The Enkindled Spring

Image by jhenning at Pixabay

I love this poem for the way its verbs capture the dynamism of Spring. It bursts, puffs, lifts, fumes, flickers, lights, grows, leaps, and combusts. Can you see it, too, these acrobatics of the season?

Just look around you—into your backyard, along the path you walk each day, into the canopy overhead. Though not always readily apparent, awakening motions are everywhere.

May we, like Lawrence, allow them to toss us about, losing ourselves in the industrious joy and hope of new life.

The Enkindled Spring

by D. H. Lawrence (1885—1930)

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze. 

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

First published in Lawrence’s collection, Amores: Poems(London: Duckworth, 1916).