“The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Ouch! A contemporary lament for our materialism and climate neglect? No – English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, writing in 1802. Is there no updating human history?

Before I confuse you, let’s slip on the promised rose-hued spectacles.

Despite Wordsworth’s bleak-eyed moments, because he in the midst of the Industrial Revolution did know where in the natural landscape to look, he is even better remembered as the immortaliser of that most famous spring scene, “a crowd / A host, of golden daffodils”.

We too can buttress our spirits for the fight against the forces of darkness by temporarily shifting our focus. This is not to avoid the issues. Just harnessing good energy to sustain us over time. To help us endure.

Of course, for friends in the southern hemisphere, flip to the fiery colour chart of autumn. The same principle applies.

Though north of the equator, I am not enjoying an English spring this year. Daffodils and crocuses, the trees – ah! magnolia and cherry – the hawthorn hedgerows … I am simply not there this time to observe, immerse myself, and exult in it.

I am in the Azores islands, my new home.

We arrived, as my late Queen, Elizabeth II, might have said, “my husband and I” in late May last year, and, while remaining UK citizens, were granted residency in this autonomous province of Portugal by the end of August.

Why and how we found our way to this mid-Atlantic spot is a story I’ll save for another day. But, like a couple who’ve just met – analogy only, we’ve been together for thirty years! – this is our first earth journey round the sun, through all four seasons, here in this volcanic and verdant archipelago.

Back to everything that batters us daily: the news, the cost of living, what is surely unnatural in the weather. Our peace is shaken. Solutions seem indeterminate.

I have been querying my own heart and mind, and now I am asking you: What in the ailing world, in the depths of your tired, bewildered, weather-beaten self, do you long for – is it change, or a sense of permanence? And where can either be found?

These are questions another English writer, from the mid-20th century, CS Lewis – who still charms the child in some of us with his Narnia tales – addresses in a novel for grown-ups, The Screwtape Letters.

First published in 1942, and dedicated to Lewis’s close friend JRR Tolkien, the story follows the campaign of temptation by a junior devil, Wormwood, under the instruction and scrutiny of his Uncle Screwtape, to push an assigned, unnamed young man beyond redemption. Set just before and during the Second World War, it’s modern not medieval; I won’t spoil the final showdown.

On whether to precipitate change or cling to stability as the answer to our ills, senior demon Screwtape admits with bitterness the beautiful paradox – how “each season [is] different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme”.

My coming to the Azores represents change. Travelling here alongside my life partner embodies permanence. We humans crave and need both.

These islands bloom differently from Britain. Reflecting their stepping-stone status in oceanic exploration, it’s shocking-pink azaleas and yellow-centred creamy-petalled Cape marguerites that confront me; species not native, gone wild.

But fresh as the stiff Atlantic breezes, it’s recognisably the immemorial spring.