In Praise of the “Cruellest” Month

April’s poetic bounty

All photos were taken near my home on the underapprecaited Mt. Davidson

Welcome to April, a month that inspires a sense of rebirth and hope with the coming of spring.

Is it any coincidence that it is also National Poetry Month?

Here at Through the Fog, I want to celebrate the season with all of you. For those in and around California, this should mark the end of the winter rains, although we got a burst of late-March showers, and the forecast calls for more downpours to come. 

After a slow start, we have had a wet year. Good for the skiers, and the reservoirs. 

The hills are in verdant splendor reminiscent of Ireland, and wildflowers are sprouting with abundance. In some gardens they might be considered weeds but their worth is evident in the backdrop of broader landscapes and vistas. 

Nature sparkles when it is unrestrained and unrepentant. 

Spring is a time for inspiration — a favorite muse for writers, musicians, and painters. It’s not surprising that artists who concern themselves with weighty matters of life, death, and the nature of it all, should gravitate to this time of transformation. 

As for April itself, the name comes from the Roman calendar, but the word’s original meaning is unknown and left to speculation. I think this wonderful month wears this mystery well. 

Regardless, April has gotten its due when it comes to at least English literature. 

Some of the most famous opening lines in history name the month outright, but not always in a positive light. 

Let’s start with two of the most famous:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

That is how T.S. Eliot began his masterpiece The Waste Land — a complicated look at loss, death, and the modern world written just after World War I. 

Then there’s this famous opener: 

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

If you guessed the source to be George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, written in the wake of World War II, please give yourself a pat on the back. In both cases, the month summons a world out of balance. It seems pertinent that each was written in the aftermath of global conflict and bloodshed. 

But let’s turn to happier tidings. I came across an old article in The New Yorker by the Australian writer Germaine Greer entitled “Did Shakespeare Love the Cruellest Month?” (A reference to Eliot’s poem; see above.)

A fun fact that Greer notes, “No other month is mentioned half as often in his works as showery, windy, sometimes unforgettably exquisite April.” (I love that.) She then quotes this lovely section from Act I, Scene 3 of The Two Gentlemen of Verona: 

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.

Going through the list of Shakespearean Aprils is an idiosyncratic way to be reminded of his genius and ability to invoke and spin the natural world into glorious metaphors. 

But I wanted to end my seasonal reverie by featuring a different poet’s evocation of the month. This one has a strong personal resonance because my father would often regale my brothers and me with dramatic recitations of the verse in a Middle English accent that we assumed as children was authentic. In retrospect, it was probably heavily influenced by his study of German.

Nonetheless, it is a happy memory. 

I am talking about the opening lines to the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (another veritable masterpiece). 

Chaucer has been called the "father of English literature.” He’s certainly part of the canon and was the subject of one of my favorite classes in college, a time in life when you get to study things like medieval poetry. 

Today, we live in an era when many new literary voices and perspectives are derided by so-called traditionalists as unworthy of study. We should remind them that Chaucer himself, writing in vernacular English instead of Latin, French, or Italian, should be considered an underrepresented voice for his time. What once was considered radical can, with time, become iconic. 

Ultimately words are there to be shaped and shifted into new and splendid permutations. 

I share here Chaucer in his original Middle English as well as a translation into modern English. 

I suggest trying to read the original first aloud and with great gusto (although maybe out of earshot of family, friends, and pets). I doubt any of us are getting the accent right, but the beauty of the sounds — the poetry — is unmistakable. 

One useful note: Late eighteenth-century scholars determined that the final “e” at the end of words in Chaucer’s time was not silent. So a word like “roote” should be pronounced roo-te. The additional syllable helps with the meter. 

Happy April to you all. And please share your favorite art for the season in the comments section below. 

Here’s Chaucer in the original:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

And in modern English:

When in April the sweet showers fall
That pierce March's drought to the root and all
And bathed every vein in liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has with his sweet breath,
Filled again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and leaves, and the young sun
His half-course in the sign of the Ram has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)
Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in distant lands.
And specially from every shire's end
Of England they to Canterbury went,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak

We are all on our journeys. Poetry and spring are lovely companions.