‘Spring’ by Morrison Handley-Schachler

Spring

The Spring is coming and each day
Earlier falls dawn’s curtain grey
Before the star-enchanted world
Where, in each other’s limbs fast curled,
As Venus, our directrix, bade,
In many acts our masque we played,
Then, in a night-long revelry,
Entranced I slept and dreamt of thee.
But each day sooner we must cower
At sunshine’s energetic power
And hear what song the skylark sings
And dread the labour morning brings,
As Life the beaten ranks she feeds
As captives in her triumph leads
And, with our charges and our routs,
With our suspicions, fears and doubts
And all the evils small and great
We suffer and we perpetrate,
Light’s hours with all confusion heave.
But I still hope and I believe,
Behind day’s chatter, noise and care,
Night’s scenery and stage are there
And what are daytime’s troubled beams
But intervals between our dreams?

Morrison Handley-Schachler is a Chartered Public Finance Accountant and Lecturer in Accounting. He has a doctorate in Ancient History and has published articles on ancient Persian history, accounting history, financial crime, auditing and financial risk management. He lives in South Queensferry, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Scotland.

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CODEC News:

Margaret Coats February 27, 2022

Attractive wording and appropriate structure, with daylight hours (lines 9-19) only an interval between the dreams at either end of the poem. We seem to lose the season of Spring after the first lines, or is it re-interpreted as the transition between light and night? After all, who rejoices at the coming of Spring, if it does no more than deprive us of longer dream time!

Morrison Handley-Schachler February 28, 2022

Thank you for your kind comments, Margaret. Here in Scotland, the weather does not get much warmer and certainly no drier in Spring but the two things you do notice are the rapid increase in daylight hours and the crocuses and other Spring flowers coming up. I did also base the opening line on an oft-repeated phrase from Game of Thrones – sometimes the darkness of Winter can be fun.