When lawrence craved for spring to come at last

THANKFULLY, poems about spring may still warm us, while we patiently await the real thing!

Written in Zennor in 1917, DH Lawrence’s Craving for Spring, a veritable Beltane bonfire of vernal energy, begins. . . “I wish it were spring in the world. Let it be spring! Come, bubbling, surging tide of sap! Come rush of creation! Come life! surge through this mass of mortification.”

Spring is life itself, and must enter the very being of women and men.

Its urgent spring comes “quickly,” lifting we “winter-weary” masses from “the winter of the world” into blossom, “towards our culmination” and the summer of existence.

Chaffinches make “cosy” nests, the willow’s powdered “with gold,” but people only blossom with death. “Give us our turn, give us a chance, let our hour strike, O soon, soon!” Lawrence implores.

Only when our blood begins “purpling with violets,” and we “catch a whiff” will it “be spring in the world.”

Walt Whitman’s verse had set Lawrence on fire - “The primal soul” uttering “itself in strange pulsations” which “throb naked and vibrating as they emerge from the quick” - like “life itself”! “The whole being is there in “perfect utterance.” It’s “the greatest poetry.”

Lawrence’s 1927 essay Flowery Tuscany declares, “By May, the great winds will drop, the sun will shake off

‘Give us our turn, give us a chance, let our hour strike, O soon, soon!’ Lawrence implores

his harassments,” with abundant “tender, proud, spikey” pale-lilac irises making a “mauve light” and “so much scent in the air.”

“Death is something permanently intervening between us and the sun.” Nevertheless, “In the sunshine, even death is sunny. And there is no end to the sunshine.”

This “sunniness means change,” and “it’s our fault” if we stop thinking that “the sun always shines.”

100 YEARS AGO, “Friday evening,” 2nd May 1924, Lawrence writes from Taos to William Hawk about requiring “a load of lumber, 2x4 and 1x10 or 1x8,” from the saw-mill.

They asked the blacksmith to order it, but if William’s going to San Cristobal could he arrange delivery “to our little ranch on Tuesday,” requesting “a wagon load,” rather than “ten dollars worth.” They’ll go up on Monday, weatherpermitting.

4th May, tells Thomas Seltzer they’re “packed and ready to go.”

Further letters to: “care Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.” If Seltzer confirms Lawrence’s income tax “second half” as $43.47, he’ll “send a check to the Collector of Inland Revenue at Albuquerque.”

He’s “glad to be on the hills again, near the trees, now the warmer weather has at last come.”

Bynner wants them to go down to Mexico, but Lawrence supposes they’ll “wait now for autumn.”

(Next Monday - Lawrence Springcleaning!)