April 19, 2010
MANN TALK: The Certain Glories of April Days
By Perry Mann
Special to Huntingtonnews.net
The poet T.S. Eliot labeled April the cruelest month of the year. Having lived my allotted springs according to A.E. Housman’s poetic calculation in “The Loveliest of Trees,” I believe that Eliot’s epithet is accurate relative only to the glorious clemency and unparalleled benevolence of March’s successor’s; that is, when an April day is well into May and with merciless whim assumes the demeanor of December, the sudden loss of April’s favor has no comparable deprivation, a thought put more simply and poetically by Robert Frost.
Tree tops in infant leaf dance in frenzy, buffeted by northern gusts; and between the top of their dance and blue infinity, gray-bottomed puffs scud southerly, interrupting the sun’s consolation.
Spring is the year’s adolescence. The mood swings of the teens are reflected in the weather and season: The sunny warmth of the yearning young, the fertile luxuriance of pubertal persons, the snowflake cool of irk and sulk and the sudden shower of tearful tantrum. Steady autumn, the year’s retirement, is the contrasting measure.
The streams are pregnant with spring’s swell and green from the antisepsis of February’s freeze. The shoals have muscles, not the skinny-kid purling of August nor its cesspool stagnation. Every riparian way is rippling toward lucid level---a circuitous course from autumn’s moribundity to spring’s fecundity.
A walk on a hillside through a meadow on a Sunday morn is a symphony of quiet and a temple of beauty. Fields carved from forests shine like emerald isles amid hills succeeding hills. And a sturdy red barn set in acres of green is a jewel of security and joy to heart and eye. The honeybee works the dandelions in nature’s plan of propagation and scheme of sweets and has no worry of unemployment, even though the squires of suburbia poison their lawns to oust the yellow miscreants, bringing more uniformity to inanity.
Forsythia bushes are bombs of butter. The daffodil elite, Mount Hood, King Alfred, Bella Vista and Pheasant’s Eye demurely reign in innocence. The grape hyacinth in royal regalia is to the austere, olive-drab asparagus what Charles I was to Cromwell. The Episcopalian to the Puritan; the Cavalier to the Roundhead.
A host of red tulips tossed by the wind are an assemblage of Amish women red-bonneted, nodding amen to the sun’s charity. And the cherry trees are in bridal dress, spangled with blooms of holy white. The forests, which a month before mimicked petrifaction, are a profusion of variegated green and factories of fruition. The courageous colors of the crocuses have joined the snows of yesteryears, leaving their green bereaved.
The ubiquitous robins, which gang in woods in February, have paired and moved to hop the lawns of towns. But the magically maneuverable swallows have come to country to stay and to swoop and dive with an agility and grace that make the air antics of a top gun appear arthritic. The shrill notes and punctuated runs of the killdeer and the manic imitations of the irrepressible mockingbird are in the land. Spring is here.
Returning from my hymnal hour, that is, from a time of listening to the songs of silence, I met a cortege of cars with headlights on leading and following a sleek hearse, in which rode a corpse whose allotment of springs had run out. There were numerous cars, most late model and no pickups, indicating the deceased’s substantial standing, a status now reduced to memory.
The headlights were a glaring incongruity in the noonday sun. The cost and attention paid to the deceased by his kinsmen and their indifference to the dead of other species --- the casualties of car-craze --- that littered the berm of the road they traveled, cried more incongruity, attesting further to man’s simplistic idolatry of himself and exhibiting an occasion of the dead burying the dead amidst burgeoning life.
Housman in “The Loveliest of Trees,” a companion to “When I was one and Twenty,’ changed focus from the springtime snares of youth to the inevitability of age, to the running out of the sands of time, to how little room remains after 20 springs “To see the cherry hung with snow.”
Years ago I shared this poem with another; and in the years after, whenever we would meet, we would talk about the glories of springs that had gone and the number that remained of our three score and ten. Now, I have spent my allotted springs and have borrowed eighteen---perhaps a few from the dead in the cortege. I owe to those who loaned me the others a king’s ransom of pounds and crowns and rubies. And I owe to Housman the perennial joy of reading this poem when the earth’s tilt and circle spawn spring.
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.
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MANN TALK: The Certain Glories of April Days
By Perry Mann
Special to Huntingtonnews.net
The poet T.S. Eliot labeled April the cruelest month of the year. Having lived my allotted springs according to A.E. Housman’s poetic calculation in “The Loveliest of Trees,” I believe that Eliot’s epithet is accurate relative only to the glorious clemency and unparalleled benevolence of March’s successor’s; that is, when an April day is well into May and with merciless whim assumes the demeanor of December, the sudden loss of April’s favor has no comparable deprivation, a thought put more simply and poetically by Robert Frost.
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.The fecundity of spring is chastened by winter’s puritan frigidity. The daffodil lured into bloom is tossed by the cold currents of reality like some dreaming immigrant seduced in her new land and abandoned.
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.
Tree tops in infant leaf dance in frenzy, buffeted by northern gusts; and between the top of their dance and blue infinity, gray-bottomed puffs scud southerly, interrupting the sun’s consolation.
Spring is the year’s adolescence. The mood swings of the teens are reflected in the weather and season: The sunny warmth of the yearning young, the fertile luxuriance of pubertal persons, the snowflake cool of irk and sulk and the sudden shower of tearful tantrum. Steady autumn, the year’s retirement, is the contrasting measure.
The streams are pregnant with spring’s swell and green from the antisepsis of February’s freeze. The shoals have muscles, not the skinny-kid purling of August nor its cesspool stagnation. Every riparian way is rippling toward lucid level---a circuitous course from autumn’s moribundity to spring’s fecundity.
A walk on a hillside through a meadow on a Sunday morn is a symphony of quiet and a temple of beauty. Fields carved from forests shine like emerald isles amid hills succeeding hills. And a sturdy red barn set in acres of green is a jewel of security and joy to heart and eye. The honeybee works the dandelions in nature’s plan of propagation and scheme of sweets and has no worry of unemployment, even though the squires of suburbia poison their lawns to oust the yellow miscreants, bringing more uniformity to inanity.
Forsythia bushes are bombs of butter. The daffodil elite, Mount Hood, King Alfred, Bella Vista and Pheasant’s Eye demurely reign in innocence. The grape hyacinth in royal regalia is to the austere, olive-drab asparagus what Charles I was to Cromwell. The Episcopalian to the Puritan; the Cavalier to the Roundhead.
A host of red tulips tossed by the wind are an assemblage of Amish women red-bonneted, nodding amen to the sun’s charity. And the cherry trees are in bridal dress, spangled with blooms of holy white. The forests, which a month before mimicked petrifaction, are a profusion of variegated green and factories of fruition. The courageous colors of the crocuses have joined the snows of yesteryears, leaving their green bereaved.
The ubiquitous robins, which gang in woods in February, have paired and moved to hop the lawns of towns. But the magically maneuverable swallows have come to country to stay and to swoop and dive with an agility and grace that make the air antics of a top gun appear arthritic. The shrill notes and punctuated runs of the killdeer and the manic imitations of the irrepressible mockingbird are in the land. Spring is here.
Returning from my hymnal hour, that is, from a time of listening to the songs of silence, I met a cortege of cars with headlights on leading and following a sleek hearse, in which rode a corpse whose allotment of springs had run out. There were numerous cars, most late model and no pickups, indicating the deceased’s substantial standing, a status now reduced to memory.
The headlights were a glaring incongruity in the noonday sun. The cost and attention paid to the deceased by his kinsmen and their indifference to the dead of other species --- the casualties of car-craze --- that littered the berm of the road they traveled, cried more incongruity, attesting further to man’s simplistic idolatry of himself and exhibiting an occasion of the dead burying the dead amidst burgeoning life.
Housman in “The Loveliest of Trees,” a companion to “When I was one and Twenty,’ changed focus from the springtime snares of youth to the inevitability of age, to the running out of the sands of time, to how little room remains after 20 springs “To see the cherry hung with snow.”
Years ago I shared this poem with another; and in the years after, whenever we would meet, we would talk about the glories of springs that had gone and the number that remained of our three score and ten. Now, I have spent my allotted springs and have borrowed eighteen---perhaps a few from the dead in the cortege. I owe to those who loaned me the others a king’s ransom of pounds and crowns and rubies. And I owe to Housman the perennial joy of reading this poem when the earth’s tilt and circle spawn spring.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now* * *
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.
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