Post #1870452

2026-04-27 15:24 UTC

A cold spring: the violet was flawed on the lawn. For two weeks or more the trees hesitated; the little leaves waited, carefully indicating their characteristics. Finally a grave green dust settled over your big and aimless hills. One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine, on the side of one a calf was born. The mother stopped lowing and took a long time eating the after-birth, a wretched flag, but the calf got up promptly and seemed inclined to feel gay. -- Excerpt from Elizabeth Bishop, &quot;A Cold Spring&quot; Full poem available here: https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/bishope/ColdSpring.html #ElizabethBishop #TodaysPoem #Poetry

Replies (1)

@NearerAndFarther@techhub.social 2026-04-27 15:32

Elizabeth Bishop has been keeping me poetry'd the last bit of time, just one here and there from her collected works. It's raining right now and so "a cold spring" seemed apt. I love the four instances of "your" in this poem because they say so much, although that so much varies depending on the flicker of the light. They are possessives --- but as such they feel almost desperate. For the world described, and the poem doing the describing, would function just fine without them. And yet, that's also what they do: they put the bigness and distance of the world in perspective and proximity. So while the world might do just fine without them, the poem, on the other hand, would certainly *not* be the same poem without them. Drop four words and something would be lost.

Open ##2870740