A Medley of Weather Lore — A Closer Reading

Proverbs and Practical Lore

The January section alone contains over a dozen proverbs, many from specific regions: a Scottish saying links wind direction to 'milk and fish' or 'fruit on the trees'; a French proverb presages a good year from a sequence of monthly weather; a Devon couplet pairs 'winter time for shoeing' with 'peascod time for wooing.' The compiler often notes origins—'Scotland,' 'France,' 'Spain'—but the excerpts do not explain how these were gathered. Several proverbs are contradictory: 'A fair day in winter is the mother of a storm' sits alongside 'A snow year, a rich year.' This suggests Wright valued variety over consistency, presenting lore as a mosaic of folk belief rather than a unified system.

Poetry as Weather Record

Wright intersperses proverbs with poems by known authors. Herrick's 'Faire Dayes: or, Dawnes Deceitful' describes a sudden thunderstorm after a fair dawn, mirroring the proverb about fair days breeding storms. A stanza from Keats praises 'swelling downs' and 'blue hair-bells,' while Christina Rossetti's lines on flags ('Blue flags, yellow flags, flags all freckled') appear without attribution to a larger work. The excerpts do not show whether these poems were chosen for their weather content alone or for literary merit. The preface's list of permissions—including Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris—indicates a deliberate literary framing, but the body text gives no commentary on the poems' relation to folklore.

Seasonal Structure and Gaps

The table of contents arranges lore by month, from January to December, with an index. This calendar structure implies a cyclical, agricultural year, but the excerpts reveal uneven coverage: January gets dense proverbs, while later months include a July entry on St. Swithun's Day and a flower-girl poem from an unnamed London street-call 'about 200 years old.' The preface acknowledges permissions for poets like Alfred Austin and Francis Doyle, but the excerpts do not show whether every month includes both prose and verse. The compiler's voice is absent—no introductions or transitions explain the arrangement. Readers must infer that the 'medley' is intentionally miscellaneous, leaving gaps where the excerpts offer no rationale for what is included or omitted.

Because the excerpts are incomplete, the full scope of Wright's sources remains unclear. The compiler's preface thanks publishers but does not describe fieldwork or archival research. Readers should approach the text as a curated anthology rather than a scholarly folklore study. The index may help locate specific proverbs or poems, but the work's value lies in its juxtapositions—a Scottish wind saying beside a Herrick poem, a farming tip next to a Victorian flower allegory. Treat each entry as a fragment of a larger tradition, not a definitive statement.

Flipping through A Medley of Weather Lore, I stopped at the crab-apple blight rhyme, which felt less like prediction and more like a patient, cunning bargain with nature. The same quiet cleverness lingers in that old Japanese fable, where patience turns a small creature into a force of reckoning. It reminded me of Battle of the Monkey & the Crab — Key Ideas to Explore, and I smiled, thinking how folklore always hides a sharp little tooth beneath its gentle moss.