Spring is about surprise. Spring happens every year, and yet it’s possible to be amazed over and over at what the season brings with it: the smell of damp earth; shoots emerging from the ground; birds returning. I’ve been reading some poems that express the exuberance of spring wonderfully.
e.e. cummings was very good at exuberance, and wrote several spring poems. A bookstore in my neighborhood had one posted in the window: “in Just-/ spring when the world is mud-/ luscious the little/ lame balloonman// whistles far and wee…” The line near the middle, “when the world is puddle-wonderful,” reminds me of my son, who views puddles (as I did, at his age) as things to be enjoyed, not avoided. (Full text of the poem here.)
In “Québec May” by Earle Birney you can sense both the energy of growing things and people’s revived spirits: “Now the snow is vanished clean/ Bo’jour, Pierre, ça va?/ skyward point the cedar billows/ birches pinken poplars green/ magenta runs the sumach tine/ pouring down the hills like wine/ Yellow catkins on the willows/ yellow calico on line/ ‘Allo, Marie, ça va? ”
Of course, people have been writing poems about spring for centuries. One of the few bits of poetry I remember from a class in Middle English literature is the opening of this lyric: “Lenten is come with love to toune,/ With blosmen and with briddes roune,/ That all this blisse bringeth.” Unfortunately, all this bliss contrasts with the speaker’s unhappy love life, but there’s still a lot about the beauty of birds and flowers here.
And there’s the most famous of Middle English lyrics: “Sumer is icumen in,/ Lhude sing, cuccu!/ Groweth sed and bloweth med/ And springth the wude nu./ Sing, cuccu!” The rhythm skips merrily along, like the lambs and calves in the second stanza. (Hear a music video of this here.)
And finally, there is A.E. Housman’s “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now…”, in which the speaker thinks about how many years he may have left to live, and concludes: “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.”
Spring has sprung. Carpe diem.