Spring

From Anecdotal Evidence: `The Pilgrim Steps of Spring':

.... What has come back to me is a Northerner’s sense of earning the right to spring’s return. Character-building is built into the cycle of the seasons. Only the stalwart shall know spring. In Houston, solstice and equinox are permeable membranes. The seasons customarily blur. Here is Sonnet VI by Robert Bridges from his sonnet sequence The Growth of Love (1876):

While yet we wait for spring, and from the dry
And blackening east that so embitters March,
Well-housed must watch grey fields and meadows parch,
And driven dust and withering snowflake fly;
Already in glimpses of the tarnish’d sky
The sun is warm and beckons to the larch,
And where the covert hazels interarch
Their tassell’d twigs, fair beds of primrose lie.
Beneath the crisp and wintry carpet hid
A million buds but stay their blossoming;
And trustful birds have built their nests amid
The shuddering boughs, and only wait to sing
Till one soft shower from the south shall bid,
And hither tempt the pilgrim steps of spring.

The final line recalls Chaucer – the turning of the seasons as a sort of pilgrimage. ....

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Pilgrim Steps of Spring'