Spring Departure Boards

Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales has a famous beginning; it states the season:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour

[When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created]

It hits all the tropes of spring: growth, fecundity, moisture. It explains that this is the season of pilgrimage:

So priketh hem Nature in hir corages
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes

[So Nature incites them in their hearts
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages
And palmers to seek foreign shores
To distant shrines, known in various lands]

The link is causal. ‘Whan’ spring ‘thanne’ pilgrimage. The rhyme works to reinforce this. Chaucer also makes it almost biological. Nature itself pricks the courage of pilgrims.

This is because in spring movement becomes easier. We seek cover less and are more confident in the outdoors. In the case of the Francigena, the passage through the Alps is usually frozen until late May. Spring makes things possible.

My last post was about atemporality and the benefits of resisting linearity. The seasons seem like a good place from which to do this: they remind us of circularity, of rotation and oscillation.

Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’ considers this sort of movement in Spring:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

It’s actually a fairly sad poem. The birth of spring is framed as some kind of illusion. There’s almost a weariness to the growth.  The language is hesitant and unwilling. It’s as if he’s describing an elderly magician pulling a rabbit out of a beaten up top hat.

His poem ‘First Sight’ provides an interesting counterpoint.

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

Lambs are the archetypal image of Spring but Larkin submerges them in snow. It is a poem about the cold but it’s more importantly a poem about the perceived magic of the seasons.

It is typical of Larkin that to find joy you are better off looking at Winter than Spring. Possibility always tends to be better than actualisation. There is a boundless positivity to the prospect of recapitulation in ‘First Sight’. The image of the ignorant, innocent lambs is such a simple but powerful imaginative device. Trying to imagine ourselves out of seasonal understanding is probably just as impossible as the lambs trying to imagine themselves into it. Nonetheless, it encourages in the reader a deep and profound sense of wonder.

Elizabeth Bishop addresses this sense of wonder more cautiously poet. She is a poet who cuts open emotion and experience with  masterfully understated language. Her poem ‘A Cold Spring’ describes a Spring that is incremental to the point of hesitancy.

There is a line about a third of the way through: ‘The next day was much warmer.’ For me, it perfectly describes the experience of a Spring in which every week a new best surprises us. Improvement happens slowly and sometimes nervously but is sure to arrive. It is like watching one of those time-lapse videos of flowers blooming but in slow motion. It is like watching flowers bloom.

I write this the night before I walk my first stretch of the Via Francigena. The April weather has so far been mixed. When back in Newcastle it was terrible around Easter and then became glorious. I am spending the night in Canterbury and it is wet again. April’s showers are proving disappointingly accurate.

And yet, I am hopeful, even though my Weather App insists tomorrow will be worse. I do not hope for tomorrow but I do hope for Spring.

My favourite lines of Larkin’s ‘The Trees’ are ‘Their yearly trick of looking new/ Is written down in rings of grain’. I remember first learning that you could tell the age of a tree by counting its rings. It was my grandfather who showed me. He was a botanist although I don’t think its a hugely specialist skill.

For Larkin the rings seem to be a sort of gotcha; the Wizard behind the curtain.

But what’s the biology of the rings? Wikipedia informs me ‘The inner part of a growth ring is formed early in the growing season, when growth is fast and is known as early wood. The outer portion is the late wood, and is denser than early wood.’

So the rings aren’t really fixed lines at all. They aren’t candles on a cake acquired each solstice. They require Spring and Autumn. A constant Spring would result in no growth rings.

I don’t expect this contradicts what Larkin wrote but it might allow us a more cheerful perspective. One synthesised with the lambs of ‘First Sight’.

Although we can never share the wonder of those lambs, we might still fully participate in the joy of Spring. Not with the expectation of eternal growth but with the awareness of circularity. That the seasons are a wheel and what is at one point up will soon be down and what was the end is now the beginning.

It is a wheel that moves creakingly slowly, however. Despite the speed at which our planet hurtles through space, the seaons seem eternally unflustered by any attempt at a rush. Dictated by an apparently arbitrary 23.4 degree tilt on the earth’s axis, Spring teases us with this inscription of possibility.