April's got game

What did April ever do to T.S. Eliot? Maybe he had a schoolboy crush on a girl named April who teased him and pleased him and then flounced off to leave him meditating on death and despair--why else would he describe April as "the cruellest month," a month "mixing / memory and desire" and "stirring / Dull roots with spring rain"? Eliot slaps cruel April across the face in The Wasteland, but Chaucer had other ideas.

In the Prologue to Canterbury Tales, April bring sweet showers and devotes itself to piercing, bathing, engendering, and pricking Nature in the whatsit. Chaucer's April inspires fertility and growth, awakening "smale foweles maken melodye" and quickening Nature's spirit, but April also inspires folk of all classes to go on pilgrimages, ostensibly to seek spiritual growth but also to indulge in a whole lot of eating and drinking and making merry with sundry tales both demure and bawdy. For Chaucer, April's got game!

For my students as well. Everyone engaged in academe knows that April is indeed the cruellest month, showering students and faculty alike with projects and deadlines, pricking the conscience with regret for every prior moment of procrastination, engendering songs of despair among students who see their gpas plummeting and profs who see their grading-piles growing. 

Everyone's a fool on April first, but my English majors and Writing Center tutors have come up with a clever way to ease into April's craziness: they're hosting a word-game party featuring Scrabble and Boggle and Poetry for Neanderthals. 

I suspect that T.S. Eliot would have spoken more kindly of poor April if he'd welcomed the month with a raucous round of Poetry for Neanderthals, and Chaucer would have killed at Scrabble--if only the other players could be made to accept his spellings. 

I've lived so long with Eliot's cruel April that now I'd like to cheer on Chaucer's. "So priketh hem Nature in hir corages"--Autocorrect wants to change "corages" to "corsages," but Chaucer wasn't talking about prom dates. He was talking about the heart, the temperament, the center of emotion. Take courage, April! It's you and me, maken melodye!