My Mississippi Spring

I am on my way to Oxford, Mississippi where I will be reading on Friday. I’ve never been to Mississippi before, and though all sorts of poems and stories and songs come to mind when I think of Mississippi, because I realize it will be springtime in the South and because I love springtime in the South (the pear trees, the cherries, the forsythia, oh my!), I am thinking, most often, about the poem “My Mississippi Spring.”

My Mississippi Spring
My heart warms under snow;
flowers with forsythia,
japonica blooms, flowering quince,
bridal wreath, blood root and violet;
yellow running jasmin vine,
cape jessamine and saucer magnolias:
tulip-shaped, scenting lemon musk upon the air.
My Mississippi Spring—
my warm loving heart a-fire
with early greening leaves,
dogwood branches laced against the sky;
wild forest nature paths
heralding Resurrection
over and over again
Easter morning of our living
every Mississippi Spring!
--Margaret Walker
I came to a kind of understanding with the South in the midst of my first Southern spring. For those of you who’ve never experienced a Southern spring, you really ought to find a way to get south of Maryland sometime between March 1 and May 1. Walker’s poem goes a long way toward describing the flowering that happens in the land and the resurrecting quality this flowering can have upon the soul. The title poem of my first book, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, stems from the greater understanding I realized about the world and my place in it while marking the progress of a Southern spring. Those leaf buds, bright bark, poetry.
Anne Spencer lived her whole life in the town where I wrote What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. In the poem I’m about the share, Anne Spencer, caught in the rapture of a Virginia spring, pities poor Robert Browning, who’d never experienced the wonders she knew.
Life-Long, Poor Browning
Life-long, poor Browning never knew Virginia,
Or he'd not grieved in Florence for April sallies
Back to English gardens after Euclid's linear:
Clipt yews, Pomander Walks, and preached alleys;
Primroses, prim indeed, in quiet ordered hedges,
Waterways, soberly, sedately enchanneled,
No thin riotous blade even among the sedges,
All the wild country-side tamely impaneled . . .
Dead, now, dear Browning, lives on in heaven,--
(Heaven's Virginia when the year's at its Spring)
He's haunting the byways of wine-aired leaven
And throating the notes of the wildings on wing;
Here canopied reaches of dogwood and hazel,
Beech tree and redbud fine-laced in vines,
Fleet clapping rills by lush fern and basil,
Drain blue hills to lowlands scented with pines . . .
Think you he meets in this tender green sweetness
Shade that was Elizabeth . . . immortal completeness!
-Anne Spencer
I love the playfulness of that poem. And the pride Spencer does nothing to deny. “(Heaven's Virginia when the year's at its Spring).” I love the sheer cockiness of both Walker and Spencer as they talk about their region’s superior springs. Their sentences, overladen with detail and specimens, seem reminiscent of burgeoning flower beds.
There are plenty of great spring poems out there. A lot of them are collected right here on the Poetry Foundation site. I’ve got a number in my personal favorite poems catalog, but these two came to mind given my journey to the Oxford Conference for the Book and my hopes of being greeted by the magnificence of Mississippi in full spring.