| Poetry Corner
‘Shine Out, Fair Sun’
Shine out, fair Sun, with all your heat,
Show all your thousand-coloured light!
Black Winter freezes to his seat;
The grey wolf howls, he does so bite;
Crookt Age on three knees creeps the street;
The boneless fish close quaking lies
And eats for cold his aching feet;
The stars in icicles arise:
Shine out, and make this winter night
Our beauty's Spring, our Prince of Light!
Anon.
This anonymous 17th-century poem is the first set by Benjamin Britten in his Spring Symphony. It is far from the mood of later movements: the joyous schoolboy whistles of The Driving Boy or the cobweb-light rocking of the harp and flute in Welcome Maids of Honour. This is Spring before it’s even been thought of, when it’s just the glint in Winter’s hard eye. But the poem is an invocation, and brings forth Spring through insistence; ‘shine out, and make this winter night / Our beauty’s Spring’. Britten calls forth, from a cold jumble of notes, the symphony’s first sweet, vernal melodies.
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