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Admiring April despite weather

The last straw was finding where the crows went: downtown is where.
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You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You’re one month on in the middle of May

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

— Two Tramps in Mud Time, Robert Frost, 1936

The last straw was finding where the crows went: downtown is where. On the first sunny morning in three weeks, but featuring a wind sharp enough to shave the teeth off a rasp, I slunk out of the office where I had just had my income tax extracted, and there they were, heckling and jeckling, crowing and caw-hawing me.

Back home the in-box was again overflowing with complaints of a winter that won’t end, and all the faint signs and portents of an unsprung spring. Sister in law, Caroline, gleefully reported finding the first wild crocus at the top of her hill above Pincher Creek. The next day, the Old Curmudgeon, Don Cahoon, found his first crocus in the foothills 120 km to the north. But the day after that, Caroline barely made it up her hill in her four-by-four on her road covered with 25 cm of new and still coming snow.

There are few reports of any spring fishing at all. In his last column for the Edmonton Sun, friend and colleague, Neil Waugh, superb scrivener of skunkings, reports on getting shut out on an early “duty” trip to the North Raven River.

The loudest and longest discussions online are of an April ritual, no matter what the weather: the constant yakkity-yak of mating, nest-building magpies, or “flying rats,” as one of the kinder emailers calls them. Then there is much hope about the return of the friendly neighbourhood merlins, their killdeer-like call evacuating whatever songbirds might have returned after surviving the magpies last summer, but also mercifully shutting up the apisci kakakes, as the Cree, resorting to onomatopoeia, named magpies for the way they sound.

Much of the street and email language about our April so far is decidedly unparliamentary, occasionally so foul, in fact, that I was driven to poetry, hoping for civilized discourse and enlightenment on April. Immediately I found that April is National Poetry Month, and that no other month is mentioned half as much as April in Shakespeare’s work, which is not surprising, since it was the month of his birth and death, although he did not know the latter yet.

At the end of the 14th century, in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer gave one of the mildest views of April as renewal: (translated from middle English): “When, in April, sweet showers fall … That genders forth the flowers … Then do folk long to go on pilgrimages.” (Me: to a holy trout stream, maybe?)

A century or so later, April’s foolery was creeping in, to this, from Shakespeare’s To Gentlemen of Verona, foreshadowing Frost in the excerpt quoted to start this column: “The unglory of an April day, Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, And by and by a cloud takes all away.”

The sunny view of April hung on, especially in 1845 for a Robert Browning, off in Italy and homesick: “Oh to be in England, now that April’s there.” I prefer the wag’s version: “Oh to be in August, now that April’s here.”

In “modern” times, April poetry has had a reality check:

“April is full of dazzling mud and dingy snow”: Song of a Second April, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921.

“April is the cruelest month”: first line of The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot. 1922.

“It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13”: 1984, George Orwell, 1949.

In all the ranting and raving I read and hear about our April weather, I detect a certain amount of ironic admiration for nuances of a current hot environmental debate: Is it global warming or climate change that afflicts us?

Perhaps the argument has relevance for our other 11 months, but you have to admire April just a little for sticking to its script over the centuries, according to the poets, and constantly confounding us and our usually premature expectations of and for spring — except when it totally April Fools us with a rare, perfect, un-Aprilish April. Now, that’s climate change, maybe even some kind of warming.

Grudgingly admire, yes, but you don’t have to like April. Ezra Pound wrote a parody of a mid 13th century old English rota celebrating summer, in which he used unparliamentary language in his reviling of winter; it works for me to give the poet the last word, by substituting “April” for his first word:

April is icumen in,

Lhude sing Goddam,

Raineth drop and staineth slop

And how the wind doth ramm!

Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.