For a week of poetry about the month of April — which began on Monday with the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and ends on Friday with the first part of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” — The New York Sun today features “Aprilian,” a poem that Bliss Carman (1861–1929) included in his 1922 volume, “Later Poems.”

Back in October, the Sun offered an 1894 poem by Bliss — who would be proclaimed the poet laureate of Canada, crowned with a wreath made from maple leaves, when, late in life, he left the United States to make a financially desperate reading tour of his native Canada.

It’s especially appropriate to include “Aprilian” in this week of April poetry, since Bliss Carmen’s birthday comes this month, the poet born on April 5 in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The poem is a charming 16-line verse about the feeling that comes with April. It’s also a fine study in a way to use “half meter”: one of the interesting forms of English verse, in which three-foot lines somehow manage to draw our ear into hearing ballad meter instead of a strict trimeter.

Ballad (or hymn or “common”) meter consists of alternating four- and three-foot lines, as heard in thousands of ballads and hymns: “Amàzing gràce, how swèet the sòund / That sàved a wrètch like mè.” As Emily Dickinson and other poets knew, however, a run of three-foot lines can suggest this ballad form, even though the first and third lines in a rhymed quatrain are a foot short.

In “Aprilian,” Carman helps establish that sense by giving the first and third lines what’s called a feminine ending, with an unstressed syllable at the end of the line (“sunshine” and “gladness,” with the masculine rhyme of “bloom” and “room” for the seond and fourth lines). The April of the poet’s memory is a young man’s month, knowledgeable about the past but unburdened by the sorrows of that past: “With her there was no shadow.” And the poem ends with a hint that the speaker is now sorrow-laden — not dwelling in youthful April but only remembering its old joys.

Aprilian
by Bliss Carman

When April came with sunshine
And showers and lilac bloom,
My heart with sudden gladness
Was like a fragrant room. 

Her eyes were heaven’s own azure,
As deep as God’s own truth.
Her soul was made of rapture
And mystery and youth. 

She knew the sorry burden
Of all the ancient years,
Yet could not dwell with sadness
And memory and tears. 

With her there was no shadow
Of failure nor despair,
But only loving joyance.
O Heart, how glad we were!

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.