C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Spring

By Henry Timrod (1828–1867)

SPRING, with that nameless pathos in the air

Which dwells with all things fair,

Spring, with her golden suns and silver rain,

Is with us once again.

Out in the lonely woods the jasmine burns

Its fragrant lamps, and turns

Into a royal court with green festoons

The banks of dark lagoons.

In the deep heart of every forest tree

The blood is all aglee,

And there’s a look about the leafless bowers

As if they dreamed of flowers.

Yet still on every side we trace the hand

Of Winter in the land,

Save where the maple reddens on the lawn,

Flushed by the season’s dawn.

Or where, like those strange semblances we find

That age to childhood bind,

The elm puts on, as if in Nature’s scorn,

The brown of Autumn corn.

As yet the turf is dark, although you know

That not a span below,

A thousand germs are groping through the gloom,

And soon will burst their tomb.

Already, here and there, on frailest stems

Appear some azure gems,

Small as might deck, upon a gala day,

The forehead of a fay.

In gardens you may note amid the dearth

The crocus breaking earth;

And near the snowdrop’s tender white and green,

The violet in its screen.

But many gleams and shadows need must pass

Along the budding grass,

And weeks go by, before the enamored South

Shall kiss the rose’s mouth.

Still there’s a sense of blossoms yet unborn

In the sweet airs of morn;

One almost looks to see the very street

Grow purple at his feet.

At times a fragrant breeze comes floating by,

And brings, you know not why,

A feeling as when eager crowds await

Before a palace gate

Some wondrous pageant; and you scarce would start,

If from a beech’s heart,

A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say,

“Behold me! I am May!”

Ah! who would couple thoughts of war and crime

With such a blessed time!

Who in the west wind’s aromatic breath

Could hear the call of Death!

Yet not more surely shall the Spring awake

The voice of wood and brake,

Than she shall rouse, for all her tranquil charms,

A million men to arms.

There shall be deeper hues upon her plains

Than all her sunlit rains,

And every gladdening influence around,

Can summon from the ground.

Oh! standing on this desecrated mold,

Methinks that I behold,

Lifting her bloody daisies up to God,

Spring kneeling on the sod,

And calling, with the voice of all her rills,

Upon the ancient hills

To fall and crush the tyrants and the slaves

Who turn her meads to graves.

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