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 betweenWhere the wood fumes up, and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagrationOf green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blazeOf growing, these sparks that puff in wild gyration,Faces of people streaming across my gaze.
And I, what fountain of fire am I amongThis leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossedAbout like a shadow buffeted in the throngOf flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.
- “Enkindled Spring,” by D.H. Lawrence
Which is your favorite season? Do you cherish the arrival of spring as much as this winter-weary Midwesterner does? (With apologies to my friends in the Southern Hemisphere…)
Image: First meet with Cherry blossom this year! by autan via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }
I find I feel a tremendous amount of energy when spring arrives. It feels great, but in fact, my most favourite season is fall. It’s cozy, colourful, and has a strange spirit of renewal all it’s own. I think it goes with that feeling of “going back to school” that never quite leaves us. Fall makes me look forward to cozy blankes, sitting by the fire, walks in the fresh, cool air.
Like Christine, as much as I love spring, I think fall is my favorite season. All in all, I prefer the transitional seasons of spring and fall to the more severe seasons of summer and winter. I guess I’m a temperate kind of girl.
I do not know that I have a favorite season. I love spring and fall, even winter when it doesn’t drag on for years. I think summer is great but is probably my least favorite.
I am looking forward to this spring as I have had enough winter, this year.
While summer is probably my favorite, the changing of the seasons is what I treasure and savor. It’s simply magic. Just when you think you can’t take any more winter, the warmer air comes to melt the snow, the first hints of green appear, and all seems right in the world.
But on the opposite end of the spectrum, the change from fall to winter is equally welcome and magical. The beautiful leaves, the natural world preparing to sleep for the winter, and the beauty of the first snowfall that makes you catch your breath.
Thank you for this, Kristen. As I’ve started to read poetry lately, I appreciate this lovely Monday morning post!
You make a great point, Eva, about the change being as delicious as the seasons themselves. This year winter was so long and so snowy that the sudden arrival of spring two weeks ago felt like a literal breath of fresh air. But perhaps it was the transition from one to the other that was just as important as the new season itself.
Spring is so longed for in this neck of the woods; I love the bulbs blooming and the gray disappearing. But summer is my fave. Long days, swimming, kids around, a carefree air.
I love DH Lawrence!
Fall in New Jersey is my favorite from my childhood. Spring is a very, very close second with the arrival of cherry blossoms :) and azaleas.
I love the poem. I never read DH Lawrence before. I think I will have to check him out.
I’m so envious of my Northern Hemisphere friends who are going into Spring. But I have learnt that if you are going through Winter, keep going… SPRING awaits you on the other side. *smile*
My favorite season is SPRING.
Enjoy!
For me, too, spring is where it’s at. I try to start fresh with the new year, but it’s the warm temperature, the longer days, the green buds and sprouts of spring that make me feel I’ve arrived. I love having four recognizable seasons, though, as each brings its own sense of renewal – even if I tire of some more quickly than others.
I wonder what our friends who live in climates with less distinction between the seasons will make of this post. Like you, as much as I love spring, I do like the contrast that living in a place with separate seasons gives me. (Then again, I’ve never known anything else; I imagine I might be able to get used to living in a place like, say, San Diego.)
I thought I had a favorite (Fall) until I realized that I anticipate the beginning of any season with equal fervor, as with each new season is a new beginning that fuels my energy, creativity and excitement.
Thank you for your comment on my blog – so glad to have found yours through Stacia as well. Being new in the blogsphere, finding creative and passionate bloggers like yourself inspires me to find my own voice. Motherese is now part of my essential read – I love your insight, and as a lover of literature myself, I’m just thrilled to find DH Lawrence here.
Welcome to the Motherese community, JT! I am thrilled to have you here and hope that my readers will click on over to visit you at your wonderful blog. (Checking out your photos and stories from your trip to Malaysia kept me up past my bedtime last night!)
Love the poem and Spring (except for the pollen that irritates my allergies!).
Ahh, yes, springtime allergies. I wondered why I was feeling so sleepy all weekend and then I remembered the Benadryl that I had been taking for my own allergies. I think I need to find a less drowsy solution.
Thanks for the poem to start the day. Right now, spring is no doubt my favorite season, but that will probably change in about three months!
“This conflagration/of green fires…” Dang. That is beautiful.
Fall is, by far, my favorite. But after a hard winter, it’s hard to deny the charms of Spring.
Yeah, I know, Lawrence is pretty ridiculous. I rediscovered that poem in a book this weekend and then thought about what I could write in reaction to it. But the images were so perfect, I figured I would just leave it to stand on its own.
Lazy days of summer. Perfect. Need I say more.
In the past 48 hours, we’ve had 70 degrees with sun, pouring rain, hail, and this morning, snow. That is definitely a “tossing about of spirit” – but not quite what Lawrence had in mind, I believe.
I’m ready for any season that wants to stick to the same weather for a 3-day period.
Gorgeous poem.
And, of course, the day I posted that ode to spring, our temperatures plummeted 20 degrees and we had rain all day. Sigh. No snow, but I too am feeling less springy.
Such a pretty photo! I want to smell them. :)
I love autumn and spring. The colors are always so beautiful. Not huge on winter and summer.
Kristen,
I love poetry, what a great reading for an amazing sunny day. I love spring and summer the most. I like emerging from my cocoon rather than entering into my cocoon in the fall and winter. Walt Whitman is my favorite writer and poet. I give you this poem and hope you enjoy it:
Miracles
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves–the
ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
Joely, thank you for introducing me to that poem. I am only slowly becoming acquainted with more poetry and clearly must address my attention to Whitman – and soon!
If I had to pick a favorite (and only if I HAD to) my favorite season would be fall. But I truly love all the beautiful things each season has to offer. And I live in a part of the country where (to my temperment, anyway) just as I’m getting tired of the cold, it starts warming up or just as I’m am thinking I’m going to melt fall starts to cool things off for me.
Kristen, I have always loved Fall. Being a teacher, I guess the newness of the school year beginning still keeps me entralled after so many years in the trenches. There is a slight crispness to the air, the colors are just beautiful…so much beauty all around…
Having lived in South Florida my (nearly) entire life, I had never witnessed the change of seasons. Hubby’s Mother’s Day present last year was to go see U2 in Boston in September. It was the most amazing thing to see what I had been imagining all these years the change of season to be.
Of all the trips I have been on, I think that this one was the most special for many reasons. A new city full of history, alone to with my favorite guy, my FAVORITE BAND of all time, all during just a spectacular weekend of glorious weather. It was all I had dreamed of, and then some.
I lived just outside of Boston for five years and I miss it terribly. I’m so glad you and your husband were able to spend such a special weekend in such a special city – and seeing U2 of all things! Awesome!
I have been reveling in the slight signs of spring in New England for the past couple of weeks. That first red blush on the tips of the trees. The crocus that push their way up. The little green shoots of future daffodils. It makes me feel so good to shake winter off!
Another ode to New England. Are you guys conspiring to make me cry from missing my homeland? :)
It seems that Fall is the winner in this bracket!! (Yes. I am FINALLY learning about basketball. Only because my husband is sacrificing our time to the basketball gods. It better be worth it in the end.)
I love spring. LOVE it. If I could pick when to have my children, I would have them all around February, March, and April because the sunshine does something to a new mother’s soul. A good way to ward off that PPD.
But, I love Fall as well. The colors are gorgeous.
I guess it’s a toss up between Spring and Fall for me.
I’m torn between winter and summer (see, I lean toward black and white… No shades of gray!). As you know I ADORE skiing, the crisp winter air and the beauty of new snow (although could do without the messy roads and SICKNESS). On the other hand, there is nothing better than the outdoor, fun filled summer days. The joy in my kids eyes as they dip their toes into the pool for the first time. The excitement in their eyes as the waves crash into their knees. The lazy evenings with cocktails on the deck. The smores roasted on the outdoor fire. Ah… Summer… Maybe that’s the winner!
But really, each season has its own glory, especially here in NE!
I loved the Lawrence poem… it made me think of the story of Moses and the burning bush as an epiphany perhaps rather than a miracle. Joely’s addition of Whitman resonated as well, that exuberant embrace of the everything always inspires.
As for my fave season, I’m with Whitman… yet living in LA makes seasons a subtle observance. I do love the fall, the leaves and colors… at least back east. But I love the languid feelings of summer, especially a summer thunderstorm. And while spring has much to recommend it, I’m with T.S. Eliot in agreeing that somehow April is the cruelest month.
All that fire imagery has me fired up for spring, so to speak. (We “celebrated” the equinox with temps in the 30s and a thunderstorm.) But fall is my favorite season … also a season of fire, with the brilliant colors of the leaves and mums, the pumpkins and squash from the harvest; the Indian Summer sunsets. I look forward to it all (hot, sticky, miserable) summer long.
All of these comments are making me feel like I should do some sort of emotional inventory at the beginning of each season: do I prefer the transition from winter to spring or summer to fall more?
Well, we don’t have a full four seasons in Arizona, or whatever we have is abbreviated, but right now it’s definitely our spring. Ideal weather in the days, crisp nights, hiking and biking, but bittersweet because soon it will be 115 degrees!
I am a fall lover. Spring is very close second, though.
D.H. Lawrence is a master. For sure.
Hi Kristen – I know I’m late to the party here, but Eva Evolving left a comment on my blog on Monday (where I posted a spring poem as well) encouraging me to run over here and partake of your poem. It’s a delight! I do cherish spring and its message of renewal and rebirth. I love all the seasons, but have a special place for spring in my heart.
Thanks so much for visiting, Patty! And thanks to Eva for sending Patty to Motherese!
And I don’t mind at all that you were “late to the party,” Patty, because your comment gave me the perfect excuse to come back to read some Lawrence this morning – and I really needed it now that our first spring snow is on the ground, blanketing the shoots that had just broken through.
Sigh.