A Cold Spring

A brief look at Elizabeth Bishop's remarkable poem about spring.

Adirondack painted trillium, photo by the author

A Cold Spring

For a Friend in Maryland
“Nothing is so beautiful as spring” —Gerard Manley Hopkins

By Elizabeth Bishop

A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practiced leaping over your fences.
The infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer,
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the south.
In his cap the lilacs whitened,
then one day they fell like snow.

Now, in the evening,
a new moon comes.
The hills grow softer. Tufts of long grass show
where each cow-flop lies.
The bull-frogs are sounding,
slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs.
Beneath the light, against your white front door,
the smallest moths, like Chinese fans,
flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt
over pale yellow, orange, or gray.
Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies
begin to rise:
up, then down, then up again:
lit on the ascending flight,
drifting simultaneously to the same height,
–exactly like the bubbles in champagne.
–Later on they rise much higher.
And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer
these particular glowing tributes
every evening now throughout the summer.

I thought I’d share this Elizabeth Bishop poem with you on a cool spring day with more cold to come now before the cardinal cracks its whip and summer awakens—as a follow up to my last post. I love the tenderness and care of Bishop’s voice, how patiently she urges her ideas from her world to ours, how deeply perceptive she is, how her metaphors come from such a genuine place; they never feel overtly “poetic” or forced and are always so unexpected. “The violet was flawed on the lawn” is such a characteristic Bishop line, her voice—all at once gentle and urgent—coming through loud and strong. The word “flawed” here feels like a new word entire as it speaks to the splash of color coming even as winter continues to hold on. In this monochrome world, color is the flaw! “The trees hesitated” captures the expectancy of spring we all feel, the just-about-almost-not-quite-but-soon-now warmth we know is on its way. “The little leaves waited/carefully indicating their characteristics” somehow fully expresses the look of newly formed leaves, all their veins and shape there but in miniature. “Finally a grave green dust/settled over your big and aimless hills”—the view of spring coming from a distance here, the perfect way to express that day when the buds have emerged altogether on the forest trees. And later she zooms in to the “cigarette butts,” the red-red centers of white dogwood blossoms, that word “apparently” so removed and matter of fact, bemused almost. We also have the disturbance of the “wretched flag” of a cow’s after birth, another sudden color, spring the time of rebirth (in all its messiness) of animals too, and the “unplaceable” other colors, “almost motion” (not even color really, something more than/different than color) that come with the first days of summer—none of these your typically “poetic" ways of admiring the beauty of spring. And yet, the poem by avoiding cliché, by reaching for new ways to gather and paint a picture makes for a more dynamic, more poignant-still expression. 

Every image here is so rich and accurate, the “wound up” sparrows, the landscape seen as “stretching miles of green limbs from the south,” the lilacs that shed their blossoms “like snow”—the perfect simile given that snow and falling whiteness are still so present in our recent memories. And can anyone describe a bullfrog croak better than “slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs” or a small summer moth as “…the smallest moths, like Chinese fans,/flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt/over pale yellow, orange, or gray”? 

I’ll stop with my commentary and just encourage you to give the poem another slow read, as I will, imagining those first fireflies who will soon be offering a “tribute” to summer.   

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Purchase Elizabeth Bishop’s poems using my Bookshop.org affiliate link. I’m sure to look at many more of her poems in the future.

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