That the Devon spring should make its long-awaited appearance on Easter only adds to its perfection. Court Green’s beauty is not just spiritual but carnal to Sylvia, body and blood. She has never borne the cold and the dark well, never been at her best during the grubby oppressions of winter. Like Demeter’s daughter, April is when Sylvia comes back to life. April, indeed, was the month she let Ted wash over her like a baptism six years ago; April the month of both her parents’ births. Even Frieda had the good sense to arrive five days late, on April Fool’s. Sylvia’s springtime resurrection this thirtieth year is coming in the sanctity of her study, in the ease she is finding there again, Nick only thirteen weeks old. Just as after Frieda’s birth, a spurt of good poems right away. These April poems with all their complications and darkness: except for Thursday’s “Elm” not perfect yet, but she liked them, their startling texture, the notable absence of the panic to please and the technical stiffness that had so predictably intruded upon her before she and Ted made the decision to leave America. Here, all around her, in its dreamland resplendence, is the terminus of their journey.

The house seems the distance of a veritable daffodil industry behind her. Even so, she hears Nicholas’s bleating complaint from the upstairs nursery as he struggles to wake from his nap. From the foot of the orchard, Ted hears the baby, too, and stands to listen over the sudden interference of Rose Key’s voice blaring from the lane cottage, intended to hijack Percy’s attention over the volume of his television set.

“Let me do it, Perce, that’s not … put it down, you’ll hurt—”

Ted is already heading downhill toward the house, swinging his full buckets. He waves his garden snips with one hand, motioning Sylvia back to her place among the flowers on the path. “I’ll bring him to you,” he assures her as he crosses between the boxwood bushes on either side of the front door.

“Thank you,” she calls automatically, inattentive as she stoops again to the flowers, fluidly commingling two distinct actions: genuine appreciation and absorption in the task at hand.