"Whan That Aprille"

April is poetry month.  National Poetry Month, to be exact.  And the opening of Chaucer's "Prologue to The Canterbury Tales" seems a good place to begin.  "Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote/The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote..."  Its eighteen lines have been a part of my life since I was a child.  My mother used to recite them, often for no particular reason ... whether she was frying chicken, driving the car, or sitting, oil paint brush in hand.  She--and I in turn--loved the sound of the words, the flow of something almost intelligible.

In college, one of my Lit professors--a Chaucer scholar who even named his son Geoffrey--said, "Don't think of it as Old English.  Chaucer's language was Middle English of the London Dialect."  I loved knowing that; I never forgot it.  Since he had us memorize those same lines, I later recited them to my daughter.

Because of Chaucer, I got to Canterbury some five years later.  I did not have a camera then, but, I did when I visited York minster one April a decade or so ago ... 

... a picture that reminds me of Browning's poem that begins, "O, to be in England/Now that April's there." (1)  He wrote it in Italy when feeling homesick. 

As well as hearing my mother come out with Chaucer, I became immersed in poetry early on by way of A. A. Milne's magnificent books, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.  Plus Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.

And then my grandmother gave me Silver Pennies, a compilation of poetry appropriate for children, all in a small format (4½ x 6) that very much appealed to me.  I was small; the book was small.  We liked each other.  (I wonder today that so many children's books are so large, so adult size.)  I often picked up this little book and prowled through its words with enormous pleasure and concentration.  It prompted me to write my own poems when I was six.  And again, in my teens.  In the preface, the editor urged the reader to listen to poetry as much as to read it.  To simply sit and hear the words, their sounds, their rhythms, their glorious proximity to each other ... to whatever images they conjured and whatever nebulous wishes they might help articulate.  Less a mind thing than a heart thing.

"Queen Anne, Queen Anne, has washed her lace
(She chose a summer's day)..." ("Queen Anne's Lace" by Mary Leslie Newton)

"Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink,

That is the finest of suppers, I think ..." ("Animal Crackers" by Christopher Morley)

"Sherwood in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake?..."  ("A Song of Sherwood" by Alfred Noyes)

"Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin.  Why do you stare at them? ..."  ("Overheard on a Saltmarsh" by Harold Monro)

Once, as an adult (having expanded my library by then), I gathered my poetry books before making a cross-country car trip and sat at my typewriter to copy favorites onto 3-hole-punched 5½ x 8½ notebook paper.  I bought metal rings to keep the pages together.  Then I took two pieces of cardboard, cut them to size, covered them with pretty paper, and used them for front and back covers.  One family member asked, "Why don't you simply take the books with you?"  No, I said, I wanted my favorites right at hand.  Easy access.

I began my three-holed compilation with two poems by Horace.  I added those Middle-English-of-the-London-dialect lines.  Some Shakespeare, of course.  The Romantic Poets.  The Rossettis, brother and sister.  Several from "Spoon River Anthology" by Edgar Lee Masters.  Many from the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.  Plus contemporary works--James Wright, Pattiann Rogers, Mary Oliver, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Off in the Great Plains, I could read aloud, "They went to sea in a sieve, they did./In a sieve they went to sea.." (2)  Or "Elysium is as far as to/The very next room .." (3)  Crossing the Continental Divide, I might want to fish out, "Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!" (4) (And though that book is now frayed, I still enjoy opening it to John Gould Fletcher's poem about "Rain and a ravel of cloud." (5)  Or to Dylan Thomas, W. S. Merwin, Charles Wright.)

I was actively writing and sending out poems then.  Some even got published.  But it seemed there were more people writing poems than reading them.  The journals even "complained" that if everyone who submitted a poem would also subscribe, they could stay in business.  And so, though I obviously did not subscribe to every journal I submitted to, I did subscribe to one a year.  "The Georgia Review."  "The Iowa Review."  "Poetry."  Then I would cancel my subscription and start another elsewhere.  Of course, every journal wanted me to stay on ... and on ...  But I had to spread the goodies around.

At a time in her life that Buddhism would call one of "impermanence," my mother found herself with little more than her oil paints, clothes, and a few things in storage including some old family dishes.  "I wish to heck I'd never gotten rid of my book, Great Poems of the English Language," she'd say.  "I loved it so."  A 1,500-page anthology, she'd often haul it out and look something up.  But then she sold it; perhaps she needed the cash.  So later, finding it out-of-print, she was on the look-out for another copy.  It was a happy day when I finally found one and gave it to her.

Now, it's on my bookshelf.  I think of my mother whenever I see it.  Inside are those words by Chaucer.  I can still recite them.  And--going on to the third generation--so can my daughter.

Footnotes:

(1)  "Home Thoughts, from Abroad," Robert Browning
(2)  "The Jumblies," Edward Lear
(3)  "Elysium Is As Far," Emily Dickinson 
(4)  "The Starlight Night," Gerard Manley Hopkins
(5)  "Blue Symphony," John Gould Fletcher

[N.B.  A blog glitch I'm trying to resolve:  If you've tried to add a "Comment" and haven't been able to, you have company.  As I understand it, you don't click onto the envelope symbol with the arrow but "0 Comments" instead.  Except that doesn't always seem to work.  Hmmm....]