From the Whistler

Aprille with His Shoures Sote


Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
It’s springtime, and poetry feels as right and natural as rain or flowers, if not quite so necessary. After all both poetry and spring are creative, and both are intoxicating. Sumer is icumen in—it’s time for gathering rosebuds and cleaning the pasture spring; the lark’s on the wing, the pilgrims are bound for Canterbury, and even the leafless vines on the road to the contagious hospital are stirring again. Not even the dour A.E. Houseman, who wrote the above stanza, could resist the show. Of course, being A.E. Houseman, he goes on to consider his own mortality: 

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And not all poets are as welcoming to the season of rebirth. T.S. Eliot’s famous opening about April being the cruelest month may have been inspired by these lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s "Spring", which appeared the year before "The Wasteland": 

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.
In the background of both poems is the lingering grief felt by many after World War I.

Regardless of poetic attitude towards spring, something about the season invites verse—we lay aside the heavy Russian novel and long for light, transient things. In this spirit we present the Whistling Shade spring poetry issue. Hang up the old coat and come take a sunset swim with John Grey, confront mountain demons with Yume Chung Martines, or contemplate an Edward Hopper painting with PJ Nights. Michelle Barnette writes a letter to her brain surgeon, Sharon Chmielarz pays tribute to an Auschwitz victim, Luke Hinrichs visits the Gunflint trail, Liza Porter has a child and says good-bye, and Greg Watson just looks at his hands.

We also have plenty of intoxicating prose for you. Jarda Cervenka explores bars of the Amazon, while Michael Fedo chronicles the adventures of the Sieur DuLhut and Margaret Frazer discusses crime fighting nuns. In all the excitement, be sure not to forget your obligatory A.E. Houseman landscape admiration tour. To finish the poem: 


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.

- Joel Van Valin