Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, HOW SPRING CAME TO NEW YORK, by HERMANN HAGEDORN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

HOW SPRING CAME TO NEW YORK, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Between the windy dusk, and the first pale light
Last Line: "the millions woke, tingling, and whispered, ""spring!"
Subject(s): New York City; Spring; Manhattan; New York, New York; The Big Apple


Between the windy dusk and the first pale light,
Spring came with breezes and fragrance. Tiptoe through the night
Into the city she came. The city lay dumb.
Its millions of eyes saw not the light Spring come.
They saw not the light feet dance with quick, sharp tread.
They saw not the twinkling fingers, the arms outspread.
The eyes half open, the lips half open, the hair
Blown back and about on the frolicsome April air.
The millions slept with their tumult of hammers and wheels.
They saw not the Spring nor the troop that danced at her heels,
Singers and fiddlers and pipers and children with lyres,
Painters with brushes and colors, and kindlers of fires,
Maidens with lutes and citherns and youths with harps,
Clowns with parody-melodies' flats and sharps,
Men with horns and boys with trumpets that rang,
Babies with bells that tinkled and twinkled and sang,
Spring with her orchestra, Spring with her rollicking choir,
Spring with her band fluting to dead desire,
Fiddling to hope past hoping, piping to pain,
"Love, laugh, and sing! Spring, Spring has come again!"
The millions slept. They saw not the blithe rout sway
With the flutes' high twiddledeedee up stern Broadway.
The towers looked down, the windows stared in surprise,
The arc-lights sputtered and winked their soulless eyes,
For wherever the stony desert showed a tree
Spring and her covey stopped, and ardently
Spring blessed the boughs and bade the cold sap run;
And at each tree, in parting, at each one,
She left a fiddler or a cithern-player
To lure the leaves out with some magic air.
Ah, but the parks were scenes of revelry!
The crocus buds threw back their quilts to see,
The grass awoke, the worms and beetles heard,
And down the corridors sent the wonderful word,
Down the corridors winding through cool brown earth
They sent the echoing, rapturous gospel of mirth.
"Heigh-ho!" cried Spring. "Lay your ear to the ground, and hark!
The grubs are stirring and stretching down there in the dark.
Listen! The voice of the slug-king, calling to war:
'Awake, O slugs! and pillage the world once more!'"
"Awake!" echoes the hollow, "Awake!" the sky,
"Awake!" cries Spring, and "Awake!" her minions cry.
"Awake!" sing the fiddles in music richer than words,
"Awake!" to the sparrows chirp the returning birds;
And the sparrows that hate themselves and despise their kind,
Cheep, hop, and turn in the warm, low, cleansing wind.
"Ai-ah!" cries Spring, and "Ai-ah" echoing purr
Rebeck and fife and gittern and dulcimer.
And "Ai-ah!" in swelling murmur, first soft,
"Ai-ah!" then louder, "Ai-ah!" surges aloft.
"Ai-ah! Oh, earth, forget the pain and the storm!
Ai-ah! Ai-ah! Oh, cold, white stars, grow warm!
Ai-ah!" What music of psaltery, oboe and flute,
What rapturous risings and fallings of viol and lute,
What calls of one to another, what jubilant hails,
What sparkling of eyes and teeth, what flowing of veils,
What bendings of bodies in laughter, what impudent skips,
What jubilant cartwheels, undulant snap-the-whips,
What rushing of feet, what flame-like blowing of hair,
What rampant revel let loose in Madison Square!
The millions slept. The millions were deaf and blind.
But into their turbulent dreams the new warm wind
Brought far-off flute notes and faint echoings
Of tremulous, bewitching cithern strings,
That traveled strangely into their dreams' waste places,
Waking new hope, old love, and dear lost faces.
All night the fiddles poured clear, silver streams
Across a weary city's arid dreams,
And when the last note fell, all quavering,
The millions woke, tingling, and whispered, "Spring!"





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