April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot famously wrote, in the opening line of The Waste Land, which many believe was the greatest poem of the 20th century.
“April is the cruelest month,” he wrote in 1922, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers.” (Spoken by a character who no longer welcomes or believes in hope’s eternal spring.)
April in Paris has its defenders, and the film Enchanted April extols the month’s charms — in Tuscany (duh!) — though the main characters flee to Italy to escape the month’s cruelty in Britain. Likewise in these parts, April is the month of unfulfilled, sometimes even crushed, hopes.
The weather warrants our disappointment: Just when we thought the season had turned a corner, a young and timid spring goes into hiding and winter resumes its fearful flirtation. The month settles into a long, dreary misery — cold, wet, raw, and grey. This leads to wondrous results, as we are so often reminded: April showers, after all, bring May flowers. My main April consolation is that the newly sprung greenery flourishes in this fertile gazpacho of miserable conditions. Gradually over many years, I have come to accept that the Earth and its flora are profoundly more important than my personal meteorological preferences.
Nonetheless, April remains my least favorite month. I find something of value in all the others — even August, which has no festive holidays. Easter sometimes falls in April, but, growing up, I saw more white Easters than white Christmases. Yes, there is April Fool’s Day and even Earth Day, but the major event of the month is April 15, the day taxes are due. Talk about The Waste Land.
There is Opening Day, but baseball and April are not exactly compatible in the upper Midwest. This year, after a promising initial start raised everyone’s hopes, the first week of the new season turned into the cruelest of them all, as anyone who saw the Kyle Schwarber collision — and the Cubs’ hopes being carted off the field with him — can attest. I felt punched in the gut for several days. And I’m a White Sox fan! I can’t imagine what the past week has been like for Cub disciples.
They didn’t just lose a good player. They lost the linchpin of their entire rebuilding effort for at least a year. Schwarber raised this team to a World Series-contending level. He was Michael Jordan to their Scottie Pippin, Dennis Rodman, Luc Longley and Toni Kukoc. Without Schwarber, the Cubs are still a good team. They might even make the playoffs. But they won’t get to the World Series, much less win one.
Cruelest month indeed.
All this in addition to three hard freezes, which fried the just-emerging magnolia blossoms on their stalks, and more days with snow as part of the precipitation mix than sunshine. Not all Aprils are so cruel, but this one, thus far, has fulfilled Eliot’s infamous assessment.
And yet … the hardier-than-imagined daffodils have survived, and the snow didn’t stick, and we know for an actual fact that the temperatures, sooner than later, will rise, and the Cubs are still winning.
We also know, deep down, that even a dreary, miserable month has its place. Poet Nikki Giovanni, after watching her grandmother in the kitchen, adopted “use everything” as her approach to poetry and, thus, to life. Use everything, she said, even misery, even loss.
April is National Poetry Month, which makes sense because poets more than anyone, know how to distill beauty from suffering.
A miserable April is a good time to take refuge in poetry, which I have done more and more in my life, generally, as I’ve gotten older, finding solace in the likes of Rilke, Rumi, Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson, who wrote that “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops — at all.” Perhaps she wrote that in April.
How do we answer April’s cruelty? Must we learn how to live without hope altogether? Not according to another poet of solace, David Whyte.
“Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability,” he said, “as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully — or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.”
“Will you actually have the conversation?” Whyte asked during an interview with Krista Tippett last Sunday. “Will you become a full citizen of vulnerability, loss and disappearance, which you have no choice about?”
April is a good time to ask such difficult questions, and eventually, as Rilke wrote, to live our way into the answers.