Shakespeare on Spring
Sonnet 98
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him,
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odor and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew.
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.
Dr. Fleming,
Thank you for the poetry. I would give a finger, perhaps two, to write a couple of lasting lines like those. It is so good, I hate to even mention it and break the silence it inspires. It’s the “Real Absence” in the education of our time.
The only memorable moment of a movie called The V.I.P.s was Margaret Rutherford, playing a hard-up duchess, and quoting, “Daffadils / that come before the swallow dares, and take / The winds of March with beauty.”
Mr. Peters, from down south, has commented before on this site of his musings in the spring walking or driving by abandoned farmsteads where hardly anything remains but the hardy Daffadils of early Spring. The last lines of Wordsworth’s poem on the other page, brings all of this again to mind. Some say poets are always stealing each other’s lines and subjects. But Frost’s ‘A Tuft of Flowers’ should remind anyone willing to notice that we humans “work together even when we work alone.” Thank you for your poems, Professor Brownlow
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.