Most poems about spring promise warmth. "New England Spring" opens by taking that promise away: "Spring never was as chill as it is now." The sentence is a complaint, but it is also a claim about memory, and the whole poem turns on the gap between what the speaker remembers and what the season actually delivers.
The first stanza sets up the memory. Earlier springs had a spiky, apple-green leaf that "leaped from the mulch / Against the brown impoverished debris," and a wind that sounded like "a canticle at earth's renewal." The verbs and nouns are generous here: leaping, singing, a religious word for a hymn of praise. Even the dead ground is vivid, since "impoverished debris" makes the brown litter look like something that was poor and is about to be enriched. That is what a good spring does, and the stanza lets us feel it before taking it away.
The second stanza begins with that withdrawal: "How long ago that was, as if to tease / All actuality." The past is not just gone but mocking, a memory that teases the present by being so much better than it. The snow and frost have left, so the chill that remains is not weather in the usual sense but "the astringent air." Astringent is a precise and slightly surprising choice. It is a word for something that puckers and dries, as an unripe fruit does, and it makes the cold feel like a taste in the mouth. The grass comes next, standing in clumps "Bristling and rough as an old man's chin." This is the poem's boldest image. Spring, the season of youth, is shown with the stubble of old age, and the simile quietly shifts the poem from the calendar to a human life. The speaker may be talking about more than the weather.
The final stanza turns upward, to the sky. The evening star "returns" and "Ascends once more to its elliptic node," a phrase borrowed from astronomy that sounds almost mathematical. Here the star is the one reliable thing in the poem, because it comes back on schedule as the spring on the ground does not. Yet it is not comforting. The star is "a frozen gem" that seems to "prink the atmosphere," a verb that suggests vain dressing-up, and it is "Endazzled on the surface where it climbs," a strange, coined-sounding word that blends dazzle and enamel and makes the light look hard and glassy. The beauty is real but cold, decorative rather than warming. The poem then closes by turning its opening line into a slightly different statement: "New England springs are colder than they were." The first line said spring was never this chill; the last says it is getting colder. The poem ends on a comparison with the past, not on any sense of arrival.
The form supports this mood of controlled disappointment. The lines are mostly iambic pentameter, the traditional English line, and they move with a dignified, unhurried steadiness. The poem does not rhyme in the expected way, though. Instead of tidy couplets we get a looser pattern of echoes, such as "leaf" and "debris," or "clumps" and "chin," so the sound texture is faintly off, as if the music is trying to return and cannot quite do it. Each stanza has five lines, an odd number, which also avoids the neat closure that an even stanza might give. The poem keeps tilting rather than settling.
What makes it worth reading is its refusal to be sentimental. A weaker poem might simply have said that spring is gloomy and that memories are warm. This one builds a precise scene, a sky and a field and a patch of mulch, and lets feelings of age, memory and decline gather inside the weather report. The cold is literal, but the poem suggests it is also something more personal, since the speaker's sense of what spring should be has outlasted spring itself.