End of April

In “The End of April” the speaker observes the beauty and fragility of the natural world. In doing so, the speaker invokes the cyclical nature of the seasons and the ways in which the fragility and endurance of nature echo the memory and experience of human connections.

While spring is often associated with rebirth and renewal in the Western poetic tradition, the speaker instead emphasizes a scene that is permeated with the end of that cycle instead of its beginning. Instead of finding a robin’s egg that still contains a growing chick within, the speaker discovers the egg once it is already “broken” (Line 3). The speaker reflects that, “What had been there / is gone now” (Lines 22-23). Likewise, the cherry tree is not in its first springtime bloom, as the speaker is kneeling amidst “fallen blossoms” (Line 6) that the tree has already shed. The speaker’s descriptions of the tree and eggs as both beautiful and yet fragile invoke how nature is both a source of life and a scene of decay. The speaker connects these natural remnants of loss and fragility with the unknown “you” the speaker “had been thinking of” when they first found the egg (Line 4), implying that, just as nature is fragile, so too are human connections.