Late Spring - Analysis

Moonlight in Daylight: A World That Won’t Keep Its Proper Order

Judith Wright’s central claim is that late spring brings a kind of stubborn, untimely hope: beauty persists even when the future it promises may be impossible. The poem begins with a quietly uncanny image: The moon drained white by day still lifts from the hill. The moon is supposed to belong to night, yet here it rises in daylight, pale and half-erased. That wrong-time radiance sets the emotional key—wonder edged with depletion—and prepares us for the pear-tree that also refuses to behave as it should.

The Fallen Pear-Tree That Blossoms Anyway

The second image answers the first with a more earthly miracle. On the hill, the old pear-tree, fallen in storm, nevertheless springs up in blossom still. The sentence holds two truths at once: the tree has been damaged, even toppled, and yet it keeps producing the sign of renewal. The tone here is tender, almost reverent, but not sentimental—Wright doesn’t hide the storm or the tree’s age. The tension is already clear: blossom usually points toward fruit, but the poem keeps placing endurance alongside loss, as if survival itself has become the tree’s only harvest.

When the Moon Becomes a Woman’s Proof

The poem turns more intimate and charged at Women believe in the moon: a line that feels like a sudden widening of the lens. The speaker is no longer only watching nature; she is naming a faith, a long habit of meaning-making. The moon becomes less an object in the sky than a figure for female cycles, aging, and persistence across time. Holding a branch, the speaker compares it to she whose flower is ages old. The pronoun blurs: she could be the moon, a woman, or womanhood itself. That blur matters, because it lets the poem suggest that what the pear-tree is doing—flowering after damage—has an emotional analogue in women’s lives, where hope and the body’s limits can coexist.

Carrying Blossoms Like Contraband Hope

The speaker’s gesture becomes physical and domestic: and so I carry home the flowers from the pear. Bringing the blossoms inside feels like trying to keep a transient brightness, like smuggling a piece of late spring into ordinary life. Yet Wright sharpens the mood by making the blossoms into obstinate tokens. A token is a sign, a substitute, sometimes a consolation prize. The adjective obstinate gives the blossoms a will of their own, as if they insist on meaning even when meaning is risky. The poem’s softness tightens into something braver: a recognition that hope can be irrational, even defiant.

Blossom Versus Fruit: The Poem’s Unforgiving Knowledge

The final clause lands with calm force: the pear-tree makes tokens for fruit it cannot bear. That line retroactively darkens the earlier whiteness—the moon drained, the branch white and still—as if the poem has been showing us beauty in the color of absence. The key contradiction comes into focus: the world offers the outward sign of fertility while withholding fulfillment. Read one way, it’s about aging and the body: late spring is the season of blossom, but late spring implies time running on, the threshold where promise begins to fail. Read another way, it’s about grief after damage: something can be broken by a storm and still perform the motions of renewal. Either way, the poem refuses the easy comfort that blossom guarantees fruit; it gives us persistence without reward.

The Hard Question the Blossoms Ask

If these flowers are tokens, what are they asking the speaker to accept: consolation, or defiance? The act of carrying them home suggests a choice to live with the sign even when the outcome is denied—to honor the pear-tree’s refusal to stop flowering, and to admit, without bitterness, that some kinds of fullness will not come.