The crocus springs into its new world with fertile cheer, and daffodils beam spherical radiance seducing muscles to smiles. Spring has come in joy and sadness. I can’t help but think of sorrow. Is that true?

There is failed promise, dashed hope. Ernest Hemingway captured it, as Hemingway does. Writing in his 20s from Paris, he notes, “In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
From Ernest Hemingway’s “False Spring”

Full of youthful steps, a spongy head, and brooding shoulders, Hemingway passes a day of false spring by going through the routine. He is slowed by obligations, limitations, and dependencies, which proclaim our adult status.

Hemingway also feels a loss, an ache: “Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring.”

Spring was promised and unfulfilled.

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a writer who felt the intensity of nature, paints spring in similar strokes. Like Hemingway, he enjoyed meaningful company but preferred solitude.

In 1909, Rilke wrote of solitude’s greatness, our fear of it, our need for it, and our quickened temptation to forgo it if only to be in any company be it “ever trivial or banal.”

Perhaps those are precisely the hours when solitude grows, for its growth is painful like the growth of boys and sad like the beginning of spring. But that must not put you off. What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness.
From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet

The painful growth of spring?

Indeed the warmth, the light, the presence of flowers, and the joy and comfort of these wonderful, faithful human companions would make us happy.

Maybe it’s not their presence but their fickleness that stings. “We loiter in winter when it is already spring,” noted Thoreau in Walden.

The metaphor expands in the hands of British essayist Laurie Lee, this slow, easing spring, early to appear and quick to fade. In his elegy of time and place that only exists in memory, Lee faces spring like a foe:

Almost overnight comes gusty March and the first real rousing of spring—a time of blustering alarms and nudging elbows, of frantic and scrambling awakenings. It is a bare world still, but a world of preparation and display against the naked face of the countryside. The cold east wind puts an edge to activity.
From Laurie Lee’s “The English Spring”

Although March is the first of “hot certainties,” it continues to claw and rage, furious and wild.

But spring’s cruelest trick, Lee continues, is yet to come: “[April] is the month of the spring’s sweetest pain—the pain of awakening and having to live once more after the anesthetic of winter, the agony of sap returning to the limbs, of numb hands held to the fire.”

No wonder T. S. Eliot called it the cruelest month.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
From T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

Arthur Rimbaud wrote something similar fifty years earlier. In his confessional and self-exploratory poems, Rimbaud called winter his worst season. “I dread winter because it is the season of comfort.” As we are settled in our warmth, layers, and comfort, spring shakes it up. Stirring memory and desire.

There is life and birth and death in spring. There are lambs and rains and feasts and withdrawals, resurrections and divination. Time is compressed and expanded. It contains all of our joy and slows down, so we notice minutia. Like falling in love. Heartbreak. Falling in love. Heartbreak. The seasons of which we all know only too well.

I’m forced (happily) to turn to David Whyte, a masterful American poet and chef of words who has written a miscellany of standard terms and their complex meanings. Of “heartbreak,” he writes:

Heartbreak is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight.
From David Whyte’s Consolations

Is spring a cruel temptress luring us out of our winterized selves? One would think so, reading all these individuals I mentioned.

After I left home for college, my parents introduced each early March phone call with news on the fruit crop of Western Michigan, for the vulnerable blossoms, for the vulnerable trees, for the vulnerable farmers. If there was a late frost, I knew immediately: pain and sadness from Mom, anger and disbelief from Dad.

They all ran towards spring, helpless and hopeful, and spring let them down.

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot. […] Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete’s quick but abstract ability to let go.
From David Whyte’s Consolations

Who doesn’t run toward spring with open arms and wide, receptive hearts? Gathered flowers in our arms. The longer days, the broken ground, the flow of life.

The guilt lies in us, too. We are numbed from winter, anxious for warmth and light, we run towards spring expecting it to be summer, and it’s not. Spring isn’t cruel or heartless. It’s spring. Will we never understand that nature seeks less of us as a partner than we do of her?

I’ve taken many early spring walks in forests, marveling at plants and blooms, only to get nasty sunburns on the tips of my ears because the leaves had yet to form. My need for love has consistently outpaced nature’s readiness to give.

Spring keeps us young—youthful hope and love. Run towards the forces that open the soil and expand the afternoon—a gleam in spherical daffodil splendor. Run towards spring and embrace it fully.

Though it may hurt, all the best lovers do.