"If it's ever spring again, spring again"

Yesterday being the first day of spring, I thought about this powerful poem by Thomas Hardy, the British writer we usually think of a novelist.

"If it's ever spring again"
Thomas Hardy

If it's ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I when
Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,
Seeing me not, amid their flounder,
Standing with my arm around her;
If it's ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I then.

If it's ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay crop at the prime,
And the cuckoos - two - in rhyme,
As they used to be, or seemed to,
We shall do as long we've dreamed to,
If it's ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay, and bees achime.

I set this to music about five and a half years ago. I can date it with some confidence because my daughter, who is about to turn six now, is obviously an infant when she wakes up and growls in the middle of this take I found on an old songwriting tape.

Free mp3

"If it's ever spring again"
(Chris King, Thomas Hardy)
Chris King

The last working group of Three Fried Men that played out was performing this song. We have talked about putting together a working group again, and I'd want to revive this song. It's fun to sing. The poem itself is the most elegant thing I can ever remember reading about sex.

Thomas Hardy, by the way, is forever linked in my memory with a gratuitius act of theft. The time I went - accidentally - AWOL from the U.S. Navy and never returned, I had a book checked out of the ship's library. I believe I still have it, somewhere - a hardback copy of his novel Far from the Madding Crowd, stamped "USS Saipan," a ship since decommissioned.

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Moorcock image by James Parker from a site of heraldic symbols.