Doing What Spring Does to Cherry Trees
Created at: August 10, 2025
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. — Pablo Neruda
A Line of Tender Transformation
Neruda’s wish is not to possess but to awaken—to be the season that coaxes a beloved into bloom. By invoking spring, he frames love as a gentle catalyst, an atmosphere of warmth and light that invites latent beauty to reveal itself. Thus, desire is recast as nurture: the speaker longs to become the conditions under which another flourishes. This opening vision prepares us to see intimacy less as conquest and more as cultivation.
Context within Neruda’s Love Poems
Building on this idea, the line comes from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), specifically Poem XIV, “Every Day You Play,” where cosmic skies, play, and radiance gather toward a single tender resolve. The poem’s closing wish—“Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos”—arrives like a soft crescendo, completing a movement from adoration to a vow of care. In this light, the metaphor is not ornamental; it is the poem’s ethical core.
How Spring Coaxes Cherry Blossoms
Moreover, the botany deepens the metaphor. After winter chilling, buds respond to longer days and rising temperatures; sap flows, tissues swell, and anthesis—the opening of flowers—unfurls. Pollinators arrive, and what seemed inert becomes a choreography of exchange leading to fruit. Historical phenology in Kyoto shows how warmth advances sakura bloom, linking climate and tenderness (Aono & Kazui, 2008). Likewise, love does not force a blossom; it provides timing, protection, and steady warmth so the beloved can open of their own accord.
Blossoms in Culture and Memory
Meanwhile, cherry blossoms carry a cultural resonance that amplifies Neruda’s line. Japanese hanami celebrates brief, luminous bloom while sensing mono no aware—the pathos of things—where beauty is inseparable from transience (Motoori Norinaga, 18th c.). Such gatherings suggest that flourishing is a shared public joy, not a private hoarding. By evoking cherry trees, the poem nods to a global lexicon of renewal, reminding us that love’s radiance is brightest when we know it will pass—and therefore cherish it now.
Erotic Care and Ethical Love
From here, the metaphor becomes ethical: to “do what spring does” is to serve another’s becoming. The Song of Songs (2:11–13) similarly entwines desire and season—“Winter is past… the flowers appear.” Love, then, is a gardener’s art: preparing soil, pruning harm, trusting time. Rilke echoes this stance when he calls love “two solitudes that protect and border one another” (Letters to a Young Poet, 1904). Desire is affirmed, yet it matures into care that protects the beloved’s autonomy.
Language, Translation, and the Word “Contigo”
At the level of language, the Spanish matters: “Quiero hacer contigo…”—literally, “I want to do with you.” That contigo (“with you”) signals partnership rather than action upon. Translators render it variously—“do with,” “do to,” or “as spring does”—but the original cadence tilts toward companionship. The grammar itself models reciprocity: the beloved is not an object but a co-creator of bloom.
Bloom, Fade, and the Courage to Renew
Finally, the line carries time within it. Cherry blossoms blaze, then fall; Chilean spring—Neruda’s home—arrives in September, reminding us seasons differ, yet renewal returns. Because bloom is brief, the poem urges courageous tenderness now. Love’s task is seasonal: to keep making the conditions for return—again and again—so that after each winter of the heart, a shared spring can find its way back into flower.