Spring: The Lyrical Season
Or, Why April Is In Fact The Cruelest Month

Spring is for the young, a lyric to be sung,
As backward my heart's heavy burden is flung
Into reflection of the past
And the fact of my own life's end
Soon to come.

Spring is when everything is new and alive and blooming, when grass and flowers and bugs and bees are all abuzz with procreation, regeneration, birth, renewal. Winter begins its thaw, and as we continue along the timeline of our life and look headlong into a shortening future, April's lush fecundity can seem a mockery to a person who is older and has seen a few springs come and go.

This mind set, this feeling, when you notice your own life's arc hitting its midpoint, you know that these displays of nature's sexual recreation are limited to you, - sure they will continue on after you have gone, but when you see them you are hit with a mixed feeling of joy and wonder and inspiration that there is possibility in life for shedding old skin and becoming new again and yet also the cold understanding that your own life inches toward its own winter.

As you hear the lyrical song of nature's rebirth, you cannot hear the music as you once did as a child, with the pure joy of 100% involvement of the song as you sang along with your heart in; you also hear amid the notes of joy and life slight strains of ending, decay, a betrayal of life's one time promise.

All this is pure Wordsworth's Ode. A line:

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

and

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.