Three poems to get you ready for spring

Invigorating spring poems to enjoy from the beautiful seasonal anthology A Nature Poem for Every Spring Evening.

The arrival of spring sees the natural world beginning to awaken. As the season progresses and the days get noticeable longer, we’ll soon have lighter evenings that we all can enjoy. Spring is a season much loved by poets for all the promise it holds. This season of new beginnings is celebrated in A Nature Poem for Every Spring Evening, edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, featuring 91 poems from March through to May. Here are three poets’ takes on this season of change, to stir your excitement for this fleeting but delightful time of year.

An April Day

Breezes strongly rushing, when the North-West

stirs,

Prophesying Summer to the shaken firs;

Blowing brows of forest, where soft airs are free,

Crowned with heavenly glimpses of the shining

sea;

Buds and breaking blossoms, that sunny April

yields;

Ferns and fairy grasses, the children of the fields;

In the fragrant hedges’ hollow brambled gloom

Pure primroses paling into perfect bloom;

Round the elms rough stature, climbing dark and

high,

Ivy-fringes trembling against a golden sky;

Woods and windy ridges darkening in the glow;

The rosy sunset bathing all the vale below;

Violet banks forsaken in the fading light;

Starry sadness filling the quiet eyes of night;

Dew on all things drooping for the summer rains;

Dewy daisies folding in the lonely lanes.

Laurence Binyon (1869–1943)

Very Early Spring

The fields are snowbound no longer;

There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green.

The snow has been caught up into the sky –

So many white clouds – and the blue of the sky is cold.

Now the sun walks in the forest,

He touches the bows and stems with his golden fingers;

They shiver, and wake from slumber.

Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls.

Yet is the forest full of the sound of tears …

A wind dances over the fields.

Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter, Yet the little blue lakes tremble

And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver.

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)

The Enkindled Spring

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,

Wild puffing of green-fire trees, and flame-filled

bushes,

Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between

Where the wood fumes up and the flickering, watery

rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration

Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze

Of growing, these smoke-puffs that puff in wild

gyration,

Faces of people blowing across my gaze!

And I, what sort of fire am I among

This conflagration of spring? the gap in it all – !

Not even palish smoke like the rest of the throng.

Less than the wind that runs to the flamy call!

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)

A Nature Poem for Every Spring Evening is available to buy from good booksellers and online.

Illustrations by Jessamy Hawke

A Nature Poem for Every Spring Evening 

Jane McMorland Hunter | £14.99