We have entered April, a month of
poetic significances, but also of deceptions.
“April is the cruelest month,” writes Eliot in that part of his poem
called “The Burial of the Dead.” April comes “breeding lilacs out of the dead
land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” It is in the mix of memory and desire, or at
any rate in the imperfect ratio between them, that the danger of deception
lies. The last two days of March here
were warm and sunny. Some of the early
daffodils were already out, but now they came on in a riot. And the forsythia, until now a mere
golden-green haze, popped overnight into full gold. “The flowers have appeared in our land, the time
of pruning has come” says the singer of the Song of Songs. “The voice of the turtle is heard in our
land.” That’s the King James Version, of course, where the “turtle” is Tudor
English for the turtle dove. At the
Fleming homestead, however, it was real turtles, two of them, Hector and Chloë,
who were suckered into thinking that spring was really here. They are not much for voice, actually, but they waddled out of their hibernation in our
enclosed atrium to sniff the air and have a paddle in the pool. As I have done no serious yard work for
months, the atrium is a real mess; but it was still a jolly scene, turtles
strutting in the sunshine. Then, most
cruelly indeed, at nightfall on Sunday, the temperature fell again to freezing;
April Fool’s day broke bright but chill.
The turtles had returned to the drawing board stage of spring under
their hibernatory blankets of dead leaves.
The greatest of April poems in
English—to which Eliot obviously alludes--is undoubtedly the General Prologue
to the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer
with its famous first sentence: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/The droghte of March has perced
to the roote…” As I used
to make my living teaching this poem, its rhetorically gaudy opening has for me
a special significance. It is the one
bit of Middle English known to the general public; most educated people of
sixty winters or more learned it in high school, back in the days when people
used to learn things there, and many can still quote a large portion of
it. Can and do. It’s quite an opening line: nine couplets and
a hundred and twenty words long. Despite
the fact that all it “says” is that people
want to go on pilgrimage in April, a surprising amount happens in it,
actually, and rather quickly. Some of my
fellow Chaucerians want to deny that Chaucer is an allegorist. I am not quite sure what they make of “the
drought of March.” Just what March
drought is that? I ask. Chaucer is
either an allegorist or a really lousy meteorologist. The latest statistics I have are from 2018. In February of that year 64.3 millimeters of
rain fell on London, in April 86.3. In
March there were 104.4 millimeters. Just
saying.
There are other poetic months,
especially May and June. The first poem
I can remember being made to memorize in school was by the American poet James
Russell Lowell. I don’t think it
actually has a title, but our reader called it “June Day.” Lowell is pretty
obscure these days, probably better known (if at all) as an abolitionist than
as a bard. He was big in the
mid-nineteenth century, but I’m not sure that even I own his works. To get the text I sought I had to turn to the
Internet, where the subject of his poem is defined as “the weather”. Just like Chaucer, I guess. It begins by asking the question, “What is so
rare as a day in June?” As our summer
vacation began in that month, it was a question some of us could get
behind. But our teacher had very
interesting things to say about it. She
told us that the words in poetry often need a little more thought than
“ordinary” words may call for. For example, what about the word rare in the first line? she asked. What rare
ordinarily meant was “seldom occurring” but it must mean something else
here. Otherwise the answer to the
question, “What is so rare as a day in June?” would be a day in April,
September, or November—other months of thirty days. I’m still pondering the ingenuity of that one,
meaning that she had achieved the teacher’s higher goal—getting a student to think, rather than simply telling him
what to think. Then there was the cook-out at which the host
asked his friend, Will Shakespeare, how he liked his steak. O rare
Ben Jonson. I also had to think a
little about the third line (Then Heaven
tries earth if it be in tune), since the meaning of try was not the ordinary one and there was this rather fancy if it be, a form of verbal contingency I
could recognize and was happy now to be able to name as “subjunctive”.
One special function of the
subjunctive becomes increasingly important with advancing age, and that is the
“condition contrary to fact”. If I were you, blah blah blah. If all were as it should be, one swallow
would a summer make. At the very least,
two turtles would make a spring.
