SO, WE come to April, a month that seems specially marked out for poets, perhaps because it begins with a fools’ day. Chaucer famously opens his Canterbury Tales: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote. . .” And, over the chasm of the centuries, across the desolate wasteland churned up by the Great War, T. S. Eliot replies, subverting Chaucer’s lines with icy irony:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
(The Waste Land)
Both the rain and the roots in Chaucer’s couplet are also there in Eliot’s lines; but what a difference of tone and tenor!
In between these two masters, each an emblem of the age in which they lived, there is room enough over the centuries, in a succession of April showers, birdsong, and blossom, for other poets to have their say and their moment in the April sun.
April is the poet’s month supremely because, of course, it is the month that brought Shakespeare into the world, and saw him leave it; but not before he had given us some of the finest phrases about April, not least “The uncertain glory of an April day” from The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It is a passage that compares that uncertain glory with first love:
O, how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away!
And, of course, it is in Shakespeare’s sonnets that April appears most beautifully again. There, in Sonnet 98, we meet with “proud-pied April”:
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
Keats wondered at one point whether Shakespeare might be his muse, and certainly he shares with Shakespeare the feeling for spring, and for April in particular, though Keats also anticipates Eliot; for he can evoke not only the resonance that youthful optimism might have with spring, but also explore the contrast: show what it is to come to April, not full of the joys of spring, but in the grip of melancholy. So, he writes, in his “Ode on Melancholy”:
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose. . .
Perhaps there is some recollection of Keats’s “April shroud” in Eliot’s move, in the space of one line, from “April” to “the dead land”, though, for Keats, unlike Eliot, the melancholy never erases or subverts the beauty, but, rather, intensifies it. For Keats, Melancholy “dwells with beauty”, a beauty that is all the more intensely valued and loved because it is “beauty that must die”.
Perhaps we should leave the last word on the poets’ April to one of its most famous celebrants: Robert Browning: “Oh, to be in England Now that April’s there.”
For a change, I am actually in England now that April’s here, and these are not my own “home thoughts from abroad”, but, thankfully, home thoughts from home. So, I can do just as Browning suggests, and saunter out “While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England — now!”
