Jackson opens by picking a quarrel with the Romans, or at least with their calendar. March takes its name from Mars, the god of war, and she bristles at the label: the "warring ancients" called it "the month of war,--as if in their fierce ways / Were any month of peace!" The aside is wry. People who fought so constantly, she hints, were hardly in a position to blame one month for violence. From the start, the poem sets a name against what the speaker actually sees.
The first eight lines concede that March is noisy. "The wild / Winds clash and clang," and the hard, clattering consonants make the sound audible. The line break after "wild" also flings "Winds" onto the next line like a sudden gust. The damage is vivid: "broken boughs are piled / As feet of writhing trees." The trees become suffering bodies, and the fallen branches lie at their feet like wreckage. Yet the speaker insists she finds "no war in Nature." Her evidence is the violets, which "raise / Their heads without affright, without amaze, / And sleep through all the din, as sleeps a child." The repeated "without" gives the line a lulling, lullaby rhythm, and the inverted "as sleeps a child" slows it further. Noise, the poem argues, is not the same as threat.
The form supports this. Jackson uses the Petrarchan pattern: an octave rhymed ABBAABBA, then a sestet rhymed CDCDEE. The octave's two rhyme sounds keep returning, closing in on each other like a shelter around the violets. Beneath the storm-tossed content, the iambic pentameter stays steady, so the verse itself is calm while the weather rages. The final couplet, "bear" and "year," is only a near rhyme to a modern ear, but it still lands as a quiet click of closure.
The turn arrives at line nine: "And he who watches well may well discern." The doubled "well" slows the line and makes it sound like advice. The poem now addresses anyone patient enough to look past the din. What that watcher finds is "sweet expectation in each living thing." The vocabulary has changed completely, from "clash" and "clang" to "sweet," "yearn," "secret joy." The earth becomes a woman, a "pregnant mother" who is "hidden" and "sacred" and who carries something unseen. March's violence is recast as the stage before birth. The boisterous winds are part of the waiting, not an attack.
The last two lines carry the poem's richest image: the earth "doth bear / Annunciation lilies for the year." The Annunciation is the angel's announcement to Mary that she will bear a child, and lilies are the flower traditionally shown in paintings of that scene. The Christian feast of the Annunciation falls on 25 March, so the reference grows out of the month itself. Jackson merges two meanings of "announcement": the angel's message and the first signs of spring. Her pregnant earth echoes the pregnant Mary, which lifts the season's quiet preparation into something close to holy. The closing word "year" also widens the poem's view, from a single stormy month to the whole cycle that March sets in motion.
The poem's appeal lies in how it corrects a reputation without denying the facts. She never pretends March is gentle, and the broken boughs stay on the ground. What she disputes is the interpretation, the idea that a loud month must be a hostile one. The archaic "doth" and the formal sonnet shape lend this gentle argument some dignity.
The title also tells us this sonnet belongs to a larger sequence, a "calendar" in which each month presumably gets its own portrait. In that company, March is a clever choice for a challenge: the month most easily mistaken for a fighter is the one most busily preparing for life. The poem's lasting lesson is about attention. The violets sleep through the storm because they know what the hurried observer does not, and the poem invites us to look as closely as they seem to.