It is good to see the warmer weather returning, and to feel the sunshine gracing us again. It makes quite a considerable difference to monotonous days. The weather this past week first brought to mind the setting of Robert Browning’s ‘A Lover’s Quarrel’: “Oh, what a Dawn of Day! / How the March sun feels like May”. However, at the back of my mind, a slightly more convoluted idea was forming, taking its roots in Robert Herrick’s ‘Farewell Frost, or Welcome Spring’.
FLED are the frosts, and now the fields appear
Re-cloth’d in fresh and verdant diaper.
Thaw’d are the snows, and now the lusty spring
Gives to each mead a neat enamelling.
The palms put forth their gems, and every tree
Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry.
The while the Daulian minstrel sweetly sings,
With warbling notes, her Terean sufferings.
What gentle winds perspire ! As if here
Never had been the northern plunderer
To strip the trees and fields, to their distress,
Leaving them to a pitied nakedness.
And look how when a frantic storm doth tear
A stubborn oak, or holm, long growing there,
But lull’d to calmness, then succeeds a breeze
That scarcely stirs the nodding leaves of trees :
So when this war, which tempest-like doth spoil
Our salt, our corn, our honey, wine and oil,
Falls to a temper, and doth mildly cast
His inconsiderate frenzy off, at last,
The gentle dove may, when these turmoils cease,
Bring in her bill, once more, the branch of peace.
Robert Herrick, ‘Farewell Frost, or Welcome Spring’
The identity of the seventeenth-century citizen, and much of their livelihoods in turn, revolved around ideology: moral instruction and religious practice. Today, far-removed, we revolve around different factors. Whether financial, material, status, pride, or perhaps family, children, and day-to-day survival, much of this boils down to occupation. What is evidently comparable, though, is the scale of the effect on livelihood.
Continue reading ‘Farewell Frost, (or Waking the Dead)’
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