We Like March His Shoes Are Purple - Analysis

March as a swaggering newcomer

The poem’s central move is to turn a month into a person whose confidence is almost insolent: March arrives in purple shoes, new and high, as if he’s dressed up and standing taller than the rest of the year. That playful outfit matters because it frames March not as gentle springtime but as a showy intruder—someone you might like precisely because he’s loud, strange, and different. The speaker’s We like March has the warm sound of approval, but it also feels like a risky crush on a troublemaker.

Helpful mess, then sudden harshness

March’s first actions are contradictory in a way that captures the season’s whiplash. He Makes he mud for dog and peddler—a democratic, street-level detail that makes March feel physical underfoot, inconvenient but real. Then, with almost no transition, he Makes he forest dry. Mud and dryness belong to different weather moods, and the poem holds them together, suggesting that March’s gift is not balance but volatility. The month is productive—he changes the world—but his productivity is unruly, leaving both mess and brittleness behind.

Even the snake reads the calendar

The poem sharpens when March’s coming is registered by the non-human world: Knows the adder’s tongue his coming. The adder doesn’t merely wake up; it knows, as if March carries a signature that the body recognizes. Then March begets her spot, a startling verb that makes him feel almost fatherly—or more ominously, like a force that stamps creatures with their markings. Spring, in this view, isn’t just rebirth; it’s the return of danger, the reactivation of venom, the seasonal permission for threats to resume their work.

Heat that changes the mind

The line Stands the sun so close and mighty / That our minds are hot is where March stops being merely weather and becomes psychology. The sun’s closeness doesn’t just warm skin; it overheats thought. That phrase minds are hot hints at impatience, restlessness, maybe even reckless desire—the mental equivalent of thawing too fast. March is not calm enlightenment; he’s a glare that can make judgment waver. The tone here shifts from amused description to a kind of wary awe, as if the speaker feels the season press against the limits of sanity.

Good news with a dare inside it

Calling March News positions him as a messenger: he announces what the other months have been holding back. But the poem immediately turns that announcement into a provocation: Bold it were to die while blue-birds buccaneering overhead. The bluebirds are not simply pretty; they’re pirates, raiding the sky with cheerful violence. And the sky is British, an oddly specific adjective that makes the scene feel like a flagged territory—ruled, claimed, imperial—rather than a neutral backdrop. March’s brightness is so triumphant it dares you to choose death against it, as if living has become the default command of the atmosphere.

A liking that borders on surrender

One of the poem’s tightest tensions is that the speaker both enjoys March and portrays him as overpowering: mud and drought, snake-knowledge and sun-domination, playful purple shoes and a sky full of buccaneers. The final dare—Bold it were to die—suggests that March’s real power is coercive: he makes vitality feel inevitable, almost politically enforced by that British sky. The poem’s praise, then, is not innocent. To like March may mean to like being pushed—mentally heated, morally challenged, and swept up in a season whose beauty carries teeth.