Yes, it’s time for what everyone 'round here waits for: the monthly title contest. Submit your favorite quote and/or lyric with the word “April” in it in the comments; the winner gets their website linked to at the top of the random list (over there on the left).
Oh, and for those of you keeping an eye on that other contest, we’re currently up to 1,972 comments…
Feeling poetic:
Such comfort as do lusty young men feel
When well-apparelled April on the heel
Shakespere
April knows her own, and is content
Susan Coolidge
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
T.S. Eliot
"I love April because it starts with April Fool's Day and I can just lie, and lie, and then I can lie some more. Ah ha ha ha - fooled you again!" - Jayson Blair (Ha ha, not really!)
Nothing I could turn up from Williams mentioned April, alas. So instead, this:
"The April's in her eyes, it is love's spring,
And these the showers to bring it on."
- William Shakespeare, Antony & Cleopatra III.ii
"Maybe he's found the answer 2 all the April snow"
(from prince's "sometimes it snows in april" from the sountrack to "under the cherry moon"
April Come She Will
Pieces of April
April O'Neil
Richie Aprile
April Come She Will
Pieces of April
April O'Neil
Richie Aprile
"To what purpose, April, do you return again?"
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay (via this week's New Yorker)
Ah, but you can't leave out the second half of the Millay quote:
"To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough."
dammit, dammit... I'm sitting here thinking, "didn't Canterbury Tales start with something about April?"
So, I googled it, and, of course, that's your damn title to the post. I officially have to hate you for being either smarter and/or faster than me.
Either way, here's the whole thing:
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;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Can win a consolation prize?
More Edna St. Vincent Millay:
April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
Josephine Preston Peabody:
Spinning in April
MOON in heaven's garden, among the clouds that wander,
Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways,
Whiten, bloom not yet, not yet, within the twilight yonder;
All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days
-----------------
Longfellow:
Sweet April! many a thought
Is wedded unto thee, as hearts are wed;
Nor shall they fail, till, to its autumn brought,
Life's golden fruit is shed.
(how can I resist trying for a 2-for-1 contest..?)
John Greenleaf Whittier:
THE BIRDS against the April wind
Flew northward, singing as they flew;
They sang, "The land we leave behind
Has swords for corn-blades, blood for dew."
----------------
Sara Teasdale:
I WENT out on an April morning
All alone, for my heart was high.
I was a child of the shining meadow,
I was a sister of the sky
----------------
Wordsworth:
IT was an April morning: fresh and clear
----------------
Celia Thaxter:
HOW long it seems since that mild April night,
When, leaning from the window, you and I
Heard, clearly ringing from the shadowy bight,
The loon’s unearthly cry!
-------------------
And, finally, Carl Sandburg:
Branches
THE DANCING girls here … after a long night of it …
The long beautiful night of the wind and rain in April,
The long night hanging down from the drooping branches of the top of a birch tree,
Swinging, swaying, to the wind for a partner, to the rain for a partner.
What is the humming, swishing thing they sing in the morning now?
The rain, the wind, the swishing whispers of the long slim curve so little and so dark on the western morning sky … these dancing girls here on an April early morning …
They have had a long cool beautiful night of it with their partners learning this year’s song of April.
Okay, I'm done...
In April, we all sang a duet with Tina Turner. In a way it was nice and it was our favorite song.
-They Might Be Giants.