“Spring” appears in Louise Imogen Guiney’s debut poetry collection Songs at the Start (Cupples Upham and Company, 1884). In his essay, “The Poetry of Louise Imogen Guiney,” poet, playwright, and screenwriter George O’Neill noted in 1931: “Miss Guiney’s writing shows an exquisite ear. She warred uncompromisingly against the tyranny of English sibilance: her success in this struggle she once called (in a letter to the present writer) ‘my little secret’; it will, in fact, be found to play a large part in her best verse music. She would not tolerate bad rhymes, rhymes for rhyme’s sake, cacophonies, bad grammar, forced constructions, the colloquial or the stereotyped. Her intolerance is sufficiently indicated by her ruthless rejections […]. She did not, indeed, aim at the glory of being a virtuoso in verse […]. She did, however, achieve distinction in another excellence that is rarely observed in women-writers: that of forcible and condensed expression.”