Quote of the Day (Langston Hughes, on the ‘Little Sleep Song’ of April Rain)

“The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.”—African-American poet, librettist, translator, and fiction writer Langston Hughes (1901-1967), “April Rain Song,” originally published in 1921, reprinted in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (1994)
 
I had a somewhat different reaction to overnight rain than Langston Hughes did: I awoke to hear its soft patter outside my window this morning, rather than falling asleep to it.
 
But I recalled that I had just heard yesterday about this poem. It’s a lovely set of verses (only five more lines than you see here) and easy to find on the Internet. I urge anyone who’s never encountered it to look it up.

Quote of the Day (Sir William Watson, on April’s ‘Golden Laughter’)

“April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter,
But, the moment after,
Weep thy golden tears!”—English poet Sir William Watson (1858-1935), “Song,” in The Poems of Sir William Watson (1936)
 
I had never heard of this poem until last week, when I watched Katharine Hepburn reciting these lines in Without Love (1945), the third of her nine films with Spencer Tracy. I’m not sure who was responsible for including this literary allusion: screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart or Philip Barry, who created the original Broadway play.
 
All of this got me wondering about other instances of poetry used in films. “S.G.,” the creator of the blog “Rhyme and Reason,” had a useful May 2016 post, “My Top Twelve Poems in Movies.” I’d like to add just one more: Joyce Kilmer’s “Rouge Bouquet,” recited movingly by the actor portraying him, Jeffrey Lynn, in this clip from the 1940 movie The Fighting 69^th.

Quote of the Day (Robert Penn Warren, on Louisiana in Early April)

“A month from now, in early April, at the time when far away, outside the city, the water hyacinths would be covering every inch of bayou, lagoon, creek, and backwater with a spiritual-mauve to obscene-purple, violent, vulgar, fleshy, solid, throttling mass of bloom over the black water, and the first heartbreaking, misty green, like girlhood dreams, on the old cypresses would have settled down to be leaf and not a damned thing else, and the arm-thick, mud-colored, slime-slick mocassins would heave out of the swamp and try to cross the highway and your front tire hitting one would give a slight bump and make a sound like kerwhush and a tinny thump when he slapped heavily up against the underside of the fender, and the insects would come boiling out of the swamps and day and night the whole air would vibrate with them with a sound like an electric fan, and if it was night the owls back in the swamps would be whoo-ing and moaning like love and death and damnation, or one would sail out of the pitch dark into the rays of your headlights and plunge against the radiator to explode like a ripped feather bolster, and the fields would be deep in that rank, hairy or slick, juicy, sticky grass which the cattle gorge on and never get flesh over their ribs for that grass is in that black soil and no matter how far the roots could ever go, if the roots were God knows how deep, there would never be anything but that black, grease-clotted soil and no stone down there to put calcium into that grass—well, a month from now, in early April, when all those things would be happening beyond the suburbs, the husks of the old houses in the street where Anne Stanton and I were walking would, if it were evening, crack and spill out onto the stoops and into the street all that life which was now sealed up within.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), All the King’s Men (1946)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the Passing of April and First Love)

“All the time in the world—his life and hers. But for an instant as he kissed her he knew that though he search through eternity he could never recapture those lost April hours. He might press her close now till the muscles knotted on his arms—she was something desirable and rare that he had fought for and made his own—but never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of night. . . .

“Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.” —American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Sensible Thing,” in All the Sad Young Men (1926)

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on a ‘Soft April Night’)

“Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.”―Russian short-story writer and playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), About Love and Other Stories (1895)

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on April’s ‘Spirit of Youth in Everything’)

“From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.”—English playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), “Sonnet 98” (“From You Have I Been Absent in The Spring”), in Sonnets (1609)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on April’s ‘Green Traffic Light’)

“April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.” — American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), John Mistletoe (1931)

Quote of the Day (W.H. Davies, on April’s ‘Charms of Primrose Gold’)

“When April scatters charms of primrose gold

Among the copper leaves in thickets old,

And singing skylarks from the meadows rise,

To twinkle like black stars in sunny skies…

"When I go forth on such a pleasant day,

One breath outdoors takes all my cares away.” —Welsh poet W.H. Davies (1871-1940), “April's Charms,” in The Collected Poems of William H. Davies (1916)

I took the image accompanying this post a year ago, up by Broadway and 89^th Street in Manhattan. As I write this now, the atmosphere is not what Mr. Davies had in mind. But the greatness of spring lies as much in its promise as in its bloom.

Quote of the Day (Lizette Woodworth Reese, on April Wind and Rain)

“Straight from the east the wind blows sharp with rain,

That just now drove its wild ranks down the street,

And westward rushed into the sunset sweet.”— Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856-1935), “April in Town,” from The Four Seasons: Poems, edited by J. D. McClatchy (2008)

Quote of the Day (Geoffrey Chaucer, on April)

“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

I finally got around to reading critic Joan Acocella’s reconsideration of Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales, in the December 21-28, 2009 issue of The New Yorker (sorry, full text isn’t available, though you’ll find an abstract here.)

It brought me back to one of my most vivid memories at Columbia University nearly three decades ago, when Professor Robert Hanning recited the above passage vigorously in his medieval literature course, dwelling on each phrase in a way that made Chaucer’s Middle English come alive—seem understandable, really—even without the interlinear translations that we would have found indispensable without this reading.

Acocella’s fine essay mixes the best of what so many of us learned in our English classes then with some details about Chaucer’s life that either make you shake your head in wonder (he managed to serve, as an important government official, under both King Richard II and the man who deposed him, Henry IV—not an easy accomplishment) or grin (King Edward III granted him, in 1374, a gallon of wine per day--something, I'm sure, that must have made the poet and king's servant very popular with friends).

With April 15—and the terror the IRS strikes into the hearts of so many—so close, it’s nice to think of at least one tax official—the creator of The Canterbury Tales—who had a brain and a heart.

Whenever I associate something in literature with April, I think immediately of two poems: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and The Canterbury Tales. Eliot has his virtues, but when you think of the extraordinary amount of homely imagery conveyed even in the above passage—not to mention the ironies of “The Summoner’s Tale” and the bawdy humor of “The Miller’s Tale”—well, it really is no contest, is it?