April

I'm certain I'm not the only young man or woman whose budding interest in poetry was quickened by happening upon the following lines:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (Boni and Liveright 1922).

I seem to recall that the presence of April, my birth month, played some role in why I was smitten with the lines.  But I could be misremembering.  On the other hand, I was a melancholy, bookish lad (some things never change), so I suspect my recollection may be accurate.  In any case, the lines have remained with me for nearly fifty years, even though my affections have long since migrated from The Waste Land to Four Quartets.

All of which leads (in a roundabout fashion), dear ever-patient readers, to our annual visit to my favorite April poem:

                         Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) (Penguin 2004).  The poem was originally published on April 19, 1952, in Kavanagh's Weekly.  Ibid, page 280.

Allan Gwynne-Jones (1892-1982), "Spring Evening, Froxfield"

I suppose one might argue that "Wet Evening in April" is not a true "April poem" at all.  One expects something along these lines: "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/Is hung with bloom along the bough . . ."  Or something even more effulgent and, yes, flowery:

                                   April, 1885

Wanton with long delay the gay spring leaping cometh;

The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:

All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth:

The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.

Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower

At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter's drouth.

On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower

In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south.

Robert Bridges, The Shorter Poems (George Bell & Sons 1890). Caught up in his enthusiasm for the month, Bridges includes sprightly internal rhymes within the first five lines.

Or perhaps something more restrained, but still evocative of the month's beautiful and hopeful course:

                    April

Exactly: where the winter was

The spring has come: I see her now

In the fields, and as she goes

The flowers spring, nobody knows how.

C. H. Sisson, What and Who (Carcanet Press 1994).

Mind you, I am quite fond of each of these poems, and they have appeared here on more than one occasion.  Still, April would not be April without its characteristic tinge of melancholy.  All of those cherry, plum, and pear petals drifting down beneath a blue sky, carpeting the green grass and the sidewalks.  It's wonderful how April and October share a similar bittersweet wistfulness and wistful bittersweetness, isn't it?  Every six months, year after year, the falling of petals and the falling of leaves.  Trying to tell us something.

William Wood (1877-1958), "April Weather"

Ah, well, everything in the World and in our life eventually comes around to our evanescence, and the evanescence of the beautiful particulars that surround us.  "But it is a sort of April weather life that we lead in this world.  A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm."  (William Cowper, letter to Walter Bagot (January 3, 1787), in James King and Charles Ryskamp (editors), The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume III: Letters 1787-1791 (Oxford University Press 1982), pages 5-6.)  This is lovely, but perhaps too dramatic.  Life is a matter of petals and of leaves.  And of gratitude.

          Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade

Pear blossoms pale white, willows deep green —

when willow fluff scatters, falling blossoms will fill the town.

Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering —

in a lifetime how many springs do we see?

Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o (Copper Canyon Press 1994), page 68.

Adrian Paul Allinson (1890-1959), "The Cornish April"

Present

I am an escapist.  The past month I've spent a great deal of time in 17th century Japan in the company of Gensei, a Buddhist monk-poet, and in Victorian England in the company of Christina Rossetti.  From what world am I fleeing?  I suspect you know.

"I have not yet looked at the newspaper.  Generally I leave it till I come back tired from my walk; it amuses me then to see what the noisy world is doing, what new self-torments men have discovered, what new forms of vain toil, what new occasions of peril and of strife.  I grudge to give the first freshness of the morning mind to things so sad and foolish."

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Archibald Constable & Co. 1903), page 7.

Unlike Henry Ryecroft, I am not amused by what appears in the newspapers (or in their modern electronic successors).  Hence, I am content to leave news out of my life entirely.  "Where, to me, is the loss/Of the scenes they saw -- of the sounds they heard."  (Mary Coleridge, "No Newspapers.")  Of course, in this day and age snippets inevitably seep through -- insidious, noisome.  Our life is now akin to being forever stranded in an airport departure lounge, forced to listen to the ever-present cable news presenters dissembling from an unasked-for television screen hovering in the air somewhere above us.  Ah, welladay!

But we have it within us to live a seemlier life, a life of peace and quiet, of small things.

Trailing my stick I go down to the garden edge,

call to a monk to go out the pine gate.

A cup of tea with my mother,

looking at each other, enjoying our tea together.

In the deep lanes, few people in sight;

the dog barks when anyone comes or goes.

Fall floods have washed away the planks of the bridge;

shouldering our sandals, we wade the narrow stream.

By the roadside, a small pavilion

where there used to be a little hill:

it helps out our hermit mood;

country poems pile one sheet on another.

I dabble in the flow, delighted by the shallowness of the stream,

gaze at the flagging, admiring how firm the stones are.

The point in life is to know what's enough --

why envy those otherworld immortals?

With the happiness held in one inch-square heart

you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.

Gensei (1623-1668) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Grass Hill: Poems and Prose by the Japanese Monk Gensei (Columbia University Press 1983), page 70.  The poem is untitled.

"The point in life is to know what's enough."  Exactly. "September 1 -- the beards of Thistle & dandelions flying above the lonely mountains like life, & I saw them thro' the Trees skimming the lake like Swallows."  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon Books 1957), Notebook Entry 799 (September, 1800).

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Glamis Village in April"

On his walk, Gensei misses nothing.  "In the deep lanes, few people in sight;/the dog barks when anyone comes or goes."  A mere commonplace?  But perhaps Gensei is echoing a line in a poem written in China twelve centuries earlier by T'ao Ch'ien (who was revered by Japanese poets): "A dog barks somewhere in the deep lanes."  ("Returning to the Fields" (line 15) (translated by Arthur Waley), in Arthur Waley, One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (Constable 1918), page 78.)  Or perhaps he is simply (and not so simply) paying attention to the World.  Never underestimate the commonplace, the quotidian.  These terms are not pejorative.

               Lark Descending

A singing firework; the sun's darling;

     Hark how creation pleads!

Then silence: see, a small gray bird

     That runs among the weeds.

Edmund Blunden, Poems, 1930-1940 (Macmillan 1940).

While out walking yesterday afternoon I heard no larks singing in the cloudless sky.  But I did hear an unseen woodpecker far off in the woods, hammering.  A small thing.  "There have been times when looking up beneath the sheltring [sic] Trees, I could Invest every leaf with Awe."  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804, Notebook Entry 1510 (September, 1803).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Springtime in Eskdale" (1935)

An aside, in closing.  I am ever in search of those who have found serenity and equanimity.  This is why I have long been fond of Gensei, and of his poetry.  Thus, I was delighted when, a few weeks ago, I unexpectedly came upon this, which was previously unknown to me.

     Homage to Gensei

Last night I lay awake

From some sound in the night

And pictured I could take

(Knowing that I could not)

The firm and quiet way

Of the gentle monk Gensei,

Who watched from his Grass Hill

(Three hundred years away)

Beneath a favorite tree,

Or from his leaky hut,

Travels of crow, cloud, sail;

With some food and wine

Welcomed the always rare

Visit from old friends; wrote

His poems, though unwell

Much of the time; read; gave

Lessons, again while sick,

Kept clear of pedantry

(And all he wrote of it

Rings true of it today),

With his goose-foot walking stick

To keep him company

Took walks, kept his mind free

And agile as the air,

Transcending tragedy,

Under his bent old pine

With writing brush in hand

Quiet at close of day

Saw out the evening sun

Across the shadowy land.

     *        *        *        *        *   

Slight rustlings in a tree

And a slow car going by

Returned me to what's mine,

What it had all come to,

What I still had to do

With my own dwindling days.

Alan Stephens, Collected Poems, 1958-1998 (Dowitcher Press 2012).  The ellipses are in the original text.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Glamis Village" (1939)