Spring is late, and the poem never announces it. It lets a butterfly do the work. On the first clear day in weeks, butterflies "walk slowly over / the dry forest floor." Butterflies are supposed to fly, so the verb tells us something is wrong with the weather. The cold seems to have grounded them, and the first stanza hints at this without explaining. The title, "Lines for a cold May," names the problem, but the five short stanzas that follow are less about the cold than about everything that carries on in spite of it.
Each stanza is a small, separate snapshot, and the poem moves through them like a walker who keeps stopping. The ferns come first. They are "interrupted," their "delicate tips... still clenched / against the cold." The adjective "clenched" turns the unfurling fern into a fist, so the plant seems to be holding its breath. Then a gnat "clings to a bobbing / pink lady's-slipper," and the line break after "bobbing" makes the reader's eye bob too. The wind that keeps the ferns shut is the same wind that swings the flower, and a tiny insect hangs on to it. In the fourth stanza the vernal pond "quakes under / a coat of leaf-pieces," and "tent caterpillars" stand alone as a heading before it. The poem doesn't spell out the connection. Judging by the juxtaposition, the caterpillars are feeding in the trees above, and the debris is what reaches the water. The reader has to assemble the cause from the clues, just as a person would on a real walk.
The form suits this method. Every stanza has three lines, and most follow a short-long-short pattern that comes close to the five-seven-five rhythm of haiku without being bound to it. "Interrupted ferns'" and "against the cold" are quick and clipped, while the middle lines stretch out to seven or eight syllables, and the speaker's own line, "I bend down for a closer look," is the longest. There is no rhyme and no punctuation apart from an apostrophe or two, so the stanzas sit side by side like entries in a field notebook. Sound does some of the work that rhyme would otherwise do. The hard c and k sounds in "clenched," "cold," "clings," "quakes" and "coat" give the poem a brittle, chilly texture. Then the last line loosens into "such a fresh green globe," where the soft, rounded g and gl sounds feel almost warm.
That last stanza is where the poem turns. Until now the speaker has been invisible, and the poem has been all observation. In the final stanza an "I" appears, and he does something small and physical: he bends down. The oak apple gall at his feet is a round growth on an oak, and the poem sets it against everything that came before. The ferns are clenched, the butterflies slow, the gnat barely hanging on, and the pond is shaking. The gall is simply "fresh" and "green" and whole. The word "such" is the only moment of open feeling in the poem, a small exclamation of pleasure. Where the earlier images show life being held back, this one shows it already complete, a sphere with no interruption in it.
The poem is significant for how modestly it makes its point. It makes no speech about nature or climate or hope. It just trusts attention: a cold May looks different when you crouch down and watch the walking butterflies, the shut ferns and the leaf-littered pond. The title promises a season of lack, but the poem finds the woods crowded with small activity. The sequence also ends on a gesture, someone bending closer, that suggests that noticing is its own reward. A reader finishing the poem is likely to look down at the next patch of ground more carefully.