All suddenly the wind comes soft,
       And Spring is here again;
 And the hawthorn quickens with buds of green,
       And my heart with buds of pain.

 My heart all Winter lay so numb,
       The earth so dead and frore,
 That I never thought the Spring would come,
       Or my heart wake any more.

 But Winter's broken and earth has woken,
       And the small birds cry again;
 And the hawthorn hedge puts forth its buds,
       And my heart puts forth its pain.

Note

frore (adj., archaic): Extremely cold; frosty.

It’s been a while since I ran anything by Brooke - something I thought I’d amend today. “Song” is actually not a poem I’ve read before; I was leafing idly (and a trifle sleepily) through Brooke’s collected poems, looking for some old favourite I might have overlooked, when I was startled into awareness by the fourth line.

Brooke is usually a poet I find soothing, even at his bitterest - his words often speak of restlessness and heartache, but they do it with a quiet melancholy and philosophical tone that convey an unspoken measure of acceptance. Today’s poem stands in sharp contrast - it is stripped of the usual ‘detached observer’ voice that runs in constant counterpoint through most of Brooke’s poetry, the words and expression are simple to the extent that from a lesser poet they’d have degenerated into amateurishness. Here, instead, the net result is that the words get out of the way, and let the poem’s emotional content through, in a manner very reminiscent of Teasdale (normally not someone I would compare to Brooke at all).

One of the things I enjoy most about running Minstrels is the way it has forced a shift in the way I read poetry, from a passive intake of other people’s selections to an active search through reams of verse, looking with an anthologist’s eye for a more than usually good one. Today’s poem is an excellent example of the rewards of such an endeavour - an uncharacteristic Brooke poem that I’d likely never have come across were I not systematically reading through his collected works, but one that I am very glad to have discovered.

— Martin

Links

Wikipedia on Brooke:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Brooke

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/7086/brookeidx.htm