Quotations and Literature Forum

If anyone could post some quotations about Spring or their favorite season I would appreciate it.

Came the Spring with all its splendor,
All its birds and all its blossoms,
All its flowers, and leaves and grasses.

--Longfellow, Hiawatha
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The Autumn is a treasury and the Winter is a mountain.
The Spring is like a fountain and the Summer is a woman.

(From; The Quest of the Ivory Crown, by Phantom Delta, 2001)

Ah, a delightful invitation, Phantom Delta. Here goes:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire's end
Of England they to Canterbury wend,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.
--Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The General Prologue

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
--T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

In the spring a young man's fancy
lightly turns to thoughts of love.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall

Just can't let it go--for the purists among us, and I'll admit I'm one, the original Chaucer:

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.
~Emily Dickinson
1875; "The Single Hound," 19I4.

Autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
~Elizabeth Bowen
"The Death of the Heart," 1939.

But the cheerful Spring came kindly on
And show'rs began to fall:
John Barleycorn got up again
And sore surpris'd them all.
~Robert Burns
"John Barleycorn," st. 3.

Come, gentle Spring! ethereal Mildness! come.
~James Thomson
The Seasons. Spring. Line 1.

Happiness is like a sunbeam, which the least shadow intercepts, while adversity is often as the rain of spring.
~Chinese Proverb

Here is the earth resurgent with color and bloom of Spring,
Glorying the dream and the vision in the song you bring.
~William Stanley Braithwaite
"The Vision."

I thought that spring must last forevermore
For I was young and loved, and it was May.
~Vera Brittain
"May Morning," St. 4 (May 1916), "Poems of the War and After," 1934

I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
~Robert Browning

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant. If we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
~Anne Bradstreet

In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature.
~Edna O'Brien

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done?
~Matthew Arnold
"Empedocles on Etna."

Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.
~Pietro Aretino (1492 - 1556)

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.
~Robert Schuller
Attributed to his father; in "Reader's Digest," Feb 1990.

One swallow does not make a summer,
but one skein of geese,
cleaving the murk of March thaw,
is the Spring.
~Aldo Leopold

Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.
~Al Bernstein

Spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon, summer with the breeze, winter with snow. When idle concerns don't fill your thoughts, that's your best season.
~Wu-Men

Spring is God's way of saying, 'One more time!'
~Robert Orben

Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet.
And all the things are made young with young desires.
~Francis Thompson
"The Night of Forebeing," 'Ode to Easter'.

Until spring comes, nightingales do not sing.
~Azerbaijani Proverb

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

When one has faith that the spring thaw will arrive, the winter winds seem to lose some of their punch.
~Robert L. Veninga

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
~Stanley Horowitz

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
~Samuel Butler
"The Way of All Flesh."

The days of Autumn come quickly like the running of a hound upon the moor.

--Irish Charms, Mystic Cures & Superstitions

(This is one of my favorite all time quotes about autumn. I can just hear the hounds in the distance and feel the mist of the autumn air. Rhapsody!)
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I went camping on the last night of Winter and woke up on the first morning of Spring.

--Phantom Delta

The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his heaven-
All's right with the world~Robert Browning, Pippa Passes, Morning.

Now fades the last long streak of snow,
Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow~Tennyson, In Memoriam

In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love~Tennyson, Locksley Hall

One swallow does not make a Spring~Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

— J.R.R. Tolkien


Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines —

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches —

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind —

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined —
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance — Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

— William Carlos Williams


For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snow and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

— Algernon Charles Swinburne


And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

— Henry Reed

The untaught harmony of spring.
— Thomas Gray

Regards,
Lou

_________________
Regards,
Lou
I feel like a fugitive from th' law of averages.
— Bill Mauldin

Pervigilium Veneris
The All Night Vigil of Venus

First verse:

cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet.
Ver novum, ver iam canorum; vere natus orbis est,
vere concordant amores, vere nubunt alites,
et nemus comam resolvit de maritis imbribus.

Rather literal translation:

Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved,
and he who has loved, tomorrow let him love.
Spring [is] new, spring now [is] of songs;
in spring the world was born,
in spring, loves (/lovers) are in harmony,
in spring the birds mate (/marry),
and the grove unravels (/unfastens) [her] foliage (/hair)
after marital (/conjugal) showers.


for the rest of this very beautiful poem (with an English translation)
go to: http://www.geocities.com/ckieffe/venus1.htm

The Summer is a woman
and June is her name.
I embrace her like a new bride
and love her with the heart
of a mighty stag.