Hello friends. Spring is officially here. The calendar tells me so. Today is a cold spring day in Chicago.
Lots of art focuses on the renewal of spring as something to celebrate. And usually in spring my spirits are lifted, but sometimes, I experience a moment of missing winter. Not the frigid temps and winds and snows but the mindset of winter. I feel unprepared, like I need a few more days.
So that’s what inspired me to share “The Enkindled Spring” by D. H. Lawrence. The last lines express a familiar feeling.
If you want to see some exquisite spring-y photographs, which have just come into the public domain, check out Ogawa Kazumasa’s Hand-Coloured Photographs of Flowers (1896), which I read about in The Public Domain Review.
Hope you have spring energy and a bit of winter indolence.
Peace, love, and solace
The Enkindled Spring
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.
D. H. Lawrence, 1885 – 1930
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