Westron Wynde

The lyrics of the original were decidedly secular:

'Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,

The small raine down can raine.

Cryst, if my love were in my armes

And I in my bedde again!'

Recovering the original tune of Westron Wynde that was used in these Masses is not entirely straightforward. There is a version that uses the secular words, but with rather different notes:[1]

"Western Wind" secular lyric version

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The version used by the three Mass composers can only be inferred by what they put into their Masses. In program notes (see below), Peter Phillips offers the following reconstruction:

"Western Wind" Mass version

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But this is not always exactly what appears in the Masses; thus the New Grove quotes the following sequence from Taverner's Mass:

"Western Wind" Taverner's version

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For the words being sung here, see Mass (music).

Westron Wynde was put to music by Igor Stravinsky as a movement (Westron Wind) of his Cantata (1952).

The American folk group The Limeliters (Louis Gottlieb, Alex Hassilev, and Glenn Yarbrough) recorded a version using a variation of the first tune above, with modern English stanzas interpolated. Both the variation and the interpolated stanzas were most likely written by the Limeliters themselves, one of whom (Gottlieb) was a musicologist and would have been familiar with the original song.

The British guitarist John Renbourn recorded his own arrangement of the tune for two guitars on his 1970 album The Lady and the Unicorn. The song has been recorded by Maddy Prior and Tim Hart on the album Summer Solstice and by Barbara Dickson on Full Circle.

The British band Current 93 recorded an extended and modified version of the song sometime between 1982 and 1995, adding various new lines. This version, however, was not released until 2010.[2]

Susan McKeown and The Chanting House perform poet Robert Burns's version of the song entitled "Westlin Winds" on the 1995 album "Bones."

British composer Roger Jackson used the text and added a new verse in an entirely new setting in 2014.

"Eye of Heaven, pray gently smile,

And though the cold wind blow,

Soft, may you warm and mind my love

That I do love her so"

Both simplified and distorted versions of this poem have been printed over the past many years. These include both tampered and accurately modernized versions. For example William Chappell inserted 'O' at the start of the poem and replaced the word 'Cryst' with 'Oh' in his 1859 version. The latter was probably done to make it a safe reading for women and children in the 19th century context. He also included 'doth' between 'down' and 'rayne' based on his probable interpretation that the wind did blow the rain away. Some modernization of spellings was done by other editors to make the poem accessible for modern reading.[3]

The poem is used by:

• Ernest Hemingway in his novel A Farewell To Arms (1929).
• Virginia Woolf in her novel The Waves (1931).
• Wilbur Daniel Steele in his short story How Beautiful with Shoes.
• Madeleine L'Engle in her novel The Small Rain (1945).
• Thomas Pynchon for the title of his first published story, The Small Rain (1959).
• Walter Tevis in his novel Mockingbird (1980).
• Marta Randall in her book Dangerous Games (1980).
• The character Thierry (Judge Reinhold) in the 1991 thriller Zandalee.[4]
• The character Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson) in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008 film).
• The character Sarah Burton (Anna Maxwell Martin) in South Riding (2011 miniseries).