Petals and Poetry

Photo by Ruxandra Mateiu on Unsplash

Spring is finally here! Although the calendar date for spring marks it as starting in March, personally, I never feel like it’s spring until at least April, when it’s finally warm enough for all the winter snow to fade away and for the birds to come back home. Many of my favorite poems reference spring or center around it, so in order to celebrate this delightfully warm change in seasons, I listed some of them below with a short summary. I hope they’re meaningful and fun to read, and happy spring!

“Sonnet 98,” William Shakespeare

Shakespeare often uses nature imagery in his sonnets, as in the famous line from “Sonnet 18,” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” In “Sonnet 98,” Shakespeare uses the imagery of spring, such as “proud-pied April” and “lays of birds” to illustrate how much he misses the person to whom he’s dedicated “Sonnet 98.” Spring is beautiful all around him, but he doesn’t enjoy it as much as he might because the person mentioned at the beginning of the poem isn’t with him. Instead of enjoying spring, Shakespeare says that the world feels more like winter.

“To Violets,” Robert Herrick

“To Violets” is dedicated to violet flowers. I recommend “To Violets” for anyone who’s uncomfortable with poetry or long poems; it’s a short poem that celebrates the simple beauty of flowers in spring.

“To Blossoms” and “To Daffodils,” Robert Herrick

Herrick makes the list again! I grouped these two poems separately from “To Violets” because they’re a bit longer and more complicated. Both poems mourn how fast flowers are to bloom and fade, but “To Daffodils” deliberates on the similarities between the lifespans of flowers and people (“We have short time to say, as you,”). “To Blossoms” focuses more on how the tree blossoms are short-lived, but turn into leaves in summer. Although the flowers fade, so do the leaves—“Like you awhile, they glide/Into the grave.” I think “To Daffodils” is the sadder of the two, as it ends with regret about how short life is; “To Blossoms” has some of the same regret, but I think it ends with hope; the flowers and leaves have died, but you know at the end of the poem they’ll be back again.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” William Wordsworth

Speaking of daffodils…Wordsworth loves them just as much as Herrick does. The narrator of Wordsworth’s poem wanders alone one day and comes across a field of daffodils; in his moment of loneliness, they lift his spirits. Whenever the narrator needs cheering up, he thinks back on that day, and the daffodils “Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

“Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Pied Beauty” isn’t about spring in the sense that the rest of these poems are—it doesn’t mention spring specifically, or, as far as I can tell, any spring-specific flowers. But it does have a wonderful amount of wordplay and nature imagery, and it’s tons of fun to read aloud! “Pied Beauty” mentions several things in nature that are “pied,” or spotted. Cows, fish, birds, and farmland all make an appearance, and the narrator celebrates the unique beauty of these things while praising God for creating them.

Plenty of poems use nature imagery, and these are just a few of them. Whether you try one or all, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about some of my favorite poems!

~K