End of April

“The End of April” is a lyric poem by American poet Phillis Levin. It was originally published in the literary magazine The Plum Review, which ran from 1991 to 1997. The poem was then featured in Levin’s second collection, The Afterimage (1995), which was praised upon publication for its ability to capture signs and meanings in daily life, sometimes even in the tiniest objects. In Levin’s long career this is an early poem, but it bears many hallmarks of the typical style of her lyrics, including a sense of wonder at nature and meditating on longing and loss. The poem was included in Poetry 180, the poetry project created for use in high schools by US Poet Laureate Billy Collins in 2002, with a poem for each day of the school year. As Poem 178 in that series, “The End of April” has been widely taught and is one of Levin’s most popular poems. Levin has served as professor of poetry at the University of Maryland and Hofstra University. She has published six poetry collections to date, with her poems featured in various publications such as Agni, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry, amongst others.

Poet Biography

Phillis Marna Levin was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1954 to Charlotte E. Levin, a teacher, and Herbert L. Levin, an electronics engineer. Levin has one sibling, a brother, Phillip Engel Levin. She began writing poetry as a child and pursued it throughout high school. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and received her bachelor of arts in poetry, philosophy, and psychology in 1976. She then attended Johns Hopkins University, receiving a master of arts in poetry in 1977.

Temples and Fields, her first book, came out in 1988 and was critically acclaimed, winning the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. From 1985 to 1997, she was an editor of Boulevard. She joined the faculty as an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland in 1989 and continued at that institution until 2006.

In 1995, she published her second volume of poetry, The Afterimage, which includes “The End of April.” That same year she received a Fulbright Fellowship to Slovenia to translate the works of poet Tomaž Šalamun. In 2001, her third volume of poetry, Mercy, was published and she edited The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. In 2003, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Levin also received an award from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2007.

In 2008, Levin married Dr. Jack Stacey Shanewise, a pioneer in anesthesiology. She also published her fourth collection, May Day. This was followed, in 2016, by Mr. Memory & Other Poems, inspired by a character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Steps. This book was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2022, she was the subject of Molly Peacock’s book, A Friend Sails in On a Poem, which detailed the women’s 45-year friendship, which started when they met at Johns Hopkins. This book also contains some of Levin’s poems and recounts several of the women’s conversations about craft. Her next book will be An Anthology of Rain (2025).

Levin has been featured in the annual Best American Poetry three times (1989, 1998, 2009) and has received numerous awards. Poet Laureate Billy Collins chose “The End of April” for his first anthology Poetry 180 and it is now widely taught in American high schools. Levin is currently a professor and poet-in-residence emerita at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York (Long Island), where she lives with her husband.

Poem text

Levin, Phillis. “The End of April.” 1995. Library of Congress.

Summary

At the “end of April,” the speaker rests on the lawn under a tree and reflects on a relationship with a person from their past. They discover a bird’s broken egg among the fallen blooms and notice how the mostly complete shell is tiny and fragile. The speaker notes the ephemeral quality of the eggshell, then examines it, looking through its “missing crown” (Line 16) to the empty interior. The speaker notes that whatever might have lived within the shell is now gone. The speaker imagines the creature/baby bird living inside themselves. There, it unfurls its “wings” (Line 23) and rends the speaker’s heart.