Most poems about spring are content to be pretty. "Always Renaissance" is more interested in what spring costs. Its opening line makes the point at once: "It's the beginning / again . . . that is brave!" The bravery lies in beginning, and in beginning *again*, after the "cloistered grave / silence of winter." The ellipsis after "again" works like a held breath before the exclamation, as if the speaker had paused to look at how many times this has already happened.
The poem's central image is a drama of seeds and earth. The seeds are "little" and "new," and they come "tumbling" and "fumbling": two verbs that rhyme and make the seeds sound clumsy, eager and slightly comic, like children who have not yet learned to walk. Yet they are "fumbling with the mysteries of earth," a phrase that lifts the clumsiness into something close to the sacred. They do not understand what they are doing, but they do it anyway, and the poem asks us to admire that. They "clamor for birth," a loud, demanding verb. Nothing in this poem is gentle or passive; renewal here is noisy and insistent.
Over all this stands a female figure, "she," who "feeds" the seeds "the wind and the rain." The poem never names her, and that is part of its effect. She can be read as Earth or Nature, though the text leaves the identification open. Her "wise body glows / With the Wisdom that sows." The capital letters give "Wisdom" the weight of a force or principle rather than simple knowledge, and the repeated *w* and *s* sounds in "wise," "glows," "Wisdom" and "sows" bind her intelligence to her generosity. She nourishes and she plants, and the two acts are one.
The poem's structure mirrors its theme in an interesting way. The lines are short and irregular, with no steady metre, so the rhythm itself seems to tumble and fumble. The rhymes arrive in a pattern that keeps shifting: "grave" with "brave," "earth" with "birth," "feeds" with "needs" across the stanza break. The sentence spills across stanzas as if the seeds' energy cannot be contained by neat divisions. The clearest example is "as she feeds // them the wind and the rain," where the pronoun "them" is pushed over the white space onto the next stanza, a small formal enactment of something being nourished and carried forward.
Then the poem ends on a rhymed couplet, the tightest form it has used so far: "the hard crusts of earth, resent bars / That temper the passion to peer at the stars!" Here the mood turns. The seeds have "needs that strain" against the "hard crusts," and the word "resent" admits something the earlier lines only hint at: growth involves struggle against limits. The "bars" suggest confinement, almost a prison, and the closing image sets the earth-bound seed against the stars, with the verb "peer" suggesting a longing to see beyond one's own ground. The poem ends on that reach upward rather than on any arrival, which suits a poem whose title insists on continuity.
That title is worth a second look. "Renaissance" literally means rebirth, and by adding "Always," the poet turns a historical term into a natural law: rebirth is not one great moment but a permanent condition. The same energy that cracks the soil in spring can be read as the human impulse to learn, create and aspire. The poem never says so outright, but the seeds' "passion to peer at the stars" invites that reading, and it is an inference the imagery supports rather than something the text states.
What gives the poem its quiet significance is this refusal to sentimentalise. Renewal is presented as brave, loud, awkward and resisted, and it is made no less beautiful for that. A short poem of twelve lines manages to hold winter's silence, spring's clamour, and the permanent tension between the ground we start in and the sky we want.