dreams

Spring

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.

Little boy,
Full of joy;
Little girl,
Sweet and small;
Cock does crow,
So do you;
Merry voice,
Infant noise;
Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year.

Little lamb,
Here I am;
Come and lick
My white neck;
Let me pull
Your soft wool;
Let me kiss
Your soft face;
Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year.

さあ、フルートを鳴らそう！ 
まだまだ聞こえないよ！
鳥たちは昼も夜も賑やかな様子だ。 
ナイチンゲールは谷間の中で 
ツグミは大空の下で 
元気に歌っている。 
そう、元気が大事。 
このまま元気に今年の春を
迎えようじゃないか。

William Wordsworth

Lines Written in Early Spring

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 ’tis 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.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ is written in quatrains rhyming abab; the metre is iambic pentameter, that rhythm of living speech (in the English language, at least) that was what Wordsworth was trying to capture in Lyrical Ballads, as his 1800 Preface would make clear. And the poem should be read in the context of Wordsworth’s other poems from this time.

木々の間に横たわった私は
自然の奏でる音を聞いた
すると心地よい思いはいつしか
悲しい思いに変わっていた

人間の心は自然の一部
私も自然と結びついている
だがそのことが私を悲しくさせる
人間は自然に何をしたかと

プリムローズの繁み越しに
ペリウィンクルの花が連なる
花々は自然の息吹を享受している
そう私は確信する

小鳥たちは跳ねつつ飛び交う
彼らの思いは計り知れぬが
ちょっとしたその仕草にも
生きる喜びが感じられる

つぼみを含んだ枝々が広がり
そよ風を受け止めようとするのを見ると
そこにもまた喜びがあると
そう私は思わずにはいない

 ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now‘

A. E. Housman (1859-1936) didn’t write a great deal of poetry. When he died, he had published just two slim volumes, A Shropshire Lad (published at his own expense in 1896) and the fittingly titled Last Poems (1922). The second poem in Housman’s perennially popular A Shropshire Lad, the poem that begins ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, is one of his most widely anthologised poems. Below is the poem, with some notes towards an analysis of its meaning and language.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

First, a brief summary of ‘Loveliest of trees’ then. The poem sees the speaker reflecting on the fact that, at twenty years of age, he only has fifty of his threescore years and ten (i.e. seventy years, which the Bible states as the average length of a man’s life) remaining. Because time is short, the speaker announces that he will appreciate the cherry blossom while he’s around to do so.

‘Loveliest of Trees’ is, then, something of a carpe diem poem (urging us to ‘seize the day’ and enjoy life while we can) and also, like many of A. E. Housman’s poems, something of a memento mori (i.e. a reminder that we are going to die someday). These two meanings softly provide a backdrop to Housman’s description of the lad walking along the ‘woodland ride’ (a ‘ride’ being a path meant for horses) and admiring the white cherry blossom on the trees.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 98. 

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.

春の間私は君と離れて過ごした
誇らしげな四月は色鮮やかな装いのうちに
萬物に青春の息吹を吹き込み
陰気なサターンでさえ笑いかつ踊ったほどだ

だが鳥たちの歌声を聞いても
色も香もとりどりな花の匂いをかいでも
私はさわやかな話をする気になれなかったし
ほころびた花を摘み取る気になれなかった

白い百合の花を見ても心動かず
深紅のバラを見ても素敵だと思わなかった
それらはただ甘いだけ　その姿は君を真似しているだけだ
君はあらゆるもののお手本なのだから
私にはまだ冬のままに思える　だから君がいないなら
これらを君の影だと思って戯れ遊ぼう

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring

‘Spring’ is not as widely known as some of the other sonnets written by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), which is a shame: it’s a powerful evocation of the beauty of spring. It is that season, Hopkins reminds us, ‘When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush’. Here is ‘Spring’, followed by a brief analysis of it.

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.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

In summary, ‘Spring’ is like a number of other Gerard Manley Hopkins poems in that it’s a Petrarchan sonnet broken up into an octave beginning ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring’ and a sestet beginning ‘What is all this juice and all this joy?’. The sonnet can be seen as a two-parter – which is how Seamus Heaney saw it – with the first eight-line unit describing and celebrating the phenomena of spring and the concluding six-line unit relating these phenomena to God.

The meaning of Rossetti’s bittersweet spring poem

‘Spring’ is not one of Christina Rossetti’s best-known poems, but it is a fine poem about springtime. Rossetti (1830-94) celebrates the new life that the spring brings, as all of the ‘hidden life’ beneath the earth ‘springs’ into action, bursting forth upon the scene. Here is ‘Spring’:

Spring

Frost-locked all the winter,
Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits,
What shall make their sap ascend
That they may put forth shoots?
Tips of tender green,
Leaf, or blade, or sheath;
Telling of the hidden life
That breaks forth underneath,
Life nursed in its grave by Death.

Blows the thaw-wind pleasantly,
Drips the soaking rain,
By fits looks down the waking sun:
Young grass springs on the plain;
Young leaves clothe early hedgerow trees;
Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits,
Swollen with sap put forth their shoots;
Curled-headed ferns sprout in the lane;
Birds sing and pair again.

There is no time like Spring,
When life’s alive in everything,
Before new nestlings sing,
Before cleft swallows speed their journey back
Along the trackless track –
God guides their wing,
He spreads their table that they nothing lack, –
Before the daisy grows a common flower
Before the sun has power
To scorch the world up in his noontide hour.

There is no time like Spring,
Like Spring that passes by;
There is no life like Spring-life born to die, –
Piercing the sod,
Clothing the uncouth clod,
Hatched in the nest,
Fledged on the windy bough,
Strong on the wing:
There is no time like Spring that passes by,
Now newly born, and now
Hastening to die.

This poem describes the way life begins all over again in the spring, and does so through the use of some beautifully vivid images. As with much of Rossetti’s poetry, however, death is never far behind, and there is a melancholy sense of the transient beauty of spring. As soon as the new life of springtime is ‘newly born’, it is already ‘now / Hastening to die’. Rossetti, who elsewhere wrote so well about winter, here imbues spring with a bittersweet sense of its own transience: to borrow from and adapt Percy Shelley, if spring is here, can autumn be far behind? Such is the cycle of nature: ‘Life nursed in its grave by Death.’