Each year, when April faithfully comes around, my newsfeed clogs. That one verse, on Twitter, Facebook, et al, repeated like a mantra. “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.” The beginning of TS Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, to my despair, is conveniently less than 140 characters. It studs the screen, line after line, as though it’s the only April poem ever written.

But it isn’t.

And considering April is heralded as World Poetry Month, with tens of millions of readers, students, booksellers, publishers, bloggers and, of course, poets marking poetry’s place in our culture and our lives, we might wish to cast our nets wider. If March was the month of Mars, god of warfare, then this is the month of Venus, goddess of spring, rebirth, and love. While the etymology of the word April remains uncertain, it’s tempting to think that it derives from Aphrodite. All beauty, pleasure, procreation. Perfect for poetry, really.

In Emily Dickinson’s ‘Nature Poem 9’, April gathers slowly, with gentle measured changes. “An altered look about the hills/A Tyrian light the village fills/A wider sunrise in the dawn/A deeper twilight on the lawn.” For Carl Sandburg too, April lends the world a special light. In ‘Plowboy’ he sees a farmhand and two horses lined against the grey turf gleaming brown, smell of soil in the air, cool and moist.

I shall remember you long,

Plowboy and horses against the sky in shadow.

I shall remember you and the picture

You made for me,

Turning the turf in the dusk

And haze of an April gloaming.

In Jack Kerouac’s ‘Nebraska’, “April doesn’t hurt like it does in New England.” All through the month he crisscrosses the country — Nevada, Wyoming, Chicago, Toledo, Montana — “a wandering/a wandering/In search of April pain.” The poem is more dream song than vivid travelogue, marked by a cadential fluidity that mimics the free-spirited course of his journeys. Away from rural countryside, Arthur Symons’ ‘April Midnight’ is firmly entrenched in London, where the moon may have been replaced by gas-light, but still “spring calls to us, here in the city/Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover!” It is still an invitation to carouse, to roam “lover-like” in the streets.

You the dancer and I the dreamer,

Children together,

Wandering lost in the night of London,

In the miraculous April weather.

Miraculous though the April weather might be in Symons’ poem, it’s marked in many others by references to rain. Famously, the opening lines of Chaucer’s General Prologue in The Canterbury Tales . They’re ripe with energy and poetic vitality: “Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote/And bathed every veyne in swich licour/ Of which vertu engendred is the flour” (When April’s gentle rains have pierced the drought/Of March right to the root, and bathed each sprout/Through every vein with liquid of such power/It brings forth the engendering of the flower). Langston Hughes’ ‘April Rain Song’ is subsumed in musical sensuality, and characteristic simplicity. “Let the rain kiss you/Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops/Let the rain sing you a lullaby/The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk/The rain makes running pools in the gutter/The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night/And I love the rain.” In Ogden Nash’s ‘Always Marry an April Girl’, the month and his lover are inextricable; he personifies its changeability in the playful way he does best:

Praise the spells and bless the charms,

I found April in my arms.

April golden, April cloudy,

Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;

April soft in flowered languor,

April cold with sudden anger,

Ever changing, ever true —

I love April, I love you.

Edna St Vincent Millay has a more jaundiced view of the month (similar to TS Eliot, but with so much more élan and irreverence). She undoes centuries worth of eulogies written to the season with ‘Spring’ —

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Yet, to end on a more affirmative note, I turn, oddly enough, to that master of self-deprecation and deprivation, Philip Larkin, whose poem ‘The Trees’ is a rare example of a glimmering lush enthusiasm he so carefully (almost) never displayed. Who wouldn’t rejoice in this sumptuous last line:

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

( Janice Pariatis the author of Seahorse )

Follow Janice on Twitter @janicepariat

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