Spring

This year’s northern-hemisphere vernal equinox will arrive about seven hours from now, so here’s my traditional spring post, even though the rains aren’t over.

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remember’d is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, from “Atalanta in Calydon” (1865)

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