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Thursday – First Day of Spring
I celebrate our official entry into spring with Thomas Gray’s lovely “Ode on the Spring,” which is striking for its sensuous imagery. Novelist and essayist Iris Murdoch, who has observed that literature “is concerned with visual and auditory sensations and bodily sensations,” asserts that “if nothing sensuous is present, no art is present.” Gray’s poem is chockfull of visual and auditory sensations.
In the ode the poet is seated under an oak tree with his poetic muse—which means that he’s being poetically reflective—and concluding that he’s in exactly the right place. Far from “the ardor of the crowd” (or “the madding crowd,” as he calls it in his famous “Elegy on a Country Churchyard”), he sees how small the great are and how poor the wealthy. To borrow from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” he scorns to change his state with kings.
As peaceful as he is feeling, however, Gray is a depressive, which means he can’t stay content for long. After a few moments of basking in the shade and listening to a nearby stream (he compares himself to a reposing cow), he begins reflecting upon mortality. Gray, after all, is a poet who looks at an Eton rugby match and focuses on the rainstorm that is about to interrupt it. (“Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play,” he laments in one of the darkest passages in literature.) In this case, he thinks about how short-lived will be the busy insect life that is creeping and flying about him.
At first, everything is lovely. “The insect youth are on the wing,” he exclaims, “Eager to taste the honied spring.” The very next thought, however, is how evanescent this all is. The various bugs may “flutter thro’ life’s little day,” he writes, but soon everything will come to an end: they will leave their “airy dance…in dust to rest.” Needless to say, he applies the observation to humans as well.
What he has missed, however, is how this gay and colorful assembly is living fully in the moment. “We frolic, while tis May,” the bugs inform him, a carpe diem reminder to focus on the present rather than the future. The contrast with his own life reminds him that he himself has little of color or sweetness. He is a “solitary fly” who lacks a “glitt’ring female.” “Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone,” he glumly concludes about himself.
So much for the peace that he has found earlier in the poem.
The images of the poem, however, offset his gloomy self-assessment. How can one possibly be somber when spring is busting out all over, releasing insects to “float amid the liquid noon,” skim lightly “o’er the current,” or show off “their gaily-gilded trim/ Quick-glancing to the sun.” While Mary Oliver, in her own close observation of insect life (a grasshopper), also reflects upon mortality (“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”), she lets the amazement of the moment overwhelm any darker thoughts. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do,” she writes in lines that have become a maxim for living, “with your one wild and precious life?”
So go seek out Gray’s tree or Oliver’s field of grass, throw yourself down, and lose yourself in the moment. You can worry about death at some other time.
Ode on the Spring
By Thomas Gray
Lo! where the rosy-bosom’d Hours,
Fair Venus’ train appear,
Disclose the long-expecting flowers,
And wake the purple year!
The Attic warbler pours her throat,
Responsive to the cuckoo’s note,
The untaught harmony of spring:
While whisp’ring pleasure as they fly,
Cool zephyrs thro’ the clear blue sky
Their gather’d fragrance fling.
Where’er the oak’s thick branches stretch
A broader, browner shade;
Where’er the rude and moss-grown beech
O’er-canopies the glade,
Beside some water’s rushy brink
With me the Muse shall sit, and think
(At ease reclin’d in rustic state)
How vain the ardour of the crowd,
How low, how little are the proud,
How indigent the great!
Still is the toiling hand of Care:
The panting herds repose:
Yet hark, how thro’ the peopled air
The busy murmur glows!
The insect youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the honied spring,
And float amid the liquid noon:
Some lightly o’er the current skim,
Some show their gaily-gilded trim
Quick-glancing to the sun.
To Contemplation’s sober eye
Such is the race of man:
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.
Alike the busy and the gay
But flutter thro’ life’s little day,
In fortune’s varying colours drest:
Brush’d by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chill’d by age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest.
Methinks I hear in accents low
The sportive kind reply:
Poor moralist! and what art thou?
A solitary fly!
Thy joys no glitt’ring female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,
No painted plumage to display:
On hasty wings thy youth is flown;
Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone—
We frolic, while ’tis May.
