Genevieve Taggard wrote “Spring Touch” in the early twentieth century, at a time when American poets were paring down Romantic nature verse into something sharper and more physical. Born in 1894, Taggard was a lyrical poet with a social conscience, but in this compact poem she turns her ear toward the body’s response to spring. The result is less a landscape description than an encounter: the speaker does not stand apart from the season but wades into it, and the season seems to wade back.
The poem opens with a landscape already unsteady: “tender-mad” meadows, “wobbling lambs,” trees that are “tipsy” and “leaned like foam on green, wind-gullied seas.” Everything sways, tilts, or spills. Spring is not gentle here; it is intoxicating. The central idea emerges as the poem shifts from animals and trees to a direct address: “you, swimming the sky / Waist deep in surf of apple-blossoms.” That “you” might be a lover, or spring itself, or both at once. By the final lines, the speaker is bodily involved: “I, / Sweet to your thigh, / Take the new tingle of your froth of seeds.” Spring’s fertility is felt as a touch, a tingling current between two bodies and between the speaker and the season.
The poem’s construction intensifies that blurring of boundaries. Taggard uses a loose iambic pulse, with many lines expanding to pentameter while two short lines—“The tipsy trees” and “Sweet to your thigh”—interrupt the flow like quick breaths or sudden balance lost. Rhyme works in two main clusters: the long i of lie, sky, I, and thigh, and the sharper ee sound of weeds, trees, seas, leads, and seeds. These paired sounds give the poem a forward surge, as if the rhyme itself is seeding and reseeding. Repetition also creates motion: “The pale moth flutters where the pale moth leads” doubles the image so the eye follows a flickering path, while “pale” links the moth to the foam and blossoms.
Imagery and word choices draw the natural and the human into one field. “Milky weeds” suggests both lambs nursing and a white sap that runs through the meadow. “Froth of seeds” fuses sea foam, apple blossoms, and reproductive energy into a single white effervescence. The word “tingle” is crucial because it names the poem’s effect: sensation before thought, a prickling on the skin. “Waist deep” turns the sky into water, the apple blossoms into surf, and the beloved’s body into a shoreline the speaker can touch. Even “sweet to your thigh” is intimate but not explicit, locating desire in the meeting of skin and the new season.
What makes “Spring Touch” significant is the way it compresses an entire season into nine lines of tactile, unstable energy. Taggard refuses to treat spring as a postcard. Instead, she lets it enter the body, making renewal feel both ecstatic and a little unsteady. In an era when women poets were assertively writing about desire and embodiment, this poem stands out for its ease: the speaker does not apologize for wanting to be inside the “surf” of the season. The final image is not of looking at blossoms but of taking in their seed-froth, as if spring’s touch cannot be complete until it is shared between one body and another.