Shirley Collins / English Folk Classics / 1959
The Queen of May
gentle, pastoral, quietly sensuous
This is a pastoral courtship ballad built on the ancient English association between May Day, flowers, and sexual awakening. A narrator meets a reluctant maiden outdoors, pursues her, wins her over, and the song ends in marriage framed as a crowning ceremony.
courtship ritual springtime fertility symbolism pastoral idealization persistence and persuasion marriage as resolution
Who's speaking
A first-person male narrator recounts a past encounter directly to the listener, functioning as both participant and storyteller; his account is untroubled and self-congratulatory, giving no access to the woman's inner feelings beyond her initial refusal.
What happens
The song moves in a clean line from chance encounter to resistance to pursuit to consent to consummation to marriage, each verse advancing the plot by one step without digression or complication.
How it's built
Six verses of roughly equal length function as narrative stanzas rather than verse/chorus alternation, typical of English broadside and traditional ballads; there's no repeated refrain, and the song's momentum relies entirely on sequential storytelling, each verse ending on an image (flowers, hands, bells) that closes that stage of the courtship before moving to the next.
Section by section
Opening verse
The narrator presents himself as a passive wanderer who merely stumbles upon the woman, establishing an idyllic, almost accidental beginning that frames what follows as natural rather than calculated.','quote':
Second verse
“I pray you pursue your own way”
Her refusal is clear and direct, briefly giving her agency and voice before the narrative moves past it; this is the only moment of resistance the song grants her.
Third verse
The verb choice shifts the balance of power as the narrator describes closing the distance himself, reframing her eventual acceptance as a natural outcome of his persistence rather than a fully voluntary decision.
Fourth verse
“The tree spread its branches around”
Nature itself seems to enclose and sanction the couple at the moment of physical intimacy, lending the scene an air of pastoral blessing rather than transgression.
Fifth verse
The return to picking flowers after the implied consummation reasserts the song's central metaphor, folding the sexual act back into the seasonal imagery that opened the song.
Final verse
“I crowned her the queen of sweet May”
The closing coronation image elevates the private encounter into public ritual, tying the folk tradition of a May Queen to marriage and suggesting that courtship, however quick, is being folded into sanctioned custom.
Craft
- floral extended metaphor
- May blossoms, primroses, and the 'gathering of May' recur throughout as stand-ins for both the season and physical intimacy, so that picking flowers and picking a bride become the same gesture.
- pastoral setting as moral neutral ground
- The outdoor, unpeopled landscape (meadow, mossy bank, grove) removes any social witnesses or consequences, letting the encounter unfold as if outside ordinary social scrutiny.
- compressed narrative time
- The leap from the first meeting to marriage within six verses mimics the condensed, almost fairy-tale pacing common to traditional ballads, where cause and effect move quickly toward a tidy resolution.
Reading it
The most straightforward reading treats this as a traditional seduction-to-marriage ballad in which persistence is rewarded and the pastoral setting signals innocence and natural order rather than coercion; the woman's shift from refusal to compliance is conventionally read as coy resistance giving way to genuine affection, a common trope in this song type. A more skeptical reading notices that her only spoken line is a refusal, that the narrator's physical closing of distance precedes any expressed change of heart, and that the song gives no indication of her feelings after that point, inviting a modern listener to read the narrative as a male fantasy of easy conquest dressed in flowers. Both readings are available in the text; the ballad itself does not adjudicate between them.
Context
This is a traditional English folk song of the broadside/May-song type, predating Shirley Collins's 1959 recording by potentially centuries; such songs were part of the stock repertoire collected by early twentieth-century folklorists and revived in the British Folk Revival, in which Collins was a central figure. I don't have specific documented history on this exact text's provenance or collection source, so I'm working primarily from the lyric itself.
Listen for
- the plainness of Collins's vocal delivery against the song's more charged content, which tends to flatten any sense of urgency or menace
- the recurring return to floral and seasonal imagery at structurally similar points in each verse
- the single moment of direct speech from the woman, and how quickly the song moves past it
- the shift from pursuit language to domestic/ceremonial language in the final two verses
- the absence of any musical or textual break between verses, reinforcing the song's steady narrative momentum
About Shirley Collins
Shirley Elizabeth Collins MBE is an English folk singer who was a significant contributor to the British Folk Revival of the 1960s and 1970s. She often performed and recorded with her sister Dolly, whose accompaniment on piano and portative organ created unique settings for Shirley's plain, austere singing style.
b. 1935 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue