The opening lines humorously treat a climatic period, the "Little Ice Age" following the medieval warm period, as though it were a weather event that we could say started and ended at a specific moment: from the spring of 1315 to 1851. In reality this was a gradual cooling trend, not something that suddenly began in a particular month.
Another humorous note is sounded by "You remember 1816 as the year without a summer." Of course no one living remembers that year, and few people are aware of weather events from centuries past. The sudden change of subject suggests that there's a causal link between the Little Ice Age and the freakishly cold summer of 1816, but as the rest of the song will go on to explain, there isn't one.
Did many people at the time think Benjamin Franklin--who had died almost 30 years earlier--or a freemason conspiracy caused the weather events of 1816? I highly doubt it. Doing some searching for Franklin in connection with the summer of 1816 only turned up the interesting factoid that, in addition to doing experiments on electricity, Franklin was actually one of the first people to theorize that unusually cold weather could be caused by the ash kicked into the atmosphere by volcanoes, which turned out to be the cause of the freak weather events of 1816-18. What a clever guy! If anyone has any guesses as to where Melora could have gotten this claim, I'd be interested to hear.
The line "That was the real cause, discovered by some explorer" is puzzling. It makes it sound like Mount Tambora, or the fact that it had erupted in 1815, was only discovered later by Europeans thanks to some voyage of discovery, when in reality Tambora is part of what was then the Dutch East Indies and was reported on by European observers at the time. That said, I'm not an expert and don't know exactly who did first posit a link between the eruption and 1816's unusual weather, so I suppose that person could have been "some explorer." Anyone else know about this?
"You are so very choleric of complexion / Please beware the mounting sun and all dejection" is a quote from a modern English translation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, specifically the Nun's Priest's Tale, lines 190-91. The hen Pertelote is giving advice to her husband, the rooster Chanticleer, after he has related a disturbing dream he had. The gist is that he's just not taking enough care of his health, the dream being a product of humoral imbalance. How this relates to the previous 2 lines, or how this whole stanza relates to 1816, I am at a loss to understand.
The opening lines humorously treat a climatic period, the "Little Ice Age" following the medieval warm period, as though it were a weather event that we could say started and ended at a specific moment: from the spring of 1315 to 1851. In reality this was a gradual cooling trend, not something that suddenly began in a particular month.
Another humorous note is sounded by "You remember 1816 as the year without a summer." Of course no one living remembers that year, and few people are aware of weather events from centuries past. The sudden change of subject suggests that there's a causal link between the Little Ice Age and the freakishly cold summer of 1816, but as the rest of the song will go on to explain, there isn't one.
Did many people at the time think Benjamin Franklin--who had died almost 30 years earlier--or a freemason conspiracy caused the weather events of 1816? I highly doubt it. Doing some searching for Franklin in connection with the summer of 1816 only turned up the interesting factoid that, in addition to doing experiments on electricity, Franklin was actually one of the first people to theorize that unusually cold weather could be caused by the ash kicked into the atmosphere by volcanoes, which turned out to be the cause of the freak weather events of 1816-18. What a clever guy! If anyone has any guesses as to where Melora could have gotten this claim, I'd be interested to hear.
The line "That was the real cause, discovered by some explorer" is puzzling. It makes it sound like Mount Tambora, or the fact that it had erupted in 1815, was only discovered later by Europeans thanks to some voyage of discovery, when in reality Tambora is part of what was then the Dutch East Indies and was reported on by European observers at the time. That said, I'm not an expert and don't know exactly who did first posit a link between the eruption and 1816's unusual weather, so I suppose that person could have been "some explorer." Anyone else know about this?
"You are so very choleric of complexion / Please beware the mounting sun and all dejection" is a quote from a modern English translation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, specifically the Nun's Priest's Tale, lines 190-91. The hen Pertelote is giving advice to her husband, the rooster Chanticleer, after he has related a disturbing dream he had. The gist is that he's just not taking enough care of his health, the dream being a product of humoral imbalance. How this relates to the previous 2 lines, or how this whole stanza relates to 1816, I am at a loss to understand.