We’ve all heard the proverb “April showers bring May flowers,” but what’s more interesting is this month’s significance in literature. While Shakespeare aligned April with youth and vitality, Eliot called it “the cruelest month.” Melville compared April to a red-cheeked dancing girl, and Millay even titled one collection Second April. Here are a few of our favorite April quotes in literature.

detail of April. Image ID: 1547079

The April winds are magical,
And thrill our tuneful frames;
The garden-walks are passional
To bachelors and dames.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “April” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
—Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud Time” in A Further Range

April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet XCVIII of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Song of a Second April” in Second April

But it is a sort of April-weather life that we lead in this world. A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm.
—William Cowper, Letters of William Cowper: Chosen and Edited with a Memoir and a Few Notes