Perhaps, no other season is as anxiously awaited as Spring. After a long, cold, dark and brutal Winter, many people begin to anticipate the sunshine and warmth of Spring as early as January, knowing full well they are weeks away from seeing their apocalyptic tundra replaced by lilting song birds and kaleidoscopic flowers.
A person's mood and spirit can often be influenced by their environment, i.e. the weather and the seasons of the year; especially during times of economic strife and hardship, people look to something viscerally felt, to lift the spirit, and encourage hope.
After the Winter
Expressing Spring as hope, and the season for new life, Claude McKay's bittersweet ode to better days, After the Winter, never explicitly references Spring, but longingly anticipates its arrival:
Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
And against the morning’s white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward... (lines 1-5)
Spring is like a perhaps hand
Perhaps, it is the predictability, the reliability, of a season that brings hope to a weary populous poet e.e. cummings speaks to in his poem Spring is like a perhaps hand; as the world changes before the eyes via some kind of cosmic exterior decorator:
arranging
a window, into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) (lines 3-8)
Those with even a passing knowledge of e.e. cummings may recognize the symbolic hand from the poet's beautiful and evocative, somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond:
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Spring
Alas, not everyone sees Spring as inherently beautiful; some, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, views the season as perhaps nothing more than a gaudily decorated facade, covering up the true ugliness of nature. Brutal (and funny) observations abound in Millay's richly drawn poem, Spring:
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify? (lines 9, 10)
Life in itself
Is nothing... (lines 13,14)
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. (lines 17,18)
Emily Dickinson's insight
And though it is hard to argue with the cold, hard realities of life (and death) as laid out by Ms. Millay, it seems inevitable that men and women will continue with each passing season to succumb to Emily Dickinson's equally astute insight:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul...
...the little bird
That kept so many warm.
Both Claude McKay's After the Winter and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Spring (as well as Emily Dickinson's complete works) can be found in their entirety at PoetryFoundation.org
More poetry of the seasons:
Rainer Maria Rilke – Three Summer Poems
Carl Sandburg – Four Autumn Poems
William Carlos Williams – Two Winter Poems
Martin G. Wood - M.G. Wood is a writer of screenplays, film and literary reviews, and poetry. M.G. Wood can often be found ...
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