INTERNET GRANDFATHER®

Spring

                                 I think most of us look forward to spring. After the bleak winters, we look forward to budding plants, growing trees and warmer weather. Somehow, the light and air seem better in the spring. We feel more optimistic year round because of spring: Whenever the weather is bad, we can tell ourselves that spring will eventually come. I always argue for optimism and spring helps me make my argument.                                

                                         We're having spring weather here so I'm feeling very cheerful right now. I seem to be able to work and play better and even sleep better when there is daylight later in the day and it's warm. I find myself thinking more pleasant thoughts and approaching life more cheerfully.

                                          When I'm thinking pleasant thoughts, I sometimes turn to poetry. Poetry helps me shape my thoughts and often turns me to a new way of looking at things. I went to the internet and searched for poems about spring by my favorite poet, William Wordsworth.  I find his poetry beautiful, moving and thought-provoking. The poems I've read show a deep melancholy in the company of beauty.

                                         I soon found a work, Lines Written in Early Spring. The first stanza is

                                                      I heard a thousand blended notes,
                                                                        While in a grove I sate reclined,
                                                                        In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
                                                                        Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

                                         Does he mean that it is sweet to experience sad thoughts? */ There is a certain sweetness in sadness, although I don't think pleasant thoughts necessarily lead to sadness. Why can't we continue to think pleasant thoughts and avoid sadness altogether? I have to admit, however, that I agree with Wordsworth to an extent: Pleasant thoughts are often followed by sadness; the pleasant things in our lives often make us think of sad things, if only because the sad things make us better appreciate the pleasant. Maybe it's simply sweet to think and feel at all.

                                         Maybe it's guilt that leads us from happy to sad, maybe happy reminds us of other, sad times, but whatever it is we can either accept the sadness that follows pleasant thoughts or resist it. I've concluded that it's better to accept these changes of mood because, in the same way that winter leads to spring, sad times will inevitably lead to happy times. Let's do our best to think pleasant thoughts but not be defeated by sad thoughts, accepting that pleasant thoughts will eventually replace the sad.

*Scholars tell us that reading the entire poem shows that Wordsworth was contrasting the beauty of nature with the unpleasant state of mankind. I'm trying only to understand the first stanza, standing alone.

3-19-07