On the north side of my house, so close I can almost open the window and reach their branches, are ancient lilacs trees.

As I sit here looking at them this last week of May, they have started to show off their fragrant purple blossoms. Each spring as those blossoms emerge, I am first reminded how spring comes here later than it does in my native New York, and then the opening line of Walt Whitmans lament about the assassination of Lincoln, unbidden, pops into my mind:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomd.

That would be on April 14, 1865, when lilacs on the east coast were in bloom,and John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. Reacting to that event and the emerging season, Whitman, consciously or not, yoked together the unchanging regularity of natures cycle, and in contrast the unpredictable and disruptive vagaries of human behavior.

Other poets have observed the same contrast. The opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales, salute the arrival of spring, again specifically in April, with that months warming breezes and showers waking up nature, and in sync with this regular occurrence, longen folk to goon on pilgrimages. Chaucer sees how the natural movement from the end of winter to the revival of spring leads to a religious impulse to celebrate the souls victory over death in its hoped-for resurrection. How genuine and heartfelt that feeling is among those joining the imagined pilgrimage to Canterbury is revealed in the wide variety of tales, from bawdy to pious in the tales the pilgrims tell, all set against the steady backdrop of the natural world in springtime.

Fast forward from Chaucers 14th century to the early 20th for another poets view of the winter to spring transition. In his The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot begins by stating, April is the cruellest month. The poem goes on to explain the cruelty of the springs return to life promising an accompanying spiritual rebirth that is not realized, in depressing contrast to natures annual revival.

Whitman, Chaucer, and Eliot, each in his own way explores how natures annual spring awakening encourages us to look for a corollary in people. Whitman feels devastated that Lincoln, a beacon of human aspiration, is felled by very human hatred. Chaucer delights in the variety of human behaviors against the background of, and in contrast to, natures unchanging pattern.

In a sense, though, Eliot might be the most apt window into our current experience. Eliot was writing not only after the carnage World War I but the great influenza pandemic of 1918 as well. I also note the similar sources of both the Spanish flu and our pandemic. The Spanish flu is said to have entered humanity in the spring from an avian source: our coronavirus is thought to have crossed into the human bloodstream from a bat.

I am struck with how both pandemics remind us that as uplifting as springs revival is, nature, in the form of a virus carried by creatures of the natural world, can offer a counter narrative and remind us that it is neither friend nor foe, neither supportive nor hostile.

Rather, it just is. No doubt, human activity influences the natural environment, and disrupts natural patterns. But human nature, as opposed to Nature with a capital letter, has its own consistency in its seemingly unquenchable appetite for outbursts of mindless violence as we have seen in the recent civil unrest in response to an unspeakable act.

On the one hand, my lilacs will, as they do, bloom on schedule. And on the other, people, sadly, will do as they do.

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Stephen Lewis, originally from Brooklyn, New York is a retired college English professor and writer whose novels include three mysteries set in northern Michigan. Contact stevelew@charter.net.

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Stephen Lewis: A meditation on what spring portends - Traverse City Record Eagle