spring
“Spring”
William Carlos Williams
O my grey hairs!
You are truly white as plum blossoms.
Spring is an obvious inspiration for art - almost…too obvious. My favorite attempts, though, are the ones that rescue the season from irrelevance-by-cliché by expanding the layers of symbolism that we humans have constructed around the vernal equinox. Some glean joy and hope from all the renewal and rebirth happening, the delusions of spring fever. In high school, I was introduced (actually, if you took an American literature class in high school, you probably were, too) to e.e. cummings whose playful and deconstructive syntax hooked me - he shattered the grammar I’d so assiduously studied and exploded the structures I’d meticulously diagrammed…and I loved it.
[in Just-]
e. e. cummings
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
Mud….luscious? Puddle…wonderful? The poet made me see spring a different way by entering the naive delight of children who are unafraid of slinging mud and splashing water. You see, I was never one of those children. I was the child who, mystifyingly, returned from playing outside with still-clean hands, shoes and socks still intact. I never played piracies and marbles. Once, when I was 6, a neighbor and I played “hunters” in the strip of trees between our yards until we stepped into a wasps’ nest. I wasn’t particularly interested in playing outside after that. I never got used to the crush of dirt under my fingernails and the slop of earth that splotches shoes and socks that have frolicked. I wonder if that’s what cummings experienced and offers to us, a chance to use spring to return to naifdom, to unlearn cynicism and sarcasm (or, in my case, obsession and compulsion and a general resistance to frolicking freely), to relearn (or acquire for the first time) how to delight, how to turn joy into a verb.
Other poems go deeper. They grab me with familiarity and drag me past the natural cycle and into the questions of purpose, of meaning. It doesn’t take much for Mary Oliver’s words to grab me - she’s the ultimate observer and meaning-maker. She doesn’t milk an image or a setting or a feeling for its meaning - instead, she seems to sit with it (an image or a setting or a feeling) until her eyes expand or her heart sinks. Rather, she sits with it until my eyes expand, until my heart sinks.
“The Hummingbird”
Mary Oliver
It’s morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
And again it is spring,
and there are the apple trees,
and the hummingbird in its branches.
On the green wheel of his wings
he hurries from blossom to blossom,
which is his work, that he might live.
He is a gatherer of the fine honey of promise,
and truly I go in envy
of the ruby fire at his throat,
and his accurate, quick tongue,
and his single-mindedness.
Meanwhile the knives of ambition are stirring
down there in the darkness behind my eyes,
and I should go inside now to my desk and my pages.
But still I stand under the trees, happy and desolate,
wanting for myself such a satisfying coat
and brilliant work.
Envious of a hummingbird - not for the simplicity of his life but for the sharpness, the clarity of his purpose. I love the tension she draws between the knives of ambition and wanting for myself such a satisfying coat and brilliant work. This is not the typical song of spring, of revelry; she so precisely defines a conflict I know well, between insidious ambition and authentic purpose, between hiding behind my desires and succumbing to natural harmony. The renewal of spring, in this light, is less rebirth and more excavation, the uncovering of ancient mysteries that demands not instant mechanization and profit but stillness, care, and reflection, the honing of my senses to absorb what’s been secret for so long.
Ada Limón grabs me with talk of fuschia and cherry trees, two especially poignant features of spring in the PNW, but then she sits with the changes that come a few weeks later.
“Instructions on Not Giving Up”
Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Is there a better summation of the natural and metaphorical springs in our lives? Sure, the equinox and the cherry blossoms and the daffodils and the tulips get the festivals, but, the poet reminds, the important part comes later. Fragile blossoms fall, and leaves emerge like armor, like skin healing over a wound or sore. If there’s hope in spring, it’s rooted in the knowledge that leaves return, that growth sustains, that open palms are always hidden in angry fists.
And then there are poems that resist cliché in a way that proclaims, Do not tell me what to feel. That’s the purpose of clichés, isn’t it? To tell us how to feel, to invoke the inherited and baked-in conventional wisdom that helps us navigate unknown territory, that tells us what to do when we don’t know what to do. For folx who only know Edna St. Vincent Millay for her famous “First Fig” in those American lit anthologies (My candle burns at both ends…), “Spring” is a startling departure.
“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.
Beauty is not enough, she protests against the prettiness of the season. I know what I know. Doesn’t it feel like a response to someone who told the poet to smile in that sexist, patronizing tone that men tell women to smile? She published the poem in 1921, perhaps as a response to the boisterous confidence that replaced the devastation of a world war and a global pandemic (eerie parallels, no?). With all this anger, all this fury she humbles April and all of us who (pardon the pun) insist on a rosy outlook despite the evidence life has already laid before us. All the renewal, all the rebirth, she reminds, will succumb in autumn and winter to silence and gray. Flowers and leaves will decompose and return to the earth, where they’ll wait to be warmed and mixed with rain and find themselves, or at least their carbon and essence, splattered on the shoes and socks of children delighting in spring rains.
