T.S. Eliot may have coined “April is the cruelest month”, but I guess I’m looking for something a bit more in keeping of the season of renewal and rebirth. So, what are your favorite peoms about spring? I like Emily Dickinson’s “A Light Exists in Spring”, but I’d love to hear others.
I get a kick out of Ogden Nash’s “The Passionate Pagan and the Dispassionate Public.” A snippet:
Spring is what winter
Always goes inter.
Science finds reasons
For mutable seasons.
Can’t you control
That faun in your soul?
Please go and focus
Your whims on a crocus.
You can read it in its glorious entirety here (scroll about halfway down the page).
Being a classicist, I’ll go with Shakespeare:
WHEN daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!–O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!–O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
Speaking of cuckoos, this is more of a song but I’ve seen it in poetry collections:
1=has come in
2=the meadow blooms
3=don’t stop
(1) 14th Century:
The grand-daddy of all English-language vernal poetry, The Prologue to “The Canterbury Tales” is wonderfully evocative of spring:
*Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
(That slepen al the nyght with open eye)
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.*
[When fair April with his showers sweet,
Has pierced the drought of March to the root’s feet
And bathed each vein in liquid of such power,
Its strength creates the newly springing flower;
When the West Wind too, with his sweet breath,
Has breathed new life - in every copse and heath -
Into each tender shoot, and the young sun
From Aries moves to Taurus on his run,
And those small birds begin their melody,
(The ones who 'sleep` all night with open eye,)
Then nature stirs them up to such a pitch
That folk all long to go on pilgrimage]
(2) 20th Century:
E.E. Cummings coined the sublime descriptions “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful”:
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious
<snip>
*and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
<snip>*
SDMB thread
Asks for seasonal poem
Haiku writer stumped.
*In early spring-tide, when the icy drip
Melts from the mountains hoar, and Zephyr’s breath
Unbinds the crumbling clod, even then 'tis time;
Press deep your plough behind the groaning ox,
And teach the furrow-burnished share to shine. *
Book 1 of the Georgics by Virgil
Spring has sprung
The grass has ris
I wonder where
The birdies is?
Spring is sprung
The grass is riz
The bird is on the wing.
Isn’t that absurd?
I thought the wing was on the bird.
I either recite those or email them to my kids every year, along with the frog poem. They think I’m weird.
More Shakespeare:
" It was a Lover and his Lass" from As You Like It:
*IT was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.
*[etc.]
It’s often set to the music of his contemporary Thomas Morley, as can be heard at the link on this page .
In spite of cold and chills
That usher in the early spring,
We have daffodils
Author unknown. Translation of a haiku, I presume, but I learned it in 2nd grade.
From the movie Groundhog Day, as quoted by “Nice Phil”:
“Winter, slumbering in the open air, wears on his smiling face a dream of spring.” (Samuel Coleridge) (I admit, I had to look it up to find the origin!)
And just for fun, a quote about the approach of Spring from “Nasty Phil” as he stands outside the Groundhog’s hole:
“This is pitiful. A thousand people freezing their butts off, waiting to worship a rat. What a hype! Well, it used to mean something in this town: they used to pull the hog out, and they used to eat it. You’re hypocrites, all of you! … You want a prediction about the weather? You’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be gray, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.”
Not Spring specifically, but this verse about April has always resonated with me:
Robert Frost, *Two Tramps in Mud Time *
So true!
Thanks, these were great! Keep them coming… 
“There Will Come Soft Rains”, Sara Teasdale
*There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.*
Well, it’s kind of about rebirth…
Tom Jobin’s The Waters of March
Vere novo, gelidus canis cum montibus umor
liquitur et Zephyro putris se glaeba resolvit,
depresso incipiat iam tum mihi taurus aratro
ingemere et sulco attritus splendescere vomer.
A beautiful poem.
Spring is here, spring is here,
Life is skittles, and life is beer,
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the Spring. I do. Don’t you? 'Course you do…
Henry Reed’s “Naming of Parts” It starts:
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
[/quote]
Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds,
You and your arithmetic will probably go far.
Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are.
. . .
Two and two are four
Four and four are eight
Eight and eight are sixteen
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two . . .