Spring is when a young man’s thoughts turn to love, axiomatically.
I’ve always thought that’s because things are new in spring — flowers blooming, temperatures rising, a new year beginning to really take shape. And that’s sort of what Alfred, Lord Tennyson meant in the poem that gave us the phrase — but as with virtually every saying that has passed into popular parlance, the original context is different.
In “Locksley Hall,” Tennyson writes from the perspective of a man grown old, and of the brilliance of the world in his youth dimmed and tempered by age.