“April is the cruelest month.” — T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

Can’t figure this out. Why is it the cruelest month? There is the saying that April roars in like a lion and out like a lamb. I guess maybe these two thoughts are connected, as April is a month when the weather typically turns stormy; one hour the sky is clear and the sun warm, the next, an icy breeze blows from the north, chilling to the bone.

April is like a chameleon, or a person who can’t make up their mind. They seem to be one way, and then they are not. April is unpredictable, flakey, flip-flopping.

Here’s a poet with pleasant thoughts of April:
 
“Oh, how fresh the wind is blowing!
See! The sky is bright and clear,
Oh, how green the grass is growing!
April! April! Are you here?”

— Dora Read Goodale, American poet (1866-1915)

A little too like PollyAnna for me. But not quite as bad as Eliot makes it out to be.

I believe that this April we will find ourselves challenged to know what the weather will be, one day waking up to sunshine, but ending the day with cloud and rain — and another day, experiencing winds that whip up the clouds and blow them all away. We will lovingly soak up sun on the days when it appears, and not so lovingly put on our slickers and pull out our umbrellas when a cold rain pounds down for hours.

We’re in for the typical roller-coaster ride of April. Are you ready?

One last poet to end with, and a poem with a somber thought:

“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 . . . “

— Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (an elegy for Abraham Lincoln)