The cruellest month

APRIL, T S Eliot famously said, is the cruellest month. Why did he say that? The enigmatic American poet expressed it in this manner:

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. This is both strange and intriguing. Winter kept us warm? Really? Not this past winter, for sure.

When you hear the word April, what does it do to you? It makes me glad to think that we have survived another winter and that the light stretches forward to summer, and daffodils and long light nights. But most of all, April makes me think of my late friend the Orcadian poet and novelist George Mackay Brown. April was GMB’s favourite season and he wrote about it in exquisite prose and poetry – such as this: This morning – as I write – is April 3, and the first wash of Spring has gone over the earth. It is such a beautiful word – April – that even to utter it lightens the heart. It is a little poem in itself. It is full of delightful images.

It has its own music – little trembling lambcries at the end of a field. The first daring lark lost in light. You feel, in April, that you have come through another winter, a little bruised maybe, but unbowed. Those chalices of light, the daffodils, having been sorely battered by the March storms, are shedding, one by one, their green covers and opening their vernal tapers. Soon all of Orkney will be stitched by golden threads of daffodils, a lovely spread garment for Primavera. What a gift this man had! Chalices of light, vernal tapers, a lovely spread garment for Primavera.

If I could write like this, I could die happy. When George wrote these words, he knew that he would die soon. He remembered the spells he spent in hospital or sanatorium, sometimes because he needed respite from a threatening world. He thought back to the time when he believed he would not live beyond the age of 23, riven as he was by tuberculosis. Yet this shy poet, who rarely left his native Orkney, would go on to be honoured as one of Scotland’s greatest ever poets.

Back to T S Eliot. George used to listen to Eliot’s The Wasteland most days on his old gramophone – on so loud that his mother and his sister used to regularly mimic “April is the cruellest month” as they went about the house.

April was the cruellest month not for George – he said that his bag was packed – but for his many admirers. He died on April 13, 1995.

We need the poets. I admire both Eliot and Brown. I leave the last word about April to the man himself: So we ought to relish each one of the thirty days of April, the month that tastes of childhood. Easter, too, often falls in April, and April the sixteenth is that wonderful day in the Orkney calendar, the martyrdom of St Magnus in Egilsay.

Ron Ferguson’s book about George Mackay Brown’s spiritual journey, The Wound and the Gift, was shortlisted for The Saltire Society’s Scottish Research Book of the Year.

“When you hear the word April, what does it do to you? It makes me glad to think that we have survived another winter and that the light stretches forward to summer...

This article appears in the April 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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