where are the songs of spring?

Good morning, April! April is the cruelest month, breeding | Lilacs out of the dead land, | Mixing memory and desire, stirring | Dull roots with spring rain my favorite month, and it is my favorite month not only because it is the month of my birth, but also because it is National Poetry Month in the U.S. For those of you new to this journal, this will be my -- holy crap -- fourth year posting poetry for National Poetry Month. I post a poem every day, and I endeavor (with varying degrees of success) not to repeat myself. I have a spreadsheet! I look forward to this all year!

This year, I am going to begin with a poem that has nothing to do with spring. I never post this poem, because it's about entirely the wrong time of year -- still, though, it seems a good place to start, with the warm breeze, and the slightly-hazy blue sky, and the birds twittering outside my open window. It's my favorite of his odes, no matter what time of year. And I do like beginning with Keats.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, --
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

~John Keats (1795–1821), To Autumn, 1819.