"Can trouble live with April days?"
Yet they are not all jubilant chords that this season awakens.
Occasionally there is an undertone of vague longing and sadness, akin
to that which one experiences in autumn. Hope for a moment assumes the
attitude of memory and stands with reverted look. The haze, that in
spring as well as in fall sometimes descends and envelops all things,
has in it in some way the sentiment of music, of melody, and awakens
pensive thoughts. Elizabeth Akers, in her "April," has recognized and
fully expressed this feeling. I give the first and last stanzas:--
"The strange, sweet days are here again,
The happy-mournful days;
The songs which trembled on our lips
Are half complaint, half praise.
"Swing, robin, on the budded sprays,
And sing your blithest tune;--
Help us across these homesick days
Into the joy of June!"
This poet has also given a touch of spring in her "March," which,
however, should be written "April" in the New England climate:--
"The brown buds thicken on the trees,
Unbound, the free streams sing,
As March leads forth across the leas
The wild and windy spring.
"Where in the fields the melted snow
Leaves hollows warm and wet,
Ere many days will sweetly blow
The first blue violet."
But on the whole the poets have not been eminently successful in
depicting spring. The humid season, with its tender, melting blue sky,
its fresh, earthy smells, its new furrow, its few simple signs and
awakenings here and there, and its strange feeling of unrest,--how
difficult to put its charms into words! None of the so-called pastoral
poets have succeeded in doing it. That is the best part of spring which
escapes a direct and matter-of-fact description of her. There is more
of spring in a line or two of Chaucer and Spenser than in the elaborate
portraits of her by Thomson or Pope, because the former had spring
in their hearts, and the latter only in their inkhorns. Nearly all
Shakespeare's songs are spring songs,--full of the banter, the frolic,
and the love-making of the early season. What an unloosed current, too,
of joy and fresh new life and appetite in Burns!
In spring everything has such a margin! there are such spaces of
silence! The influences are at work underground. Our delight is in a few
things. The drying road is enough; a single wild flower, the note of
the first bird, the partridge drumming in the April woods, the restless
herds, the sheep steering for the uplands, the cow lowing in the highway
or hiding her calf in the bushes, the first fires, the smoke going up
through the shining atmosphere, from the burning of rubbish in gardens
and old fields,--each of these simple things fills the breast with
yearning and delight, for they are tokens of the spring. The best spring
poems have this singleness and sparseness. Listen to Solomon: "For lo,
the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the
earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the
turtle is heard in the land." In Wordsworth are some things that breathe
the air of spring. These lines, written in early spring, afford a good
specimen:--
"I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind."
"To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
"Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 't is my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
"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."
Or these from another poem, written in his usual study, "Out-of-Doors,"
and addressed to his sister:--
"It is the first mild day of March,
Each minute sweeter than before;
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside the door.
"There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.
. . . . . . . . .
"Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth;
It is the hour of feeling.
"One moment now may give us more
Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season."
It is the simplicity of such lines, like the naked branches of the
trees or the unclothed fields, and the spring-like depth of feeling and
suggestion they hold, that make them so appropriate to this season.