Spring

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1921

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Flowers

Millay subverts many of the common symbolic meanings around flowers. Throughout literature and art, creators use flowers to represent rebirth, fertility, and spring's arrival. Millay emphasizes the revival connotations by naming the crocus, representing new beginnings and hope. At the same time, many flowers' short blooming periods make them potent symbols of fleeting youth and life. The speaker sees April offering hope all around her. However, she believes the hope is false and a deception.

In “Spring,” the speaker notices the crocus, the other budding flowers, and the fragrant earth. “What does that signify?”, she asks (Line 10). She then shares an image of maggots eating corpses. The flowers become linked with time's progress, impending death, and wasted potential. The brain while alive blooms with ideas and memories but in death only nourishes maggots. When April arrives, along with another year, it only brings people closer to death. Millay uses this trope to highlight April's false joy. April may bring beauty through the trees and flowers, but readers know these plants will eventually fade.

Millay also carries on a tradition from ancient Greek mythology in her use of flowers. The Greeks remembered the fallen youth Narcissus, Adonis, and Hyacinthus by naming flowers after them. By linking the men underground with the flower above ground, Millay alludes to the men's death as tragic, untimely, and worth remembering.

Due to their root systems, flowers bridge the earth's underground and surface. While the flowers offer new life, they grow out of the dead or from the same space as the dead. The speaker feels bitter toward the flowers for taking advantage of the tragedy to bloom or views it as unfair that they get to bloom while others die.

This links to Millay's subversion of the flower's symbolism. In many cultures, the flower signifies resurrection. Despite their prominence throughout the poem, the flowers never revive or heal anyone. They highlight the unfairness of the men wasted in War, yet the flowers get to continue blooming. Nothing will return the dead to life. This insight increases Millay's bitterness toward April's cheer and promise of new life since it does not extend it to the dead. She does not understand how spring can be happy when people have died to nourish its blooms.

Maggots

Maggots have a single but powerful appearance in “Spring.” Millay features them eating dead men's brains. While worms have long symbolized death and decay in Western art, how Millay contextualizes them in her poem makes them striking.

In the poem's first half, Millay emphasizes the new flowers and warm weather brought in by April. As the speaker looks around, she remarks that its beauty conceals the dead. The maggots become April's accomplices, covering up the dead men's existence by eating the bodies. The corpse empties as the maggots eat the organs, which proves that death holds no more meaning than life since the speaker now views as empty.

Maggots are also one of the first stages in a fly's life cycle. Despite signifying new life, the maggot remains a sullen image since they must consume the dead to move forward. For people to move forward, they must put the dead out of their minds just as April has. The living then must fill in the spaces left by the dead.

The Earth

In “Spring,” earth represents time and perception. Millay creates the symbolism by contrasting the earth's surface and underground. The speaker vividly describes the plants' colors, textures, and shapes. The sun above her provides warmth, and the earth smells nice. April's coming brings spring and renews the earth. Its arrival makes the progress of time seem pleasant and beautiful.

However, the speaker fears time marching forward and the inevitability of death. Away from human eyes, time progresses underground too. Instead of bringing growth, the underground brings decay. Maggots eat away the dead's bodies, further taking away all the dead once were in life. April runs down a hill in the poem's last image, moving closer to the underground. It strews flowers. The flowers will eventually hit the ground, pointing the reader's focus back toward the decay happening underground. Even when April revitalizes the earth, growth cannot stop or hide that time brings death.

Millay further makes the dead seem hidden when the speaker implies that maggots eat men's brains above ground with the phrase “not only under ground” (Line 11). Within the context of World War I, Millay references men missing in action, lost at sea, or cremated.

The speaker realizes time's sleight-of-hand because April's beauty makes death's absence more noticeable. She even implies that April's beauty only comes at the dead's expense. When talking about scents, the speaker says, “the smell of the earth is good“ (Line 8). When Millay places the earth's smell after the plants and before death's introduction, she makes the land's fertility the result of the dead's decomposition. The new only comes by destroying the past.