A guest post by David Riley
What’s the best poetry about spring? I’ll tell you, it’s
my job to pontificate. It’s when humans are, at most, at the edge of things.
Take Seamus Heaney’s Rite of Spring, for example. Spring is there and does
better than people can, who can only imitate its liberating effects.
Even more, people can be removed from things, as Ted
Hughes does in The River in March. His river is an elemental force, it might even
be a deity in itself. In Heaney and Hughes there are things the river and
Spring can be and do - they don’t stand for something, they are something.
Wordsworth knew it too - his daffodils are beauty on a
hillside, whether there are people there to see it or not.
Jane Hirschfield is excellent at showing how nature is
really something other. We may dress it up and give it names, develop amnesia
every year when the same seasons come around and trot out our same banalities
but it is that something of itself, beyond us, that she shows.
Edward Thomas in his many meditations on nature
sometimes links human activity and the seasons. At other times, he urges us to
take a step back or rather to another position altogether, where we might see
nature as other creatures do. Read his Thaw. See what you think.
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| Rooks are back again by Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov |