I was at a poetry reading last night where there was a lot of Spring poems. It was obvious that a number of the people there are thrilled by the joys of Spring and up-lifted by its signs, daffodils, new growth, sunshine and lambs.
A great poet, one of the greatest, T.S. Eliot told us though that April is the cruelest month and, every year I reminded of this.
I am happy that those poets last night didn’t seem to share Eliot’s melancholy but I felt slightly awkward that I was reading a new poem, written last week, which took a harsher, more ambivalent view of Springtime.
As a gardener though, I am up there with the optimists and my little yard is looking too fine this week for me to feel truly depressed about anything. Is that true, I wonder? There is something about the beauty of Nature and the promise of its rebirth that also talks of human frailty and promises unfulfilled.
Maybe it is too easy to just say the flowers are lovely but they certainly are.
My new iPhone app that I wrote about yesterday allowed me to take a photograph with my mobile phone which, by allowing me to corrupt the colours and contrasts, I like to think, captures something of what I mean.