The speaker begins "The Spring" by announcing that winter is over. He describes the shifting seasons using vivid imagery that, perhaps surprisingly for a poem about the beauty of spring, presents winter as rather lovely in its own right.
The snow has melted, a process the speaker compares to the personified earth taking off her "snow-white robes." "The frost" no longer "Candies the grass"—another image that suggests both winter's frigidity and delicate beauty: that "frost" made the grass look like it was coated with hardened sugar syrup. It also cast "an icy cream / Upon the silver lake or crystal stream." Again, the imagery speaks to both winter's quiet cold and surreal beauty: until recently, the world was coated in a layer of creamy white, and the icy waters of the lake and stream sparkled. The world in winter seems pristine and elegant but also stiff and unfeeling—and spring's warmth loosens everything up.
The delicate sounds of these lines bring their imagery to life. Crisp alliteration ("Candies," "casts," "cream," "crystal") and consonance ("lake," "lost," "frost," "casts," "crystal stream") add to the feeling of a sharp, fragile world covered in glittering ice and snow. Sibilance evokes winter's stillness and quiet:
Candies the grass, or casts an icy cream
Upon the silver lake or crystal stream;
Lines 1-4 are also enjambed, each line flowing smoothly into the next and building momentum and anticipation. The poem pulls readers down the page, deeper into this quickly thawing world.
Finally, these lines establish the poem's form. "The Spring" is written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter: a meter consisting of five iambs (poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed pattern) per line. These are also called heroic couplets. Take lines 1-2:
Now that | the wint- | er's gone, | the earth | hath lost
Her snow- | white robes, | and now | no more | the frost
The meter here isn't always perfect (indeed, a totally perfect meter might make for a stiff, rigid-sounding poem!). For example, some might argue that line 1 actually begins with a trochee (stressed-unstressed; "Now that"), and the second line contains a spondee (stressed-stressed; "white robes"): Such variations make can certain words stand out to readers. Still, the overall rhythm is recognizably iambic, marked by a steady, bouncy beat.
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