Spring, in this sonnet, arrives as a dance: a crowd of woodland figures gliding through rain and blossom, half seen, half dreamed. Yet beneath the loveliness lies a quiet sadness. The poem opens with a scene of pure enchantment, then turns, in its last six lines, to ask why these spirits seem so tired. Its answer is that they mourn the brevity of Spring, and with it the brevity of youth.
The first eight lines build a picture almost entirely from sound, light and classical figures. We begin with "Rustle of rain, bird-song and fitful breeze," a line that works like a stage direction, setting the soundscape before any figure appears. Then come the dancers, "Dryad and faun," borrowed from Greek and Roman myth, with "vale-lilies, violets, anemones" gleaming beneath their feet. The flowers are named so carefully that the list itself becomes a kind of music. At the centre of the scene is a chase: "a nymph the satyr cannot seize." She is "diaphanous as dawn," her garments streaming, and the three adjectives that follow, "Elusive, luminous, an April dream," tell us what the poem is really about. Everything in this opening is beautiful, but nothing can be held. The nymph literally fades "through orange and white myrtle trees," and the octave ends with her disappearance.
The turn arrives with "And yet," a small phrase that changes the whole mood. The word "wistfully" is the hinge: the dancers "cling," as though they sense the dance cannot last. The poet now gives them "vague weariness," and the word "vague" is well chosen, since the sorrow has no clear cause, only a drifting awareness of loss. Even their gesture, "Scattering wild-rose petals as they pass," carries a double meaning. It is generous and festive, but scattered petals are also petals falling, spent flowers left behind. The final question names the cause directly: the sadness is "for Youth's short dream — the dream of Spring." The poem closes by comparing that dream to Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, moving through "rain-scented air," and to the dryad "fleet" over "rose-strewn grass." The last word, "grass," is ordinary and earthly, a quiet landing after so much airiness.
The form supports this movement closely. The poem is a sonnet, a compact shape well suited to a single thought that pivots. The first eight lines rhyme ABBA ABBA, with the repeated "-eem" and "-ees" sounds producing a smooth, enclosed, almost circling effect, which suits a dance. The sestet changes the pattern, CDE CDE, and the shift in rhyme coincides with the shift in feeling. The lines are mostly iambic pentameter, but the poet varies the length: the second, third, sixth and seventh lines are indented, and the sestet's final lines are indented further still. On the page, the poem seems to pull back from the margin as the sadness deepens, as though the dancers themselves were retreating.
Sound does much of the work too. The soft, flowing consonants of "diaphanous," "luminous," "elusive" and "faerie" give the language a floating quality, and the repeated "s" sounds in "Scattering," "seize," "streams" and "fades" create a hush, like rustling leaves. Nothing in the diction is harsh. Even the sorrow arrives gently, which makes it feel truer to the season.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it treats an old theme with restraint. The idea that beauty is precious because it passes is ancient, and the classical costume of nymphs, satyrs and Flora signals that the poet is working within a long tradition. But the poem does not lecture. It lets the sadness seep in from inside the beauty, until the reader realises that the loveliest images, the fading nymph, the falling petals, were already carrying the loss from the first line. Spring here is not simply cheerful; it is bittersweet, and the poem trusts us to feel why.