Harriet Monroe is best known as the founder and first editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the Chicago journal that, from 1912 onward, gave early space to Frost, Eliot, Sandburg, and other modern voices. Her own poems, however, often stayed close to nineteenth-century lyric forms. “March,” published in her 1914 collection You and I, reveals a poet practicing what her magazine preached: clear, direct, energetic writing rooted in the world outside the window.
From the opening couplet, Monroe sets fragility against force. She sees snow-drops “flutter / Their white wings in the gale,” turning the small white flowers into moths or birds tossed by a hard wind. The choice of “wings” rather than “petals” makes them seem alive and vulnerable, while “gale” insists that this is no gentle thaw. Likewise, the robin’s song is not simply pretty; it is a “gallant tale,” as though the bird were a knight or herald refusing to be silenced. In the first four lines, spring is present but embattled, sending out tiny signals through winter’s noise.
Then the speaker moves from intimate observation to a wider call: “Look where the rash wind chases / With clouds the climbing sun!” The word “rash” gives the wind a personality—impulsive, headlong, almost troublesome—and “chases” turns the sky into a game. The day “makes merry faces” while “her gray steeds run,” so the clouds become horses and the daylight itself becomes a laughing rider. Monroe does not describe the weather as if it were a painting; she stages it as a performance full of motion and mood.
That performance depends on the poem’s short, breathless music. Each stanza follows an ABAB rhyme scheme, and most lines carry three quick stresses, producing the briskness of a walk in the wind. The rhymes push the eye and ear forward: “flutter,” “gale,” “utter,” “tale” alternate delicate and forceful sounds. The verbs, too, refuse to sit still—“flutter,” “chases,” “run,” “swinging,” “roll and rail.” Even the word “rail” does double work: the waves rush and also complain, as if winter is being argued out of the landscape.
The final stanza widens the frame before snapping it shut. Brown trees swing bare against the sky, and the curled waves roll and rail. Then the poem breaks into its exclamation: “Ho!—madcap Spring comes singing / On frosty Winter’s trail!” Here “madcap” matters most. Spring is not patient, soft, or gradual; it is a wild, laughing pursuer chasing a frosty fugitive. The closing line makes the season a chase scene rather than a calendar date, and the poem’s earlier verbs finally make sense as hoofbeats and footfalls.
“March” matters less for technical invention than for its clarifying energy. Monroe’s editorial project was built on the belief that American poetry needed to wake up, to look at its own landscapes and listen to its own speech. This small lyric does exactly that. It turns an ordinary seasonal shift into something worth shouting about, yet keeps the shout inside careful rhyme and rhythm. The result is not experimental, but it is alive—a gusty, gallant, madcap piece of American weather.