Enjoying a spot of Lucy Maud Montgomery's springtime poetry

✯ Day 113 of Vintage 365 ✯

 

Easter weekend should be a time of peace and happiness, of celebrating and holding dear that elements of this resplendent part of the year that matter most to you and your family.

Though we had snow as recently here as Monday the 18th (though to be fair, it was more like a three-part flurry of rain, snow and tiny pea meal sized balls of hail), by and large the world is looking, feeling, and even smelling more like spring (gone is the heady, beautiful scent of wood smoke in the air, in its place the earthy aroma of damp soil and budding verdant grass).

I awoke on this fresh Saturday morning with the words of a poem by beloved early twentieth century Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery dancing like springtime pixies in my mind. While we commonly associate LMM with her superb books (most famous amongst which is the Prince Edward Island classic, Anne of Green Gables), Montgomery was also a gifted poetess who wrote a wonderful array of poems during her lifetime.

The piece below, titled elegantly "Spring Song", is amongst my favourite of her poems, and one that I enjoy rereading each year as spring really and truly begins to come to life in my own corner of the Canadian landscape.

To further help impart of a delightfully seasonal vibe to today's post, below Montgomery's graceful poem, resides a vintage French photo postcard (which comes via Chicks57 on Flickr) of a young girl carrying an oversized basket of spring flowers, that I thought partnered well with this timeless poem.

 

Spring Song

by Lucy Maud Montgomery

 

Hark, I hear a robin calling!

List, the wind is from the south!

And the orchard-bloom is falling

Sweet as kisses on the mouth.

 

In the dreamy vale of beeches

Fair and faint is woven mist,

And the river's orient reaches

Are the palest amethyst.

 

Every limpid brook is singing

Of the lure of April days;

Every piney glen is ringing

With the maddest roundelays.

 

Come and let us seek together

Springtime lore of daffodils,

Giving to the golden weather

Greeting on the sun-warm hills.

 

Ours shall be the moonrise stealing

Through the birches ivory-white;

Ours shall be the mystic healing

Of the velvet-footed night.

 

Ours shall be the gypsy winding

Of the path with violets blue,

Ours at last the wizard finding

Of the land where dreams come true.

 

I hope, sweet friends, that this charming look at spring, in its endlessly appealing grace and wonder will help launch your weekend (and Easter Eve!) off on a deeply cheerful note - as it most certainly has mind.