HOUNDS OF SPRING

In the glory of a Southern French spring -- forsythias, fruit trees, hawthorn, entire fields full of daisies and dandelions, blackbirds, thrushes, doves and soon the nightingale -- someone sent me an e-mail asking me what I thought was the most euphonious word in English. I pondered "melancholy", "valerian", "singular" and others, but soon they were all crowded out of my mind by the most melodious piece of poetry I know in the English language:


WHEN the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
    The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
    With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous         
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
    The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
    Maiden most perfect, lady of light,         
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
    With a clamor of waters, and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendor and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,         
    Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
    Fold our hands round her knees, and cling?
O that man’s heart were as fire and could spring to her,
    Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!         
For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;
For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
    And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing.

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


Those of austere tastes consider this downright silly. But those of us who can still channel our 16-year-old romantic selves can even now murmur it in the glory of this season, and give thanks for poor tiny Algernon Swinburne, alcoholic, queer, masochist and word-freak.