"My heart leaps up, when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it, when my life began;
So is it, now I am a man;
So be it, when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!"
Though there are so few good poems especially commemorative of the
spring, there have no doubt been spring poets,--poets with such newness
and fullness of life, and such quickening power, that the world is
re-created, as it were, beneath their touch. Of course this is in a
measure so with all real poets. But the difference I would indicate may
exist between poets of the same or nearly the same magnitude. Thus, in
this light Tennyson is an autumnal poet, mellow and dead-ripe, and was
so from the first; while Wordsworth has much more of the spring in him,
is nearer the bone of things and to primitive conditions.
Among the old poems, one which seems to me to have much of the charm
of springtime upon it is the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. The
songs, gambols, and wooings of the early birds are not more welcome
and suggestive. How graceful and airy, and yet what a tender, profound,
human significance it contains! But the great vernal poem, doubly so in
that it is the expression of the springtime of the race, the boyhood of
man as well, is the Iliad of Homer. What faith, what simple wonder,
what unconscious strength, what beautiful savagery, what magnanimous
enmity,--a very paradise of war!
Though so young a people, there is not much of the feeling of spring
in any of our books. The muse of our poets is wise rather than joyous.
There is no excess or extravagance or unruliness in her. There are
spring sounds and tokens in Emerson's "May-Day:"--
"April cold with dropping rain
Willows and lilacs brings again,
The whistle of returning birds,
And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
The scarlet maple-keys betray
What potent blood hath modest May,
What fiery force the earth renews,
The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;
What joy in rosy waves outpoured
Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord."
But this is not spring in the blood. Among the works of our young
and rising poets, I am not certain but that Mr. Gilder's "New Day" is
entitled to rank as a spring poem in the sense in which I am speaking.
It is full of gayety and daring, and full of the reckless abandon of
the male bird when he is winning his mate. It is full also of the
tantalizing suggestiveness, the half-lights and shades, of April and
May.
Of prose poets who have the charm of the springtime upon them, the best
recent example I know of is Bjoernson, the Norwegian romancist. What
especially makes his books spring-like is their freshness and sweet good
faith. There is also a reticence and an unwrought suggestiveness about
them that is like the promise of buds and early flowers. Of Turgenieff,
the Russian, much the same thing might be said. His stories are simple
and elementary, and have none of the elaborate hair-splitting and forced
hot-house character of the current English or American novel. They
spring from stronger, more healthful and manly conditions, and have a
force in them that is like a rising, incoming tide.