Mary Webb’s speaker watches a western landscape on the edge of spring and imagines how soon it will change. Birdsong will return to quiet, untouched places—the wren’s call like a small glass bell among green, rustling branches. The plain will look broad and red in sunlight, then long and lean under the moon. The real subject is the feeling of the season’s arrival: at dark, still dawns, the almost inaudible whisper of grass beginning to grow. That strangeness fills the speaker with a joy so strong it feels like pain, arriving without a clear reason between daybreak and nightfall, carried in the cold, clean smell of wet starlight. The mood is hushed, expectant, and reverent—spring here is not loud or decorative but mysterious and almost sacred.
Spring in the West — Summary
Soon amid the inviolable places
Will green, rustling steeples chime again
With the sweet, glassy bell-notes of the wren.
Soon the plain shall lie beneath blue spaces —
Bold and broad and ruddy in the sun,
Long and lean to the moon when day is done.
Soon will come the strange, heart-lifting season When through the dark, still dawns, where nothing was, Steals the mysterious whisper of growing grass;
And a joy like pain possesses the soul, without reason, Between the budding of day and the lapse of night, With the clear, cold scent of wet starlight.