Now that spring has really come, there are some great poems about the season. Since the flowers are now all blooming and you can begin to buy strawberry plants and other early season planters, the bounty of the earth really seems at the forefront of the mind. Classic poet and Victorian-era British convert to Catholicism Gerard Manley Hopkins has a great poem on this in “Spring”:

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning

Another great poem in a different vein on spring [it is a great commentary on the human soul’s potential to be buffeted around and to find itself lost in the face of the enormity of the world] is D.H. Lawrence’s “The Enkindled Spring”:

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,Tree hydranger September 11, 2013
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration 
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.

2 Replies to “Poetry Sunday in the Spring – Katie O’Neil”

  1. D.H. Lawrence was an active supporter in the ‘free love’ movement of his day, speaking at rallies and conferences. But in a critical essay Sigred Undset remarks that he was too good a writer to distort reality and all his characters carrying the free love message are fatally flawed, unhappy, tortured. I am paraphrasing, she said it all in a sentence, with one adjective. But notice how it’s the same here. He speaks of hot but deliriously healthy spring, and then he speaks of his own soul in the last stanza. Notice the contrast. Quite the opposite, too, of what he repeated at the rallies. But he could not lie in his art. Undset thinks that’s the mark of the great writer, I think. So I look for characters to do the opposite of their author’s philosophies. including my own. O’Connor’s do, Ruby Turpin!

    Undset’s essay is in Men, Women, and Places.

    Thanks for this piece. It’s setting me to look for my favorite spring poet, e.e. cummings, of course. “Oh Thou to whom the musical white spring/ offers her lily I forget the next part. I think inextinguishable

Comments are closed.