Spring: Eliot and cummings

The very first signs of spring have come to Dayton and I appreciate them now, in my seventy-third year on this planet, more than ever.

T. S. Eliot

Crazy T. S. Eliot wrote a famous opening line that goes “April is the cruellest month.” That was supposed to be a big deal, The Wasteland, and all incoming freshman at my university were required to study it, and a whole lot more of Eliot, and we were supposed to regard it as very advanced, very wise, very insightful, very good, a masterpiece.

And yet I've never actually met anyone in real life who believed that April was cruel. Not one.

I've come to view my university now as insanity and poison, but also I've come to see that it's actually our problems and our trials and our sorrows that enable us to distinguish the true beauty that is all around us, even down to the most common flower that grows.

Dear Esteemed and Learned Mr. Eliot, how about this little poem from Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses instead?

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Or, how about thinking of good old e. e. cummings when spring comes upon us?

e. e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Or:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)