This is the fourth entry in our poetry calendar: you can read our poetry recommendations for January, our pick of the best February poems, and our poems for March in previous posts. Now, it’s the turn of April, which is a time of spring rain (those famous showers), longer evenings, and, usually, warmer weather. What are the best April poems in the English language? Here are five of our favourites.
Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The General Prologue’. Okay, well here we haven’t got in mind the whole prologue – joyous and masterly as it is. But Geoffrey Chaucer’s majestic description of April (complete with its famous showers sweet) is among the most celebrated descriptions of springtime in all English poetry, and it rings as true now as it did over 600 years ago when he wrote it. As the gloriously exultant opening lines have it, when April with its sweet showers pierce to the root the drought of March … only there’s no adequate paraphrase for Chaucer’s original Middle English spelling and syntax, which acts as a time-machine to take us back to his own time.
absent from the young man he loves. As a consequence, spring seemed like a winter to him. April may have ‘put a spirit of youth in every thing’, but for the Bard, it might as well be winter because he cannot take delight in the flowers or the birdsong (‘lays of birds’).
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. Although April appears here only in the famous opening line to Eliot’s poem, any poem which begins with the iconoclastic declaration that ‘April is the cruellest month’ needs to be on a list of the best poems about April. And this opening statement colours the poem that follows, setting up, like Millay’s poem below, a post-WWI context in which the coming of spring is to be lamented rather than celebrated.
Home Thoughts from Abroad for me. Or Daffodils/I wandered lonely as a cloud, which I associate with April, but it doesn’t actually mention April!
Nice to see the Millay poem included–one of my favorites of hers.