10 Classic Spring Poems Everyone Should ReadSpring is a fine season – perhaps the most popular of the four seasons, when it comes to poets and their seasonal choice of subject. Winter has its devotees, but there’s something to be said for spring with its new life, warmer weather, and flowers and trees coming into leaf. Here are ten of our favourite poems about spring, which we reckon are among the finest spring poems in the English language.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Spring‘. The poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) wrote many sonnets, including ‘The Windhover’ and ‘God’s Grandeur’. ‘Spring’ is not as widely known as those, which is a shame – it’s a powerful evocation of the beauty of spring. It is that season, Hopkins reminds us, ‘When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush’. (Few poets could use assonance and alliteration as vibrantly as Hopkins.)
Emily Dickinson, ‘A Light Exists in Spring‘. Written in around 1864 but not published until 1896 (as with many of Dickinson’s poems), ‘A Light Exists in Spring’ beautifully captures the way that spring slowly appears in our Shakespeare3consciousness, like a light in the distance. The final stanza of Dickinson’s poem also seems to acknowledge what we now call ‘SAD’ or Seasonal Affective Disorder, with the passing of spring affecting our contentedness.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Canto CXV from In Memoriam. This canto from Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s long elegy In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) – written in memory of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam who died young – offers a more bittersweet take on the arrival of spring. What grows in the speaker’s breast as spring comes into blossom is regret – regret that his dear friend is gone, that spring is a reminder that the world continues to turn and life carries on, but Tennyson’s friend does not return. One of the best poems in a great long poetic sequence.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 98. One of the sonnets addressed to the ‘Fair Youth’, this poem sees Shakespeare bemoaning the fact that he could not appreciate all the beauty of spring around him because he was absent from the young man. As a consequence, spring seemed like a winter to him. This is not as famous as, say, Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’), which is a shame – it’s a wonderful evocation of spring, and, as with Tennyson, it’s a bittersweet poem about the season.
William Blake, ‘Spring‘. First published in Blake’s Songs of Innocence in 1789, ‘Spring’ has the ring of a medieval song about it. The poem celebrates the joy of spring through focusing on some of Blake’s favourite aspects of the season.
Christina Rossetti, ‘Spring‘. This poem describes the way life begins all over again in the spring, and does so through the use of some beautifully vivid images. As with much of Rossetti’s poetry, however, death is never far behind – as with Dickinson’s poem above, there is a melancholy sense of the transient beauty of spring. You can learn more about Rossetti’s life and work here.
Philip Larkin, ‘The Trees‘. This first appeared in Larkin’s final volume, High Windows, in 1974. As well as his trenchantly sardonic poems about aspects of modern life, Larkin was also a great nature poet, and ‘The Trees’ is a Cherry blossomfine brief lyric about the cycle of the seasons but also the sense that each spring is not just a rebirth, but also (shades of Rossetti and Dickinson again here) a reminder of death. The trees’ age is ‘written down in rings of grain’, after all. We have more great Larkin poems here.
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written in Early Spring‘. The Romantic poets often wrote about spring, and Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, whilst not his best-known poem, is a fine example of Romantic poetry about the season. Once more, Wordsworth’s enjoyment of spring is tinged somewhat by an inner sadness, especially when he reflects on ‘what man has made of man’. Quite.
Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The General Prologue‘ to The Canterbury Tales. Okay, well here we haven’t got in mind the whole prologue – joyous and masterly as it is. But Geoffrey Chaucer‘s majestic description of April (complete with its famous showers) is among the most celebrated descriptions of springtime in all English poetry, and it rings as true now as it did over 600 years ago when he wrote it.
A. E. Housman, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now‘. The second poem from Housman’s bestselling 1896 volume A Shropshire Lad (a self-published debut that went on to become a sensation), ‘Loveliest of trees’ has many of Housman’s trademark touches: formal metre and rhyme, and a sense of melancholy. The speaker of the poem, at twenty years of age, reflects that he has seen twenty springs come and go, and will probably only see fifty more. So, best make the most of it. Quite right, too.
If you’re looking for more great poems, the best anthology of English poetry out there, in our opinion is the superb The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Christopher Ricks.
What would you say are the best poems about springtime? Have we missed any classics off this list? Step into warmer weather with our selection of classic poems about summer, or our pick of poems about the English countryside. Or enter the colder world of winter with our pick of the greatest Christmas poems.
Image (top): Portrait of William Shakespeare, Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Image (bottom): A view of cherry blossoms opening during the spring (picture credit: Bruce Emmerling); Wikimedia Commons.
