Nothing is so beautiful as spring.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins.
A cold spring:
The violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing,
taking a long time to eat the afterbirth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.
The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette butt,
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practiced leaping over your fences.
The infant oak leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song sparrows were wound up for the summer
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the South.
In his cap the lilacs whitened;
then one day they fell like snow.
Now, in the evening,
a new moon comes.
The hills grow softer. Tufts of long grass show
where each cow-flop lies.
The bullfrogs are sounding,
slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs.
Beneath the light, against your white front door,
the smallest moths, like Chinese fans,
flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt
over pale yellow, orange, or gray.
Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies
begin to rise:
up, then down, then up again—
lit on the ascending flight,
drifting simultaneously to the same height,
exactly like the bubbles in champagne.
(Later on they rise much higher.)
And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer
these particular glowing tributes
every evening now throughout the summer.
Published in the print edition of the
May 31, 1952, issue. As part of an effort to make The New Yorker’s archive more accessible to readers, this story was digitized by an automated process and may contain transcription errors.
Elizabeth Bishop, a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, began contributing poetry to The New Yorker in 1940. She died in 1979.
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