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Spring Poems

Classic and contemporary poems to celebrate the advent of spring.

By The Editors

Detail of "Giverny" by Sara Katz

Illustration by Sara Katz

FLOWERS

- Lilacs
Amy Lowell
- When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
Walt Whitman
- Daisy Time
Marjorie Pickthall
- To Daffodils
Robert Herrick

SPRING IN LOVE

- The Spring
Thomas Carew
- After the Winter
Claude McKay
- Song: Calm was the even, and clear was the sky
John Dryden
- Dear One Absent This Long While
Lisa Olstein
- Song: Spring
William Shakespeare

JOY IN SPRING

- More Than Enough
Marge Piercy
- The Late Wisconsin Spring
John Koethe
- Ode on the Spring
Thomas Gray
- [in Just-]
E. E. Cummings
- Spring, the sweet spring
Thomas Nashe
- Today
Billy Collins
- Three Haiku, Two Tanka
Philip Appleman

SPIRITUAL

- Lines Written in Early Spring
William Wordsworth
- “Feuerzauber”
Louis Untermeyer
- Swifts
Anne Stevenson
- Spring
Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Earthly Meditations
Robert Wrigley

MELANCHOLY

- Spring
Edna St. Vincent Millay
- The Enkindled Spring
D. H. Lawrence
- In Perpetual Spring
Amy Gerstler
- A Color of the Sky
Tony Hoagland
- Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day
Delmore Schwartz
- May
Jonathan Galassi
- Penumbrae
John Updike

YOUTH IN SPRING

- Spring
Elfriede Jelinek
- Sonnet 7: How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth
John Milton
- Easter in Pittsburgh
James Laughlin