More than 20 days have passed since the vernal equinox, and we are now into Spring. That, if I may say, presents “the poetry thing.” Perhaps a thousand poems and sonnets have been written for this season, most an artful blend of emotion, light, and reason.
Selecting from a sprawling field, waving, colorful, alive, let us pick just five. Winter now past, spring dashes on, a merry mix of birds, words, and soon fawns.
Robert Frost honored timeless things, rock walls, character traits, recurring winters, the heart’s flutter and sigh, and the butterfly. This is “Blue-Butterfly Day.”
“It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
There is more unmixed color on the wing
Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.
But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.”
Emily Dickinson was lighter, quick of pen, done, and then …This is “A Little Madness in the Spring.”
“A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown –
Who ponders this tremendous scene –
This whole Experiment of Green –
As if it were his own!”
Then there is Spring reflected on by an Oxford don, J.R.R. Tolkien. This is his “All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter.”
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
Lighter still, like dawn upon the window sill is Christina Rosetti’s simple ode, “Spring.”
“There is no time like Spring,
When life’s alive in everything,
Before new nestlings sing,
Before cleft swallows speed their journey back
Along the trackless track –
God guides their wing,
He spreads their table that they nothing lack, –
Before the daisy grows a common flower
Before the sun has power
To scorch the world up in his noontide hour…”
But lightest of all, laughter in his voice, every word a careful choice, was the wide awake William Blake, his also just “Spring.”
“Sound the flute!
Now it’s mute!
Bird’s delight,
Day and night,
Nightingale,
In the dale,
Lark in sky,—
Merrily,
Merrily merrily, to welcome in the year…”
And there you have it five flowers picked from the field, held together in one hand, nothing super, nothing grand, just a bit of “the poetry thing” for Spring.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!
