Unenchanted April

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Poets used to love springtime. Remember Chaucer?:

 

 

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 . . .       Or how about some Shakespeare?     It was a lover and his lass,   With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,   That o'er the green corn-field did pass,   In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,   When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet lovers love the spring.       Eh.       I myself do not much like the spring. It can be very pretty, granted, and I do think crocuses and daffodils are very nice. But there’s something a little – I don’t know – relentless about it. And I notice that, over the past hundred years, a few poets seem to be agreeing with me.       How about that ol’ T. S. Eliot?:       April is the cruellest month, breeding   Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing   Memory and desire, stirring   Dull roots with spring rain.         But my personal favorite is New England’s own Edna St. Vincent Millay:       To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.       I love those last few lines.       Happy springtime, everyone!

Biographies

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Lately I’ve found myself drawn to the biography section of the Providence Public Library. Think of it! Truman, Marechal Foch, Thomas Cranmer, Napoleon, Cleopatra, Nellie Bly, all side by side.

 

 

Recently I read two biographies in a single weekend: one of Edna St. Vincent Millay (“Restless Spirit,” by Miriam Gurko), and “O Rare Don Marquis!” by Edward Anthony.

 

 

By Sunday evening I was sad and thoughtful.

 

 

Biographies generally end with the death of the protagonist. These two were no exception. Millay loved life and dreaded death, so the account of her death at the age of fifty-eight (very soon after the death of her beloved husband) was very saddening. Marquis saw much death in his life – his two children, both of his wives – and died young himself, of a stroke, at fifty-nine years of age.

 

 

I’m fifty-five. Maybe you can see where I’m going with this.

 

 

Millay was the spirit of her age. She wrote tons of lyric poetry, in traditional meter and rhyme; she lived in Greenwich Village and associated with all kinds of people; she was a feminist ahead of her time. Her poetry is memorable, and still anthologized. I find that I know lots of her poetry by heart, even now.

 

 

Is she still taught at all? Does anyone still read her?

 

 

Marquis was a newspaper columnist. He created characters: the Old Soak, an alcoholic managing to get by during Prohibition; Hermione, a fashionable intellectual; Archy, a cockroach who’d been a free-verse poet in a previous life; and Mehitabel, an alley cat who claimed she’d been Cleopatra in a previous life.

 

 

Marquis wanted to be remembered for his serious verse, and his plays.

 

 

He is remembered to this day for Archy and Mehitabel.

 

 

He foresaw this, and dreaded it. He did not want to be remembered for two comic characters he’d created: a literary cockroach, and a cat who was a lady in spite of everything.

 

 

And yet, to this day, these are his books that are remembered.

 

 

There are lessons to be learned from biographies, if you know where to look for them.

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