BY ALEM HAILU G/KRISTOS
// Spring toast
(BY SALOMEJA NERIS)
Toasting the sun,
See spring twirl
Flower-cups in the air
If I could wipe from your brow,
World,
The furrows of care! //
Happiness is said to be the best cosmetic. In this very musical nature lyric portraying a great economy of words, readers are shown a moment of felicitation the transition from autumn to spring warrants. The former is a public symbol of sadness, while the latter happiness. When assailed by anxieties, routine responsibilities of discharging respective duties and also bored by a prosaic life burrows and furrows find their way into the faces of people.
Just like the rings on an axe-shortened long tree tells on the age of a tree, the burrows and furrows people develop on their faces lay bare the hardships they weathered as well as their aging and drawing closer to their destruction.
This notwithstanding, people easily forget the dissatisfaction they harbor when celebrations are called for. They bubble up with satisfactions that defy description. The ensuing of a new season atones for their troubled spirit. In an indirect way the persona, via word pictures, conveys the aforementioned underlying thought. The persona shows even nature portrays a reciprocal positive response to the most welcomed season. Personifying the world and spring as well as creating a brilliant metaphor between a flower and a cup the persona proclaims an occasion for felicitation is due. Toasting the sun, see spring twirl flower cups in the air. The identification of such a wonderful analogy, between the objects compared, by itself shows how much imagination the poem has demanded to emerge so superb.
This picturesque similarity renders the poem savory and vivid. Personifying the world, lending it the power of feeling, harboring resentment and the tragedy of developing furrows on its brow and burrows on its facial elements the persona imparts on readers the message that the inanimate world like the animate one senses the moment for felicitation resulting from the change of a disagreeable season by the agreeable one. Observe also spring serves us a cultural symbol of jubilation in the seasonal life cycle.
The organ like effect the rhyming of air and care creates also pleases the experienced ear. Though almost all the images on the first stanza, show felicitation is called for the words Toasting, twirl, flower cups are relatively strong.
The thematic tension in this poem is spring, as a balm, in one hand and the travails nature has in store on the other hand. The contrasting imageries and word images furrows and care on one end of the scale and the toasting of the sun, flower cups and spring on the other end also create tension in imageries. The two tensions in unison buttress the unifying theme, spring is a balm for a worn out soul. Though this poetic gem is straightforward its aesthetic quality and terseness as well as suitability for studying by heart makes it unsurpassed. See the word images of sadness have permeated the second stanza wipe, brow, furrows and care. The synchronistic effect of the poetic devices the poet utilized accentuates the underlying theme that the moment is a time for jubilation and toasting for all humans and nature alike.
Salomeja Nereis is a Lithuanian poet.(17 November 1904 – 7 July 1945)
The Ethiopian Herald December 2/2022
