Spring hopes eternal, as it were. So there are all these poems and songs about disappointment, as the world regenerates but you – despite your hopes – do not. Or not very much. College boys are writing sonnets… But I’m on the shelf…
From the many-petaled bouquet of disappointed spring poems, take this one, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
SPRING
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of downs and fleuries, signifying nothing…
Rather bitter, aren’t we? Well, as the heart grows older, natural beauty in itself isn’t enough to subdue morbid thoughts. The post-romantic poet neutrally observes the crocus; she ain’t reveling in it. She notes the killing spikes, not the flowers.
The flowers probably aren’t out yet – it’s early spring…
Too early, as in the amazing Ted Hughes poem about the spring, in which he recalls gathering daffodils with Plath – to sell them – and the way the daffodils, like Plath and Hughes, were weirdly premature … or, better to say, immature. The whole poem regrets, abhors, the poets’ arrogant, oblivious immaturity, their belief that they inhabited a world of perpetual spring and daffodil windfalls.
We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.
Sure, says Millay, there’s no death – it’s apparent (as in observe, note her almost comically dry language) that the earth is ever-renewing. But since we’re not…
And actually the earth isn’t either:
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too…
That’s Philip Larkin, The Trees. He’s talking about trees bursting into life each April.
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing…
A tale told by an idiot, brain eaten by maggots. And then the poem shrinks to its smallest bit as the poet comes out with it: Life in itself / Is nothing… Like Leopold Bloom, soulsick at the futility of human existence as he surveys men in a pub stuffing their mouths: No-one is anything.
Only one thing interrupts our tidy step-by-step declension – ridiculous April, that idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. Babbling brooks, farcical flowers. A total jerk, Spring.
April 2nd, 2011 at 10:59AM
Although I am often bored by your obsessions with college sports and academic malfeasance, I continue to read your blog everyday in hope of entries like this one. Barbarians like me have never read that poem by Edna and are poorer for it. Thank you for enriching my day.
April 2nd, 2011 at 11:22AM
Bruce: You’re very welcome.
April 6th, 2011 at 3:41PM
They tell a story at Vassar that one day when she was a student there, Edna was approached by President MacCracken and asked, “Why weren’t you in class this morning?”
“I was in pain with a poem,” she replied.
What else could you say to this spirit except, “Very well then, carry on.”