April Inspiration

In the US April is poetry month and it's easy to see why. Poets celebrate the month's burst of growth but their flowers are not always cheerful.

As if overnight spring has arrived in a dazzle of foliage and flowers. And lines of poetry celebrating April circle in my head, beginning with Chaucer:

Whan that April with showres soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in switch licour

Of which virtue engendred is the flour;

(Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, 1476)

T.S.Eliot is more downbeat: 

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

(The Wasteland, 1922)

Yet he cannot avoid the generative power of the month as the rhyme of his active verbs ‘breeding’, ‘mixing’, ‘stirring’, is picked up in spring.  

  Like his predecessors, Charles Wright identifies the month with renewal:

April again. Aries comes forth

                                                and we are released

Into the filter veins and vast line

Under the elm and the apple wood.

                                                      The last of the daffodils

Sulphurs the half-jade grass

                                             against the arbor vitae. 

 (From ‘A Journal of One Significant Landscape’, Zone Journals, 1988)

Spring blossoms

In these examples, among many, of poems about April, flowers are harbingers of new life. While we are familiar with poems dedicated to various blooms, not least the cheery daffodils celebrated by Herrick and Wordsworth, flowers generally carry less symbolic weight in poetry or prose than trees.* (The rose is an exception, boasting enough spiritual and romantic significance to swell volumes. I will return to it in June.) Thinking about this distinction, I opened a book inherited from my aunt, a devoted gardener, Wild Flowers in Britain (1944), by the poet Geoffrey Grigson and found this comment:

And if one made an anthology of English writing about flowers, one would find them occasionally described, and symbolically used, one would find flower bits here and there, but discover few long flower chapters or flower poems, except during a mid-nineteenth century period of ladyism. [!!]

Regretting this lack, by contrast with writing about birds, Grigson cites the Victorian writer and philosopher, John Ruskin’s, observation that flowers ‘seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity’ because their beauty does not evoke the ‘awe and sorrow’ necessary for ‘the sensation of sublimity’:

To the child, and the girl, and the peasant and the manufacturing operative, to the grisette and the nun, the lover and the monk they are precious always. . . . They fall forgotten from the great workmen’s and soldiers’ hands.

Apparently the latter prefer ‘crowns of leaves’ or thorns. Grigson at least has the wit to caution us against taking Ruskin so seriously that we ‘reject flowers for an everlasting tornado of eternal truths’ and miss ‘all the minute lyrical entertainments’.

He points to colloquial names for flowers as a sign of our affection for them, delighting particularly in ‘Welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk’ (a yellow stonecrop). I think that one might have fallen out of favour. His ensuing litany of common names for plants is a poem in itself.

He adds a short selection of flower quotes from various writers, including John Clare who, despite a ‘vast, limp amount of herbage’ in his poetry, also presents a ‘simultaneous reality and symbol – for example, love living within itself like a wild flower in its own scent.’ He quotes Clare’s lines from ‘The Days of April’:  

Daisies burn in April grass with silver fires,

And pilewort in the green lane blazes out

Enough to burn the fingers, . . .

(The Shepherd’s Calendar, 1827)

Illustration reproduced in Geoffrey Grigson’s Wild Flowers in Britain

While we delight in the colour brought forth by April sunshine, flower poems often turn on sadness, regret or grief. This melancholy attachmenet is perhaps allied to the ephemerality of flowers which decay rapidly before our eyes. We bring them into our homes, decorate our walls and clothing with painted versions, use them to deck altars, woo lovers, adorn bridal parties, cheer the sick and lay on graves. Particular flowers are hedged about with superstition, for example, that hawthorn blossom should never be brought indoors. In her poem, ‘April’, Louise Glück addresses her dead parents in a garden setting:

. . .

grief is distributed

between you, among all your kind, for me

to know you, as deep blue

marks the wild scilla, white

the wood violet.

(2004)

Sharon Olds too, recalls her mother through flowers: ‘Those posies might have a/ peony, a freesia, a tulip . . . the bouquets saying mother-/-we would not be here, without your song, your eye.’ (From ‘Whenever I Saw You I Handed You A Bouquet’, 2017). For both women the flowers express the inexpressible, or unsayable, in their relationships with their parents.

Through his long poem, ‘Asphodel’ (1962), William Carlos Williams charts his life by way of flowers, his great love embodied in garden, ‘A thousand tropics/in an apple blossom.’ The idea that the asphodel grows in hell gratifies Williams as he faces death.  

Yellow Magnolia in Brooklyn Botanical Garden

For all that poignancy the verbs we draw from the lexical field of flowers are cheery: flowering, flourishing, blooming (often referring to pregnancy). The phrases ‘roses in your cheeks’ and the ‘bloom of youth’ imply health, usually in young women. Flowers give us girls’ names, Daisy, Lily, Rose, Violet, Flora, Blaithín (Irish for little flower), Blodwen (Welsh, white flower). Youth, like flowers, fades.

This strong feminine association carries overtones of sex, reaching all the way back to the Greek myth of Persephone, snatched into the Underworld by Hades as she admired a narcissus. A bargain struck with her mother, Demeter, permitted her to return to earth for two-thirds of the year, the remaining third she spent with her husband underground. Spring, summer and autumn are her seasons here, marked by sowing, tilling and harvesting.

  Were Geoffrey Grigson around today he might not refer so dismissively to ‘ladyism’. Flower poems by contemporary women are not mere arrangements of pretty words. Where Williams refers to the ‘sexual orchid’, Amy Clampitt invokes ‘The Smaller Orchid’ (1983) saying ‘Love is a climate/ Small things find safe/To grow in’ unlike the ‘hothouse overpowerings, blisses/ and cruelties at teatime’ she had imagined it to be.

  In ‘The Flower Master’ (1982) Medbh McGuckian details the erotic preparations of geisha girls for their master’s arrival, as they ‘learn to stroke gently the necks of daffodils’ and finally, ‘This black container calls for sloes, sweet/ sultan, dainty nipplewort in honour/ Of a special guest’ and he ‘must stoop’ to enter.

Iris

A woman artist in Sujata Bhatt’s ‘Iris’ pleasures herself with the image of the flower:

But she can close her eyes and see

red-orange veins, the yellow  

swept with green throbbing towards blue,

and deep inside she feels

indigo pulsing to violet.

(From Brunizem, 1988)

Like flowers, life and pleasure are transitory. April is less a cruel than an urgent month, the burst of light after winter, and the accompanying growth spurt inspire a mild hysteria in us, spring fever. Renewal, however, is counterpointed by decay. There is a chill in the winds of April that nips at our heels, reminder of winters past and to come.  

  Kathleen Raine captures this tension in ‘April 1976’, underscored now by the perils of climate change:

Familiar flowers:

In this cold April yet again

Crocus, tulip, daffodils

Of English gardens poets have praised

. . .

And of the destroyer does the garden know,

How the soft rain falls from tainted skies,

Seeps into root and blade,

And in the petals opening this spring day

The insidious harm already working its way

Into those delicate threads of life the spinners weave:

I sorrow for the flowers betrayed.

Chaucer’s sweet showers are tainted now and Eliot’s lilacs will struggle to grow in the dead land. Wright’s daffodils reek of sulphur under the tree of life. These days it might not be the dearth of writing about flowers that Grigson would lament but that of the flowers themselves. Happily we have the poems and paintings to cheer our drought.

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*See What’s the Story? 23 May 2023 for thoughts on the importance of trees in fiction and poetry.

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