Naturally, the season of spring featured in many of this session’s readings, but a few alluded to other kinds of spring.
‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) took place “On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five” – exactly 249 years before our meeting, when the first two and the last two verses were read.
TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ famously opens with “April is the cruellest month”. We heard the first two stanzas. We didn’t have time for an extract from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which of course also begins with mention of (a more congenial) April. On a ‘pilgrimage’ from Hull to London by train, Philip Larkin observes ‘The Whitsun weddings’.
The ‘Death of a naturalist’ (Seamus Heaney) results from a terrifying spring encounter with a mass of spawning frogs – “the great slime kings”.
In Alan Brownjohn’s ‘April light’ the fields are lavishly spread with London muck.
Other archetypical spring phenomena are fresh green leaves, blossom and lambs. The poems celebrating these included AE Housman’s ‘Loveliest of trees’, David Leonard’s ‘Spring’, David Aldred’s ‘Primavera’, Elizabeth Jennings’ ‘English wild flowers’, Philip Larkin’s ‘The trees’ and ‘First sight’, Helen Dunmore’s ‘City lilacs’, John Clare’s ‘Young lambs’, and Norman McCaig’s ‘The shifts of spring’ in which he calls spring the joker of the seasons. The gean tree this poem refers to is the wild cherry. Ruth Pitter’s ‘Rhubarb’ led to an anecdote about a woman who could kill that hardy plant.
Ken Gambles’ ‘Spring’ contains both the seasonal and coiled varieties, and more. The poet plays with the word and conjures up a number of fine images.
Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of parts’ also refers to springs both coiled and seasonal. It cleverly interweaves a comedy of military training and observation of the natural world.
A coiled spring is also found in ‘The watch’ by Danusha Lameris; a touching meditation on mortality.
You would think that John Ashbery’s ‘The plural of Jack-in-the box’ would include at least two springs of the coiled variety, but we could find nothing in the poem that related to its title. No light was shed on what it meant, if anything.
Spring also seemed absent from the amusing Grevel Lindop poem ‘Contact lenses’, although its meaning was clear. Perhaps they spring out and get lost… and cats, as featured in new member David Leonard’s ‘Have you ever?’ are liable to spring.
Extracts from Alexander Pope’s ‘An essay on criticism’ included advice to artists to “drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring”, along with other famous lines comparing erring with forgiving, and fools with angels.
Gillian Clarke’s ‘Siphoning the spring’ took me back vividly to my days of water engineering assignments on rural hillsides. Her poem ‘Spring equinox, 2021’ can be found on the internet – a reminder of the Covid lockdown times.
Further to this theme; Simon Armitage’s new collection of poems, ‘Blossomise’, was commissioned by the National Trust to celebrate blossom. It was published on 21 March, World Poetry Day. Different poems from the collection were published in that day’s Guardian and the New Statesman.
Thanks Chris. A lucid and succinct record of an enjoyable meeting.