TO APRIL.

Sweet month of blue-eyed violets and fools, I’m glad to see you, dear. Take off your bonnet, While to your praise I pen a flowing sonnet. A thousand misses in the boarding-schools Now do the same on gilt-edged, scented paper, And bite their nails and trim the midnight taper. The clear lake like a polished mirror glows In the seraphic loveliness of morn; The speckled trout leap from their crystal pools, Waking the startled skylark’s mellow horn; On every hand new beauties still are born, Till lingering sunset’s amethystine blaze Illumes the vault of heaven with its far-streaming rays.

Thus far without impediment I got, My sleek Pegasus on an easy gallop, Or ambling steady or on cosy trot Smooth-scudding o’er the airy fields of thought, As a Venetian gondola or shallop. To halt with sudden bump my pencil’s brought. “I can not tell a lie!” (Spring poems are “rot.”) Now all my pretty phrases come to naught. It’s just a shame! But then who would have thought— Wild polar blizzards, snow and blinding sleet Beat my Pegasus and benumbed his feet? And, most unlucky mishap for a poet, The brute has got the studs and will not go it. One solid hour of labor have I lost— I can’t write summer songs in winter’s frost. O April, sure you did not count the cost Of your confounded jag! I think you’re drunk! Well, bluster if you want to show your spunk. The Weather Bureau’s all turned inside out— But pray clear up, Miss April, or clear out!