Before homes were as well heated as ours, the yearning for spring's coming must have been a more sensorial experience, being felt physically in the bones and in the senses. William Blake (1757-1827) is one of many poets who has written entreatingly "To Spring":

"Come o'er the eastern hills, and let our winds kiss my perfumed garments;

Let us taste thy morn and evening breath;

Scatter thy pearls upon our lovesick land that mourns for thee."

A more modern poet, Siegfried Sassoon, wrote a poem in 1935 that he called, "Vigil in Spring":

"The night air, smelling cold with spring

And the dark twigs of towering trees,

When age remembers youth, we bring

Aliveness back to us in these.

Leaning from windows on the gloom,

We are one with purpling woods and wet

Wild violets of our earth in whom

Aliveness wakes and wonders yet.

In breathed awareness, hushed and cold,

Of growths announcement thrust and thrill.

We lean from lifetime, growing old,

And feel your starlit magic still."

Sassoon grasps at the coming of spring as if he can share in the rejuvenation of the earth and recapture the aliveness of his youth as the sap rises in the trees. Images of rebirth and new beginnings and the miracle of those first tiny buds are abound in his poetry.