Areopagus Volume LXXIX

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the seventy ninth volume of the Areopagus. May soon approaches — let us make the most of these final April days while we can! But, I wonder, what is the spirit of April? TS Eliot took a rather dim view of things:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

While Geoffrey Chaucer, six centuries earlier, found in April the beginning of a year's joy:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour.

Perhaps April is both, a sort of month between months, a time neither wholly here nor quite there. Well, this is a query I leave unpursued. Another Areopagus, like spring rain, surely arrives...