. The narrator urges lovers to remember May as she did, linking her fidelity to the season’s language of renewal. In this moral reflection, summer’s significance is therefore not an assurance that love will remain warm by itself. It is an appeal to renew the gentleness and service that keep a pledge alive, set against the chill of fickleness and the brief heat of impulsive desire.