Celebrating the magic of spring equinox
The spring equinox. It’s a magical time of year, after the bleak landscapes and harshness of winter. It has been regarded as a time not just of renewal of the earth but of people as well, a new beginning. It has been regarded for centuries. So many festivals: Holi , Baisakhi, Navroz, Easter. Ancient Rome had the feast of Cybele, a mother goddess. The origins of many of these festivals are ancient, and corresponded to the seasons.
And hundreds of poems about spring, with varied meanings, tones and styles. In medieval English poetry, for instance, “Spring is intimately associated with tender love for Jesus…Such an association with the up-welling of love is also… a feature of secular love poetry,” says the scholar and anthologist R T Davies. Chaucer (1343-1400; dates regarded as uncertain), regarded as the father of English literature, wrote at the beginning of his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales of a motley group of people who, inspired by the weather, “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimage.” He writes, “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote/And smale fowlles maken melodye…Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimage.”
But, just as at Christmas, when people feel or are expected to feel festive, spring can be a depressing season for some. Philip Larkin, a British poet of the 50s writes in a poem called The Trees, “Their greenness is a kind of grief.” Edna St Vincent Millay, an American poet of the 20s says, “To what purpose, April, do you return again?” For her “Life in itself /Is nothing,/An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.” (Her work, well worth reading, can also be witty, satirical, passionate, romantic). And, famously there is T S Eliot’s opening line of The Wasteland. “April is the cruellest month.”
The inhabitants of The Wasteland can’t bear to have “Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.” The effort involved in starting again, changing their barren lives is too much. A “young man carbuncular” arrives to have sex with a typist who is bored but doesn’t resist him. When he leaves, “She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,/And puts a record on the gramophone.” There’s Lil whose husband has just been demobbed. A friend, in a pub with her, advises her: “Think of poor Albert,” she says. “He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,/And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will I said…Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.”
Running parallel to these sordid episodes are lines about the possibility of salvation, of piecing one’s life together in a coherent way. Eliot himself was searching for a faith he could subscribe to, and his poems are a kind of pilgrimage to that goal. Finally, there’s Spring and Fall subtitled “to a young child”. Gerard Manley Hopkins is addressing a small girl who is “grieving over Goldengrove unleaving.” The beautiful autumn leaves are falling. He addresses her with great tenderness. “Leaves, like the things of man, you/With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?” She does not really know why she is crying, he says, though somewhere in “what heart heard of” she must have known intuitively what the reason for her tears was. “It is the blight man was born for,/It is Margaret you mourn for.”
And hundreds of poems about spring, with varied meanings, tones and styles. In medieval English poetry, for instance, “Spring is intimately associated with tender love for Jesus…Such an association with the up-welling of love is also… a feature of secular love poetry,” says the scholar and anthologist R T Davies. Chaucer (1343-1400; dates regarded as uncertain), regarded as the father of English literature, wrote at the beginning of his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales of a motley group of people who, inspired by the weather, “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimage.” He writes, “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote/And smale fowlles maken melodye…Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimage.”
But, just as at Christmas, when people feel or are expected to feel festive, spring can be a depressing season for some. Philip Larkin, a British poet of the 50s writes in a poem called The Trees, “Their greenness is a kind of grief.” Edna St Vincent Millay, an American poet of the 20s says, “To what purpose, April, do you return again?” For her “Life in itself /Is nothing,/An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.” (Her work, well worth reading, can also be witty, satirical, passionate, romantic). And, famously there is T S Eliot’s opening line of The Wasteland. “April is the cruellest month.”
The inhabitants of The Wasteland can’t bear to have “Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.” The effort involved in starting again, changing their barren lives is too much. A “young man carbuncular” arrives to have sex with a typist who is bored but doesn’t resist him. When he leaves, “She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,/And puts a record on the gramophone.” There’s Lil whose husband has just been demobbed. A friend, in a pub with her, advises her: “Think of poor Albert,” she says. “He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,/And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will I said…Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.”
Running parallel to these sordid episodes are lines about the possibility of salvation, of piecing one’s life together in a coherent way. Eliot himself was searching for a faith he could subscribe to, and his poems are a kind of pilgrimage to that goal. Finally, there’s Spring and Fall subtitled “to a young child”. Gerard Manley Hopkins is addressing a small girl who is “grieving over Goldengrove unleaving.” The beautiful autumn leaves are falling. He addresses her with great tenderness. “Leaves, like the things of man, you/With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?” She does not really know why she is crying, he says, though somewhere in “what heart heard of” she must have known intuitively what the reason for her tears was. “It is the blight man was born for,/It is Margaret you mourn for.”
In this poem, “Spring” and “Fall” refer to states of awareness rather than the seasons. She is addressed by a diminutive of her name in the first line, but at the end she is addressed as “Margaret,” the adult form of her name. She will weep because she knows she has to share the fate of all natural things.
