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.
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.



The Enkindled Spring
by D.H. Lawrence

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

I remember reading somewhere that a serious poet must write a spring poem every year if he really wants to be taken seriously.

Think about writing one and posting it in this thread.

Feel free to post your favorite ones by other poets, as well.  Maggie

Maggie

This is an emerald, Maggie!
Maybe move it to Discussions? Interesting how many of the "rules" of poetry writing he flaunts.
Tom

I will move it at the end of the day, Tom.

I like how he's out there and then brings it into focus; the metered cheeks of my gemini muse's IP-self
are flaming, to borrow his metaphor.

And I will steal his 'bonfires green" but use it as bonfire greens some day.

later, dude.

I put this in Submit.
Hi, GM!
Hi, DH!
 -Tom http://www.poetrycircle.com/index.php/topic,21702.msg158461.html


Can't Someone Cut that Dead Branch Down?

New green is budding out
but this one limb of dry brown leaves
that never dropped
is still a limb of dry brown leaves
that never dropped.

Who holds onto dead stuff like that
unless they believe it's the last crop
they're going to get?

The newly deceased
never take off their clothes
and never let any acquaintance go
but make them rattle in the breeze
for absolutely no reason.

What I really love about the poem below is the memory it evokes in me.  My mother memorized this in parochial school at quite a young age and always remembered it.  Instead if singing lullabys to me - she would repeat the poem, softly and the night would close over me.  She is 81 now and can still recite her party piece on demand.

The Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth
   
   

I remember this one fondly from High School - was one of my favorites. M

in Just-

by: e.e. cummings (1894-1962)

IN Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman
 
whistles far and wee
 
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
 
when the world is puddle-wonderful
 
the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
 
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
 
it's
spring
and
the
 
goat-footed
 
baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee


"in just" was originally published in The Dial Volume LXVIII, Number 5 (May 1920). New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.

oh yes spring! a doodle i did last week


green tongues poke up
at the air where

earth flicks a switch
lifebulbs ping and

BOOM like guns
with little flags

ode to spring


it’s kite season
when everything rises
for a better view of the new sun
the season of crepes and berries
morning coffee, alfresco
mint juleps with happy-cakes

annual orgies
and tax refunds

Tiko, that "tax refunds" ends up sounding sooo sexy!

julips=juleps?

For some reason, on reread, think of check kiting. LOL.
Great last S. Tom

Yes, to daffodils! I remember the poem.

I just read it out loud, el vee. What a thing!  Tom's opening stanza has that same energy:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.



New green is budding out
but this one limb of dry brown leaves
that never dropped
is still a limb of dry brown leaves
that never dropped.


Let's talk about spring poems until it's time to write one for fall...;)

marvelous what he does each time with the baloonman

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5917

AA terrific read, guys and gals.

that same energy is here.

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
 
when the world is puddle-wonderful

Yes!--up to a point! Gog, I think I'll pass on that lunch with Charles Bernstein though!

April

Carnies spit and drive their stakes for the wires of a tent,
like bulbs of billowy fluff to shake the fevers of December.
Their t-shirts, splattered with tobacco drool, are smudged
with the dirt the spades lay near. Fourteen worms
squirm every which way to flee the cardinals and jays;
and from where the eddies gurgle, close to the rush
of overflowing banks, I can hear basketballs
in the street stop whenever the motorcycles roar,
throttled up to piss off Mr. Mahler.
Already, I’m dreading the rabbits.

spring

is

sprung

Frost, Olson, and so many of the critical reviews of our peers, address the points made in this first paragraph in one way or another.. That darned ear....

"...attend to language with their ears, to compose according to the measure of their breathing (spiritus),..."


"Poetry, like any art, must renew itself continually. Charles Olson’s manifesto "Projective/Verse", published in 1950, describes poetry’s need to recover the energy of its sources from the exhausted (in his view) formal practice of Eliot and the New Critics. Projective verse, a.k.a. "composition by field" and "objectism," sees the poem not as words in lines upon a page, but as a field of energy-charged objects representing the poem’s psychic content in a state of immediacy, before laziness and habit have conspired to turn it into mere verse. Olson exhorts poets to attend to language with their ears, to compose according to the measure of their breathing (spiritus), to work with the "elements and minims of language...to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical," and so to fix the pulse of energy before it reaches the stasis of conventional form."

"Poets writing now have a choice between these (and other!) models as they try not only to follow John Ashbery’s cryptic admonition to "Make it sweet again!" but to answer the vexing question, what is "sweet?"


Isn't it our own we're looking to sweeten? And doesn't the journey mjake us better readers?

Your epic dabbles, which is too light a word, in meter and rhyme, and I think what you hear frees your abilities on many levels to be outrageously creative with imagery and flow, Tom.

"...attend to language with their ears, to compose according to the measure of their breathing (spiritus),..." This could be me talking!LOL


Off to read of spring...

Their t-shirts, splattered with tobacco drool, are smudged

tobacco splattered t-shirt drool is smudged
with dirt the spades have raised:  tense, larry?

You can have some language fun with this, lar.

April

Carnies spit and drive their stakes for the wires of a tent,
like bulbs of billowy fluff to shake the fevers of December.
Their t-shirts, splattered with tobacco drool, are smudged
with the dirt the spades lay near. Fourteen worms
squirm every which way to flee the cardinals and jays;
and from where the eddies gurgle, close to the rush
of overflowing banks, I can hear basketballs
in the street stop whenever the motorcycles roar,
throttled up to piss off Mr. Mahler.
Already, I’m dreading the rabbits.

Absolutely mag, It is awfully early for this one.

On another note, love the essays you linked. Bernstein is worth the read, though a bit of wading is required. In "content's Dream" he has a wonderful quote from Stanley Cavell: "The camera is outside its subject as I am outside my language." For me the debate has to do with the degree which we want our language to be transparent.

what a wonderful quote, larry.

there are just not enough hours in the day...

Definitely, we tend easily to think of meter and rhyme as things that corral us or limit, but their potential lies in their subversiveness.

here's a bit of reading...an interesting journey for the great last line, not so much in what he says, but how he's saying it.

Nocturne Of Remembered Spring by Conrad Aiken

I.

Moonlight silvers the tops of trees,
Moonlight whitens the lilac shadowed wall
And through the evening fall,
Clearly, as if through enchanted seas,
Footsteps passing, an infinite distance away,
In another world and another day.
Moonlight turns the purple lilacs blue,
Moonlight leaves the fountain hoar and old,
And the boughs of elms grow green and cold,
Our footsteps echo on gleaming stones,
The leaves are stirred to a jargon of muted tones.
This is the night we have kept, you say:
This is the moonlit night that will never die.
Through the grey streets our memories retain
Let us go back again.

II.

Mist goes up from the river to dim the stars,
The river is black and cold; so let us dance
To flare of horns, and clang of cymbals and drums;
And strew the glimmering floor with roses,
And remember, while the rich music yawns and closes,
With a luxury of pain, how silence comes.
Yes, we loved each other, long ago;
We moved like wind to a music's ebb and flow.
At a phrase from violins you closed your eyes,
And smiled, and let me lead you how young we were!
Your hair, upon that music, seemed to stir.
Let us return there, let us return, you and I;
Through changeless streets our memories retain
Let us go back again.

III.

Mist goes up from the rain steeped earth, and clings
Ghostly with lamplight among drenched maple trees.
We walk in silence and see how the lamplight flings
Fans of shadow upon it the music's mournful pleas
Die out behind us, the door is closed at last,
A net of silver silence is softly cast
Over our thought slowly we walk,
Quietly with delicious pause, we talk,
Of foolish trivial things; of life and death,
Time, and forgetfulness, and dust and truth;
Lilacs and youth.
You laugh, I hear the after taken breath,
You darken your eyes and turn away your head
At something I have said
Some intuition that flew too deep,
And struck a plageant chord.
Tonight, tonight you will remember it as you fall asleep,
Your dream will suddenly blossom with sharp delight,
Goodnight! You say.
The leaves of the lilac dip and sway;
The purple spikes of bloom
Nod their sweetness upon us, lift again,
Your white face turns, I am cought with pain
And silence descends, and dripping of dew from eaves,
And jeweled points of leaves.

IV.

I walk in a pleasure of sorrow along the street
And try to remember you; slow drops patter;
Water upon the lilacs has made them sweet;
I brush them with my sleeve, the cool drops scatter;
And suddenly I laugh and stand and listen
As if another had laughed a gust
Rustles the leaves, the wet spikes glisten;
And it seems as though it were you who had shaken the bough,
And spilled the fragrance I pursue your face again,
It grows more vague and lovely, it eludes me now.
I remember that you are gone, and drown in pain.
Something there was I said to you I recall,
Something just as the music seemed to fall
That made you laugh, and burns me still with pleasure.
What were those words the words like dripping fire?
I remember them now, and in sweet leisure
Rehearse the scene, more exquisite than before,
And you more beautiful, and I more wise.
Lilacs and spring, and night, and your clear eyes,
And you, in white, by the darkness of a door:
These things, like voices weaving to richest music,
Flow and fall in the cool night of my mind,
I pursue your ghost among green leaves that are ghostly,
I pursue you, but cannot find.
And suddenly, with a pang that is sweetest of all,
I become aware that I cannot remember you;
The ghost I knew
Has silently plunged in shadows, shadows that stream and fall.

V.

Let us go in and dance once more
On the dream's glimmering floor,
Beneath the balcony festooned with roses.
Let us go in and dance once more.
The door behind us closes
Against an evening purple with stars and mist.
Let us go in and keep our tryst
With music and white roses, and spin around
In swirls of sound.
Do you forsee me, married and grown old?
And you, who smile about you at this room,
Is it foretold
That you must step from tumult into gloom,
Forget me, love another?
No, you are Cleopatra, fiercely young,
Laughing upon the topmost stair of night;
Roses upon the desert must be flung;
Above us, light by light,
Weaves the delirious darkness, petal fall,
And music breaks in waves on the pillared wall;
And you are Cleopatra, and do not care.
And so, in memory, you will always be
Young and foolish, a thing of dream and mist;
And so, perhaps when all is disillusioned,
And eternal spring returns once more,
Bringing a ghost of lovelier springs remembered,
You will remember me.

VI.

Yet when we meet we seem in silence to say,
Pretending serene forgetfulness of our youth,
"Do you remember but then why should you remember!
Do you remember a certain day,
Or evening rather, spring evening long ago,
We talked of death, and love, and time, and truth,
And said such wise things, things that amused us so
How foolish we were, who thought ourselves so wise!"
And then we laugh, with shadows in our eyes.

oh dear...
marvelous.

Another fun one:




Spring is like a perhaps hand     
 

 
          III

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.


- E. E. Cummings

 

ah...what sweet blasts from the past.

(snippet of a spring poem creeping around in my head)


the secret is lost when
spring rains the ground

a canopy of green but
the secret is a lonely

thing prefers the brown
of limbs

the tan of empty
beaches

the brown of limbs 

'chelle, you had me with this snippet until this inversion.

Here's some William:


Spring






Song, from Act V, Scene 2 of Love’s Labors Lost by William Shakespeare (1598)




 When daisies pied, and violets blue,
   And lady-smocks all silver-white,
 And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
   Do paint the meadows with delight,
 The cuckoo then, on every tree,
 Mocks married men, for thus sings he:
       “Cuckoo!
 Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O word of fear,
 Unpleasing to a married ear.

 When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
   And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,
 When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
   And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
 The cuckoo then, on every tree,
 Mocks married men, for thus sings he:
       “Cuckoo!
 Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O word of fear,
 Unpleasing to a married ear.

Hmm... Thanks for the thought Maggie - maybe I should drop the brown and go straight to tan 

Love the William- M

Just read it again, and the muse was seeing the threat of empty beaches for some strange reason.

Glad you liked the W. His stuff is music to my ears.Not so much the what sometimes, but the way for sure.

i like that maggie, might use it - seems like it might be a bit of a longer piece - M

This morning, I'm sure  it's spring.
Something sings warm
like it owns me.
Yeah, the temperature might fall,
but that's cold
just taking spring's dog for a walk.
I'm always gonna be spring's dog.

Why not start here, Tom; this is a great opening line. Oh, hell, it's a great ending line, as well.

Something sings warm like it owns me.


What say all who visit here, use this as an opening line and see where it takes our pens. You game?

Fun.  I'm game Maggie (you first lol )

we need Tom to play, 'chelle; it's his ball...lol

Sure!

Do you mean we each add a line or do we all compose our own poem?

Well, I composed my own:

Of garden dirt

Something sings warm like it owns me,
notes float on the wavering, winter wind.
Turn to follow, turn again, and again
and I'm back to spring.

Each moment grows greener!
Lingers on fingertips, smells
like wild onions just-pulled from black earth.
Giddy-sick, and welcome is the smell.

Crumbly warmth, bare-nail raked,
rain-nourished, thunder-pumped;
the sedulous garden climaxes,
sends clouds of pollen windward.

Boundaries are fuzzied, the sun whispers
in my ear: You've been out-under ME too long.

Title works so wonderfully with the poem, Lavonne. That "giddy-sick" perfect for smell of uprooted wild onions. Tom

Idyll

Something sings warm like it owns me
and I want to object
but don't want it to stop.
                                    Listening's all
I've ever cared about. I could disappear
entirely,
            borne off comfortably in a sack
like so many others sung to and owned
who don't come back.

                                Deborah, spring
has nothing to do with it.

Thanks Tom! And yours is one of the best love poems I've ever read. Not tender but oh so honest!

How delightful. Thank you, Lavonne. Tom
p.s. still thinking about italics at "all", any advice there anyone?

Idyll

Something sings warm like it owns me
and I want to object
but don't want it to stop.
                                    Listening's all
I've ever cared about. I could disappear
entirely,
            borne off comfortably in a sack
like so many others sung to and owned
who don't come back.

                                Deborah, spring
has nothing to do with it.

Nice poems - does that mean I get to use your line to write one too Tom?  :) 

Maybe tonight......after I get all my homework, bills and emails done LOL

M

It's only my line in my poem, outside of which, it informed me in 1968, it has quite a rich and varied life. Tom

( this went to an odd place - decided to run with it, see what happens-M)




X

Something sings warm, like it owns me –
the loosened ground holds as skies burst

then fade.  I watch the years laid bare,
the day grow with fresh pine and old songs.   

I have to quit watching the news.

To Touch: close as a man in the next room on the other side of the world

Something sings. Warm. Like it owns me.
And it needs no recognition, no written
thread of mind-voice that signs in wonder-
lust so critics have something to burm
with their false prayers and failed dreams
and expiring cups of medicated coffee.

Mirrors have no reserves to feed their lies
and bloated faith; their faces have been
turned to the wall by the commonwealth,
their voices made invisiible by the indivisible.

Power and greed will try to bury the crowd,
but something sings. In ever steady tones.
 
It's warm. An idea that can't be touched,
It owns me, still. It owned my father's luck,
and my father' father's father's.

It's an old voice that sings for future lives
and immediate deaths.

Something sings. And the devil in the desert's
going down because of it.

Oh, I like that, M.

What about saying:

watch day grow with fresh scents and old songs.  

 

Nice, el vee.

A couple of thoughts:

Something sings warm like it owns me—
notes afloat on a wavering, winter wind.

—a smell
of wild onions just pulled from the earth

love this thread, thanks for starting it, here's my 2 sense worth :)

sprung delicious full
up seedlings through
harsh barren stone
crushing winter gloom

spring hinges
hope with survival
cold naked truth
lusting for warmth

Just lovely. Tom

Very beautiful, Maggie. "burm"="burn" or "berm"? Tom

Made some edits to mine and trying it out with the general population.

Glad you joined us, marg.

I like your second effort there. Strong and clear.

spring
sags
into
summer

then
falls

couldn't resist it.

spring
sags
into
summer

then
falls
prey
to the cold

The Red Emperors Emigrate

A couple stuck around
for one more spring
to let me know
the others had all
packed up and gone
looking for a place more
tuned to their biology.

It's nothing personal—
south possibly, or west.
Neither my soil nor
my light's the best
for their requirements
though they have
given it a good shot.

So this is going to be it:
five, six this final year
after a decade of twenty
or thirty, more, then less.
But the alternative
for them is extinction
and no one wants that.

No, I give my blessing,
appreciate the heads-up,
hope they all reach
ground to prosper in,
which they deserve.
Pulling up roots like this
takes nerve.

No thanks, it's flattering
you ask, but no, I'll
stick it out, I still
have all the others here
for one thing—though
for how much longer
I don't know.

It's hard to not get
sentimental, to
remind myself that
their arrival here,
a free gift with
the poet's daffodils,
was fully accidental.

the daffodil poeticus
is so unusual looking
and highly perfumed
among narcissus

if it multiplied
and seized hold
of the entire lawn
a crowd would form
on the april sidewalk

and swear they
were in heaven

but it doesn't
there's one lone stalk
way over there
and the same clump
of five over here

that comes up
year after year
to suggest that beauty
lies not within a trumpet
but an ear

Love this ending. is this yours?

there's one lone stalk
way over there
and the same clump
of five over here

that comes up
year after year
to suggest that beauty
lies not within a trumpet
but an ear

yes. from my scraggly garden. happy you enjoyed, Maggie. Tom

A almost read them both as one.

I don't blame you. I have a comfortable rut when it comes to garden writing.

high spring today
the cold all gone
as in an oven
newly lit

the garden plants
really notice it
and shoot up
almost visibly

in a sudden rush
for airspace
and rootspace
and to embrace

the possibilities
that this might be
the year they throw
their chains off

You see me with the chain-saw
and burst out in snowy flowers,
trying to invoke the old taboos
against beheading limbs in bloom,
the throttling of pregnant women
or simmering lambs in ewe's milk.

It's very nearly good enough.
To go ahead and cut is going to hurt,
and then to toss your fragrant sprays
onto the stinking compost heap
and bring just one of them inside
to prop up like a goddess in a vase.

But we both know that blossoming is
just a front for breaching sewer lines.

How about:

the year they off
their chains

It's a nice piece, Tom.

Am totally in love with the next one!


It almost gets away from you in the 2s but you pull it back beautifully.

The rhyme in the couplet is fantastic!!

Nice Nice Nice.

Give this a name and put it out there!!!

Glad you enjoyed, spring-poem lover! I'll come back and finish these soon. Tom

The last two lines of this piece are terrific.

Lament of the Middle Man
by Jay Parini

In late October in the park
the autumn's faults begin to show:
the houses suddenly go stark
beyond a thinning poplar row;
the edges of the leaves go brown
on every chestnut tree in town.

The honking birds go south again
where I have gone in better times;
the hardy ones, perhaps, remain
to nestle in the snowy pines.
I think of one bold, raucaus bird
whose wintry song I've often heard.

I live among so many things
that flash and fade, that come and go.
One never knows what season brings
relief and which will merely show
how difficult it is to span
a life, given the Fall of Man.

The old ones dawdle on a bench,
and young ones drool into their bibs;
an idle boffer, quite a mensch,
moves fast among the crowd with fibs.
A painted lady hangs upon
his word as if his sword was drawn.

Among so many falling fast
I sometimes wonder why I care;
the first, as ever, shall be last;
the last are always hard to bear.
I never know if I should stay
to see what ails the livelong day.

I never quite know how to ask
why some men wear bright, silver wings
while others, equal to the task,
must play the role of underlings.
"It's what you know, not who," they swore.
I should have known what to ignore.

I started early, did my bit
for freedom and the right to pray.
I leaned a little on my wit,
and learned the sort of thing to say,
yet here I am, unsatisfied
and certain all my elders lied.

A middle man in middle way
between the darkness and the dark,
the seasons have tremendous sway:
I change like chestnuts in the park.
Come winter, I'll be branches, bones;
come spring, a wetness over stones.

agreed, thanks Maggie, Tom