"COME, @3gentle@1 Spring! ethereal @3mildness@1 come!" Oh! Thomson, void of rhyme as well as reason, How couldst thou thus poor human nature hum There's no such season. The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name! For why, I find her breath a bitter blighter And suffer from her @3blows@1 as if they came From Spring the Fighter. Her praises, then, let hardy poets sing, And be her tuneful laureates and upholders, Who do not feel as if they had a @3Spring@1 Pour'd down their shoulders! Let others eulogise her floral shows, From me they cannot win a single stanza, I know her blooms are in full blow -- and so's The Influenza. Her cowslips, stocks, and lilies of the vale, Her honey-blossoms that you hear the bees at, Her pansies, daffodils, and primrose pale, Are things I sneeze at! Fair is the vernal quarter of the year! And fair its early buddings and its blowings -- But just suppose Consumption's seeds appear With other sowings! For me, I find, when eastern wings are high, A frigid, not a genial inspiration; Nor can, like Iron-Chested Chubb, defy An inflammation. Smitten by breezes from the land of plague, To me all vernal luxuries are fables, Oh! where's the @3Spring@1 in a rheumatic leg, Stiff as a table's? I limp in agony, -- I wheeze and cough; And quake with Ague, that great Agitator; Nor dream, before July, of leaving off My respirator. What wonder if in May itself I lack A peg for laudatory verse to hang on? -- Spring mild and gentle! -- yes, as Spring-heeled Jack To those he sprang on. In short, whatever panegyrics lie In fulsome odes too many to be cited, The tenderness of Spring is all my eye, And that is blighted! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SONNET: TO SLEEP by JOHN KEATS OVERTURE TO A DANCE OF LOCOMOTIVES by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS APPARITIONS by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH LILIES: 23. FINALLY ALONE by GEORGE BARLOW (1847-1913) TO LADY CHARLOTTYE GORDON; DRESSED IN A TARTAN SCOTCH BONNET by JAMES BEATTIE |