Spring is the period express from God, according to Emily Dickinson. The Bard – his mind on earthly things – reminds us that sweet lovers love the spring. Today’s post brings you a serving of Dickinson and Shakespeare and warmest wishes for a Beautiful Easter and Passover.

Note: The film “A Quiet Passion,” based on the life of Emily Dickinson, opened this week to rave reviews. From NPR.org:

Many people are drawn to Emily Dickinson because of her mysterious life – the brilliant poet rarely left her family home in Amherst, Mass., and her work wasn’t recognized until after her death….

“What moves me about all the poems I’ve read is everything is distilled down to the bare essential,” [film director Terence] Davies explains. “But it’s the very reticence of that that makes it desperately, desperately moving.”

His new film, A Quiet Passion, stars Cynthia Nixon as Dickinson. The movie creates an image of a complicated woman whose poetry is steeped in pain.

From The New York Times:

An admirer can be forgiven for approaching “A Quiet Passion”… with trepidation. The literalness of film and the creaky conventions of the biopic threaten to dissolve that strangeness, to domesticate genius into likable quirkiness. But Mr. Davies, whose work often blends public history and private memory, possesses a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.

To Dickinson – played in the long afternoon of her adult life by Cynthia Nixon – the enemy of poetry is obviousness. (It is a vice she finds particularly obnoxious in the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the reigning poet of the age.) “A Quiet Passion” refuses the obvious at every turn. The romantically disappointed recluse of “The Belle of Amherst,” William Luce’s sturdy, sentimental play, has been replaced by a prickly, funny, freethinking intellectual, whose life is less a chronicle of withdrawal from the world than a series of explosive engagements with the universe. The passion is not so quiet, really. Dickinson muses and ponders, yes, but she also seethes, scolds, teases and bursts out laughing.

*      *      *

From Emily Dickinson:

844

Spring is the Period
Express from God.
Among the other seasons
Himself abide,

But during March and April
None stir abroad
Without a cordial interview
With God.

*      *      *

https://shakesongs.com/it-was-a-lover-and-his-lass/

From Shakespeare (As You Like It) (even better – listen to it sung below – it’s a song after all):

It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green cornfield did pass,
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
Those pretty country folks would lie,
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that a life was but a flower
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

And therefore take the present time,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
For love is crownèd with the prime
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

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