Heliophage

William Carlos Williams, austere but dispositive in Spring and All

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

John Updike’s faith, and doubt, refusing seasonal metaphor in Seven Stanzas at Easter

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

Philip Larkin, the weight of last lost years uncharacteristically leavened in The Trees (audio)

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.