Issue #24

Spring and Fall to an Old Child

Leaving and Unleaving

If you fly east across 82 degrees of longitude, spend a long weekend, then head north 4 latitudinal degrees for a short stay, and finally north again 3 additional degrees, you can turn back the clock, seasonally speaking—not that you’d want to. Not that I wanted to, anyway.

Such was my schedule that after several years of having no experience of a real spring, I got to observe it in each of its stages, from late to early. The earth seemed to grow younger and younger—while I myself was subject to the usual laws of time, growing older and more and more disgruntled.

I left Kauai at the end of April, which is nominally springtime. Seasonal changes are more subtle there than elsewhere and are measured more in differences in rainfall than in temperature. Even in winter and spring leaves can grow the size of toddlers. Spring adds a few more flowers to our flower-filled island, most noticeably plumeria, but the humid, warm air keeps wardrobe choices the same year-round. Unless you are bound and determined to dress in communion with the rest of the country, it's a sock-free, flannel-free, parka-free life.

From Kauai I went to Maryland, which shares Hawaii’s humid climate and in deep summer its lush greenery; but a Maryland spring is a true spring, the most glorious in the nation as far as I’m concerned. Though I had missed the cherry blossoms, daffodils, and most of the flowering trees, the rhododendrons and azaleas were in full bloom, and the world was as green as it would be all year. It was warm, warmer than Hawaii, but my clothes were by necessity less casual, more structured.

By early May I was in southeast Michigan. Spring comes to southeast Michigan at least six weeks later than it does to Maryland. It dithers and diddles, stepping aside for bursts of winter, tiptoeing back and forth around the entry, and finally, finally breezing in like a weekend guest only to leave before you can pull your windbreaker from the back of the closet.

When I arrived downstate the trees had just started to green, and only the most delicate flowers had blossomed—lily of the valleys, snowdrops, bloodroot. The sun was bright but distant, the air cool and clear. Out came long pants and sweaters and socks. Even in layers I shivered.

(As I write this, I realize that weather reports from other people’s travels can be a bore, and complaints about having to leave Hawaii are off-putting. Please extend me some patience, I’m moving past this shortly.)

Then my husband and I drove to northern Michigan (northern lower Michigan, that is, the Upper Peninsula is a whole different story). The further north we drove, the less green the trees, until all we saw were barren limbs, many of them damaged from a recent ice storm, lining the highway like an honor guard at a funeral. (Oh yes, I am getting dramatic, you can sense my growing dread of northern chill.) Dishearteningly, May mornings up north required fleece and thick socks. By afternoon the temperature would jump 20 degrees and in the evening would sink back down. The shoreline was brown. I glared at the leafless trees as if they had purposefully delayed blooming to suck my soul dry.

In less sour moments I noticed the traditional beauties of spring, the smattering of bird song, the air washed clean, the knobby buds on trees. It was “Just- spring,” as poet e.e. cummings would say; but at the very least I wanted spring-spring, heavy-duty spring, lilac-cuttings-in-the-house spring, a spring that would make me sing to the heavens like Gerard Manley Hopkins in his beautiful ode to the season—

What is all this juice and all this joy?

Instead I was asking why my skin was so flaky and why it was so freaking cold in the middle of May.

*

When I was a little girl my older sister Annie used to come up behind me and recite another of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems: “Spring and Fall to a Young Child.” Her dramatic rendition delighted me both because it was a novel form of attention and because the poem began with my name:

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

That poem has been with me all my life. Either it’s predicted or it’s influenced my attitude towards seasonal change, but the result is the same: I, Margaret, have never liked an unleaving. And although as a child I didn’t understand the final lines of the poem, they understood me all too well:

It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Margaret mourning Margaret explains my disgruntlement these past few weeks: to experience spring in reverse is to experience autumn—the de-leafing and de-greening of the natural world—is to experience my own mortality.

*

A few days after settling in, the air grew warmer and stayed warm into the long evenings. Suddenly I noticed flies buzzing through the house, in one opened door and out the other, passing through as it were. Ants traipsed up the drains that had been dry all winter long, stirred to life by new moisture. Hosta spears unfolded, and hydrangea bushes, which days ago had been mere sticks dangling with last season’s dried blooms, now sported buds. Overnight the shoreline seemed to have greened.

Everything softening. My attitude too. By what quick sleight-of-hand did this miracle occur? Poet May Sarton captures the surprise of sudden spring in “Metamorphosis”

Always it happens when we are not there--
The tree leaps up alive into the air,
Small open parasols of Chinese green
Wave on each twig. But who has ever seen
The latch sprung, the bud as it burst?
Spring always manages to get there first.

*

Yesterday I drove through lacy woods on an unpaved road. On both sides of the track white trillium grew in clumps in the underbrush. I had forgotten how magical and rare a trillium sighting is. I teared up, suddenly caught in the past.

In early spring my aunt would invite me and my youngest daughter, my only child not yet in school, to walk through the woods near her condominium and afterwards have hot chocolate and hot tea in her sunny kitchen. “The trillium’s out,” she’d tell us. Anne Marie and I would wander, enchanted, along a stream and over footbridges, the path sometimes clear and sometimes not, everywhere surrounded by precious trillium brightening the leafmeal. Anne Marie had been warned not to pick the flower: once picked it would never come back. The warning was part of the magic, as if we were in a fairy tale. We could only look at the trillium; we could not have it. In two weeks the white blooms would all disappear, and if undisturbed they would return the next year and the year after that. Each spring we saw them, the same trillium plants with new fresh blooms, until Anne Marie started school full-time and was perhaps too old to hold hands with her mother in the woods on a spring morning.

Where have they gone, that young mother, that little daughter?

Where have you gone, sweet aunt?

*

The Rites of Spring

Nijinsky famously caused a riot in the theater when he debuted his ballet “The Rites of Spring.” Will Forte’s dance may cause a different riot, a giggling one, at least it does for me.

Even though “Locker Room Motivation” concerns a college basketball team down 34 points and ready to quit, it just as well could be a dance to spring. Forte is bursting with all that juice and all that joy—he dances the way we danced as girls, with freedom and glee and yearning, holding nothing back. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched it, and it still makes me laugh.

I love the song too—”Casino Royale” by Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass.

*

Readers Write Delights

From Pam Sheen of Minnesota:

The neighborhood chalkboard/“soapbox” where passersby vote on silly polls & answer fill-in-the-blank questions! The St Paul MN neighbor who mounted these funky frames with revolving participation & chalk has had them in place for years. Dunno who really plays along but it’s like life; you just gotta put it out there.

*

Readers Do Not Write Delights

It’s time to face the music. This feature did not take off. It barely sputtered. “Readers Write Delights” is henceforth retired. Not much of a career, sad to say. If anyone is still interested, send your delights to thepoemelf@gmail.com, but I’m not holding my breath.

*

The Whole Thang

For you poetry lovers, here are the poems from “Leaving and Unleaving” in their entirety:

[in Just-]
by e.e. cummings

in Just-
spring          when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far          and             wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles
far
and
wee

*

Spring
by Gerard Manley Hopkins


Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.     
    

*

Spring and Fall 
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child


Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

*

Metamorphosis
by May Sarton

Always it happens when we are not there--
The tree leaps up alive into the air,
Small open parasols of Chinese green
Wave on each twig. But who has ever seen
The latch sprung, the bud as it burst?
Spring always manages to get there first.

Lovers of wind, who will have been aware
Of a faint stirring in the empty air,
Look up one day through a dissolving screen
To find no star, but this multiplied green,
Shadow on shadow, singing sweet and clear.
Listen, lovers of wind, the leaves are here!

*

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