D. H. Lawrence’s “The Enkindled Spring” reads less like a gentle pastoral than like a controlled explosion. Written in the years around the First World War and published in his 1917 collection *Look! We Have Come Through!*, the poem comes from a writer deeply interested in raw vitality and in the uneasy place of the human self within the non-human world. Lawrence turns the season of renewal into a furnace.
At its heart, the poem stages a confrontation between the impersonal energy of spring and the uncertain “I” who watches it. The opening stanza piles fire onto landscape: spring “bursts up in bonfires green,” with “Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes.” Thorn-blossom lifts not as delicate petals but as “wreaths of smoke,” and even the wet world of rushes is “watery, flickering.” The central idea is not simply that spring is powerful, but that this power makes the speaker question his place among the living. By the second stanza, the scene has become a “conflagration / Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth,” and the speaker admits, “I am amazed.” Then the poem tightens: sparks of growth turn into “Faces of people streaming across my gaze,” linking human presence to the blaze while also suggesting how easily individual faces dissolve into a rushing crowd. The final stanza asks the crucial question—“what fountain of fire am I among / This leaping combustion of spring?”—and answers it bleakly. The spirit is not fire at all, but “a shadow buffeted in the throng / Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.” Where spring burns with purpose, the human speaker feels unignited, knocked about, without direction.
Lawrence builds this uneasy energy into the poem’s movement. The three stanzas use an ABAB rhyme pattern, but the rhymes are often slant or delayed—“green” with “between,” “among” with “throng”—so the ear never quite settles. Lines are mostly iambic, yet Lawrence crowds in extra syllables and abrupt stresses: “Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes” feels dense and breathless, as if the syntax itself is sprouting too fast. Enjambment also works like kindling. The phrase “sparks that puff in wild gyration, / Faces of people streaming across my gaze” runs over the line break so that the sparks become faces before the reader can steady the image. The final stanza’s break suspends “My spirit is / tossed,” leaving the word “tossed” isolated at the edge of the verse, just as the speaker feels thrown about.
The poem’s vocabulary is deliberately narrow and incendiary: bonfires, emerald, flame, smoke, fume, conflagration, blaze, sparks, combustion. But against this recurring fire, Lawrence sets water and shadow. The “watery, flickering rushes” introduce a hiss of steam, and the closing “shadow” is the anti-image of the whole poem—dark, cool, insubstantial amid so much burning. This contrast matters. The speaker does not simply admire spring; he measures his own inner life against it and finds himself wanting. The “fountain of fire” he hopes to be never arrives.
The significance of “The Enkindled Spring” lies in this twist. Many nature poems praise spring for comfort or rebirth; Lawrence’s version is closer to awe tinged with dread. The poem makes spring’s vitality so intense that it becomes almost violent, and the human observer cannot automatically belong to it. That ambivalence—rapture at natural energy, unease at one’s own separateness—gives the poem a modern psychological edge. Lawrence’s controlled conflagration still burns because it refuses to pretend that the human self is at home in the natural world. Instead, it asks how to stand near such green fire without being reduced to a lost shadow.