Blossom Dearie / The Diva Series / 1952
They Say It's Spring
playful, arch, warmly defiant
A wry love song that argues against the cliché that romantic feeling is just a seasonal chemical accident. The singer catalogs the standard explanations for her happiness — spring, May, weather, hormones — only to reject each one in favor of the specific person she loves.
romantic skepticism vs. sincerity nature as false cause seasonal metaphor self-aware wit love as constant rather than transient
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses her lover directly, arguing with an implied chorus of 'cynics' and 'poets' who insist her feelings are merely seasonal. She's self-aware and teasing, not naive — she knows the cliché and dismantles it point by point.
What happens
The song opens with a nostalgic admission of once living in illusion, then moves into present-day skepticism about pat explanations for love. Verse by verse she tries on the 'it's just spring' theory, entertains it playfully, then keeps circling back to insist the real cause is her partner. The song builds through repeated refutation until the closing lines collapse the metaphor entirely, replacing season with person.
How it's built
Built on a recurring refrain ('they say it's spring') that returns with variations, functioning almost like a debate refrain rather than a static hook. Verses alternate between conceding the poetic case for seasonal love and rebutting it, creating a call-and-response between conventional wisdom and the singer's private conviction. The final stanza acts as a resolution, echoing the ring/proposal image to make the argument concrete and personal.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins by placing youthful illusion in the past tense, setting up an adult narrator who claims to have outgrown dreamy notions — only to spend the rest of the song discovering she hasn't fully escaped them, just redirected them toward someone real.rest of the song discovering she hasn't fully escaped them.refrain refrain removealt
First refrain
“They say it's spring”
The refrain introduces the external voice of convention, attributing her happiness to something impersonal and cyclical rather than to her own choice or her partner's specific effect on her.
Lark/firefly verse
She briefly indulges the springtime cliché with buoyant animal imagery, matching the giddy tone of the accusation before pulling back with a quiet insistence that something more permanent is at work.
Poets verse
“poets plights are pathetic”
Here the argument sharpens into literary critique: she accuses poets of romanticizing transience as if impermanence were profound, positioning herself as poetic but not sentimental in that same hollow way.
Final verse
The closing stanza replaces the seasonal alibi with a direct, concrete memory of a proposal, dismantling the whole metaphor by insisting the real cause of her happiness was never the season but the specific person standing in front of her.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Spring stands in for any external, impersonal explanation of love throughout, letting the singer build a sustained argument against reductive romantic clichés.
- anaphora
- The repeated 'they say' framing casts conventional wisdom as a chorus of received opinion, which the singer positions herself against.
- personification/animal imagery
- Comparing herself to a lark and a firefly humorously literalizes the 'giddy with spring' cliché before she pivots away from it.
- irony
- She calls herself poetic while mocking poets' explanations, using the label against itself to distinguish sincere feeling from poetic cliché.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a gentle satire of the 'love is just spring fever' trope common in popular song and poetry — the singer systematically refutes each seasonal cliché to arrive at a sincere, non-ironic declaration of love for a specific person. A secondary reading might emphasize ambivalence: she flirts with the possibility that her feelings are indeed chemical or seasonal, and the final declaration is less a triumphant rebuttal than a hopeful assertion she needs to believe. The lyric supports the first reading more strongly, given how firmly the ending closes the argument.
Context
This is a mid-century American popular song in the cabaret/jazz standard tradition, the kind of witty, wordplay-heavy lyric associated with sophisticated supper-club repertoire of the era. Blossom Dearie's light, precise vocal delivery suits the song's arch, conversational tone and ironic distance from the sentimental cliché it's dismantling. I don't have specific biographical or recording details about this particular track beyond what's given.
Listen for
- The shift in vocal tone between the breezy 'spring' claims and the firmer declarations about the specific loved one
- How the melody likely lifts on the seasonal imagery and settles more plainly on the personal claims
- The way repeated variations of the refrain build an argument rather than simply repeating a hook
- The final stanza's callback to a proposal, which recontextualizes all the earlier abstract debate as rooted in one real memory
About Blossom Dearie
Margrethe Blossom Dearie was an American jazz singer and pianist. She had a distinctive light and girlish voice.
1924 - 2009 / United States
Full biography and catalogue