It’s that time again and it feels like years since it’s been here. Spring has arrived and although many still see snow on the ground, we know it won’t stick around for long. Where I live, cool breezes have come upon us lately. Long afternoons cast golden light along sidewalks and birds you haven’t heard in a while are suddenly in song. It’s my favorite season, a sort of new beginning.
Spring is the season that, when it arrives, feels like it’s been gone the longest. Things begin to buzz and you feel like you’re on the brink of a new beginning, even if you don’t know what it is. No one captures the pure blossoming of spring quite like poets and their poetry. Leave your jackets behind and turn your face to the sun, these are the poems and their excerpts to get you in the mood for a spring awakening.
1. “Spring” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
2. “A Cold Spring” by Elizabeth Bishop
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practiced leaping over your fences.
3. “Today” by Billy Collins
open all the windows in the houseand unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peoniesseemed so etched in sunlight
4. “Trees” by Philip Larkin
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
5. “Sonnet 98” by Shakespeare
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.
6. “In Perpetual Spring” by Amy Gerstler
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring
7. “Young Lambs” by John Clare
A glittering star or two–till many trace
The edges of the blackthorn clumps in gold.
And then a little lamb bolts up behind
The hill and wags his tail to meet the yoe
8. “Lines Written in Early Spring” by William Wordsworth
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
9. “A Light Exists In Spring” by Emily Dickinson
A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely hereA color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake,
But human naturefeels.
10. “Spring” by Christina Georgina Rossetti
Blows the thaw-wind pleasantly,
Drips the soaking rain,
By fits looks down the waking sun:
Young grass springs on the plain;
Young leaves clothe early hedgerow trees;
Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits,
Swollen with sap put forth their shoots;
Curled-headed ferns sprout in the lane;
Birds sing and pair again.
Feature Image Via Unsplash
