“With the heart of May
    Doth every beast keep holiday.”

In New England where “Northern natur” is “slow an’ apt to doubt,”

“May is a pious fraud of the almanac.”

or as Hosea Biglow says: 

“Half our May is so awfully like May n’t,
’T would rile a Shaker or an evrige saint.”

41.  The original edition has “grasping” instead of “groping.”

42.  Climbs to a soul, etc.:  In his intimate sympathy with nature, Lowell endows her forms with conscious life, as Wordsworth did, who says in Lines Written in Early Spring: 

    “And ’t is my faith that every flower
    Enjoys the air it breathes.”

So Lowell in The Cathedral says: 

    “And I believe the brown earth takes delight,
    In the new snow-drop looking back at her,
    To think that by some vernal alchemy
    It could transmute her darkness into pearl.”

So again he says in Under the Willows: 

          “I in June am midway to believe
    A tree among my far progenitors,
    Such sympathy is mine with all the race,
    Such mutual recognition vaguely sweet
    There is between us.”

It must be remembered that this humanizing of nature is an attitude toward natural objects characteristic only of modern poetry, being practically unknown in English poetry before the period of Burns and Wordsworth.

45.  The cowslip startles:  Surprises the eye with its bright patches of green sprinkled with golden blossoms. Cowslip is the common name in New England for the marsh-marigold, which appears early in spring in low wet meadows, and furnishes not infrequently a savory “mess of greens” for the farmer’s dinner-table.

46.  Compare Al Fresco, lines 34-39: 

    “The rich, milk-tingeing buttercup
    Its tiny polished urn holds up,
    Filled with ripe summer to the edge,
    The sun in his own wine to pledge.”

56.  Nice:  Delicately discriminating.

62.  This line originally read “because God so wills it.”

71.  Maize has sprouted:  There is an anxious period for the farmer after his corn is planted, for if the spring is “backward” and the weather cold, his seed may decay in the ground before sprouting.

73.  So in Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line, when robin-redbreast sees the “hossches’nuts’ leetle hands unfold” he knows—­

    “Thet arter this ther’ ’s only blossom-snows;
    So, choosin’ out a handy crotch an’ spouse,
    He goes to plast’rin’ his adobe house.”

77.  Note the happy effect of the internal rhyme in this line.

93.  Healed with snow:  Explain the appropriateness of the metaphor.

94-95.  Is the transition here from the prelude to the story abrupt, or do the preceding lines lead up to it appropriately?  Just why does Sir Launfal now remember his vow?  Do these lines introduce the “theme” that the musing organist has finally found in dreamland, or the symbolic illustration of his theme?