Equinox
The spring equinox here in the northern hemisphere occurred about eight hours ago. I know there are many reasons to not feel particularly celebratory right now, but I’m nonetheless posting my traditional spring quotation of Swinburne:
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)
(It occurs to me that I should add a content warning in case anyone goes to read the whole poem: it includes, among other things, references to traumatic bits of Greek mythology.)
In the past, I’ve also included various other bits of spring poetry, but the ones that I’ve most recently linked to are no longer available online, and I’m not going to go looking for others right now.