It is difficult to write about spring. Or, I should say, difficult to write originally about spring. The idea has been tried. By everyone. Everywhere. But we still try: lifted up by the season, we cannot help ourselves from saying so.
But what exactly to say if it’s all been said? Many successful lines are clear, bright observations that don’t worry about originality. As Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The earth laughs in flowers.” Or Robert Browning’s often quoted description: “The lark’s on the wing; the snail’s on the thorn; God’s in his heaven – All’s right with the world!” Which is just the sort of bright clarity that makes us scratch the noggin and wonder, “Why should I bother?”
Some writers are less profound on spring, actually joking about it. Doug Larson, who lived and wrote in Wisconsin and knew about spring’s drawbacks, wrote “Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.” Like Larson, the poet e.e. cummings advises us not to mind the slop, saying that in spring, “… the world is mudluscious …” And of course, there’s the old Maine joke: “We had a mild winter … until spring started.” Now that I think about it, as it pours outside, these comments seem just right for Gloucester in 2024.
The best prose or poetry on spring, as with the best art in general, mix joy with life’s real problems, the flowers with the flaws. Robert Frost does that in “A Prayer in Spring.” Here’s how it starts:
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Back to the Midwest, in “The Late Wisconsin Spring,” John Koethe writes:
“The loneliness comes and goes, but the blue holds …”
And Edna St. Vincent Millay pulls no punches in “Spring.” It begins:
“To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.”
No, beauty is not enough. We still have to hoe, sow seeds, fertilize and water the garden. Still have to go to work, pay the rent, cook, wash the dishes. But this is an upbeat spring column so I am going to close with a citation that, while it implies the mix idea, is itself upbeat and original and funny. From Robin Williams: “Spring is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s Party!’’’
John J. Ronan is a former poet laureate for the city of Gloucester and host of “The Writer’s Block” at 1623 Studios.