Walter de la Mare’s “Spring” opens with a memory that feels close enough to touch: “Once when my life was young, / I, too, with Spring’s bright face / By mine, walked softly along, / Pace to his pace.” The speaker recalls youth as an actual walk beside the season. Spring is not scenery but a companion with a face and a gait. The phrase “I, too” quietly suggests that Spring was already in motion, and the speaker was allowed to join. The wording “my life was young” rather than “I was young” already creates a slight distance from the self, a hint of the loss to come.
The poem’s music reinforces that memory of walking. Each stanza is a quatrain of mainly three-beat lines, with a shortened, indented fourth line — “Pace to his pace,” “Then would he shed,” “Their quarry see,” “Now that I’m old.” The pattern feels like a steady stride that repeatedly pauses or falters. Rhymes alternate, some full (“face”/“pace,” “may”/“way,” “cold”/“old”) and some half-rhymes (“young”/“along,” “outspread”/“shed”). That slight unevenness keeps the poem from becoming too smooth, just as the “wild face” disturbs the pretty scene.
In the second stanza, the landscape turns into light and fire. The “crimson may” — hawthorn blossom — becomes “a clear flame outspread,” arching over the happy way. Spring is not soft or pretty here; it is radiant, almost overwhelming. The verb “shed” matters because it means both to pour out light and to let something fall. Spring sheds “wonderful light” from a “wild face,” and the adjective “wild” changes the mood. What had seemed like a bright companion now carries an untamed energy. “Strangely” at the start of the third stanza admits that the memory is odd, not simply idyllic.
The simile that follows is the poem’s dark heart: “Like hounds that keen in chase / Their quarry see.” The light Spring casts on the speaker is compared to the sudden alertness of hunting dogs when they sight their prey. It is not a comfortable image. It suggests being singled out, watched, pursued. In youth the speaker may have felt that intense attention as wonderful, but the simile carries a threat. “Keen” works doubly, meaning eager and sharp, and the word will return in the final stanza as “keenness cold,” where it has become a blade rather than an appetite.
The last quatrain turns sharply: “Oh, sorrow now to know / What shafts, what keenness cold / His are to pierce me through, / Now that I’m old.” The speaker no longer walks beside Spring; he knows what the season carries. “Shafts” suggests arrows or spears, but also sunbeams — the same light that once felt like a gift is now a weapon. “Keenness cold” yokes sharpness with cold, two qualities that hurt. The final line is devastating because it supplies the reason: age has altered the relationship. What the speaker once matched pace for pace now leaves him behind, and Spring’s renewal can pierce him with the memory of what he cannot keep.
The poem is significant because it takes a conventional subject — spring as youth and rebirth — and exposes its double edge. De la Mare does not announce that spring is cruel; he lets the remembered light slowly become a hunter’s gaze. The “sorrow now to know” is the sorrow of experience, the understanding that the brightness the speaker once walked beside was also always a power that wounds.