An early poem from D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), which appeared in his 1916 collection “Amores,” “The Enkindled Spring” shows the young writer emerging from something like a traditional Georgian poet into the Lawrence we remember: the modernist, sex-driven author of such novels as “Sons and Lovers,” “The Rainbow,” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

The poem is in pentameter quatrains, rhymed abab, and it plays with traditional tropes of spring. The season “bursts up in bonfires” — a torrent of imagery that shows the world ablaze with green fire. Weak poets striving to be, say, an ersatz Walt Whitman, would then turn to describing themselves as joined to the spring blaze: a phallic tower of spring’s force, a yonic frenzy that creates new life. 

Lawrence is better than such easy self-congratulations. He knows how to turn an encounter to a mortifying self-reflection, as he does in “Snake” (“I missed my chance with one of the lords / Of life. / And I have something to expiate: / A pettiness”) or the failed-seduction poem “Piano,” which we offered as a Poem of the Day last spring.

If the first stanza of “The Enkindled Spring” is about the amazing fire of spring, the second stanza moves to consider the poem’s speaker, as he notices his own amazement at “this conflagration.” And the third stanza turns to self-reflection, the What am I? of existential doubt, as the poet realizes that he is not the fire but part of the unlit shadows that waver between the flames: “a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.”

The Enkindled Spring
by D.H. Lawrence

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, 
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, 
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between 
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. 

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration 
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze 
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, 
Faces of people streaming across my gaze. 

And I, what fountain of fire am I among 
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed 
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng 
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.