Poetry on Thursday: Spring/New Beginnings

This week's poetry prompt from Kym was "spring/new beginnings." When I think of spring, I think of nature and the flora and fauna of the world know when spring is coming even when it feels to us humans like winter will never end.

The combination of nature and poetry always brings to mind the work of one poet in particular for me: Robert Frost. I think I may have mentioned here before that in my junior year of high school, I was required to pick an American writer to do an in-depth study of and then write a term paper on. I chose Frost and read every poem he ever wrote in preparation to write the paper, and my thesis was that he chose nature as a canvas on which to paint his internal emotional state. Frost was a fairly traditional poet, in that his poems were rhyming and often had regular meter. They're also familiar to many people, even those who don't typically read poetry, because some of them are ubiquitous and easily memorized. But chances are you've never heard or read this one, though I think you'll like it -- to me, it so perfectly captures my feelings when there's the very first hint of spring in the air.

To the Thawing Wind

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit's crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o'er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

From The Poetry of Robert Frost, (c) 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.