Lines written in early spring

 

Bumblebee sleeping in flowers of Three-cornered Leek. Frome, 6 March 2026.

I'll imagine all of these bumblebees are the very common Buff-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), whose queens emerge quite early -- not that I really know anything about bumblebees, but anyway they don't look like Early Bumblebee (Bombus pratorum).

The Comma butterfly is Polygonia c-album. One of the first butterflies to emerge from hibernation, in March. (I saw a Peacock butterfly too, but it wouldn't stay still for a photo.)

Three-cornered Leek or Three-cornered Garlic (Allium triquetrum) is native to SW Europe. Introduced in the British Isles and began to spread in the wild from around 1850, initially in Cornwall and now in much of the SW. In Sweden it's called Sloklök ("drooping onion") but it isn't established in the wild there, at any rate not yet.

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale). But that doesn't really tell the story. In the south of its range it reproduces sexually in the same way as most other plant species. But the further north you go, the more this is replaced by non-sexual apomixis, leading to large numbers of minutely different microspecies, often with their own ecological niches. About 70 microspecies have been recognized in Germany, about 250 in the British Isles, and nearly 1,000 in Sweden. The Swedish name is Maskros ("maggot-rose").

Bumblebee sleeping in flowers of Three-cornered Leek. Frome, 9 March 2026.

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Lines Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure:—

But the least motion which they made

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

(By William Wordsworth. From the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798).)

Comma on Dandelion. Frome, 14 March 2026.

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"What man has made of man".

A reader of 1798 could think of:

the Reign of Terror in France (1793-1794);

the latest war in Europe, ongoing since 1792 (and harking back to the brutalities of e.g. the Seven Years' War (1756-1763));

the slave trade (not banned until 1807), or slavery itself (keeping the existing slaves was legal under British law until 1833);

the oppressive conditions of the industrial revolution.

the age-old oppression of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful, as much evinced in the other poems of Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's line is powerfully generalized. But at any rate we're talking about shaping the lives of other people: exploitation, manipulation, control, oppression, dehumanization, predation; tampering with someone else's freedom to live a natural life in a natural community and enjoy the pleasure of spring. 

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You know how we spend loads of time thinking and talking about what we want to do but aren't yet doing and may likely never do; but things we actually are doing, there's not so much to say about them, we just get on with them. Conversation is often about compensation (to be cynical); yet also about reminding, starting the depths. 

It can be like that with poetry too. Wordsworth's simple yet inexhaustible poem continues to feel central just because we didn't act on what he's saying, though an eight-year-old child can see that it's spot-on. In fact in the two centuries since he wrote the poem, we've doubled down: more killing, more technology, more technological killing, more dehumanization. Wordsworth's poem is there in the centre of our culture to compensate and to stir, the poem's existence a frail hope in itself, like the existence of early spring. 

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I suppose we should take "early spring" as meaning some time around the equinox. Spring started a bit later in those days. But anyway, primroses and periwinkles are very early flowers.

I'm thinking about how differently Wordsworth would have seen early spring, compared to my photos. Evidently he wouldn't have seen Three-cornered Leek in 1798. He probably wouldn't have known there were different bumblebee species. He wrote poems titled "To a Butterfly", but he never mentions any specific butterfly species. The idea that dandelions might be many species rather than one wouldn't have interested him at all. In fact Wordsworth was rather against the growing enthusiasm for focussing on species and types; for botanists and geologists grubbing about collecting specimens and ticking their lists, as he says in The Excursion. For him nature was something grander and more interlinked; it was almost God, it was a manifestation of God's plan anyway, it wasn't something you could pin down with your IDs. Oh, and in 1798 there were no cameras, let alone macro lenses. 

I heard a thousand blended notes...

It's a beautiful rendering of the chorus of birds in early spring, without picking out individuals. What did he hear in Alfoxden that morning? I imagine robins and wrens in prominent mid-range, blue tits and goldfinches at the higher pitches, sparrows chirping, at mellower pitch a song-thrush or blackbird, and maybe the distant cooing of wood-pigeon or chattering magpies or the cawing of rooks. And that's probably all wrong, a 21st-century urban sound imposed on an 18th century valley in the Quantocks. But no matter about the details: Wordsworth's early spring can still be our early spring in 2026, more or less. 

 

Wordsworth knew plenty of species, of course; his name is forever associated with some of them: the daffodil, the green linnet (greenfinch), the yew and the hazel, the small celandine ... though he tells us he only became aware of the latter as an adult. Or in this poem the primrose and the periwinkle. The expression "trailed its wreaths" is enough, in my opinion, to identify this as the lesser periwinkle, Vinca minor (Vinca major is more arching than trailing). Like Three-cornered Leek it was an introduction from southern Europe, but a more ancient one and well-established in Wordsworth's day.

Bumblebee on Dandelion. Frome, 17 March 2026.