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List of April Poems

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Saffron

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List of April Poems

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I happened to notice how many poems mention the month April. I have begun to suspect that April is the most frequently written about month in Poetry and therefore why National Poetry Month is in April.

The List

I Love You
by Sara Teasdale

When April bends above me
And finds me fast asleep,
Dust need not keep the secret
A live heart died to keep.



Madrigal
by Mary Leader

How the tenor warbles in April!
He thrushes, he nightingales, 0 he's a lark.
He cuts the cinquefoil air into snippets
With his love's scissors in the shape of a stork.
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#3

Always Marry An April Girl

Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true --
I love April, I love you.

Ogden Nash
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Spring

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
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Sonnet XCVIII: From you have I been absent in the spring

by William Shakespeare
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
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You left me an easy one, "The Wasteland," opening lines.



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

Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales:

Whan that April with his shoures soote,
The drougth of March hathe perced to the roote

W.D. Snodgrass's "April Inventory," in which the word is mentioned only in the title.

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I'd ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who's trusted me
I'd be substantial, presently.

I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body's hunger;
That I have forces true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.
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DWill wrote:You left me an easy one, "The Wasteland," opening lines.

April is the cruelest month,
I think this line of poetry is one of the truest statements I have ever seen in print! Reading the poems that include April in a line, adds supports to my opinion.
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April is the cruellest month

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You beat me to it! This is the first line I thought of when I saw April poems. The Wasteland is one of my all time favourite poems - a desperate quest for meaning, which is certainly how I feel sometimes.
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I found another poem with April. I'm only going to post the first stanza.


when faces called flowers float out of the ground... (67)

when faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-
but keeping is downward and doubting and never
-it's april(yes,april;my darling)it's spring!
yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
(yes the mountains are dancing together)

As I am investigating the poetry of E.E. Cummings I see that he has several that mention April. The penultimate line of this one is terrific! It captures, i think, why April is such an apt metaphor for anything in transition, uncertain, emerging, something coming shyly, or something long waited for -- April is rather full.


If I have made, my lady, intricate

If I have made, my lady, intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes (frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body's whitest song
upon my mind - if I have failed to snare
the glance too shy - if through my singing slips
the very skilful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

- let the world say "his most wise music stole
nothing from death" -
you will only create
(who are so perfectly alive) my shame:
lady whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.
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poems

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Cool. let me post Poems


I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A Poet could not be but gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
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