Spring Dance, by Arthur Frank Mathews
Philip Larkin
Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings,
Their children finger the awakened grass,
Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings,
And, flashing like a dangled-looking glass,
Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,
The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me,
Threading my pursed-up way across the park,
An indigestible sterility.
 
Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water
Is earth’s most multiple, excited daughter;
 
And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.
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