Ethel B. Cheney's "Futile Spring" is built on a trick of escalation. Three stanzas begin with nearly the same words, "I can endure it" or "I can endure that," and each time the speaker concedes a loss and claims to bear it. Only in the last two lines does the poem admit what she cannot bear. The title has already warned us that something is wrong: spring, the season of renewal, is here and is, in the poem's own word, futile.
What is lost is never named outright. Instead we get a series of empty places. The house is "still," shuttered "to the sunlight," its doors "fast to April's call." The orchard path is overgrown, hiding violets and wild strawberries "where no footsteps pass." Petals float away "unseen." Everything points to a place that has been left without people, and the poem lets us feel that absence without explaining it. We are never told whether the house was abandoned, sold, or emptied by a death. The poem suggests a loss and leaves its cause open, which makes it more haunting.
The pattern of concessions is what gives the poem its shape. In the first stanza the speaker can bear the silence indoors. In the second she can bear the neglected path. In the third she can bear even the beauty going to waste, the petals "on hidden streams," the swallows that "dip and wing / Thrice circling round." The swallows are a quiet, precise detail. They have come back as they do every spring and circle the place looking for a way in or a nest to return to, yet find no sign of life. Then comes the turn, signalled by "but grief too great is this." The grief is not the empty house or the lost path but the "wide barn doors" closed "against the spring." A barn is a working building, a place of animals, harvest and labour. A closed house is sad, but a closed barn means the whole life of the farm has stopped. The word "against" matters too, because it makes the doors sound almost hostile, as if the place were refusing spring on purpose.
The form supports this slow build. The poem is written in regular iambic pentameter, steady and unhurried, which gives the speaker's voice a controlled, composed quality. The rhyme scheme is ABCB, with the second and fourth lines of each stanza linked: "doors" and "floors," "grass" and "pass," "wing" and "spring." The final rhyme is the most important, since "wing" and "spring" bring the swallows' flight and the season's arrival together in one closing sound, just as the poem delivers its blow. The repeated opening phrase works almost like a refrain, and because we have heard the speaker endure so much, her breaking point carries real weight. The tone is restrained throughout, and that restraint is where the pathos comes from. She does not cry out; she lists what she can survive, and the list itself reveals how much she has already lost.
The imagery sets small, delicate things against large, solid ones. The "pale violets" and "stars / Of wild strawberries" are tiny and beautiful, and they bloom unseen. The barn doors are huge and heavy and shut. The "stars" metaphor is lovely, turning strawberry blossoms into something almost celestial, which makes the idea of no one walking past to see them sadder still. Silence, too, is given an odd physical presence: it "creaks across the floors," as though emptiness itself were a kind of footstep.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in twelve lines. It takes a familiar subject, the contrast between nature's return and human absence, and avoids easy sentimentality. The speaker's refusal to say exactly what she grieves for lets readers bring their own losses to the empty farm. The poem suggests that spring is not always a comfort. When the people and work that gave a place its meaning are gone, the season's cheerful insistence on beginning again only sharpens the ache.