The Hounds of Spring and the First Crocus

  I do love the images of white hounds in poetry and art....the  sculptured hounds of the Cluny tapestries and medieval manuscripts. The images of them joyfully leaping in the dark woods in their pursuits or when they turn their elegant attention to their mistress with her unicorn.

And the light and the dark.....the malevolent black hounds running down their victims in the side streets of London.  The huge black dogs following me down a country road in a Florida  twilight.

The white hounds are the delight of a chase, the agile mind finding a clue, the discovery of the first crocus of spring.  The black hounds are revenge and relentless violence.  Hatred bounding down the dark city streets. The hound of heaven and the Hound of Baskerville.

Here's  a section of a poem where I have been muttering the first line to myself all last week.  Ever since I peeked out to see snow covering my tulips and crocus last Wednesday morning.  In a city that often goes snowless the whole winter, a March snow is peculiar and eventful.  However, my primroses and crocus have survived the cruel blast.

            Atalanta

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

    When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
    The mother of months in meadow or plain
    Fills the shadows and windy places
    With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
    And the brown bright nightingale amorous
    Is half assuaged for Itylus,
    For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
    The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
              
    Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
    Maiden most perfect, lady of light,
    With a noise of winds and many rivers,
    With a clamor of waters, and with might;
    Bind on thy sandals, I thou most fleet,
    Over the splendor and speed of thy feet;
    For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
    Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.
              
    Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
    Fold our hands round her knees and cling?
    O that man’s heart were as fire and could spring to her,
    Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!
                        For the stars and the winds are unto her          
    As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;
    For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
    And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing.
              
    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 remembered is grief forgotten,
    And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
    And in green underwood and cover
    Blossom by blossom the spring begin.........

And I will be onto the next image......golden apples of the sun.....poor Atalanta.

Comments

[Jack DiBenedetto]

My computer crashed and I lost my address book. Your site gets better and better! I've added to my blog.
Jack