Spring Song by Reg Saner

A suitably twisting love letter to the season of relief

Wind snores. Night

calls in its dogs.

If a bat flies across

the last star

and two robins fly out

of the sun; if sleeping roots

dream of repeating the tree,

lower down we can be certain

all the dead leaves

listen in. But not for anything new,

for merely once more, for air

veined and birdwinged

as Orpheus again,

his latest apparition

singing his way out of hell

disguised as merely ourselves.

Hello and welcome to Words That Burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This week’s poem is Spring Song by United States poet Reg Saner. Given that we’ve truly entered spring at the time of recording I thought it would be appropriate and timely to cover some spring poetry.

When it comes to spring poetry, you're not short of options for a poetry podcast. Everyone from Shakespeare to Keats, from Whitman to Hopkins, from Yeats to Gluck it seems has penned an ode to the season at one point or another.

I stumbled upon this one quite by accident in one of the many lists of poems for spring you find every year and it caught my attention instantly with those first few lines. There is a macabre almost occult feeling to the retreat of winter here. It stuck in me; then there was Reg Saner himself whom I’d never heard of . I’m sorry to say that even having written this episode I have remarkably little information on the man.

The internet holds sparse records on him, though from the little I have learned of him. That probably would have suited him just fine.

Born in 1928 (Wild and Graziano 1982), Reg Saner seems to have worn many hats. He was a soldier, a professor, a poet, an essayist and a vehement conservationist(Legacy 2021).

Of all the many feathers in his hat, that last one may have been the most important to Saner himself. Nature is the great theme on which he wrote, it was his true poetic muse.

Saner came from Illinois, which has the great distinction of being the United States second flattest state.(Smith, n.d.). He got his first glimpse of mountains and thus the wilderness when he joined military service.(“Colorado Poets Center : Reg Saner :,” n.d.).

This initial exposure to nature was so transformative that Saner and his wife would up sticks and move to Boulder Colorado , where he would spend the remainder of his life.

His deep love of nature was something he spoke passionately about at any given opportunity. He equated being in nature to a kind of religious experience, the only one he had ever had faith in given that he was an atheist.(Saner, n.d.)

Speaking about the peace it brought him he stated:

Living among rocks, clouds, and trees in Colorado, I tend to get my most immediate impulses from them. Nature poetry, always a crossroads where earth and air intersect. My feel for things and men is temporal. Man on the edge, the dangerous edge of things, fascinates me. I look into ways our address defines us because I believe what we are will always be where [we are] (Saner, n.d.)

A crossroads is the most apt way to look at much of Saner’s poetry. He is drawn to intersection and the change those things bring.

It's apparent from the very start of the poem as winter and spring meet:

Wind snores. Night

calls in its dogs.

If a bat flies across

the last star

and two robins fly out

of the sun;

Here nature is a blur of one single being, every aspect of it has a living pulse. The wind is snoring, invoking the sawing thundering quality of the darkest winter nights. The sleep of the wind is the great force of nature settling down to rest.

The night has pets in their dogs, she is calling them back. That language of recall and retreat is very intentional. Winter is ending. From there there is a changing of the guard of sorts Something must take its place if night's watch is over. The final signal of its closing is the single bat crossing the last star before sunrise.

Saner has a wonderful talent for creating cohesive images that represent natural phenomena. In this case he has conjured a truly gothic winter full of bats and raging dogs.

In equal measure he creates a wonderful symbol of spring as two robins fly out of the sun in a burst of hope and warmth. It's an interesting choice of bird, one that unintentionally evokes Irish folklore around the robin bringing fire from the heavens and them being a symbol of renewal. (Gartland 2017)

I can't be sure of Saner's intentions in choosing the bird but folklore seems an excellent springboard for the next section of the poem :

if sleeping roots

dream of repeating the tree,

lower down we can be certain

all the dead leaves

listen in. But not for anything new,

for merely once more, for air

veined and birdwinged

Abruptly the cyclical nature of the seasons becomes the focus of the poem. The poem leaves the binary night and day behind shifting its focus to an ancient recurrence.

The roots of a tree are given a kind of sentience here. They, like the wind, will sleep now. They dream of repeating the tree as an elegant and simple way to remind the reader of the shed and sprout cycle of many trees through the years.

Saner writes that lower down we can be certain

all the dead leaves listen in. I get the distinct impression they are listening in on the dreams of the root. For some reason this mention of dead leaves seems almost mournful to me but the poet makes it clear that there's no real death here. The listening of the leaves is

… not for anything new,

for merely once more

The trees and all their components know that this too will pass and come again. Then comes what I consider to be the most beautiful image of the poem . Saner describes the change of the seasons and its eternity of changing as air veined and birdwinged.

There's no real logical reading to be given here other than the fact I think it's a beautiful piece of verse that encapsulates once again the hope and radiance of spring. It is something swift and breathing, a living, feeling thing like every other part of the poem. Saner creates his own perfectly fitting words for this, fusing things together to put across his meaning just right.

As I said , there is an ancient, almost eternal feeling to the whole scene. Saner always looked at Nature as the greatest record of time. That record was, by its sheer length and breadth, humbling for him. Saner stated that mountains were time you could see.(Gessner 2006) When pressed on that he stated:

‘’Gone time fascinates me, and the Colorado I love looks like time petrified, Darwin’s “enormous quantities of time.” (Gessner 2006)

Once again, the cyclical quality of less formal belief systems is echoed in Saner’s poetry. His eternal nature scene references the concept of cyclical time so often found in mythology from the ancient Greeks to the Celts, to the many myriad tales of African folk tales.(Cilliers 2018). This mythological callback is fitting for the final section as he evokes one of the most famous poetic figures in myth to close his verse; Orpheus:

as Orpheus again,

his latest apparition

singing his way out of hell

disguised as merely ourselves.

In these lines is another elegant recognition of the paradox of change and recurrence in nature. Saner’s Orpheus has returned again but the phrase latest apparition implies in some way that he bears a new form. Orpheus of course is returning from hell, or in this poem emerging from the depths of winter to spring. The final line of the poem disguised merely as ourselves is one of my favourites as it reveals that there is not one us who doesn’t sing, or at the very least hum, when we recognise the first hints of spring, with the sun on our faces and the leaves gracing trees.

Reg Saner’s spring song is a brief but teeming ode to the season of relief. I think the language and reverence in his words is a testament to a poet who dedicated his life to nature and the hope that people would see it with the same awe he did. Saner’s impact on contemporary poetry was significant in the 80’s(Wild and Graziano 1982) with many poets of the time lauding his work, he was after all the inaugural recipient of the Walt Whitman poetry prize.(Wild and Graziano 1982;)

Saner himself walked away from poetry in a sense, embracing the essay as his preferred form of veneration for nature, especially as he got older(Gessner 2006). Personally, I think that might have been a great loss, as there is an unmistakable feeling of folklore and vibrancy in his poetry. Never is this dual sense clearer than in this poem. Whether or not he’d be happy to be remembered as a poet, and I hope he wouldn’t mind, I’ll probably make this beautiful little love letter to spring an annual re-read, again and again.

What did you think of the poem? As always this is my interpretation and I’d love to hear yours. If you’d like to get in touch with me there are a few ways to do so.

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References

Gartland, Fiona. 2017. “Winged messenger of solace – An Irishwoman’s Diary on the robin redbreast.” The Irish Times, July 17, 2017. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/winged-messenger-of-solace-an-irishwoman-s-diary-on-the-robin-redbreast-1.3156634#:~:text=And%20in%20Irish%20folklore%2C%20to,those%20in%20the%20spirit%20world.

Cilliers, Johan. 2018. “The Kairos of Karos: Revisiting Notions of Temporality in Africa.” Stellenbosch Theological Journal 4 (1): 113–132–113–132.

“Colorado Poets Center : Reg Saner :” n.d. Accessed March 28, 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20081004145912/http://www.unco.edu/colopoets/poets/saner_reg/index.html.

Gessner, David. 2006. “The Ecotone Interview with Reg Saner.” Ecotone. December 15, 2006. https://ecotonemagazine.org/interview/the-ecotone-interview-with-reg-saner/.

Legacy. 2021. “Reginald Saner Obituary.” Legacy. May 9, 2021. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/dailycamera/name/reginald-saner-obituary?id=9957485.

Saner, R. n.d. “Saner, Reg(inald Anthony).” Paperpile. Accessed March 30, 2024. https://paperpile.com/app/p/764595e6-93de-0ea8-803b-6f11ea38f914.

Smith, M. K. n.d. “Study Says Illinois Is Second-Flattest State on Mainland.” Paperpile. Accessed March 28, 2024. https://paperpile.com/app/p/a8e35b5f-af2d-0a5c-811e-630164024f46.

Wild, Peter, and Frank Graziano. 1982. New Poetry of the American West. Logbridge-Rhodes.