Spring Magic

        It’s time for another fantasy poem, so here is Alzuna by Alfred Noyes (UK, 1880-1958).  

The forest of Alzuna hides a pool.

Beside that pool, a shadowy tree up-towers.

High on that tree, a bough most beautiful

Bends with the fragrant burden of its flowers.

Among those flowers a nest is buried deep.

Warm in that nest, there lies a freckled shell.

Packed in that shell, a bird is fast asleep.

This is the incantation and the spell.

For, when the north wind blows, the bird will cry,

“Warm in my freckled shell, I lie asleep.

The freckled shell is in the nest on high.

The nest among the flowers is buried deep.

The flowers are on a bough most beautiful.

The bough is on a tree no axe can fell.

The sky is at its feet in yonder pool.

This is the incantation and the spell!”

        This is an odd poem, but I think a fun one.  Using the chain structure of many simple, silly children’s rhymes (such as The House that Jack Built), it manages to sound a little more Serious and Significant.  With a symmetrical structure that works its way in and then all the way back out again to end where it began, it manages to sound as if it’s  actually getting Deeper and Deeper.  The whole sound of it is rather like an incantation and a spell, but what, in fact, is the magic?  As I sit here with the robin nesting in the holly bush outside my window, the mere ordinary spring fact of a bird packed warmly in an egg in a nest in a flowering tree seems like as mystical and magical a thing as the world could possibly need.

[Picture: Preface heading, wood engraving by Charlton Nesbit from Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds, Vol. 1, 1797 (Image from Wikimedia Commons).]