February Is Now be the Cruelest Month

 

by Pa Rock

Observer of Nature

For those who plan their lives around a calendar, spring traditionally begins during the third full week of March, and for others of a more intuitive nature spring has sprung when the roses begin budding and blooming, the baby birds are hatching out, and the sounds of lawnmowers start to fill the air - and all of that often happens in April, or at least it did up until a few years ago.

The 14th century poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, saw April as the time of rebirth.  In the prologue to his "Canterbury Tales," Chaucer declared:  

"When April the sweet showers fall

And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all

The veins are bathed in liquor of such power

As brings about the engendering of the flower . . . "

And nearly six centuries later American and British poet T.S. Eliot expressed a very similar view in the opening lines to his epic poem, "The Waste Land:"

"April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain."

But weather patterns have changed and poets today who want to bang on about the arrival of spring might feel pressured by reality to forgo the pleasant two-syllable "April" and instead go with the clunkier four-syllable "February" in celebrating nature's annual rebirth.

The temperature was in the seventies here in the Ozarks yesterday, and it will be again today - as well as much of next week.  Winter almost never happened, and it certainly did not get cold enough for long enough to interfere with the coming summer's crop of ticks and chiggers.  This summer will likely be an itching and scratching fiasco!  

The sprawling old lilac bush that stands in front of my house and tries to pull me off of the mower whenever I get too close is already heavy with green buds.  It's veins are drawing liquor from the dead land and preparing to burst forth into fragrant flowers - and it's only February!

Can the dandelions be far behind?

The arrival of spring stayed fairly constant during the five hundred and thirty years between the time Chaucer penned his Canterbury Tales in 1392 and Eliot described his Waste Land in 1922, but now, just one century past Eliot's classic, spring has advanced two full months.

It's called global warming, and it is a product of global capitalism raping, and smothering, and poisoning the only home that we have, the home we all must share - and it has been done solely through greed so that some may live better than others.

Chaucer and Eliot would both be aghast and ashamed, and all of us should be.

(Note for language purists:  Yes, I realize that I spelled "cruelest' two different ways.  It has one "l" in the title because that is the American spelling and this is an American blog-posting, and the word has 'two "l's" in the quote from "The Waste Land," because that is the British spelling and the poem was composed and published in Great Britain, and that is the spelling which was used by the poet - who was actually a native of Missouri.)