Spring

Spring is presented as the season that most fully embodies renewal, abundance, and harmonious life. In Eden, its “vernal aires” animate the leaves, birds, waters, flowers, and groves, while the dance of the hours sustains an “Eternal Spring.” Later, the season becomes part of a measured cosmic order whose continuance depends on the covenant made after the Flood and whose final limit is the purifying fire that will renew Heaven and Earth.

Spring in Eden

Spring first appears as a quality of the Garden of Eden’s total environment rather than merely as a division of the calendar. The garden’s streams nourish flowers “worthy of Paradise”; lawns, flowering valleys, thornless roses, vines, fruit trees, birds, and murmuring waters compose a landscape in which growth seems effortless and death has not yet entered human experience. Against this abundance, the poem names the season through “vernal aires,” breezes that carry the scents of field and grove and set the trembling leaves to music. The season’s power is therefore ecological and musical at once. Birds apply their chorus, waters mingle in lakes and streams, and the natural world appears to participate in a coordinated dance. “Universal PAN” is joined with the Graces and the Hours, and together they lead on the Eternal Spring. The mythological allusions that follow—to Enna, Daphne’s grove, the Castalian spring, and other imagined paradises—serve by contrast: none can equal the Edenic season, because here natural beauty is not an isolated marvel but the ordinary condition of creation.

Cosmic Order and Seasonal Change

Spring is also defined by what would happen if the heavens were not arranged to produce variation. In the account of Creation, the Sun and Moon are established to divide day from night and to mark signs, seasons, days, and circling years. The Sun governs the day, the Moon the night, and the stars participate in a larger system of light, motion, and recurrence. Spring thus belongs to a created temporal order rather than to an undifferentiated eternity. After the Fall, the poem explains seasonal change through altered celestial motions. The heavenly bodies and winds are assigned courses that bring winter from the north and summer heat from the south. Without this adjustment, Spring would have smiled perpetually upon the Earth, with equal days and nights. The alternative would not be simple happiness: regions beyond the polar circles would remain in unbroken day, while cold and heat would not be distributed through the inhabited world as they now are. Seasonal succession therefore becomes a form of providential regulation, preserving a habitable world through alternation rather than through permanent Spring.

Spring, Sin, and Environmental Rupture

The seasonal system is bound to the poem’s account of moral and physical disorder. Once the forbidden fruit has been tasted, the Sun’s intended course is altered, and the changing heavens produce corresponding changes in sea and land: blasts, vapors, mist, hot exhalations, and pestilential corruption. Violent winds arise from different quarters, forests and seas are overturned, and the climate becomes capable of storm, frost, hail, and destructive heat. Spring consequently stands in a tense relation to the postlapsarian world. It remains part of the recurring order, but it no longer signifies an untouched creation in which every creature peacefully grazes and every plant grows without thorn. Discord enters the animal world as well: beasts turn against beasts, birds against birds, and fish against fish, abandoning the former herbivorous harmony. The season’s return can restore growth, but it cannot by itself restore innocence; the larger cycle now carries the marks of sin, mortality, and conflict.

Spring After the Flood

After the Flood, divine mercy re-establishes a dependable rhythm for human and natural life. God’s covenant with Noah promises that the Earth will not again be destroyed by flood, that the sea will remain within its bounds, and that rain will not again drown the world with human beings and animals in it. The rainbow becomes the visible sign by which the covenant is remembered. Within this promise, “Day and Night, Seed time and Harvest, Heat and hoary Frost” continue their course. Spring is not named in isolation here, but it is implied by the alternation between sowing and harvest, heat and frost. Its meaning has shifted from the effortless, eternal fertility of Eden to the dependable but cyclical renewal of a wounded world. The second human stock can labor, sow, reap, sacrifice, and live for a time in peace because the seasons remain ordered after catastrophe.

Thematic Significance

Spring mediates the poem’s central opposition between permanence and change. In Eden, Eternal Spring figures a sacred condition in which renewal never needs to answer to decay. After disobedience, however, the world enters historical time: seasons alternate, bodies age, disease appears, and future generations inherit both life and curse. Spring survives, but as recurrence rather than immunity from death. Its recurrence also carries a promise beyond history. The covenant preserves the seasonal order “till fire purge all things new,” when Heaven and Earth will be renewed and the just will dwell there. Spring therefore links three states of creation: the original abundance of Eden, the damaged but governed cycles of mortal life, and the future renewal toward which providence directs the world. It is at once a memory of lost innocence, a practical condition of continued life, and an image of restoration that remains incomplete until creation itself is made new.