We’re almost half-way through March, and spring is well on its way, despite the cold weather. The arrival of spring always makes me think of poetry and flowers, so here are a few poems you can check out for the month of March:
1) Spring by William Blake
Sound the flute!
Now it’s mute!
Bird’s delight,
Day and night,
Nightingale, In the dale,
Lark in sky,–
Merrily, Merrily merrily, to welcome in the year.
2) Sonnet 98 by William Shakespeare
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress’d in all his trim Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.
3) A Cold Spring by Elizabeth Bishop
A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag, but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.
4) Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
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.
5) In Perpetual Spring by Amy Gerstler
Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.