The poem-as-life notices, besides the inevitable themes of public and private life, two other great intertwined subjects — nature (the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, animals, plants) and time, with its seasons and months. Because nature and time are such ancient resources for poetry, perhaps the hardest achievement is to write an original poem about, say, spring. An anonymous thirteenth-century poet began our spring poetry as he heard the cuckoo (the herald of spring) and saw all of nature come to life. At that time, there was only one word, “sumer,” for the new season after winter; the word “spring” was a later invention.
Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude° sing, cuccu! loud
Groweth sed and bloweth med° meadow
And springth the wude nu.
Sing, cuccu!
Awe° bleteth after lomb, ewe
Lhouth° after calve cu,° loweth / cow
Bulluc sterteth,° bucke verteth° — leaps / breaks wind
Murie sing, cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu.
Wel singes thu, cuccu.
Ne swik° thu never nu! stop
The spring songs of the Middle Ages generated a whole series of seasonal poems.
A contemporary poet, Dave Smith, writes his spring poem in an auto junkyard, using a pun on the word “spring” to make new sap rise even in rusty steel:
Every poet should write a Spring poem.
— LOUISE GLÜCK
Yes, but we must be sure of verities
such as proper heat and adequate form.
That’s what poets are for, is my theory.
This then is a Spring poem. A car warms
its rusting hulk in a meadow; weeds slog
up its flanks in martial weather. April
or late March is our month. There is a fog
of spunky mildew and sweaty tufts spill
from the damp rump of a back seat. A spring
thrusts one gleaming tip out, a brilliant tooth
uncoiling from Winter’s tension, a ring
of insects along, working out the Truth.
Each year this car, melting around that spring,
hears nails trench from boards and every squeak sing.
We feel that the rusting car warms into new life partly because it has been used by courting couples who have lent their presence to the phrases Smith uses for the back seat — its “damp rump,” its “spunky mildew and sweaty tufts.” When even a metal spring puts out new shoots, when even nails spring free from the boards they have been hammered into, we know that spring is irresistible.
The seasons have become a constant resource for poets describing stages of human life, so that in reading poems as life we can’t fail to think of Keats’s sonnet on the human seasons, which sets out the great analogy between nature and ourselves:
Four seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man.
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span.
He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring’s honeyed cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming nigh
His nearest unto heaven. Quiet coves
His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness — to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
A poet can choose any one of the “human seasons” and find its counterpart in the natural world.
When poets describe Time, they tend to employ many of the images of passing time that have entered cultural memory — such motifs as the waves of the sea, the progress of the sun from dawn to dusk, the fall of great men, the tragedy of early death, Time the Grim Reaper, and so on. Here, using such time-honored resources, is Shakespeare on Time. In his first model of how we imagine Time, the moments of our life are seen as waves of the sea, all alike; in his second model, the moments of our life are like the dramatic rise and eclipse of a sun, or the rise and fall of a tragic hero; and in his third model, we scarcely have time to live before Death scythes us down.
Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent° toil all forwards do contend. repetitive
Nativity,° once in the main° of light, birth / sea
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish° set on youth, beauty
And delves the parallels° in beauty’s brow, furrows
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
What does Shakespeare set against Time in the final couplet?