Juice and Joy

We have a late spring in Maine, so daffodils and tulips are blooming now. Gardeners (like me) are longing to plant as the soil warms.

Here is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), an English poet and Jesuit priest who wrote

poetry not like anyone else’s. His “sprung rhythm” is very unusual for a Victorian poet. Hopkins uses language in creative ways, too.

SPRING

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.

Blooming Spring, Finally

This lovely short piece is by English poet A.E. Housman (1859-1936), who wrote just two slim (and beloved) volumes of verse: A Shropshire Lad, published at his own expense in 1896, and Last Poems, 1922. This poem is from A Shropshire Lad.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.