Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, BUCOLIC COMEDY: SPRING, by EDITH SITWELL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

BUCOLIC COMEDY: SPRING, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: When spring begins, the maids in flocks
Last Line: Singing their cold, forlorn madrigals.
Subject(s): Spring


WHEN spring begins, the maids in flocks
Walk in soft fields, and their sheepskin locks

Fall shadowless, soft as music, round
Their jonquil eyelids, and reach the ground.

Where the small fruit-buds begin to harden
Into sweet tunes in the palace garden,

They peck at the fruit-buds' hairy herds
With their lips like the gentle bills of birds.

* * * * *

But King Midas heard the swan-bosomed sky
Say "All is surface and so must die."

And he said: "it is spring; I will have a feast
To woo eternity; for my least

Palace is like a berg of ice;
And the spring winds, for birds of paradise,

With the leaping goat-footed waterfalls cold,
Shall be served for me on a dish of gold

By a maiden fair as an almond-tree,
With hair like the waterfalls' goat-locks; she

Has lips like that jangling harsh pink rain,
The flower-bells that spirt on the trees again."

In Midas' garden the simple flowers
Laugh, and the tulips are bright as the showers,

For spring is here; the auriculas,
And the Emily-coloured primulas

Bob in their pinafores on the grass
As they watch the gardener's daughter pass.

Then King Midas said, "At last I feel
Eternity conquered beneath my heel

Like the glittering snake of Paradise --
And you are my Eve!" -- but the maiden flies,

Like the leaping goat-footed waterfalls
Singing their cold, forlorn madrigals.





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