Celebrate the first day of spring with a favorite poem

“A little madness in the Spring,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Is wholesome even for the King.” Decades later, in “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost echoed the sentiment, “Spring is the mischief in me.” What better mischief to kick off the change in seasons than to share a favorite poem about spring?

“May-Day,” a thirty-five page paean to spring, opens Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second collection of poems. His close observations of nature lead to intimations of an underlying, transcendent, transformative power, as this excerpt demonstrates:

For thou, O Spring! canst renovate
All that high God did first create.
Be still his arm and architect,
Rebuild the ruin, mend defect; . . .
Not less renew the heart and brain,
Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,
Make the aged eye sun-clear,
To parting soul bring grandeur near. . .
In city or in solitude,
Step by step, lifts bad to good,
Without halting, without rest,
Lifting Better up to Best;
Planting seeds of knowledge pure,
Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure.

Writing around the same time, Emily Dickinson’s experience of spring is more ethereal and foreboding, as these first four lines of her twenty-line meditation show:

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period—
When March is scarcely here

In the 1891–1892 edition of Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman delights in something as simple as discovering “The First Dandelion”:

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden,
     calm as the dawn,
The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

For Robert Frost, a sense of the fleeting nature of discoveries like Whitman’s prompts “A Prayer in Spring,” which begins:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

The Poetry Foundation features links to a number of other splendid poems about spring. Won’t you share your favorite?

Related LOA works: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems & Translations; Walt Whitman: Poems and Prose; American Religious Poems (includes “A Prayer in Spring”)

Remembering John F. Kennedy on the 50th anniversary of his inauguration

Fifty years ago today John F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as the 35th President of the United States. His speech (video below), which at fourteen minutes is relatively short for an inaugural address, has become one of the most famous Presidential speeches in American history, including its unforgettable line, “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

For the inaugural ceremony, Kennedy asked Poet Laureate Robert Frost to recite either a new poem or “The Gift Outright,” a poem published in 1942 that Frost later called “a history of the United States in a dozen [actually, sixteen] lines of blank verse.” Frost did compose a new poem for the inauguration, but he was unable to read from his manuscript due to both the wind and the reflection of the sun hitting the snow-covered ground. Thinking quickly, he instead recited from memory “The Gift Outright” (“The land was ours before we were the land’s. . .”). The Library of Congress has scanned and posted on their website the typescript of the poem he had intended to read, “Dedication.”

In honor of the 50th anniversary, the Kennedy Library recently began digitizing various documents from Kennedy’s life. From the trove, Maureen O’Connor has extracted JFK’s college application and has posted it on Gawker’s website. Harvard’s application in those days was all of three pages long, and Kennedy’s “essay,” date April 23, 1935, was a mere five handwritten sentences. (O’Connor comments, “Somewhere, a guidance counselor just burst into a maniacal fit of laughter.”) The future president wrote:

The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a ‘Harvard man’ is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.

This week also marked the passing of one of Kennedy’s closest colleagues, Sargent Shriver. The first director of the Peace Corps, Shriver was instrumental in encouraging Kennedy to telephone Coretta Scott King in 1960 when her husband was jailed in Georgia, an essential (and controversial) move during the Civil Rights era. Shriver remained close to Jackie Kennedy after JFK’s assassination, helping her to plan Kennedy’s state funeral.

Related LOA volume: The paperback edition of American Speeches: Political Oratory from Patrick Henry to Barack Obama, which was published today, contains four speeches delivered by Kennedy, including his inaugural address.

Joel Barlow, Joaquin Miller, Walt Whitman, Trumbull Stickney, Hart Crane, Robert Frost: poets appraise Columbus

Many poets have evoked Columbus over the years. In 1787 one of the “Hartford Wits,” thirty-four-year-old Joel Barlow, published his long epic poem The Vision of Columbus by subscription; his readers included George Washington and Thomas Paine. Twenty years later he revised it extensively and republished it as The Columbiad. In this excerpt Columbus first sees the New Land:

High moved the scene, Columbus gazed sublime,
And thus in prospect hail'd the happy clime:
Blest be the race my guardian guide shall lead
Where these wide vales their various bounties spread.
What treasured stores the hills must here combine!

In 1892 Joaquin Miller composed “Columbus” for the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. For decades this poem, memorized by millions of schoolchildren, rivaled the Gettysburg Address in popularity. “Sail on” memorably closes each stanza, leading to the climax:

Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck,
    And peered through darkness. Ah, that night
Of all dark nights! And then a speck—
    A light! A light! A light! A light!
It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!
    It grew to be Time’s burst of dawn.
He gained a world; he gave that world
    Its grandest lesson: “On! sail on!”

The same anniversary year moved Walt Whitman to write “Prayer of Columbus.” Here Columbus is not one of the heroic voyagers of Whitman’s 1870 “Passage to India” but “A BATTER’D, wreck’d old man” composing a last desperate prayer that isn’t answered until the last stanza:

And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal’d my eyes,
Shadowy, vast shapes, smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.

Ten years later Trumbull Stickney would adopt a much more critical stance in a fifteen-line broadside:

You say, Columbus with his argosies
Who rash and greedy took the screaming main
And vanished out before the hurricane
Into the sunset after merchandise,
Then under western palms with simple eyes
Trafficked and robbed and triumphed home again:
You say this is the glory of the brain
And human life no other use than this?
I then do answering say to you: The line
Of wizards and of saviours, keeping trust
In that which made them pensive and divine,
Passes before us like a cloud of dust.
What were they? Actors, ill and mad with wine,
And all their language babble and disgust.

In the late 1920s Hart Crane found in Columbus’s journals the solution to how he would begin his epic 1930 poem, The Bridge. Columbus’s descriptions resonated with Crane’s own experiences of the Caribbean and in the “Ave Maria” section of The Bridge Columbus appears as one mystically redeemed by his first experience of the new continent:

I thought of Genoa; and this truth, now proved,
That made me exile in her streets, stood me
More absolute than eve—biding the moon
Till dawn should clear that dim frontier, first seen
—The Chan’s great continent . . . Then faith, not fear
Nigh surged me witless . . . Heaving the surf near—
I, wonder-breathing, kept the watch,—saw
The first palm chevron the first lighted hill.

In “America Is Hard to See” (1951), Robert Frost contrasts how as a youth he viewed Columbus when he would have “had Columbus sung / As a god who had given us / A more than Moses’ exodus.” Now older and more sardonic, he realizes:

But all he did was spread the room
Of our enacting out the doom
Of being in each other’s way,
And so put off the weary day
When we should have to put our mind
On how to crowd but still be kind.

Listen to N. Scott Momaday read “You say, Columbus with his argosies” in Segment Five of The Republic of Verse.

Related LOA works: Four Centuries of American Poetry (5 volumes); Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose; Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters; Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays