From where I write, I’m watching a female blackbird picking twigs from our viburnum, pausing on top of the fence, then flying off to add them to her nest, wherever that might be. Just over the past week I’ve noticed the male blackbirds singing, perched in bare bushes, in the cold but now light evenings. Presumably their singing, stirring and full-throated and full-hearted as it always sounds to me, has had the desired effect. And just before them, the wrens started launching their rocket-like, vertical flights of song, topped off with dizzyingly high trills. There’s no human soprano or boy treble who can do anything quite like that.

I’m more moved than usual by these normal sights and sounds of early spring, probably because this has been, in more senses than one, such a hard winter. But the birds seem undeterred, either by the cold or by any caution that might attend such hazardous undertakings.

Travelling recently in the London Underground, far from any obvious sign of spring, I came across exactly the right poem for this particular time of this particular cold year. That great and fortunately ever-renewing venture Poems on the Underground had chosen a poem called “A Prehistoric Camp” by the Scottish minister-poet Andrew Young, which is about the different ways animals and humans approach spring.

It begins with a wonderful image of lambs “with thick leggings on” leaping over “small hills that are not there” – a more playful and zany image than I associate with the gentle Young, and more reminiscent of the later Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, who I now realise must have learnt a good deal from his predecessor. The next stanza is the heart of the short poem; it simply records the poet’s observation of bare hedgerows in a late cold spring.

Then come these two lines: “Birds build their nests in the open air/ Love conquering their fear.” Somehow that simple last line, recalling the Latin motto “amor vincit omnia”, or “love conquers all”, avoids sounding like a cliché and touches the heart. In the last stanza, these fragile nests are compared with the “vaster nest” of “a race of men long gone” – the giant earthworks that crown the Iron Age hill fort of Eggardon in Dorset.

The poem is deceptively modest, like so many others written by Young, who was born in 1885 – the same year as Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence, but he seems to have stood to one side as the turbulent forces of Modernism swept past. For decades that has ruled Young out of serious consideration as a poet (shamefully, he is not included in Christopher Ricks’s recent edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse), though I think he has never lacked readers. But then Young was interested in much longer spans of history, and ultimately of nature, than the brief spasms of literary movements.

Steep yourself in evolutionary and geological time, and human history, – which normally, and for good reasons, dominates our consciousness – recedes into the background. To do this in the midst of economic depression and war (Young lived through both world wars, and worked for the YMCA in France during the first one) might seem inhuman.

That is a criticism that you could level against Young’s almost exact contemporary, the west coast American nature poet Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers, to put it more precisely, was not so much inhuman as anti-human: he came to the bleak view that human beings were destructive creatures who deserved less sympathy than the magnificent hawks and other wild animals he celebrated.

Young is just as much a celebrant of the natural world as Jeffers, but he conspicuously avoids Jeffers’ misanthropy. There are two reasons for this. First, Young seems to regard humans as no less strange and no less ultimately transient than the other creatures on the planet. Exchanging glances with some fly-plagued cows, in “Man and Cows”, Young reflects on the oddness of the fact that both cows and humans have been considered divine, “in Egypt these, man once in Palestine”. Human beings, however they may try to deny it or transcend it or destroy it, are ultimately part of the natural order, not set apart from it.

The second reason, connected with the first, is encapsulated in the word Young uses for the spirit that moves the birds to build their nests in the bare hedgerows: love. The word “love” comes surprisingly often in his poems, and there is nothing highfalutin or idealised or churchy about Young’s idea of love.

In one his most beautiful poems of spring, “March Hares”, he is transfixed by the amorous play of hares, their “serious game of love”. Even more earthily, walking on a wet day through thick woods, he joins the “slow black slugs that strolled abroad/ making soft shameless love in the open road”.

From Young’s perspective, human civilisations, grand and imposing and terrifying in their own time, are ultimately subsumed into the much greater natural order. He strives for nothing more than to be “unnoticed”, a silent, invisible but reverent and rewarded witness of ordinary marvels.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres