Theme · 72 poems

Spring Poems

The year's at the spring: poems of blossom, return, and beginnings — for Easter tables, first days, and the week the light comes back.

Spring is where English poetry keeps its optimism, and the shortest statement of it is Browning's — "The year's at the spring / And day's at the morn" — four lines from 'Pippa's Song' that have been quoted on more calendars than most poets manage in a lifetime. Wordsworth's 'Lines Written in Early Spring' and 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' give the season its English landscape; Shakespeare's Sonnet 98 gives it its restlessness; Thomas Gray's 'Ode on the Spring' gives it a warning about how briefly it lasts.

The season's sharpest poem is also its most quoted at weddings and funerals alike: Housman's 'Loveliest of Trees', where the cherry blossom becomes arithmetic — a young man counting the springs he has left. That double edge is worth knowing when you pick one. For a card or a first day of term, Browning and the Dickinson spring poems are bright and short. For anything that needs to acknowledge time passing, Housman and Gray are already doing it.