O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!
O, and then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer's Queen.
Now the nightingale, the pretty nightingale,
The sweetest singer in all the forest quire,
Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love's tale:
Lo, yonder she sitteth, her breast against a brier.
A bird traditionally associated with love and fancy, as in John Milton’s sonnet  “To the Nightingale”  and John Keats’s (later) “Ode to a Nightingale.”
The Merry Month of May