All this juice and all this joy

This past week I reread Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Published in 1911, it’s a children’s story about two spoiled, disagreeable, unloved, sickly, privileged English cousins (a boy and a girl) who are transformed by the power of nature in a hidden garden on a Yorkshire estate. (Burnett was a prolific author of fiction for both adults and kids; her initial foray into the latter market was Little Lord Fauntleroy.) They’re helped by a local peasant lad and a curmudgeonly old gardener; oh, and there's a robin. Essentially, in reviving a walled-off, unloved (in fact—actively hated), neglected garden, they are restored to humanity.

To be precise, what I read is The Annotated Secret Garden. A good deal of the annotations analyze the literary allusions (which—I dunno; does using the word “wuthering” to indicate Yorkshire winds always mean a writer is specifically linking to Wuthering Heights?) and point out religious and spiritual metaphors. (Which, again—okay.) But Burnett does set preponderance of the story during Spring, when the seemingly lifeless moors are at first a dismal and alien landscape for the girl brought from India when her parents die, but she comes to appreciate it through her interaction with both the local lad and working in the garden. She sees things growing from little green spikes poking out of the earth to brilliantly colored daffodils, columbine and lilies.

And here's the thing: there’s just something about the beauty and resilience of plants that restores your equilibrium. Despite the best efforts of humans to destroy it with war, pollution, urban sprawl and just plain arrogant destruction, nature does her best to resist and persist, showing us every Spring that she’ll take whatever bit is available—even if it’s just a weak place in concrete—to push up life.

So today, in grateful recognition of the recuperative power of gardens (whether designed by mortals or immortals), I’ll share a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets. Convert to Catholicism, Jesuit priest, exceptional poet of any age.

In the past you’ve had some of his sonnets for Easter, and his “Pied Beauty”, which takes delight in the parti-colored elements of nature. But for Gratitude Monday today, here’s “Spring”.

“Spring”

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.      

 

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