22 pages • 44 minutes read
Spring
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Themes
Disillusionment
Bitter knowledge beats at the center of “Spring.” The speaker bemoans how frivolous April's beauty seems now that death has touched her life. The opening lines set up how the speaker's views have changed. She asks April why it has returned “again” (Line 1). “Again” makes it clear that the speaker and April have met before. The second line explains why the speaker asks April about April's reason for coming: “Beauty is not enough” (Line 2). Millay's sequence illustrates that the speaker once highly valued April's beauty. However, the phrase “not enough” implies expectation and contrast. It also signals that the speaker's viewpoint changed since April's last visit when beauty was enough, so she did not need to ask why it came. Millay's speaker doubles down with the phrase “can no longer” (Line 3). Once, spring's red “little leaves opening” provided her joy and peace. However, spring's beauty “is not enough” to “quiet me” (Lines 2-3).
The speaker then says she knows death exists under the beautiful spring scenery. She feels bitter because the season's livelihood only makes death more apparent to her in its seeming absence. Spring cannot distract her from “the brains of men / eaten by maggots” (Lines 11-12).
Millay demonstrates how death alters a person's worldview and moods. Death reveals life's brevity and the inevitability of painful loss. Mourners then find it hard to resume their old outlooks and hopes since they now know the end awaits. The speaker's life feels purposeless and empty because she knows death will come and hollow out a person.
Millay ends the poem by repeating the phrase “is not enough” in a new context (Line 16). She sandwiches the expression after the speaker declares life as meaningless. April's beauty is not just inadequate but a frustrating burden for the speaker. Instead of asking what else April can offer, the speaker now complains that April's relentless, mindless cheer adds to her suffering. The speaker's experience disillusions her to the point where she cannot even fathom feeling the way she once did toward life.
Loss of Human Potential
As an anti-war poem, “Spring” highlights one of the reasons mass death hits people so hard. Millay fills her piece with images of regrowth and splendor. The speaker even implies that April exists to create beauty in the second line. The sun's warmth makes the perfect conditions for growth. Over the month, plants bloom and make the land “smell […] good” (Line 8).
However, spring's renewal leaves a bitter taste in the speaker's mouth. While crocus grows, the dead men rot. The speaker mentions that maggots eat men's brains. The speaker targets the brain as opposed to the heart or the eyes because the brain houses a person's thoughts and personality. When maggots eat a man's brain, they destroy everything about him. The men will never get the chance to share their ideas or experience the exuberant growth of April again. The men's absence begs the question of how the world may have been changed or influenced by their contributions had they not died. The contrast between spring's unimpeded bounty and the consumption of corpses highlights the injustice of the men's loss. Why does April, which only seems to offer beauty, get to return and not these men?
While Millay abstains from listing hypothetical benefits, she lets the reader know their survival would have left a positive impact through the speaker's attitude. The speaker once found beauty and “quiet” in “the redness / Of little leaves opening” (Lines 3-4). However, the men's deaths jaded her toward spring as its beauty only makes her note death's absence more as if the brightness is overcompensating for the tragedies. Thus, she is resentful of spring's callous beauty and labels it “an idiot” ignorant of people's grief (Line 18).
Anti-War
Audiences can read the plants and maggots as stand-ins for people benefitting from the death of these young men. Millay wrote “Spring” in response to the mass death caused by World War I and the subsequent Spanish Flu epidemic. Competing colonial interests, nationalist movements, and political alliances helped set the stage for the War. Some people began to view the War as innocent soldiers and civilians dying needlessly to benefit only a few already powerful.
Millay, then a pacifist, expresses that the winning nations' gains and peace came at the expense of their men. Flies use corpses as hosts and nourishment for their young maggots. The maggots have to consume bodies to grow into flies. For a nation to win a war, its military must kill as many enemies as possible. The world continues into spring and peace, but Millay's speaker knows its beauty grows out of the nutrients provided by the dead. April seems to want to distract people from war's cost by “strewing flowers” and making it seem “that there is no death” (Lines 18, 9).
Time
The speaker in “Spring” fixates on the quick speed of time's cycles. She opens the poem by remarking that April has returned “again” (Line 1). The speaker notes that she knows what spring offers: beauty, tiny red leaf buds, the sun, crocuses, and pleasing scents (Lines 2-4, 6-8). She intimately knows spring's patterns because it is an expected part of the year.
April's return also brings dread. The month brings renewed life and a needed escape from winter. Despite no “apparent […] death,” its cyclical return reminds her of death (Line 9). If April returns, it must leave at one point. As time moves forward, it moves the speaker closer to death.
Even after death, the world continues to move on, as depicted in the maggots eating the corpse's bodies. As a result, the constant progression of time makes the world always seem incomplete and futile. She compares life to “an empty cup” waiting to be filled and “a flight of uncarpeted stairs” (Lines 15). There is always a next step a person might not finish.
The poem's end drives home the speaker's sense of futility at the passage of time. Yearly, April runs downhill, a frequent figure of speech for endings. It moves everyone further toward their ends.
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By Edna St. Vincent Millay
