On Christmas Day, dwarf daffodils, as ever,
nod their barely opened heads against the wind.
I pass the place each year; each year they offer
festive joy and reassurance to my mind.
And yet — killjoy — I cannot but discover
signs unwelcome and untimely in the land
now next year’s spring has backed into December —
evidence of rising sap through shortening days:
camelia blooms, already brown, blown over;
tall mimosa trees already in full blaze.
When Hardy’s lyric wondered how
the ‘vespering bird’ and the ‘crocus root’
took the faintest hint in the wakening year
which nudged the singer to try her note,
the root ‘deep underground’ to grow,
he wrote in innocence, not fear.
His question was sincere.
This later watcher’s clear:
the rush to premature rebirth
is consequential on our acts
which ‘rudely force’ the groaning earth.
There is no question; only facts.
The Year’s Awakening — Thomas Hardy
How do you know that the pilgrim track
Along the belting zodiac
Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds
Is traced by now to the Fishes’ bounds
And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud
Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,
And never as yet a tinct of spring
Has shown in the Earth’s apparelling;
O vespering bird, how do you know,
How do you know?
How do you know, deep underground,
Hid in your bed from sight and sound,
Without a turn in temperature,
With weather life can scarce endure,
That light has won a fraction’s strength,
And day put on some moments’ length,
Whereof in merest rote will come,
Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb;
O crocus root, how do you know,
How do you know?
February 1910
