Western Wind, when will you blow,

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ that my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again!

            Anon (early sixteenth century)

When I first read this short poem I was twenty and a university student. I reckon I already knew quite a lot about love, since I had just ended my first big relationship in order to marry my first husband. In other words I had hurt somebody badly by moving on, breaking his heart, in order to be happy myself.

At that time one of the most exciting things in my life was the realization – through literature of the medieval period as well as Latin texts – that human emotions don’t change very much at all. These lines were set to music in the sixteenth century but some scholars think it is earlier.

So who is speaking in this little poem? I tend to imagine him as a soldier, standing in the freezing darkness somewhere, on duty. It was (for me) most definitely a ‘him’ – because the lines sound masculine, don’t they? But of course, no one will ever know….

The first two lines express a desperate wish for warmer weather – because when the wind turns, coming from the west, it will grow warmer and rain. The western wind is the Zephyr – harbinger of Spring. I’ve modernized the language, of course, to make it easier to understand, but the feeling comes across in the original too – the intense longing to be out of the situation he is in, and home with the woman he loves.

Visualise the scene: the bitter wind blowing, the man wrapping his cloak around himself and shivering – as he thinks about the warmth of home and the comfort of being with the one he misses most in the world. Oh, if only he could be there! That explosive ‘Christ’ is so powerful.

Then, in my mind’s eye, I move this scene to any place in any century. When people are far away from those they love, pining for the emotional and physical comforts of home, it is as if a part of their innermost self reaches out across time and space, aching to be surrounded by love. Yearning for the familiar. Dreaming of rest in the comfort of a familiar bed. This could be you, and it could be me. It could be a soldier in the trenches in the First World War, writing home to his sweetheart. Or in the Atlantic battles of WW11, or in Iraq, or in Afghanistan. Or anywhere. Or of could be a nineteen century explorer. It doesn’t matter. He (or she) expresses a universal human feeling.

Why do I always return to making this man a soldier? Well, perhaps it’s because my daughter married one and I remember how much her letters meant to him wen he was fighting in the Iraq War. So thus we make poetry a part of our own lives, using it to shed light on what we know and feel – and also bringing what we have experienced back to the poem. I find this so comforting somehow. All the greatest human feelings have been suffered before….and love is, most definitely, a form of suffering, don’t you think? Sometimes, anyway.