The golden willows lift their boughs the sun to sift: Their sprays they droop to screen the sky with veils of green, A floating cage of song, where feathered lovers throng.
How the delicious notes come bubbling from their throats! Full and sweet how they are shed like round pearls from a thread! The motions of their flight are wishes of delight.
Hearing their song I trace the secret of their grace. Ah, could I this fair time so fashion into rhyme, The poem that I sing would be the voice of spring.
Cold is the winter day, misty and dark: The sunless sky with faded gleams is rent: And patches of thin snow outlying, mark The landscape with a drear disfigurement.
The trees their mournful branches lift aloft: The oak with knotty twigs is full of trust, With bud-thronged bough the cherry in the croft; The chestnut holds her gluey knops upthrust.
No birds sing, but the starling chaps his bill And chatters mockingly; the newborn lambs Within their strawbuilt fold beneath the hill Answer with plaintive cry their bleating dams.
Their voices melt in welcome dreams of spring, Green grass and leafy trees and sunny skies: My fancy decks the woods, the thrushes sing, Meadows are gay, bees hum and scents arise.
And God the Maker doth my heart grow bold To praise for wintry works not understood, Who all the worlds and ages doth behold, Evil and good as one, and all as good.
Flame-throated robin on the topmost bough Of the leafless oak, what singest thou? Hark! he telleth how-- 'Spring is coming now; Spring is coming now.
Now ruddy are the elm-tops against the blue sky, The pale larch donneth her jewelry; Red fir and black fir sigh, And I am lamenting the year gone by.
The bushes where I nested are all cut down, They are felling the tall trees one by one, And my mate is dead and gone, In the winter she died and left me lone.
She lay in the thicket where I fear to go; For when the March-winds after the snow The leaves away did blow, She was not there, and my heart is woe:
And sad is my song, when I begin to sing, As I sit in the sunshine this merry spring: Like a withered leaf I cling To the white oak-bough, while the wood doth ring.
Spring is coming now, the sun again is gay; Each day like a last spring's happy day.'-- Thus sang he; then from his spray He saw me listening and flew away.