ON SPRING AND POETRY

By EDMUND BLUNDEN

PERCHED in the upheaved roots of the fallen elm, I got my share of the mid-day sun, and missed some of the still spiteful wind ; and if at moments the sun was inattentive, there were some excellent expressions of confidence in the return of spring. The skylark, whose performances I had associated rather with the end of March than the beginning, was up and singing now and then over the ploughman and his horses on the ridge. The nettles were beginning to invade the trodden ground beneath my elm's wood- pecker-timber. The arum's varnished leaf was thrusting into the promised shade of the hedge, where the robin was announcing himself to whom it might concern in a series of brilliant improvisations, every one different. That evening, as the gusty shower made the gullies and spouts voluble, a sign came my way which seemed more vivid and revealing than all those. As the 'bus came down the streaming road, its lights showed me here and there a toad making the best of his way across, with an energy which we do not usually expect of that underestimated race.

" Spring comes again, and brings each little pledge " ; and though we are not yet out of the gloomy wood which has preoccupied us for so many years, it may not be disorderly to urge that we should seize this opportunity. There was a time when the poets in particular had earned, or at any rate had been given, a reputation for seizing it with bespectacled rapture. No caricaturist was complete without his " property " of the bard coyly yet brightly responsive to the bird on the bough. Latterly the austere communal under- takings of poets have removed them far from this rural niche. It is quite safe by now for some of them to L. go forth " (as the late Laureate said) " and share this overflowing mirth " of a season of which we in these islands need by no means be ashamed. The ground- flame of the crocus might unblamed, even applauded, breakthe mould of. political and sociological didactics.

Probably, if one had to answer immediately the question, which season has been 'best for and in English poetry, autumn would be the choice. This impression May be due mostly to the circumstance that Keats wrote no Ode to Spring, but left us the Ode to Autumn in its lonely excellence of poetic persuasiveness. Or you may count up the other remarkably true and beautiful reveries which gather round Keats's master example— such pieces as Tennyson's " Cairn is the morn," his 'brother Frederick's " Harvest Home," Clare's address 'to the " siren " of the fading landscape. Hood alone has sent through a hundred autumns two poems which each fall of the leaf and hue of decay have justified. Autumn, it may be, is the better artist, the selective and intuitive one ; or English temperament may be -more at home with an experienced reserve. And yet, on second thoughts, spring has not done too badly by our poets, or they by spring. To begin with, there was that contribution by Mr. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. Could sallow autumn have given us that ? Chaucer may not go into details of the melody and blossom by the way, but the very Pilgrims are like birds in their eager rejuvenation. Palm Sunday in Kent gave me a tune like theirs long before I had yet turned from the lane of the goat-willows to discover : " When that April with his showres soots. The drought of March bath perced to the root. . . ."

In those days there was living not far from Canterbury a poet who has deserved better of our remembrance than he has had. Alfred Austin will never resume his former importance, nor does the first edition of his Diamond Jubilee poem to his Sovereign keep collectors awake at night. But his name comes sweetly to me now, in the promise of the year, and next time I visit my fallen elm I think I shall have In Veronica's Garden in my pocket. There is a poem in it which may answer something in the air :

" Spring came out of the woodland chase -With her violet eyes and her primrose face, With an iris scarf fOr her sole apparel, - And a voice as blithe as a blackbird's carol.

As she flitted by garth and slipped through glade, Her light limbs winnowed the wind, and made The gold of the polloned palm to float . . On her budding bosom and dimpled throat . . Then the windflower looked throughthe crumbling mould, And the celandine opened its eyes of gold, And the primrose sallied from chestnut shade, And carried the common and stormed the glade.

In sheltered orchard and windy heath The dauntless daffodils slipped their sheath, And, glittering close in clump and cluster, Dared norland tempests to blow and bluster . . . "

This is the way in which spring commonly writes her poetry through our pens, in happy haste and vivacious picturework ; yet she has her mystics too, and the challenge is not only to the outward sense. Of the poets of this season, one • of the most enduring is Henry Vaughan, who nevertheless giVes us very little of the flowers, the birds, the multitude of anima- tions that the observant may catalogue. The primrose is chief (as it is lonely) in his page ; yet all his book breathes " The Revival " :

" Unfold 1 unfold ! Take in His Light, Who makes thy cares more short than night. The joyes which with His daystar rise He deals to all but drowsie eyes ; And (what the mon of this world miss) Some drops and dews of future bliss.

Hark how His winds have changed their note, And with warm whispers call thee out !

The frosts are past, the storms are gone,

And backward life at last comes on.

The lofty groves in express joyes Reply unto the turtle's voice ; And here in dust and dirt, 0 here The lilies of His love appear."

We may find in this old writer a simple and seer-like confidence which prevails beyond even the glorious vernal fantasy of Shelley, whose presence for us is so commingled with Le clouds and seas and stars and star-flowers of the season, yet seems even in the most golden light to be dogged by a bitter shadow. We may be excused for finding our philosophy in the childlike last words of John Clare after a quarter of a century in the asylum, when coaxed into penning a closing rhyme : " . . . The wind blows bleak o'er the sedgy fen, But warm the sun shines by the little wood Where the old cow at her leisure chews her cud."

But spring needs no protracted prose discussion. Leo, a gentler constellation, now succeeds to the warlike steel of Orion ; and, though spring is whimsical and malicious as a squirrel at moments, our cue is obvious. The new poets especially should not shut themselves away over volumes of statistics about armaments or sexual ethics, but take what the gods provide. If they will, they can ; for their spirit is such as may well find a harmony with the physical wonder, the vehemence, the abrupt candour, the slum-clearance, the impartiality, the caprice and the adventure of the hour.