First fleeting signs of spring
TODAY marks the ancient pagan fire festival of Imbolc. Between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, the Earth is subtly stirring, ready to break free from winter lockdown. The lamb grows in the belly of the ewe.
On country lanes the first wild daffodils delight our eyes among the vestiges of snow, still tenderly sheathed within green spears, the plucky souls!
At the end of DH Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl, Alvina Houghton, well and truly lost from Eastwood, whose new husband must go to war, finds “little tufts of narcissus among the rocks, gold-centred pale little things”, as February arrives with “bits of snow and bursts of sunshine” in Califano. Their scent is “powerful and magical”.
In The White Peacock, Lawrence says snowdrops are so “mysterious” that “we have lost their meaning”. Seen “folded in the twilight, these conquered flowerets are sad like forlorn little friends of dryads”.
His friend Lady Cynthia Asquith once described him as “half-faun, half-prophet”. Lawrence had a mystical, uncanny affinity with flowers. He could somehow even BE them! His work is fragrantly alive with flowers. They are “the fairest thing in nature”, he says, introducing the large body of late poems that he lovingly called Pansies. But they have their roots in earth, of course, “in all its heavy humidity and darkness”.
Imbolc is dedicated to Brigid – the goddess of spring, healing and poetry... she’s adored by poets! Let’s merrily spring-clean and light a candle to her.
Then, as the Lawrence Pansy advises, “keep quiet and wait, For the word is Resurrection”. And, as Nothing To Save reminds us, when all feels lost there may yet be within “a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet”.
■ 100 years ago, on February 1, 1921, Lawrence writes to Robert Mountsier from Taormina sending him “another flower poem – Hibiscus And Salvia – which I like immensely. Hope you will.” Lawrence wrote this blast at Sicilian Bolshevists appropriating these noble “golden-throated” blooms the day before: “Eve, in her happy moments/put hibiscus in her hair”!
On February 5 he sends Mountsier another freshly composed “nice flower poem”, Purple Anemones, which is lively in another way, imagining Persephone freed from the underworld in spring, so these flowers can be “hell-hounds” to snap at her ankles and hold her by the hair! He enthuses about working a farm in Connecticut with Mountsier, where they might have “a cow, goats, fowls, pigs, and raise some fruit”, saying: “It might be real jolly.”