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"

Visitants

Everyone we have ever known remains with us.  Nothing we have ever experienced vanishes.  This is not simply a matter of our ability to retain memories, be they good or bad.  Rather, these people and these moments have a life of their own.  When these visitants have a mind to, they return.  We do not need to summon them.

                    Boats of Cane

A traveller once told
How to an inland water slanting come
Slim boats of cane from rivers of Cathay,
With trembling mast so slight,
It seemed God made them with a hand of air
To sail upon His light;
And there
Soft they unload a jar of jade and gold
In the cold dawn when birds are dumb,
And then away,
And speak no word and seek no pay,
Away they steal
And leave no ripple at the keel.

So the tale is writ;
And now, remembering you, I think of it.

Geoffrey Scott, Poems (Oxford University Press 1931).

W. G. Poole, "Plant Against a Winter Landscape" (1938)

Some may view their visitants with trepidation.  To wit:  "When the night-processions flit/Through the mind."  Yes, we are all quite familiar with those night-processions, aren't we?  I can state with assurance that they only lengthen as we grow older.

                                           Ghosts

Mazing around my mind like moths at a shaded candle,
     In my heart like lost bats in a cave fluttering,
Mock ye the charm whereby I thought reverently to lay you,
     When to the wall I nail'd your reticent effigys?

Robert Bridges, October and Other Poems (Heinemann 1920).

I fully understand such feelings, and I have done my fair share of shutting doors and closing the curtains on (as well as running away from) the moths, bats, and reticent (or not-so-reticent) effigys that return from out of the past.  But, in time, one comes to the conclusion that it is best to let them pay their visits.  We ought not to view our ghosts as chain-rattling, moaning Jacob Marleys.  After all, where would we be without them?  They are who we are.

                         Revaluation

Now I remember nothing of our love
So well as the crushed bracken and the wings
Of doves among dim branches far above --
Strange how the count of time revalues things!

Patrick MacDonogh, Poems (edited by Derek Mahon) (The Gallery Press 2001).

Leslie Duncan, "Birchwood"

Welcoming these revenants, we might be pleasantly surprised at the keenness and the clarity of the long-vanished "spots of time" (to use Wordsworth's phrase) that they bring with them.  The immediacy can be breathtaking.  Years, decades, vanish in an instant.

                 The Woodspurge

The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,
Shaken out dead from tree and hill:
I had walked on at the wind's will, --
I sat now, for the wind was still.

Between my knees my forehead was, --
My lips drawn in, said not Alas!
My hair was over in the grass,
My naked ears heard the day pass.

My eyes, wide open, had the run
Of some ten weeds to fix upon;
Among those few, out of the sun,
The woodspurge flowered, three cups in one.

From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory:
One thing then learnt remains to me, --
The woodspurge has a cup of three.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems (F. S. Ellis 1870).

Why do some things continually return to us, while so much else seems to vanish?  Why that moment?

                    Green Slates
                      (Penpethy)

It happened once, before the duller
     Loomings of life defined them,
I searched for slates of greenish colour
     A quarry where men mined them;

And saw, the while I peered around there,
     In the quarry standing
A form against the slate background there,
     Of fairness eye-commanding.

And now, though fifty years have flown me,
     With all their dreams and duties,
And strange-pipped dice my hand has thrown me,
     And dust are all her beauties,

Green slates -- seen high on roofs, or lower
     In waggon, truck, or lorry --
Cry out:  "Our home was where you saw her
     Standing in the quarry!"

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (Macmillan 1925).

This is typical of Hardy, isn't it?  He once wrote of himself:  "I believe it would be said by people who knew me well that I have a faculty (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred."  (Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (edited by Michael Millgate) (Macmillan 1985), page 408.)  Hardy suggests that his "faculty" is "possibly not uncommon," but I think not:  he was remarkably conversant with the past events of his life, down to the smallest detail. From his earliest years, he was always looking.  And he forgot nothing. Although we may lack Hardy's special gift, I think we all share the ability to "exhume" moments out of our past that have long been "interred."  (A characteristic choice of words by Hardy, given his fondness for graveyards and ghosts.)

James Cowie (1886-1956), "Pastoral"

As I noted in a recent post, I never use the word "commonplace" in a pejorative sense.  The same is true of the word "prosaic."  The visitants from our past often (perhaps nearly always) move us because they arise out of, or are intertwined with, that which is commonplace or prosaic.  We have no way of knowing what moments will come to define our lives, nor what part of each moment will haunt us all our days.

The blossom of a woodspurge.  "The crushed bracken and the wings/Of doves among dim branches far above."  Green slates.  A bamboo sleeping mat.

          Bamboo Mat

I cannot bear to put away
the bamboo sleeping mat --

that first night I brought you home,
I watched you roll it out.

Yüan Chen (779-831) (translated by Sam Hamill), in Sam Hamill, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese (BOA Editions 2000).  Yüan Chen wrote the poem after the death of his wife.

Dudley Holland (1915-1956), "Winter Morning" (1945)

April

I can assure you that my fondness for April is not attributable to the fact that I was born in this month (an Aries born in the Year of the Monkey). No, I am fond of April because of its sprightly fickleness:  anything can happen (even snow in some climes).  In my opinion, it is manifestly not "the cruellest month."

William Cowper is in the main correct about both April and life:  "It is a sort of April-weather life that we lead in this world.  A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm."  Still, despite its changefulness and "chancefulness" (Thomas Hardy, "The Temporary the All"), I believe that April carries with it an overall sense of blue- and yellow-hued promise.

                                   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 (1896).

Note the internal rhymes within lines (delay/gay, now/bough, et cetera), the combination of end rhymes and internal rhymes across three lines (cometh/starreth/hummeth, shower/flower/uptower), and the internal rhymes across lines (smiles/miles, cloud/crowd).

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

On my afternoon walk yesterday, I noticed that the tulips are beginning to peak.  The daffodils are on the wane.  Sidewalks and green lawns are strewn with the fallen creamy-white petals of magnolia trees.  April is a series of arrivals and departures.

              In the Valley

On this first evening of April
Things look wintry still:
Not a leaf on the tree,
Not a cloud in the sky,
Only a young moon high above the clear green west
And a few stars by and by.

Yet Spring inhabits round like a spirit.
I am sure of it
By the swoon on the sense,
By the dazzle on the eye,
By the long, long sigh that traverses my breast
And yet no reason why.

O lovely Quiet, am I never to be blest?
Time, even now you haste.
Between the lamb's bleat and the ewe's reply
A star has come into the sky.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Time Importuned (1928).

I hadn't noticed this until I placed the two poems together in this post:  "the dazzling south" of Bridges and "the dazzle on the eye" of Warner.  And, coincidentally, Warner employs the same technique of end rhymes and internal rhymes across three lines used by Bridges:  sky/high/by; eye/sigh/why.

Lucien Pissarro, "April, Epping" (1894)

April's mutability is embodied in the trees:  their branches are still mostly bare, but, from a distance, they seem to be enveloped in a yellow-green haze.  Mutability and promise.  "Nature's first green is gold."

                      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).

Victor Elford, "April Sunshine" (1971)

As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog may recall, I have a May poem (Philip Larkin's "The Trees"), a November poem (Wallace Stevens's "The Region November"), and an April poem that I annually revisit in each of those months.  Please humor me as we pay a return visit to my 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 first published in Kavanagh's Weekly on April 19, 1952.

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

Clouds

Today, on my afternoon walk, I came to the conclusion that I have failed to give clouds the attention they deserve.  I am not speaking of scientific attention.  I do not need to know their types.  Nor do I need to know the details of how they are formed.

Rather, I am speaking of my failure to look.  Michael Longley ends his poem "Out There" with these lines:  "I should have spent my life/Listening to the waves."  My thought today was:  "I should have spent my life looking at the clouds."

I once lived in a place where the sun set into the Indian Ocean.  To the west, there was nothing but water, sky, and clouds.  In terms of grandeur, nearly every evening was the Grand Canyon of Cloudland.

But much less can be more than enough.  Today, for instance:  a "high-builded cloud" (to borrow from Philip Larkin) in a powder blue sky moved first through the white-blossomed branches of a cherry tree and then onward through the creamy-blossomed branches of a magnolia tree.

William Brown, "Carlisle Canal Basin" (c. 1823)

                                    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 (1891).

Samuel Bough, "Cricket Match at Edenside, Carlisle" (c. 1844)

Spring goeth all in white,
Crowned with milk-white may:
In fleecy flocks of light
O'er heaven the white clouds stray:

     White butterflies in the air;
White daisies prank the ground:
The cherry and hoary pear
Scatter their snow around.

Robert Bridges, Ibid.

The poem is untitled.  The OED defines "prank" (line 6) as "to adorn; to make colorful; to brighten up with."

Francis Dodd, "Ely" (1926)

Clouds

Please bear with me as I stay with Robert Bridges's "April 1885" a moment longer.  My favorite lines of the poem are these:  "On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower/In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south."  I am reminded of the paintings and drawings by Samuel Palmer that appear in this post.  Clouds -- white clouds, bright clouds -- were an essential part of Palmer's visionary vision of the world.

                              Samuel Palmer, "The White Cloud" (c. 1832)

The lines also remind me of the final stanza of Philip Larkin's "Cut Grass"(another of those un-Larkinesque Larkin poems that often go unnoticed):

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

Philip Larkin, High Windows (Faber and Faber 1974).

                          Samuel Palmer, "The Bright Cloud" (c. 1833-1834)

And, finally, the clouds of another visionary, Ivor Gurney:

               There Was Such Beauty

There was such beauty in the dappled valley
As hurt the sight, as stabbed the heart to tears.
The gathered loveliness of all the years
Hovered thereover, it seemed, eternally
Set for men's joy.  Town, tower, trees, river
Under a royal azure sky for ever
Up-piled with snowy towering bulks of cloud:
A herald-day of spring more wonderful
Than her true own.  Trumpets cried aloud
In sky, earth, blood; no beast, no clod so dull
But the power felt of the day, and of the giver
Was glad for life, humble at once and proud.
Kyrie Eleison, and Gloria,
Credo, Jubilate, Magnificat:
The whole world gathered strength to praise the day.

P. J. Kavanagh (editor), Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (Oxford University Press 1982).

           Samuel Palmer, "Drawing for 'The Bright Cloud'" (c. 1831-1832)

A non-cloud-related note:  I may be guilty of oversimplification, but I think that "as stabbed the heart to tears" gets close to the emotional core of a great deal of Gurney's poetry.  But I hasten to add that I am no expert on the matter.  It's just a thought.

                               Samuel Palmer, "The Bright Cloud" (c. 1834)

"In The Bee-Loud Glade"

Robert Bridges's line "all day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth" (from "April 1885," which appeared in my previous post) brings to mind W. B. Yeats's well-known vision of paradise: "Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,/And live alone in the bee-loud glade."

What do you do with a poem like "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"?  It is difficult to see afresh, isn't it?  And one is hampered by the hard-to-envision spectacle of Yeats, the ambitious, grandiose, cape-wearing bard, taking himself off to the woods to live in a self-built (!) clay-and-wattle cabin and tend to nine rows of beans.  Not likely.  (Although I should note, in fairness to Yeats, that the poem was written when he was in his mid-twenties, before he had become a "smiling public man" (as he describes himself in "Among School Children") and a national treasure.)

But, in spite of all this, the poem always beguiles me.  It does, after all, speak to something that most of us can understand.  It is a lovely poem.

                          Derek Clarke, "Runner Beans, Stoughton" (1948)

                  The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

W. B. Yeats, The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1895).

               Cedric Lockwood Morris, "Connemara Landscape" (c. 1940)

April: "Exactly"

April feels like the beginning of a monumental undertaking.  All of this will culminate sometime in the middle of August, when the yellow light goes aslant and the daytime shadows sharpen.  But enough of that for now. There will be plenty of time to mull that over.  In the meantime, April is most certainly not "the cruellest month."

                             Adrian Paul Allinson, "The Cornish April"

                                 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 (1891).

         Eileen Aldridge, "The Downs near Brighton, East Sussex" (1962)

                   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 (1994).

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

Memory: "There Is Nothing To Be Frightened Of"

I intended to move from the subject of love to the subject of memory.  But, as it happens, the three poems that I had in mind turn out to have (perhaps not surprisingly) a waft of love about them.

                                                  George Charlton
      "The Churchyard at Leonard Stanley, Gloucestershire: Spring" (1942)

First, the antipodes:

                         Memory

Is Memory most of miseries miserable,
Or the one flower of ease in bitterest hell?

William Rossetti (editor), The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Volume I (1886). 

Of course, the answer to Rossetti's question is:  "It depends."

                                                  George Charlton
                  "The Churchyard at Leonard Stanley: Summer" (1942)

Next, a rare short poem by Robert Bridges (he usually tended to go on at greater length).

                                      Ghosts

Mazing around my mind like moths at a shaded candle,
   In my heart like lost bats in a cave fluttering,
Mock ye the charm whereby I thought reverently to lay you,
   When to the wall I nail'd your reticent effigys?

Robert Bridges, October and Other Poems (1920).

"Reticent effigys" is the fine thing here, isn't it?  As is the idea of nailing them to the wall.  As is the idea that one could believe for a moment that they might be "reverently" laid to rest.  Fat chance.

                                                    George Charlton
                     "The Churchyard at Leonard Stanley: Autumn" (1942)

And, finally, something that may hold out some hope.

            In the Blindfold Hours

In the blindfold hours,
in the memory wars,
don't fool yourself it never happened,
that you never loved her.
Don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.

Go to the window.  Listen to the trees.
It is only air we live in.
There is nothing to be frightened of.

Hugo Williams, Dock Leaves (1994).

                                                    George Charlton
                      "The Churchyard at Leonard Stanley: Winter" (1942)