Lilacs are May in essence.
Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.
O months of blossoming, months of transfigurations, May without cloud and June stabbed to the heart, I shall not ever forget the lilacs or the roses Nor those the spring has kept folded away apart.
The smell of moist earth and lilacs hung in the air like wisps of the past and hints of the future.
Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You've got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's "Pastoral. " A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Others said May was best, that sweet green time when lilacs bloomed and gardens along Main Street were filled with sugary pink peonies and Dutch tulips.
Now that the lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart; I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the roses, as at twenty years ago.
