ANOTHER winter is slowly coming to an end and spring is just a week away. To celebrate the transition I've brought some poetry together, with verses and lines from hymns, all of which rejoice in the beauty and glory of life.

Songbirds, tawny owls and mallard are already on the nest. And the cock blackbird, in our Bramley apple tree, sends his amazing contralto aria ringing across the gardens of our Paignton neighbourhood:

"Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green, from life through Death".

Celandine and dandelion gold; primroses the colour of cider; alexanders, cow parsley, common mouse-ear, dead nettle and wood sorrel — the familiar wild flowers are there.

But each spring is new, exciting and unique:

"Morning has broken like the first morning,

Blackbird has spoken like the first bird".

Well, a blackbird is singing in our front garden as I write this.

The melodious notes wash over the neighbourhood while hawthorn leaves uncurl.

For nearly all the springs of my life I've heard that song.

Yet it never fails to register as anything less than remarkable:

"The golden sunshine, vernal air,

Sweet flowers and fruit, thy love declare".

Bud, blossom, leafburst — new life reaches for the sun.

The first swallows are arriving. And the force of creation crackles like the energy in power cables across South Devon.

I feel it vibrating along the chain of life.

Migrants join our resident birds. Badger cubs leave the sett.

Fox cubs are curled up in earths, and beside the river a few otter kits are sniffing around.

Nearly everything and every creature reaffirms the truism that the purpose of life is to create more life. As Wordsworth wrote:

"All things that love the sun

are out of doors;

The sky rejoices in the morning's birth".

A Channel sunrise on a clear morning, with swallows arriving at the end of their migration epic, can be awe-inspiring. Image the effect it had on our distant ancestors.

A Dartmoor sunset, seen from Berry Head, can also turn us away from self.

Yes, I marvel at the force behind life in such apparently frail forms like the butterfly.

And listening to the chaffinches singing from the hedges of Stuggy Lane in Clennon Valley takes me back to my boyhood.

The beauty of nature has healing qualities.

It can offer spiritual compass bearings for people whose lives have lost purpose and direction.

My discovery of these fundamentals was like stepping out of a stuffy room, full of cigarette smoke and small talk, into a clean Dartmoor silence.