cuckoo quotes

Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! Groweth sed, and bleweth med, And springth the wude nu. See also Pound 664:27.

-Anonymous
c.1250  'Sumer is icumen in', l.1^4.

So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry, From the wet field, through the vext garden trees, Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: 'The bloom isgone, and with the bloom go I.'

- Matthew Arnold
  New Poems,'Thyrsis', l.57^60.

A rainbowand a cuckoo's song May never come together again; May never come This side the tomb.

-W(illiam) H(enry) Davies
  'A Great Time'.

And hear the pleasant cuckoo, loud and long The simple bird that thinks two notes a song.

-W(illiam) H(enry) Davies
  'April's Charms'.

   The Attic warbler pours her throat, Responsive to the cuckoo's note, The untaught harmony of spring.

-Thomas Gray
  Ode on the Spring, l.5^7.

This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly: And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at 'TheTravellers' Rest', And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, And citizens dream of the south and west, And so do I.

-Thomas Hardy
  Late Lyrics and Earlier,'Weathers'.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

- Ernest Millar Hemingway
  In the Toronto Star Weekly, 4 Mar.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

- Ken Elton Kesey
   Title of novel, derived from a traditional rhyme.

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!

-Thomas Nashe
  Summer's Last Will and Testament,'Song'.

The merry cuckoo, messenger of Spring, His trumpet shrill hath thrice already sounded.

- Edmund Spenser
  Amoretti, sonnet19.

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshedthey produced Michelangelo, Leonardo daVinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

- (George) Orson Welles
  Harry Lime's speech to Holly Martins as he leaves the great wheel,TheThird Man.This phrase was added to the script by Welles who played Harry Lime.