Thoughts on Language & Who We Are, part 2
Among the leaves bright
green of wrist-thick tree
and old stiff broken branch
ferncool swaying loosely strung —
come May
William Carlos Williams, from The Locust Tree in Flower (version 1)
Welcome, dear reader –
Spring in New England is magical. All the visual restraint of winter – the bare trees and snow – is broken open into a riot of flowering trees. Each spring, I am surprised by joy seeing the yellow forsythia lining the roads or the showy magnolias crowned in dark pink.
Spring pulls our attention to places we’ve forgotten, asks us to re-see the landscape, to be immersed in beauty and restored.
Poetry does that too, shifting the familiar landscape of language to make new connections, heighten our ability to see what has been previously unseen.
In the poem above, Williams coins ferncool. It carries the unfurling of ferns in their shaded places, that particular bright, clear green, into the tree’s flowering. All of spring – the moss, dampness, fiddleheads, violets, cool soil – is packed into that coining. And like spring, vibrating between winter and summer, ferncool oscillates between modifying and being, both adjective and noun.
That word seems the essence of spring, and yet, when Williams wrote a second version of this poem, in an experiment with minimalism, he dropped it.* The second version begins by placing two prepositions together.
Among of
green
stiff old bright
Prepositions, as a part of speech, indicate relationships. And here, at least for me, I feel pulled into this poem. It’s no longer just the tree branches or the flowers among the greenery, but myself held, surprised by joy, surprised by my own spring.
Our word spring comes from the Old English, springan (to burst forth, to leap), which can be traced back to the Sanskrit sprhayati, (desires eagerly).
What do you desire from yourself today?
What prepositions do you want to use with yourself? How are you with, among, of, beside yourself?
Let yourself be surprised by joy today, by your willingness to re-see yourself leaping, growing, alive.
Tell me about your springtime --
In flowering,
Emily
* To see both versions of his poem, go here.