Spring

Fleeting but full of emerging life, spring brings the promise of sunny days and the sweeping away of winter blues. More delicate than summer and yet equally intense, it has moved many writers to words of praise. This generously illustrated collection of poetry and prose is by turns affectionate, humorous and elegiac, with work by George Orwell, Rachel Carson, Captain Scott and more. In a passage from The Wind in the Willows, Mole spring-cleans his house before scrambling above ground to roll in ’the warm grass of a great meadow’. Anton Chekhov is in awe of the River Goltva’s ’rampant spring waters’ and a world ’lit by stars, bestrewing every corner of the sky’. Coleridge writes of birds rejoicing, their song no longer subdued by winter, while his friend Wordsworth meditates on the passage of time in his famous ’Ode: Intimations of Immortality’.