Songs of love and spring

 by Margaret Killingray (Word for the Week 28-04-2008)

My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.  The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.  The fig tree puts forth its figs, and vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance.  Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away’.  
The Song of Songs 2:10-13

Today we walked on the hills high about the Swale estuary in north Kent, where a number of woods curve round the northwest of Canterbury.  We were walking on farmland now reclaimed by the Woodland Trust and planted with tens of thousands of native trees to link together two areas of ancient semi-natural woodland, forming an area of woodland second only in size to the New Forest.  There was sun and rain, kestrels and skylarks, bluebells and primroses.  The hedgerows were a vibrant brilliant new green, May was in blossom and the trees in the apple orchards were faintly tipped with pink.

The winter is past and some of the songs of spring I sung at school came back to mind.  ‘Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king.  Then blooms each thing and maids dance in a ring.’   Or perhaps, more powerfully, Gerard Manley Hopkins –

Nothing is so beautiful as spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens…

What is all this juice and all this joy?
 A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.

Why does spring have such a powerful attraction?  This may, of course, be mainly a feature of seasons in the earth’s temperate zones.  Yet it does speak of resurrection, new life, regeneration and renewal, of the dormant brought out into exuberant life.  And our delight in spring is a delight in a new earth washed clean, a promise of a new heaven and a new earth that will be both glorious and familiar.  And also, I hope, a delight in love!  Praise him!