The poetical season beckons

Poet Edward Estlin Cummings, perhaps better known as  e.e. cummings, loved spring nearly as much as he despised using his typewriter’s shift key. 

The man was notorious for pioneering new frontiers for lowercase letters—he rarely used capital letters, enough that academics covered for him by framing his aversion as a “radical experimentation with form.” Of the demonstrably few times the man used capital letters, one time, tellingly, was to spell “Spring” in his poem “Spring is like a perhaps hand.” It should be noted that the Associated Press Stylebook does not capitalize the season, ditto Vanity Fair, which follows AP guidelines and where Cummings did a stint a century ago. Which is to say he should know better, so we must assume Spring’s capital “S” was a deliberate, artistic choice. And in this rare instance, I support it because Spring, especially in the North Bay, is a proper noun in my book. 

Here, Spring is a living, breathing being, brimming with life, verdant and vital, or as Cummings puts it in another vernal verse—it’s “mud-lucious” and “puddle-wonderful.” My own turn toward Spring has caught me off guard. I’m more of an autumnal type, by turns brooding or, glass in hand, possessed of an oily charm best accessorized with a light scarf. But now that I’m a whisper wiser and barreling through the slaloms of my sixth decade, I finally see the utility of Spring. It is the antidote of entropy. Of cynicism calcified into personality. Of the low-grade constant cultural malaise that seeps when the rain won’t quit and neither will the news. Spring does not argue with despair—it outgrows it. It pushes green through cracked sidewalks and binds broken hearts in its vines.

Spring is playing the long game. For the first time last week, even the most world-weary columnist spied diamonds in dew drops. Spring reminds us that dormancy is not defeat, that what looked fallow was merely gathering strength for its moment. Which is coming, trust me.

Or as Cummings observed during one of his famous “nonlectures” at Harvard, “Then it was spring; and in spring anything may happen. Absolutely anything.”