Most poems about spring are poems about beginnings, so it is a small shock to find one that hands the season over to the elderly. Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "Iris Are Not for Children" makes a quiet argument: April's flowers belong to old people, and summer's belong to the young. The poem never says why in plain terms. It lets the flowers and the weather do the explaining, and the explanation turns out to be a meditation on time, desire, and what it means to hold on to something small.
The first stanza sets up the claim with a pair of colours, the iris and the "jonquils with their cups of yellow fire." The phrase is lovely and a little odd, since fire is exactly what the old are said to lack: these are people "whose veins no longer blossom with desire." Notice how the poem borrows the language of flowers for the body. Veins blossom; years drip. The stanza ends with its most memorable image, years "measured out like raindrops dripping / Slower and slower from an April briar." That simile does two jobs at once. It gives us April weather, thin and cool, and it gives us a clock, with the drops falling at longer and longer intervals. The slowing is built into the line itself, since the repeated "slower and slower" makes the reader's voice linger.
The second stanza swings to the opposite pole. Summer roses, August lilies, "meadows ripen," "a sea of daisies hot and white." Everything here is heavy with heat and fullness, and the poet's word for the season is plain: "delight." Children are "concerned with these far more than April," and the verb choice is telling. Children are not described as admiring summer but as being concerned with it, absorbed, the way the young are absorbed by whatever is happening right now. The bluebird's "pattern" shadowing the daisies is a nice precise touch, a moving shape across a glaring field, and it makes summer feel like something to run through rather than sit and look at.
Structurally, the poem is held together by a steady rhythm and an interlocking rhyme scheme. Each stanza runs six lines, and the rhymes echo across them rather than snapping shut in couplets. In the first stanza, "fire," "desire" and "briar" chime at the ends of lines two, four and six, while "playing" and "dripping" sit in the first and fifth positions with no matching partner. The effect is a little unfinished, like the old people's own grasp on the season. The lines are long and loose, mostly iambic pentameter with some give in it, so the voice sounds conversational rather than formal, closer to someone telling you something they have noticed than to a speaker delivering a verdict.
The final stanza is where the poem stops arguing and starts watching. It repeats its opening line almost exactly, a refrain that turns the claim into something like a ritual, and then it follows the old into the street. The image is specific and tender: they are "clasping at these first flowers as though they held / The last fragment of April they shall hold." The repetition of "hold" is the heart of it. The first holds the flowers in a hand, while the second holds the season, and perhaps life itself, in a future the poem does not name. The word "fragment" is the quiet blow. April is already broken into pieces by the time it reaches them.
Then comes the last image, the strangest one. In their eyes is "a dream that takes them / Across the street and through the wind and cold." The poem does not tell us what the dream is. Judging by everything before it, it seems to be a memory of desire, or of April as it once was, strong enough to carry a slow body through bad weather. Spring in this poem is both a flower and a motive.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of the obvious. It would be easy to pity the old, or to scold the young. Instead, Hicky simply notices that each age has its season and its flowers, and that the people who need the small, early blooms most are the ones with the least time to wait for summer.