Spring (symbol)
Spring is a symbol of fertility, vitality, and youth. The speaker describes the ideal form of romance as one that pursues these symbolic attributes of spring—physical, fertile, sweet, and youthful romance. To be a “fool” may also mean to partake in the festivities of Spring, and to prioritize joy and pleasure over reason.
The wordplay between “Spring” and “blood” in the subsequent stanza is also noteworthy. The speaker pursues a kind of erotic excess and abundance in the images of springs, fountains, overflowing blood, and pulsating blood vessels.
Flowers (symbol)
The role of flowers is a bit complex in this poem. The speaker “swear[s] by all flowers” that their words are true. On one hand, the flowers may symbolize the natural, physical, and fertile (in line with “spring” in the previous stanza). Swearing by the flowers, then, seems apt in the context of the speaker’s argument, which urges the lady toward a natural, physical, and fertile way of pursuing a romantic relationship.
On the other hand, flowers are temporary. (“Life’s not a paragraph”—it is shorter.) The speaker’s pledge, then, seems tragically untrustworthy—what happens when all the flowers die and winter comes along? The complexity of the flower symbolism adds a dark undercurrent to the speaker’s oath for unconditional, passionate love.
The physical (motif)
The poem mentions, mainly through synecdoche, a great number of body parts (“blood,” “brain,” “eyelid,” “arm”) and physical actions (“kiss,” “cry,” “flutter,” “laugh,” “leaning”). It is almost as though the speaker is an anatomist, or a poet writing a blazon (a literary form that catalogs the physical attributes of a subject, usually female). The speaker’s obsession with the physical reinforces the poem’s main argument that love must be felt rather than thought—physical expressions and sensations are a more genuine response to love than are verbal articulations or logical arguments about them.
