Through the Lens of Poetry

Because this April is the 30th Anniversary of National Poetry Month and because Edith Morton Chase and her dear friend Mary Burrall were writers of poetry, it seems appropriate to envision April at Topsmead through the lens, more specifically, through the lines of poetry about April.   

By early April, with the massive Topsmead winter snowpack melted, last year's withered berries and a few aged apples on the leafless limbs of the fruit trees and the brown naked beds of the formal gardens around the house languish beneath a glowering grey sky.  As Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his poem "April":

    Again the woods are odorous, the lark
    Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray
    That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark,
    Where branches bare disclosed the empty day.

T. S. Eliot, in the well-known lines from his poem "The Waste Land," seems to agree with Rilke's melancholy take on the April landscape:

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

The classic New England poet Robert Frost matter-of-factly captures the winter/springness of April in these lines from his poem "Two Tramps in Mud Time," although the wind is rarely still at Topsmead!

    The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
    You know how it is with an April day
    When the sun is out and the wind is still.

And Topsmead walkers totally get Frost's point because they dress in layers for early April walkabouts; however, eventually, the showers will come, the temperatures will moderate, and the lilac buds will appear as April performs her magic.  Sara Teasdale sweetly captures this seasonal shift in her poem "April":

    The roofs are shining from the rain.
    The sparrows tritter* as they fly,                                *Teasdale's word choice 
    And with a windy April grace
    The little clouds go by.

In his poem "Today," Billy Collins perfectly captures the mood of the Friends of Topsmead docents when they open the house to prepare for the summer house tour season:

    If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
    so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
    that it made you want to throw
    open all the windows in the house....

Finally, as you notice the spots of here-and-there color from spring bulbs that seem randomly "strewn" about the Topsmead gardens, get ready for a chuckle at the end of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "April" when...

    It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
    April
    Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

And not to neglect a significant group of Topsmead walkers--the dog walkers--who surely will relate to the seasonal explosion of smells that their dogs will be exploring as captured tongue-in-cheekily by the canine narrator in Alicia Ostriker's poem "April":
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    What a concerto
    of good stinks said the dog
    trotting along Riverside Drive
    in the early afternoon
    sniffing this way and that.
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When you are walking about the Topsmead landscape this April, why not get inspired by your favorite poetic lines in this "Musings" and think like a poet?  Jot down a few lines of your own and share them in the comment section.

Margaret Hunt
Blogmistress