I’m seeing a few green tips on the bushes outside my window. Yesterday, on a drive back from Northport, we saw forsythia in its full yellow. What a relief after this winter! Then I read this poem by Linda Gregg, whose poems have always delighted me in a thoughtful sort of way. They’re not necessarily easy or quick to follow, but they always reward me.
The first line itself requires hearing again to really get it. What does it mean for the day to be “taken by each thing” and to grow “complete?” I put myself in the speaker’s mind. I think I’m seeing things one at a time, and all together they make up a day. No, that’s not it! The day itself — our sense of time — is “taken” by each thing. You could say “overtaken.”
This is the point. Beauty just keeps coming. We don’t have control of that. It’s confusing when we’re not in charge of things budding, growing, with no end to it. But it makes us smile. All we can do is go out and come in, over and over, while the earth and its creatures go on doing their thing without paying any attention to the time. Night or day, things go on.
The speaker goes out at night and kneels with her light, looking at one thing after the other. She is not in control; she’s kneeling, she’s a “poor servant.” She has “nothing to give,” All she can do is praise the spring as it goes on with its beauty.
You’d think this poem had been written by Wordsworth, wandering “lonely as a cloud” among the daffodils in 1804. But here we are in 2026, and the tone is different. The emphasis is not on what the speaker gains by looking at the flowers. The speaker here is trying to cope with the way beauty, all things, rush on “like fire.” The budding and blooming and growth move “faster than time.”
You wouldn’t find that line in Wordsworth. In Gregg’s poem, there is a stillness in the speed of things changing. The changing is everlasting, and so seems to be still in that way. You know how a fan that keeps turning seems to be still, in a way. That’s the best I know to describe this. It’s clearly a twenty-first century way of perceiving.
“Praise this wildness / that does not heed the hour.” It’s about time for us to praise the wildness. We’ve spent thousands of years trying to tame the wildness haven’t we? That’s no doubt a natural thing to do, but meanwhile, “leaves / bend in the sunlight as the rain continues to fall.” So much happens at once, sun and rain. Here, even though bombs are falling, there is this happening, “in every degree of flourishing.”
Gregg won many awards, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Literary Foundation. She taught at the University of Iowa, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. She lived in New York until her death in early 2019.