My daffodils and hyacinths are blooming. We had a couple of days with temps in the low 70s. It is cooler now, but the sun is shining. I also have maple bloom all over my front porch--not so attractive.

An oldie:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows
Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower, -
Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Not about spring, but, well - you know me -

If She Could Have Her Love For You Only One Day A Year
by Tina Kelley

If life bloomed once a year, if we sat in dim rooms the rest of the days, resting,
she would come here for that noontime, to see children waist high,
their attentions wandering like wall eyes, making noises that sound to a single person
like severe distress or pain, but mean delight. She would hear a father shouting
"Olivia! Wait for Maggie!" whatever good that does. Sun off the lake
makes bright veins on the underside of a Japanese red pine,
lightens the bark like a buttercup held under it. She would see the limp-legged wasp,
the bumblebee with jodhpurs of pollen, straddling the sweet stigma of the purple hosta.
She would see the shadows of the waterbug's feet, circled by sharp light.

If she could have her love for this garden only one day a year
she would take souvenirs. Everyone does  a snapshot, a sketch, a stone, a sentence,
two nuggets of food for the koi, moist, in the pocket of size 6x shorts. The honeybees
hump their rumps over their work, walking on the globe of a cloverhead.
She sees that the waterbugs move so seldom, is each polished slide an annual event?
She would lie down and read and walk away stronger,
with the memory of the comfort of the sun on the soles of her bare feet.
Bullfrog, dragonfly, buttercup, snow lantern, vine maple, honeybee,
cloverhead, waterbug, moonlight: She wants this by moonlight.

I am always amused by the poem that starts
Spring is sprung
De grass is riz
I wonder where dem birdies is?
I don't know who wrote it. We in Western Australia are now having cooler Autumn weather, dropped from the 40C's to mid 20C in a few days and dem birdies are fighting over the last few bottlebrush flowers on the tree outside my window. For small honeyeaters they make a lot of noise. But then so does my small but vocal great-granddaughter!

Well Robert Frost reminds us too -

"Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees."
- Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring

Below a poem by the little-known poet John Clare. Born the son of a poor labourer in rural Northamptonshire in the early 1790's, he suffered much with mental problems and ended his days in a lunatic asylum. I have often wondered how and where he learnt to read and write.

Young Lambs

The spring is coming by a many signs;
The trays are up, the hedges broken down
That fenced the haystack, and the remnant shines
Like some old antique fragment weathered brown.
And where suns peep, in every sheltered place,
The little early buttercups unfold
A glittering star or two - till many trace
The edges of the blackthorn clumps in gold.
And then a little lamb bolts up behind
The hill, and wags his tail to meet the yoe;
And then another, sheltered from the wind,
Lies all his length as dead - and lets me go
Close by, and never stirs, but basking lies,
With legs stretched out as though he could not rise.

John Clare

Here is a spring poem I've always loved. However, according to the poet, I have very few chances left to revel in the beauty of spring. Better make the most of it.

A. E. Housman (1859Â1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now


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.

Well coincidentally here is an article on Clare from
Poet on Poet of the Week on Saturday, 21 March 2009

John Clare

P.J. Kavanagh
John Clare was born at Helpstone, Northamptonshire in 1793, his father a farm-labourer and his
mother the daughter of a local shepherd. He was therefore deep-rooted in a place and in a class
by his parents, and was also affected by their 'trash of Ballad Singing . . . my first feelings
and attempts at poetry were imitations of my father's songs . . .' He worked as a labourer,
continually composing poems and in 1820 a selection of these was published by John Taylor
(Keats's publisher), which had a great and fashionable success.

Fashion changed, Clare continued to write, but further volumes failed. Disappointed, horrified by
the cruel changes (enclosures) of the world he knew and loved, in 1837 he mentally broke down and
was taken into a kindly private asylum in Epping Forest. Four years later he walked home from the
place, eighty miles in three and a half days, subsisting on roadside grass. Later that year, 1841,
he was certified insane and confined, again with much understanding, in the Northampton Asylum,
where he remained, continuing to write, for twenty-three years until his death.

He composed ballads, long narratives in verse, philosophical poems, 'imitations' of other poets,
and in this selection an attempt is made to suggest that variety: his genius lay in his quick
observation of the people and places and creatures (especially birds) he saw around him. Edmund
Blunden remarked on Clare's 'elemental terseness' and likened it to the nature-engravings of
Bewick. Clare knew that accurate description is like turning down a page in a book to mark a
favourite passage (which may be a bad habit but Coleridge used the butter-knife): 'How many pages
of sweet nature's book/Has poetry doubled down as favourite things . . .' and thereby fixed the
transient. His genius was for detail. His milkmaid turns her buckets upside down so that she and
Clare can sit, then she milks her 'breathing' cows - we see their steaming breath. His 'elemental
terseness' can end a poem about a mouse's nest, suddenly, 'The water o'er the pebbles scarce
could run/And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.' After the close-up the long-shot,
placing the mouse (and Clare) in their world and season.

Jan, thanks for the above and glad to see you back at RP.
Btw, have you read P J Kavanagh's memoir The Perfect Stranger? An interesting read 'though possibly difficult to find these days.

Many rainless days here, from 'February Fill Dyke' it has become the driest month of the year, and sunshine, tempered by very cold winds and often in very short supply over the UK, has beamed down on us for several days.
Blackthorn blossom , always the first, is out along with banks of wild primroses and gardenfulls of daffs, not to mention the curse of ground elder and nettles that take over our land each year.
Don't birds make a huge amount of noise when you consider how small they are? Tom-tits and robins belting it out from hedgerows and the first gold and bull finch have arrived ready to eat the apple blossom buds.

I should have mentioned that it is Mothering Sunday in the UK so good wishes to all mothers where ever you are. This year ALL three children remembered the date and that they had a Mother and have sent cards and flowers and Sunday lunch is being cooked for me . . . although husband is doing most of it; youngest son will 'help'. :-)

Sometimes I love Wordsworth to distraction (Tintern Abbey is an incredible poem! So is 'Lucy' and others) and sometimes I see all his faults and wonder why people rate him so much. How could he ever have written, about a Pond:

'I measured it from side to side,
'Three feet long and two feet wide'

I'm very fond of the following:

LINES

Written at a Small Distance from my House,
And Sent by my Little Boy to the
Person to Whom They Are
Addressed.

by

William Wordsworth

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before,
The red-breast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our 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.

My Sister! ('tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.

Edward will come with you, and pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress,
And bring no book, for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living Calendar:
We from to-day, my friend, will date
The opening of the year.

Love, now an 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 fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts may make,
Which they shall long obey;
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above;
We'll frame the measure of our souls,
They shall be tuned to love.

The come, my sister! come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress,
And bring no book; for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

A good friend just sent me this via e-mail, a medieval song sung around May Day, author unknown.

"Sumer is a cumen in,
loude sing cuckoo,
groweth sed and bloweth med,
and springeth wood anew,
sing cuckoo!
All the bladeth after lambeth,
after calve cu.
Bullock starteth,
buck averteth,
Merry sing cuckoo,
cuckoo, cuckoo,
Well sing as the cuckoo.
nae swik that naver nu."