You may not have heard with all of this *gestures at everything* going on, but today is the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere.
Red flowering currants busted out a while ago. Daffodils already went crazy. On an evening walk yesterday I saw an iris proudly shooting up in someone's front yard. Though our species is buckling under the catastrophe of a pandemic, the flowers seem to be doing just fine.
Spring always reminds me of one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, "Spring Pools," which you can find in his Collected Works, available at local bookstores. I know Frost is an obvious choice here, and you probably all hate him, but this was the first poem that popped open poetry's Pandora's box for me. Maybe it will do the same for you, too.
A few thoughts:
• Because people associate Frost with stiff school poetry, it's easy to overlook how weird this poem is. The speaker is talking to trees, asking them to take a moment and reflect before they use their roots to suck up pretty pools of melted snow that have collected in their crotches. It's insane to ask this of trees.
• But the insanity points out a hard lesson, of course. Nature naturally carries on after a hard winter. But humans need to memorialize their struggle somehow, however briefly. In this speaker's case, he needs a moment to reflect on the beauty of little pools, an unexpectedly pretty product of a harsh season. That's the difference between us and trees.
• "Spring Pools" is a perfect lyric poem, in that every language choice reflects the poem's subject in some way. The speaker asks the trees to "think twice," or reflect, before sucking up the pools. And look at how much the language in this poem literally reflects itself! The way the lines, "And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver, / Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone," reflect one another "almost without defect," as the pools reflect the sky "almost without defect" in the previous two lines. And look how the image of "flowery waters and these watery flowers" does the same thing! And look, and look, and look...
