`Solvency," wrote Logan Pearsall Smith, "is entirely a matter of temperament, and not of income." The start of spring is a similarly subjective concept; it begins more or less whenever you want it to begin, although today, February 1st, is probably the earliest date on which it might reasonably be said to have arrived.
According to the old proverb, it is not spring until you can plant your foot upon twelve daisies, but this criterion is only one of many would-be harbingers of this elusive season. In many parts of Ireland and Britain, the popular view is that the beginning of spring coincides with the ancient festival of Imbolg, one of the four traditional Quarter Days of ancient Ireland, and which in later times came to be known by its Christian dedication as the feast day of St Brigid. Hence the poet Antoine Rafturai had no doubts on the subject when he felt the itch to travel:
Anois teacht an Earraigh,
beidh 'n la 'dul chun sineadh,
's tar eis na Feile Brighde
ardoigh me mo sheol.
To many, however, this date is spuriously early: to T.S. Eliot, for example, February was still "the dark time of the year, between melting and freezing", when thoughts of any seasonal renaissance were distinctly premature:
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden
towards sundown,
Suspended in time,
between pole and tropic.
At the other end of the scale, astronomers delay the beginning of their spring until the vernal equinox around March 21st. And meteorologists regard the winter months as being the three coldest ones of the year on average, December, January and February, so for weather-people, the season of spring does not begin for another month, until March 1st.
Common to all philosophies, however, is the notion of spring as a time of hope and youth and fresh beginnings, when the world is awakened from the deep sleep of winter and new life surges from the earth, a season of procreation and of new vitality. Even the name itself, which in old English was restricted in meaning to either the source of a stream or the act of leaping, has connotations of newness and unaccustomed energy. Only in the 15th century did the word springtime evolve to mean a time when the world, as it were, leaps to its feet, and new life springs from the ground. Later, textual references to, for example, "the spring of the leaf" were shortened to just merely spring, by which time, etymologically at least, it could be said the season had arrived.