Poems of the Week: Spring

According to people who know about these things, Spring started on March 19th. So here it is – Spring!

Spring in the Bronx is perhaps a little different: here is an anonymous contribution (the spelling varies with the source):

Spring is sprung,
Duh grass is riz;
I wonder where dem boidies is?

Dey say duh boid is on duh wing:
But dat’s absoid!
Duh wing is on duh boid!

Hard to disagree with that.

The date for the start of Spring gets more and more precise – this year I heard in Northern California that it did not simply start on March 19th, but at 4:30pm on March 19th (I think that was the announcement, but I wasn’t exactly concentrating!). The date is that of the vernal equinox, which is the point in time at which the length of the day and the night (determined by the rising and setting of the sun) is exactly equal, all over the globe. There’s another equinox in the autumn, of course. For those of you who find that confusing, the Oxford English Dictionary has a much more user-friendly definition of the equinox:

“Either of the two points on the celestial sphere where the celestial equator intersects the ecliptic.”

I suppose that could be 4:30pm. Doesn’t that make you feel better?

From a poet’s point of view, this is completely irrelevant, of course. It would make more sense to pick the day the first poppy appears in Northern California (beats Groundhog Day as a seasonal marker).

It’s all a state of mind, isn’t it? Here’s a fragment of a lyric by Frank Loesser (1910 - 1969):

Spring will be a little late this year,
A little late arriving in my lonely world over here
For you have left me, and where is our April of old?
Yes, you have left me, and winter continues cold.

Beautiful song – he wrote the music as well. It was published in 1943.

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,

T.S. Eliot said, in the opening of The Waste Land:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Out there, in the sparkling air, the sun and the rain
Clash together like the cymbals clashing
When David did his dance. I've an April blindness.
You're hidden in a cloud of crimson Catherine-wheels.

Now that the April of your youth adorns
     The garden of your face.

April is in my mistress' face,
And July in her eyes hath place,
Within her bosom is September,
But in her heart a cold December.

However, John Keats (1795-1821) seemed to be more conscious of the moist side of English April when he wrote, in Ode on Melancholy:

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
     Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
     And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
     Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave
          Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
     Emprison her soft hand and let her rave,
          And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

Then there's John Masefield (1878-1967), another marvelous ear; this is from The West Wind:

It's a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds' cries;
I never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes.
For it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills,
And April's in the west wind, and daffodils.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

So there you are - poets' views of April. Now what to choose for the poems of the week? The more observant of you will notice that I haven't quoted Shakespeare once, although of course he mentions April several times in his plays. I'm going to choose his third sonnet, Look in thy glass, as my first poem for this week. I haven't quoted Robert Frost, either; and my second choice is his Two Tramps in Mud Time. My final choice, however, has to be Robert Browning's Home Thoughts from Abroad.

Look in Thy Glass

Two Tramps in Mud Time

Home Thoughts from Abroad