PART TWO
THE FLOWERS OF SHAKESPEARE
Spring
"THE SWEET O' THE YEAR"
I
Primroses, Cowslips, and Oxlips
PRIMROSE (Primula vulgaris). English poets have always regarded the primrose as the first flower of spring—the true Flor di prima vera. This name calls to mind Botticelli's enchanting Primevera that hangs in the Uffizi, in which the sward is dotted with spring flowers that seem to have burst into blossom beneath the footsteps of Venus and her three Graces—those lovely ladies of the Italian Renaissance, clad in light, fluttering draperies. This decorative picture expresses not only the joy and beauty of newly-awakened spring, but something much deeper, something that the painter did not realize himself; and this was what the Italian Renaissance was destined to mean to all the world: a New Birth of beauty in the arts and a new era of human sympathy for mankind.
Sandro Botticelli, whom we may appropriately call Flor di prima vera among painters, was as unaware of his mission in art as the primroses that come into being at the call of a new day of spring sunshine from a long dark winter's sleep in a soil of frozen stiffness. Something of the tender and wistful beauty of early spring—her faint dreams and soft twilights, her languid afternoons and her veiled nights, when pale stars tremble through gray mists and when warm rains softly kiss the drowsy earth—Botticelli has put into his enchanting spring idyl; and this same wistful, half-drowsy, and evanescent beauty is characteristic of the primrose.
Primrose, first born child of Ver,
Merry Springtime's harbinger,
With her bells dim