Melancholy April

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Just about a year ago, I had the great honor to serve as the officiant at the funeral of my best friend's father. He died at 92, still traveling and still independent, so if any death after nine decades an come as a surprise, this one did.

 

While working on his Eulogy, I discovered something startling: there are a vast number of melancholy poems about April. Of course, we all immediately think of TS Eliot - April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land - and Walt Whitman: When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. 

 

But there's also American poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,   

Metropolitan poetry here and there,   

In the park sit pauper and rentier,   

The screaming children, the motor-car   

Fugitive about us, running away,   

Between the worker and the millionaire   

Number provides all distances,   

It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,   

Many great dears are taken away,   

 

 

What will become of you and me

(This is the school in which we learn ...)   

Besides the photo and the memory?

(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

 

 and Maine's own Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know. 

 Pulitzer Prize winning poet Leonora Speyer (1872-1956) wrote April on the Battlefield shortly after the end of WWI:

April now walks the fields again,
Trailing her leaves
And holding all her buds against her heart:
Wrapt in her clouds and mists
She walks,
Groping her way among the graves of men.

 

And I love this one by contemporary poet Kim Addonizio (b. 1954)  

Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers,   

bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of   

is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications.   

Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing.

 

I don't know exactly why April gets the greatest share of melancholy. Poems set in December can be wistful, looking backwards, and September has its share of the end of summer and the coming of winter. But a month which should be about showers and flowers and longen to goon on pilgrimages instead inspires a lot of brilliant writers to look out their windows at the gray rain and ponder mortality.

 I wonder if, in the country, it's an historic echo of great trauma of the Civil War, which began April 12, 1861 and ended April 9 1865. Lincoln's assassination only five days later plunged the northern states into mourning, while the south reeled from destruction and humiliation. So many families on either side must have been painfully reminded of their losses each April.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this essay, except perhaps to remind everyone it's okay to feel sad even when the flowers are sprouting and the flowers unfolding in the trees. And also to encourage you to click on the links and read the poems here in whole. 

 Dear readers, what are the parts of spring that delight you, and what aspects of the season makes you, perhaps, a little melancholy?