The heart consults no sun to find the season.
Though watery sunlight burning Through the lean, crumpled leaf reveals it a flowering thing,
This does not matter more than if there were frost
On earth, no lark returning: “It is spring,” the heart says; and it is spring.
(And I think there will come a time when, the green leaf being tempered and toughened into leather,
The heart will slow in the stiff breast, aware of heat now, and
of the partridge, the slow, purposeless drummer Hunched on the rotting log; and wherever the sun may be it
is the heart then will tell you whether At length, it is done—the lark still; and the time, summer.)
ISSUE: Spring 1938