Intimations of Spring

As I have probably written around this time every year since starting this blog in 2008, spring is not my favourite season. I love autumn, and rather enjoy a good winter, but the dismal prospect of long, hot, sweaty days to come is not enhanced by the onset of hay fever and these crazy mood swings in the weather. However, I realise this is a minority opinion and I don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment; so, have at it, you sun-starved, fun-starved millions. Although for the sake of common decency, people, please keep your clouts on until May be out [1]. And why not enjoy spring here in the British Isles, this year, rather than flying off to some other, warmer spot on the planet? Let the airlines go out of business, and then perhaps the Mediterranean will stop creeping ever closer, and the sea levels ever higher.

Of course, personal preferences aside, it's impossible not to be awed by this annual resurrection, these ancient repeating patterns of life-forms reasserting themselves after the temporary cease-fire of winter, the endless fresh self-copying of immortally selfish genes. If ever "nature" is ruthlessly, unsentimentally red in tooth and claw, it is now. Inevitably, I suppose, people like to cast a sentimental, sanitising veil over this rawest season with flowers, bunnies, chocolate, and all that. But it's a jungle out there.

I don't think Tennyson's book-length poem In Memoriam (1849) is much read these days, but that is where the expression "red in tooth and claw" comes from (as well as many others, "better to have loved and lost", "never morning wore to evening, but some heart did break", etc.). The premature death of his close friend Arthur Hallam led the young poet to question his conventional Christian faith in a beneficent God, set against Nature's indifference to the extinction not only of the individual but also the species, as revealed by the new understanding of Earth's geological history. A Victorian poet's crisis of religious faith in the face of scientific advance is typical of the intellectual ferment of that fertile century, and Darwin's revolutionary ideas did not appear out of nowhere, any more than did those seedlings now erupting from your lawn.

'So careful of the type?' but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
'Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.'
In Memoriam LVI 

 

We will be heading off soon for our annual Easter visit to the Welsh Borders, where the lambing sheds will be busy, loud, and brightly lit all night, the birds will be frantically scavenging for food for their nestlings, while the raptors and ravens circle the pastures, woods, and hedgerows, scanning for an opportunistic meal for themselves and to stuff down the gaping maws of their own chicks. Darwin's famous "tangled banks" may be picturesque, but are jungles in miniature. Have you ever heard a songbird's melodious piping slowed down to the pitch of a dinosaur's territorial roar? Terrifying...

The Enkindled Spring

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.

D.H. Lawrence

1. As the Old Folk did say, "Button to chin, till May be in; cast not a clout, till May be out". Solid advice, although it's true some of the kids had been sewn into their underwear all winter.