Cuckoos and milkmaids

Always a welcome sight in spring, the cuckoo-flower whose emergence is supposed to coincide with the advent of warmer weather and the arrival of the bird itself, is also known as milkmaids and lady's smock, the ruched appearance of its petals suggesting the gathering on the front of the dairy workers' loose overall.   Shakespeare's song reference to it  in Love's Labour's Lost confirms the erotic associations of milkmaids, sex-in-the-grass and the teasing call of the bird as it deposits its eggs into the nests of paired-up species and tips their own eggs out of the nursery. Milkmaids, usually up and about early with the herd, their creamy complexions spared from the ravages of smallpox by contact with the milder disease of cowpox, were often in receipt, willing or not, of chance encounters with men who were not their husbands.

When daisies pied and violets blue 
      And lady-smocks all silver-white 
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue 
      Do paint the meadows with delight, 
The cuckoo then, on every tree, 
Mocks married men; for thus sings he: 
                                                    “Cuckoo; 
Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear, 
Unpleasing to a married ear!