The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer April is here and everyone is beginning to feel frisky. "Whan that aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour", then "longen folk to goon on pilgrimages". Down at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, April is the month to gather for the journey to Canterbury.
"April" by John Clare "Now infant April joins the Spring, / And views the watery sky, / As youngling linnet tries its wing, / And fears at first to fly." "Sweet Month!" exclaims the poet in The Shepherd's Calendar, which marks with a naturalist's eye all the signs of the warming year. April begins with the "withering sigh" of a north wind, and ends with "as fair a face / As e'er gave birth to bliss!"
"Home Thoughts from Abroad" by Robert Browning The poet wakes up one April morning in Italy and thinks of a milder climate. "Oh to be in England now that April's there." An exile appreciates what those in England hardly notice, that "the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf / Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, / While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough / In England – now!"
"Over the Land Is April" by Robert Louis Stevenson Below the mountains, the winter is over and the songs of spring begin. "Over the land is April, / Over my heart a rose; / Over the high, brown mountain / The sound of singing goes." Stevenson's lyric takes April as a metaphor of amorous awakening.
"The Waste Land" by TS Eliot The opening line, "April is the cruellest month / breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain", rings a sour change on the opening of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's roots, deliciously bathed in revivifying "licour", are forms of life unwillingly stirred.
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot dump their dull husbands (temporarily) for spring in a castle on the Italian Riviera. When Mrs Wilkins wakes on her first morning, "All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet." The blossom and fragrance revive the two women – who invite their husbands to share their delight.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell The month is important to one of fiction's most resonant opening sentences. "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." This spring brings no returning warmth or new life, just a "vile wind". Big Brother has even done for the seasons.
"An April Sunday Brings the Snow" by Philip Larkin "An April Sunday brings the snow /Making the blossom on the plum trees green, / Not white. An hour or two, and it will go." An unseasonal chill hovers over Larkin's unpublished poem on his father's death, as he shifts the jars of jam his father has made, preserving the last of his life.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates One of Yates's ruthless strokes in this study of a decaying marriage is in the naming of the idealising, deluded wife. April Wheeler is married to Frank, in suburban Connecticut. She dreams of moving to Paris while he commutes to New York and has an affair with a girl at the office. This April is doomed.
"April Aubade" by Sylvia Plath Plath's early poem celebrates the month for reborn love and fecundity, but manages to make it sound threatening. "Worship this world of watercolor mood / in glass pagodas hung with veils of green / where diamonds jangle hymns within the blood / and sap ascends the steeple of the vein." JM
