Spring is the unlocking time, the greening of fields, forests, and lawns, the season of mud puddles, sunshine, and gentle rains when the last hard edges of winter melt away and the days are soft again.
Spring figures in several Western religions. To the ancient Greeks, the season meant the release of Persephone, goddess of spring, from the underworld, allowing her to cross the earth strewing garlands and seeds, and bringing the land to life again. Jews occasionally refer to Passover as a spring festival, a time of new beginnings. For Christians, spring brings Easter and resurrection.
Many people mark the first day of spring, the equinox (from the Latin for “equal night,” meaning day and night are equivalent in their duration) as a special occasion.
This is the time when gardeners put aside the seed catalogs and reference books that they’ve been perusing all winter long, grab their gloves, shovels, and rakes, and till their flower and vegetable beds. Homeowners crank up their mowers or perform a “spring cleaning,” kids run barefoot in the new grass, and families spend evenings on the back deck of their houses or on their apartment balconies, enjoying birdsong and the voices of neighbors.
Things Are Different Now
As recently as a century ago, poems celebrating spring found an audience missing in today’s culture. We heat our homes with a flick of the thermostat, we drive to work in warm cars, and we amuse ourselves in the long winter evenings with televisions and computers.For nearly all of human history, however, at least in cold climates, winter brought confinement, limited food choices, and living with icy temperatures. In 1900, for example, the Minnesota housewife cooped up inside her house from November until April may have welcomed May like a cherished, long-lost relative. The Vermont farmer who had plodded for three months or more through snow and slush to tend the cattle in the barn surely embraced those April mornings when his breath no longer froze in his beard. Such people undoubtedly took comfort from the spring poems that came their way.
Before the stars have left the skies, At morning in the dark I rise; And shivering in my nakedness, By the cold candle, bathe and dress.
Go back in time 600 years, and we find the first lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prologue to “The Canterbury Tales” saluting April “with his shoures soote,” meaning “sweet showers,” which spell the end of winter and “the droghte of March.”Given winter’s ice and storms, words in praise of spring have long been welcomed by these folks of hearth and candlelight.
The Children’s Hour
Winter is commonly used as a metaphor for old age, while spring serves the same purpose for the young. It therefore comes as no surprise that poets famous and obscure have written many pieces for children about the splendors of this season. This anonymous counting poem encapsulates the joy in spring with several of its specific delights:Spring is here! Spring is here! Winter is gone and two flowers appear. Three little robins begin to sing. Four bicycle bells begin to ring. Five children come out and jump the rope. Spring is here now! I hope, I hope!
In “March Is Here,” Lenore Hetrick reminds the younger crew that before they can jump rope and ride their bikes, they may have to endure some windy blasts from the third month of the year.When the gray, bare boughs Creak and bend, When the tall trees toss like wild When there is a roaring Around the chimney That frightens every small child. When the clouds in the sky Rush swiftly past In shapes that you would fear, Then there cannot be The slightest doubt. March! Wild March is here!
Young and in Love
This poetic equation of spring with youth also brings us verses of romance and love.For countless generations, human beings have equated this season with fertility and rejuvenation. The maypole dances that continue to this day in Great Britain and parts of the United States, the tales of the Celtic Green Man, and the baby chicks and bunnies we associate with Easter are only some of the season’s symbols. For poets, young love is also emblematic of spring.
It was a lover and his lass, With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, That o'er the green corn-field did pass, In the spring time, the only pretty ring time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet lovers love the spring.
This connection of romance, dalliance, and spring has endured in modern times. Lerner and Loewe’s 1960 musical “Camelot,” for example, echoes Morley’s song in “The Lusty Month of May” with its opening couplet: “Tra la, it’s May, the lusty month of May/ That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray.”
Wounded Hearts
Some poets paint a picture of young love decked out in spring’s rich mantle. In Sonnet 98, Shakespeare contrasted “proud-pied April dressed all in his trim” with an absent lover. And Royalist and 17th-century poet Thomas Carew wrote of the bounties and beauties of nature in “The Spring” with such lines as “Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring/ In triumph to the world the youthful Spring.” Midway through the poem, however, he shifts gears to lament the love who has rejected him:Now all things smile, only my love doth lour; Nor hath the scalding noonday sun the power To melt that marble ice, which still doth hold Her heart congeal'd, and makes her pity cold.
Carew concludes with this devastating description of the woman he loves: “only she doth carry/ June in her eyes, in her heart January.”Had I known love, flowers would have bloomed in Spring I would have danced when hearing whippoorwills sing But in my heart no seeds of love were sown No one brought bouquets or called me his own I wear no wedding ring
Lin Lane’s poem “Had I Known Love” laments not the bitterness of a lost love or a betrayal, but the absence of any romantic love at all: “There were no strong arms to which I could cling.” Spring promises blossoms and warmer days, but there are no guarantees regarding love.Appreciation Enhanced
The seasons pass, collecting themselves into years and then into a lifetime. Many of those who are old have surely experienced that profound moment when they are telling a story of youthful romance and realize with a shock that 60 years have passed since that kiss in the April dusk in the parking lot of a high school. Meanwhile, many of the young, filled with the sap and zest of spring, pay no heed to the passage of time. The words from “Fiddler on the Roof”—“Sunrise, sunset/ Sunrise, sunset/ One season following another/ Laden with happiness and tears”—have little impact on a boy or girl in love in the springtime.Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.
Let us look forward to spring, when we can take our own woodland ride simply by pausing to savor the beauties of budding trees, the April breeze against our faces, and if we are fortunate to see such a sight, a young couple laughing and strolling hand-in-hand through a green park in blossom. Add some poetry to that banquet table, and we have a royal feast of nature’s bounties.
