May, a parody of real Spring

Under the Willows

• May is a pious fraud of the almanac.
• A ghastly parody of real Spring
• Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind;
• Or if, o’er-confident, she trust the date,
• And, with her handful of anemones,
• Herself as shivery, steal into the sun,
• The season need but turn his hour-glass round,
• And Winter suddenly, like crazy Lear,
• Reels back, and brings the dead May in his arms,
• Her budding breasts and wan dislustred front
• With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard
• All overblown. Then, warmly walled with books,
• While my wood-fire supplies the sun’s defect,
• Whispering old forest-sagas in its dreams,
• I take my May down from the happy shelf
• Where perch the world’s rare song-birds in a row,
• Waiting my choice to upen with full breast,
• And beg an alms of springtime, ne’er denied
• Indoors by vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods
• Throb thick with merle and mavis all the years.

Green Mountains

• Ye mountains, that far off lift up your heads,
• Seen dimly through their canopies of blue,
• The shade of my unrestful spirit sheds
• Distance-created beauty over you;
• I am not well content with this far view;
• How may I know what foot of loved-one treads
• Your rocks moss-grown and sun-dried torrent beds?
• We should love all things better, if we knew
• What claims the meanest have upon our hearts:
• Perchance even now some eye, that would be bright
• To meet my own, looks on your mist-robed forms;
• Perchance your grandeur a deep joy imparts
• To souls that have encircled mine with light —
• O brother-heart, with thee my spirit warms!

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) was an American poet, critic, editor, and general all-around Romantic associated with the “Fireside Poets,” which included other luminaries of New England verse: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (and which only required for membership, apparently, the possession of a tremendously conspicuous middle name). Among Lowell’s descendants were the two 20th-century American poets Amy Lowell (1874–1925) and Robert Lowell (1917–1977) and virtually half the population of eastern Massachusetts.