Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.
Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste;
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguil’d.
In one of his most popular plays, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” William Shakespeare described the pitiable state that humans experience when shot with one of Cupid’s arrows. A single dart makes a person fall in love, resulting in silliness beyond comprehension.
Such love seems most effective in spring, which O. Henry contemplates in his short story “The Marry Month of March.” Henry, like Shakespeare, points out spring’s power at making people fall to Cupid’s arrows.
Springtime
Mr. Coulson is an old man who suffers from gout. He also has a nice house, a daughter, half a million dollars, a butler, Higgins, and a housekeeper, Mrs. Widdup. Yet even smart, rich men, like Mr. Coulson, can be affected by the warm spring weather and the beautiful flowers.
With spring bursting through his window, Mr. Coulson rings for his butler, but Mrs. Widdup answers the call. She helps him with his medicine and the two begin a small conversation about spring.
Mrs. Widdup is “comely to the eye, fair, flustered, forty and foxy,” and Mr. Coulson finds himself taking her hand. He says: “Mrs. Widdup … this would be a lonesome house without you. … If half a million dollars’ worth of Government bonds and the true affection of a heart that, though no longer beating with the first ardour of youth, can still throb with genuine—” But he never finishes his sentence, for his daughter arrives and Mrs. Widdup hurries out under her scrutinizing gaze.
Spring flowers can have a potent effect on warming hearts. (Volodymyr Vlasenko/CC BY-SA 4.0)Such a Silly Thing
Left to themselves, Mr. Coulson marvels at the spring weather and Miss Coulson quickly asks when Mrs. Widdup leaves for vacation. Having ascertained that Mrs. Widdup leaves within a week, Miss Coulson formulates a plan to counteract this budding springtime love.
The next morning, when the iceman arrives, Miss Coulson meets him and requests that he bring 1,000 pounds of ice for the next four days and place the ice in the basement. The iceman sweetly responds that “it’ll be a pleasure to fix things up for [her]” and, by noon, 1,000 pounds of ice are in the basement.
Mr. Coulson now finds that his room is rather cold, his gout is acting up, and the spring feelings have been replaced by grumpiness. Mrs. Widdup (still full of springtime love) visits him, but only meets with rebuke: “Woman! … you are a fool. I pay you to take care of this house. I am freezing to death in my own room. … An old, fat, irresponsible, one-sided object like you prating about springtime and flowers in the middle of winter!”
However, the next day, when Mrs. Widdup arrives to tell about the ice she found and removed from the basement, Mr. Coulson no longer feels cold and finds spring filling him with loving thoughts again. He resumes his loving, spring-inspired proposal, but stops, wondering what his daughter will think about it all.
Through this story, Henry shows the need to laugh at nature, at ourselves, and at love, for they are all wonderful, silly things. Love, in particular, makes people do the silliest, irrational things, yet it also produces the most beautiful and noble words and works that the world has ever seen. It may be blind and such a silly thing, but it is wonderful.
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