The week in booksBooks This article is more than 7 years oldHow spring has blossomed in literature
This article is more than 7 years oldMistaken expectations, foolish illusions, dangerous liaisons … while spring is always keenly awaited in literature, its onset so often signifies troubleCarmina Burana (11th or 12th century)
Bawdy, boozy, brainy Latin poems by minstrels, rebel monks and scholars, best known as the lyrics to Carl Orff’s cantata; the first sequence evokes nature in spring, when “Flora reigns” and from the forest “the chorus of maidens / already promises a thousand joys. Ah!” Dream on, student poet.
Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare (1590s)
The April as “cruellest month” tradition perhaps begins with the song “Spring” in this early romcom’s bleak coda: though anyway offset by the sister song “Winter”, it conjures vernal joys only to undercut them by hearing in the cuckoo’s call “a word of fear” that “mocks married men”, ie cuckold. (The season is also fearful in Julius Caesar, which opens with the pre-spring Lupercal festival and sees the dictator assassinated on 15 March).
Torrents of Spring by Ivan Turgenev (1872)
A young, posh Russian travelling in Germany falls head over heels in love not once but twice, and after the second fling both women (one a shopgirl, the other wealthy) sensibly shun him. Hemingway borrowed Turgenev’s title for a bizarre, spoof-ish novel even more sceptical about spring liaisons.
“Spring comes on the World” by Emily Dickinson (unknown, pub 1890)
April days are “hueless” to the author until “thou” – lover? Christ? inspiration? – come; just as “Blossoms stand negative” before a Bee’s arrival, when they are “Touched to Conditions / By a Hum”. Dickinson’s self-imaging as passive, awaiting pollination, is disconcerting; but is it just a wry and subtly sexy pose, as much a tactic as male poets playing the seducer?
“A Scandal in Bohemia” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1891)
A rare instance of Holmes in love, as a royal intrigue pits him against femme fatale Irene Adler, AKA “the woman”. It’s no accident that Watson tells us precisely that the case that occasions this awakening of desire - which became A Scandal in Belgravia in Sherlock - began on 20 March, 1888.
A Room with a View by EM Forster (1908)
Forster avoids naming the month when Lucy Honeychurch, holidaying in Florence, has her life-changing kiss with George Emerson; but it takes place in a field of spring-flowering violets, and a local beauty who joins the English tourists’ excursion is compared to the vernal goddess Persephone. For once in literature, spring’s disruptions are wholly beneficial.
“A Backward Spring” by Thomas Hardy (1917)
Hardy had depicted spring full blown in the May Day dance scene in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but in this counter-romantic poem it’s tardy, tentative, anxious and very English: in contrast to Forster’s Italian meadow and Wordsworth’s “splendour in the grass”, “The trees are afraid to put forth buds, / And there is timidity in the grass”.
“Jeeves in Springtime” by PG Wodehouse (1921)
Spring means love means trouble again as Jeeves extracts Bingo Little from a disastrous romance (and Bertie from a disastrous shirt). Contains the classic exchange (referencing Tennyson): “In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.” “So I have been informed, sir.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
“It was a bright cold day in April,” Orwell’s dystopian novel opens brilliantly, “and the clocks were striking thirteen.” In the month’s first week, its hero Winston Smith starts writing a diary, begins seeing Julia and fatally first imagines that his future nemesis O’Brien shares his dissident views.
The Beginning of Spring (1988) by Penelope Fitzgerald
Seen as Fitzgerald’s “masterpiece” by Robert McCrum, who gave it a place in his 100 best novels. In Moscow in pre-revolutionary 1913, Russians await the end of tsarist autocracy, and British expat Frank falls unwisely for mysterious Lisa while awaiting his estranged wife’s return.
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