Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love,
To which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends he will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.
This 1915 poem, unusual among Frost’s poems for its light, lilting, simple joy in the natural world, leads me not only to his other New England poems—“After Apple Picking,” “Birches”—but also to a poet who is among his worthiest successors—Wendell Berry. To begin reflection on one poet by admiring another is, I suppose, a way of acknowledging that poetry is an ongoing conversation whose threads are tucked and woven into a design that no one poet knows or needs to know. As I return to Frost’s “Prayer in Spring,” I can’t help hearing Wendell Berry’s lovely lines, written over half a century later, as a kind of echo of the older poem:
And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
One of the functions of prayer is to bring us into the present. Whatever the prayer posture we assume—bowed head and closed eyes, hands lifted or open in our laps—the small discipline of quieting body and mind is how we commonly “come into the presence” of God, who is always present, and into the present moment. It may be that the concerns we bring into prayer include past hurts and anxieties that tug our dark imaginations toward a dark future, but to pray is to locate ourselves in “this day,” where the daily bread we need is all we need to pray for.
The petition that opens Frost’s “Prayer in Spring” appears to be a modest one: “pleasure in the flowers today” seems little enough to ask, especially on a spring morning in New England when that pleasure would seem inevitable. But to make the petition is to recognize that our capacity for such pleasure isn’t to be taken for granted. If we are among the many modern folk whom T. S. Eliot recognized as “distracted from distraction by distraction,” pausing to notice the peonies in the garden or the alyssum by the sidewalk’s edge or the wild roses clinging to a neighbor’s fence might require a release from compulsion that we can’t achieve entirely by will. Hurry is a hard habit to break, and noticing is a discipline easily eroded.
To pray for pleasure like this is to pray for the grace of undivided attention and the childlike astonishment that recognizes the flame-like petals of this particular rose as a new thing on earth, given only to this flower, this day, available this time, for me, because I am here. “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them,” Annie Dillard writes. “The least we can do is try to be there.” But being there may be more than we can manage without the particular gift of sight and open heart Frost prayed for one spring day.
This poem is also a prayer for protection from the fears that drain our energies and unsettle our hearts. Worry about the uncertain harvest may be a New England farmer’s besetting anxiety, but it serves to remind any of us of those endeavors we have to prepare, plant, water, and then leave to God and nature to complete. Raising children or bearing them. Presenting a project proposal. Investing an inheritance. Teaching a class full of squirrely twelve-year-olds. Caring for a beloved one whose prognosis is unclear. Freedom from fear was a noble hope when Roosevelt included it among the “four freedoms” he aspired to on behalf of all Americans, but it can’t be simply declared or claimed; it has to be received, and the fear dispelled, through the Spirit who saves us, again and again, from ourselves. In one guise or another, we need the angel who shows up to show up again and again to say, “Be not afraid.”
Only when we’re free from besetting fear can we “be happy in the happy bees.” The preposition here that denotes such a very particular happiness—not as happy as the bees, nor happy like the bees, nor happy about or with or (if you’re allergic and skittish about bees) in spite of them, but happy in the bees. Happy about the very fact of bees in the world, and us among them, recognizing the bees as a factor in our happiness, and—though this seems perhaps less likely—us in theirs. To pray for this kind of happiness is to seek deep and authentic contentment in what is—the created order as it was given. Contentment may seem a pale thing to desire compared to excitement or adventure or innovation—at least to the very young—but it deserves to be reclaimed as a state of mind and heart “devoutly to be wished.” Contentment is an alignment of our will with God’s will as we understand it.
Contentment makes room for small pleasures like watching a hummingbird dart and drink and hover—a pleasure to which the whole of the third stanza is devoted. I remember my mother’s calling me to the kitchen window to watch a hummingbird feed. Though they were not an unusual sight, each one of them gave her a few moments of visible delight. She loved them. She seemed to deem it a privilege to see them, as though being allowed into their world and business as a visitor was not to be taken for granted. The stillness of the hummingbird in midair offers its own particular fascination. What is it waiting for? Thinking? Or doing just there before it dives into the next flower or flies off to its nesting place? An ornithologist would offer a fair explanation of its behavior, but wouldn’t finally penetrate the mystery of otherness that is part of what makes one happy in the hummingbirds.
That happiness—contentment in connection with other creatures, acceptance of the distance between us and of the permission a moment gives to pause and draw near to them and find ourselves alive in the same great mystery—is love. Whether or not that love is divine, the speaker suggests, is not really our business. God’s purposes are God’s. Our part is to say yes to what is given, gratefully, giving it due attention, without the presumption of possession. The poem specifically unlinks possession from happiness, praying rather for a happiness that is love because it doesn’t need to possess, but only to enjoy.
The old catechisms teach that our chief end is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” “Glorify” is a large word, but it may be that its meaning lies very close to the simple matter of true enjoyment—the kind that breaks forth when a child points to a feather or a falling star and cries, “Oh! Look!” There is happiness in noticing. Noticing begets a love that, as the speaker rightly says, is up to God to sanctify.
“A Prayer in Spring” is not the prayer of an ascetic or a puritan. Its frank focus on pleasure at the beginning, then happiness, then love links the three in a way which reminds us that pleasure is good, and that pleasure is an important dimension of worship. It may be that the term “pleasure” has suffered by frequent association with the pleasures of the flesh or idle pleasures that sate but do not satisfy. But this poem restores the word to its rightful place among those long elevated to liturgical use, like gladness (“with gladness and singleness of heart”) and joy (“that our joy may be complete”). Pleasure is worth praying for because so much of mass culture militates against the slow and simple pleasures that springtime affords. We need pleasure. We need to sustain in ourselves the capacity for pleasure. And so we pray for pleasure in these flowers, this day.