Vernal equinox

I didn't realize until I was reading friends' comments on Facebook that today is the spring equinox. We're halfway between winter and summer solstice.

In English novels set in the past, you sometimes see a reference to "Lady Day." Lady Day is March 25, not 20 or 21. It used to be associated with the spring equinox prior to various calendar reforms. It is the Feast of the Annunciation (when the angel Gabriel appeared to the virgin Mary to tell her she would conceive a son by the power of the Holy Spirit--notice it is nine months prior to Christmas, the celebration of Jesus' birth).

The novel I am thinking of in particular is Adam Bede. After Mrs. Poyser gives an earful to their landlord, the old squire, her husband keeps mentioning that they'll find out on Lady Day if they can stay on their farm. That was the day leases were renewed. Wikipedia's article has more information.

I had been contemplating the date and the season before realizing it was equinox. My thought was that March had come in like a lion, so it was high time it assumed a lamb-like demeanor. Still wild and roaring, though, I'm afraid. Today has been cloudy and windy, making it feel cold. We had a little rain, too, during the time that I was in Safeway getting groceries.

I like the word "vernal." I will go look it up, but I think it just means having to do with spring. I am correct. A line came to me, something like, "an urge in a vernal wood." I googled it and it was "One impulse from a vernal wood," from William Wordsworth's poem The Tables Turned: An Evening Scene on the Same Subject. He says:

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

I'm not sure I agree with that. In fact, I know I don't, but later when he says:

Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous form of things;—
We murder to dissect.

I am in sympathy with that. I think the scientific mind is necessary and good, so sometimes it is worthwhile to tear apart a beautiful flower, to kill an animal and cut it up, and even to cut open dead people to see what's inside and to learn how things work, but it's sad, too. And dissection is a means to an end; it is something you have to do in order to accomplish something better, namely, knowledge. But appreciation of beauty is an end in itself. Isn't there some other poem about pulling a flower out of a rock to study it, but not understanding it as a result? Ah, here it is, Flower in the Crannied Wall, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It's short enough to reproduce here in its entirety:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;—
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Wordsworth and Tennyson were contemporaries, Wordsworth a bit earlier than Tennyson, but their life spans overlap. They both lived in Nineteenth Century England and saw the growth and results, for better and worse, of the Industrial Revolution.