New England Spring, 1942

The rush of rain against the glass
Is louder than my noisy mind
Crying, “Alas!”

The rain shouts: “Hear me, how I melt the ice that clamps the
bent and frozen grass!
Winter cannot come twice
Even this year!
I break it up: I make it water the roots of spring!
I am the harsh beginning, poured in torrents down the hills,
And dripping from the trees and soaking, later, and when the wind is still,
Into the roots of flowers, which your eyes, incredulous, soon
will suddenly find!
Comfort is almost here.”

The sap goes up the maple; it drips fast
From the tapped maple into the tin pail
Through tubes of hollow elder; the pails brim;
Birds with scarlet throats and yellow bellies sip from the pail’s rim.
Snow falls thick; it is sifted
Through cracks about windows and under doors;
It is drifted through hedges into country roads. It cannot last.
Winter is past.
It is hurling back at us boasts of no avail.

But Spring is wise. Pale and with gentle eyes, one day somewhat she advances;
The next, with a flurry of snow into flake-filled skies retreats before the heat in our eyes, and the thing designed
By the sick and longing mind in its lonely fancies—
The sally which would force her and take her.
And Spring is kind.
Should she come running headlong in a wind-whipped acre
Of daffodil skirts down the mountain into this dark valley we would go blind.