Edna St. Vincent Millay Greets the Spring....

Glad March is here. We're on the back end of a winter that began with a beguiling warmth that lasted through Christmas and beyond. But when we thought we would come through unscathed by harsh cold, the Great St. Valentine's Snowstorm of 2007 shook us back to reality with below zero weather, snow by the foot, clogged roads, and closed schools. March itself is no picnic, but it beckons us onward to the green grass and tender shoots of April.

Lines from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Life in itself
is nothing.
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

.

—from "Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I found these lines on Poets.org in a section entitled Life/Lines. Readers are invited to share lines that have stayed with them over the years and explain why they feel they are important. Here's what a reader says about Millay's lines:

"Even before Eliot named April cruel, Millay was there asking questions about the significance of that month's facile promise and eternal return. I admire the bravado with which she parcels out her wildly irregular lines. As well as the way she formally emphasizes April's momentary hope — set against life's continual difficulty and occasional danger — by setting “April” on a line of it's own. That bold gesture also delays ever so slightly the final disquieting image of April as some babbling daffy aunt who runs down a hill throwing flowers onto the new green. When have I thought of these lines? Endless times. And not just in April. Once in March I was in Austin, Texas while back home in Chicago, which was home then, it was still cold and trees were just sticks stuck in the cold ground. In and out of Austin, the highway medians were filled with wildflowers. There have been times since then when, in an icy March, I've thought of that Austin scene; the recollection of those strewn flowers that mark the roadways there takes me straight to the image of Millay's April as one who mindlessly and wantonly makes the moment pretty but delivers no lasting relief to those who feel the world leaning hard against them."

Mary Jo Bang
St. Louis, Missouri