Poem 3 ‘Here Too Spring Comes to Us with Open Arms’ by Caleb Femi

Themes

• Nature, growth, urban environments

• Childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience

• Life, death, love, sexuality, friendship, loneliness

Overview of the text

Resources

• Poetry: Poem 3

• The poem takes us to spring on a South London estate. The use of ‘spring’ in the title references the tradition of poetry that welcomes the arrival of spring, a convention of Pastoral poetry and Romanticism. However, this poem could be seen to be anti-pastoral, as the verse is relocated from the countryside to the city. Also, the title’s use of the adverb ‘too’ can be seen to challenge pastoral conventions. The inclusive first-person pronoun ‘us’ depicts a cohesive urban community to which the speaker belongs, again differing from pastoral poems about spring, in which the speaker often contemplates nature alone.

• Where typically a poem about spring might focus on the transformation of the natural world in springtime, this poem focuses on people and the effect the season has on them. Spring has connotations of growth within nature, freedom and increased physical movement; in an urban setting this sense of possibilities and growth is shown through human community. The personification of spring ‘with Open Arms’ has religious connotations too, as though spring is a blessing for all.

• The passage of time is a major focus of the poem: the change of the seasons , but also the transition from childhood to adulthood. Femi captures a moment in 21st-century Peckham in still life, pausing to provide a snapshot of what he hears and sees: children, teenagers, adults. The mood is anticipatory, as though something exciting is about to happen: cousins ‘plotting’ a sleepover, ‘youngers’ waiting for ‘any day now’. In the cycle of the seasons, spring is often associated with youth and adolescence, and has connotations of hope, growth and expectation The poem explores these themes, as well as innocence and experience, life and death, love and sexuality, friendship and loneliness.

• The poem’s speaker appears to be standing in the centre of an estate, watching people as spring unfurls. Initially, the poem focuses on the youth or ‘youngers’ of the estate, who hang out in groups; they are hidden from view, whispering, ‘plotting’ and dreaming. Time moves on; it is twilight, and the group becomes ‘three unbroken voices’ on a bus dissecting a party; we imagine these to be older – teenagers, perhaps. The ‘three’ then becomes ‘two’: ‘two men’ and ‘two schoolgirls’, and the focus shifts from what is said and heard to what can be seen, the way they move: ‘bouncing’, ‘walking’, ‘laughing’. Then, from ‘two’, the poet considers ‘one’ – individual boys and girls on the cusp of adulthood: a boy admiring a ‘new strip of muscle’, a girl exploring her sexuality by sending a ‘risky text’. A poem that begins with the closeness and security of a group (‘youngers cousins’) ends with a sense of loneliness and isolation, as the young must inevitably grow up and enter adulthood, with its associated loss of innocence.

Contexts for reading

• Caleb Femi is a British-Nigerian writer, poet, artist and filmmaker. Born in Nigeria, he was raised by his grandmother then moved to live with his parents in Peckham, London, when he was seven. His upbringing inspired his debut poetry collection, Poor (2020), which won a Forward Prize for Poetry. Femi studied English at Queen Mary University of London before teaching English at a secondary school in Tottenham for two years. In 2016, Femi was chosen as the first Young People’s Laureate for London.

• Femi grew up on the same South London estate as Damilola Taylor, a ten-year-old boy who died after being stabbed with broken glass by teenage boys. In an interview, Femi said, ‘The more I grew up, death became a regular occurrence not only in my immediate circle, but all around me.’ He turned to poetry to process his experiences and convey the lives of sometimes marginalised young people.

• When asked about his inspiration for the poem, Femi said: ‘People watching is essential to my writing practice. I am in love with my community… It delights me to watch them and document their lives. It underpins my passion for poetry because I am able to observe and capture moments and then put it down on paper.’ Femi also cites TS Eliot as an inspiration for this and other poems: ‘there was something when reading The Wasteland… the way that [Eliot] talks about the community in Margate… a quality of capturing and balancing the scales of the perception of people that really struck a note with me.’