In honor of the pollen that has mysteriously appeared on my car this morning, here are some poems related to spring, the season of pretty flowers and constant sniffles.
Daisy Time Marjorie Pickthall
See, the grass is full of stars, Fallen in their brightness; Hearts they have of shining gold, Rays of shining whiteness. Buttercups have honeyed hearts, Bees they love the clover, But I love the daisies’ dance All the meadow over. Blow, O blow, you happy winds, Singing summer’s praises, Up the field and down the field A-dancing with the daisies.
After the winter, Claude McKay
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, love, Toward the summer isle Where bamboos spire the shafted grove And wide-mouthed orchids smile.
And we will seek the quiet hill Where towers the cotton tree, And leaps the laughing crystal rill, And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there Beside an open glade, With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near, And ferns that never fade.
Spring, Gerard Manley Hopkins
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 ightnings 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.
To Daffodils, Robert Herrick
Fair Daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon; As yet the early-rising sun Has not attain’d his noon. Stay, stay, Until the hasting day Has run But to the even-song; And, having pray’d together, we Will go with you along. We have short time to stay, as you, We have as short a spring; As quick a growth to meet decay, As you, or anything. We die As your hours do, and dry Away, Like to the summer’s rain; Or as the pearls of morning’s dew, Ne’er to be found again.
Calmly we walk through this April’s day, Delmore Schwartz
Calmly we walk through this April’s day, Metropolitan poetry here and there, In the park sit pauper and rentier, The screaming children, the motor- car Fugitive about us, running away, Between the worker and the millionaire Number provides all distances, It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now, Many great dears are taken away, What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory? (... that time is the fire in which we burn.)
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze? What am I now that I was then Which I shall suffer and act again, The theodicy I wrote in my high school days Restored all life from infancy, The children shouting are bright as they run (This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)
Avid its rush, that reeling blaze! Where is my father and Eleanor? Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then? No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day, Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful; Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.
Spring, Edna St. Vincent Millay
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Andrea Gutierrez is the editor of the Bryan County News.
