March - Analysis

March as a stingy kind of spring

The poem’s central claim is that March offers renewal only in scraps, and that the mind survives that meagerness by turning it into art. From the first lines, spring is not a gentle arrival but a matter of a few days, a couple of flowers picked / from mud, always threatened by the bitterness of wind and a sky that turns from shining / teasingly to black / and sudden. Even the weather is given teeth—fierce jaws—so the season meant to promise warmth instead acts like a predator. That harshness matters because it establishes the poem’s persistent tension: the speaker is hungry for comfort, yet the world offers only brief, risky openings.

Stripped pyramids and fresh plaster: March as unfinished surface

When March is addressed directly, it becomes an image of beauty without protection. The speaker compares it to the pyramids—specifically, pyramids stript of the smooth casing that once guarded them. That detail is crucial: March is not the monument in its ideal form, but the monument after weather and time have torn away its finish. The comparison to Fra Angelico painting on plaster makes the same point from another angle. Plaster is exposed, vulnerable, still wet enough to take pigment; it’s also a surface that can crack. March, then, is both ancient and raw, grand and precarious—something promising precisely because it has not yet settled into comfort.

That doubleness extends to the speaker’s motive: I am moved to write poetry for the warmth there is in it and for the loneliness. Warmth and loneliness arrive as a pair, not alternatives. March makes him write because it withholds what he wants in ordinary life; the poem becomes a substitute fire, but also a way to keep company with absence.

Babylon unearthed: how wind becomes excavation

Section III erupts into a vivid museum-like vision: Ashur-ban-i-pal in blue and yellow enamel, lions rearing, arrows bristling in their necks; then Sacred bulls and dragons in embossed brickwork marching toward Nebuchadnezzar’s throne hall. The images shine with hard color and gloss, yet they are buried under ten thousand dirt years. That time-depth echoes March again: beauty exists, but under weather, mud, and delay.

The poem’s most surprising move is to make March’s wind into an archaeological force. The speaker imagines winds that blow back the sand, that enfilade dirt, and even whipt up a black army armed with pick and shovel. In other words, the same hostile wind that bites the skin becomes, in imagination, the agent that uncovers splendor. The poem refuses to choose between March as destroyer and March as revealer; it insists it can be both at once. The line digging me warmth turns excavation into a personal rescue mission: what is being unearthed is not only Babylonian glaze but a human capacity to feel warmed again, even if that warmth is only the warmth of looking.

Fiesole: a tender trap of calm

After the roar of kings and beasts, the poem pivots to a memory of stillness: My second spring in a monastery with plaster walls above Florence. The painted scene is quiet and luminous—Mary in a blue aureole, seated on a three-legged stool, intently serious. Yet even this tenderness carries a barbed comparison: the angel’s eyes hold Mary’s as a snake’s hold a bird’s. The calm is not pure safety; it contains a kind of spell, a capturing attention. Flowers are on the ground and trees are in leaf, but the gaze is the real drama: an intimate, almost dangerous concentration.

This matters because it complicates what the speaker is seeking. Warmth is not simply physical temperature; it is a state of being held—by art, by memory, by a look that fixes you in place. The monastery scene offers a model of contained spring, yet the snake-bird simile hints that such containment can verge on paralysis, as if too-perfect serenity might also be a loss of freedom.

“Now for the battle”: starving for a single flower

Section V announces a hard turn: But! now for the battle! The speaker’s third springtime approaches not as pastoral relief but as violence—murder, the real thing. The winds return, now personified as lean, serious as a virgin, restlessly seeking the flowers of March. They snake through bare branches, whip up snow, roar among yellow reeds, and cannot stop wanting what is not there: flowers nowhere to be found. In this landscape of thwarted desire, the speaker joins the winds: I spring among them / seeking one flower in which to warm myself. The need is reduced to a single blossom—one small, survivable heat-source.

The emotional honesty sharpens into self-contempt: I deride with the ridicule / of misery, naming it my own starved misery. Yet he also rallies the very forces that hurt him—Come, good, cold fellows!—as if defiance is the only available warmth. The final injunctions, think of the blue bulls of Babylon and then think of the painted monastery, show the poem’s solution: when March offers no flower, the mind must summon enamel and fresco—hard color and calm blue—as substitute blossoms.

A sharper question: is the poem asking for comfort, or for a harder kind of fuel?

When the speaker tells the winds to cut savagely at empty roses, he seems to accept that March’s flowers may be only outlines, only memories, only art. But if the roses are empty, what exactly is being cut—illusion, expectation, or the self’s last softness? The poem keeps tightening the knot: warmth is necessary, yet the speaker repeatedly reaches it through images of stripping, digging, arrows, and storms.

What March finally becomes

By the end, March is less a month than a condition: a time when the world withholds ease, and the imagination retaliates by making cold itself unearth color. The pyramids without their casing, the dragons pulled from dirt by paid diggers, the monastery plaster that holds a blue aura, and the winds hunting nonexistent flowers all point to the same idea: the season’s cruelty is real, but it can be converted into attention. The poem does not romanticize suffering; it shows a speaker who is lean and frozen and knows it. Still, he insists on carrying two inner talismans—Babylon’s blue bulls and Fiesole’s painted stillness—as if art is the only flower March reliably provides, and the only one that can warm loneliness without pretending it away.