Edward Thomas opens "April" with a confident claim and then quietly takes it back. The sweetest thing "between earth and heaven," he says, was once the first warm morning of spring. But the grammar is already hedging: "I thought / At one time." That past tense and that soft verb tell us the opinion is about to be revised.
The first stanza is a small masterpiece of looking. The sun behaves like a shy person. Once the mist "has been forgiven," the sun "has stolen out, / Peered, and resolved to shine at seven." Each verb is a hesitation, a decision, a step forward. Thomas's details are just as exact: grasses "dabbled" with wet and growing longer, "thick primroses," leaves that are "early" and "uneven," not yet the neat green of summer. Then comes a surprise. The warm, damp breath of the earth "far surpasses / The richest oven's." It is a homely, almost comic comparison, grounding a lofty opening ("earth and heaven") in the smell of baking. The birdsong is rendered by ear: a loud, rounded "cuckoo" against the nightingale's clipped "tsoo, tsoo, tsoo, tsoo." All this beauty leaves the speaker with only one response: "To say 'God bless it' was all that I could do."
The form suits that near-speechlessness. There is no fixed line length, so the lines run from the short "Was the first smile" to long, breathless ones, and the verse sounds like someone talking and thinking aloud. Rhyme still holds it together. In the first stanza "heaven," "forgiven," "seven" and "uneven" all chime on the same ending, as if the morning keeps returning to the same bright note. Thomas even splits "sur- / passes" across a line break, a playful touch that makes the reader step over the gap, as the earth's breath steps over the oven's.
Then the poem turns: "But now I know one sweeter." The shift from "thought" to "know" matters. The second stanza gives a small human scene in place of the landscape. Emily comes back "weeping," asks forgiveness "with half a certainty / To be forgiven," and the offence turns out to be nothing: "for what / She had never done." The speaker doesn't know what it was, and she can't say, "having now forgot."
This scene quietly rhymes with the first stanza. There the mist was forgiven and the sun smiled. Here Emily's tears clear and she smiles. The weather pattern of cloud giving way to light is now played out between two people, and it is sweeter because it is unforced and asks nothing of anyone. The rhymes follow suit. The "-ven" chain gives way to a run of "-ee" sounds: "Emily," "me," "certainty," "be." The speaker's own "still happy me" is part of that music. The poem never says who Emily is, and it doesn't need to. She exists entirely in this moment of tears and relief.
The ending lifts the whole poem. The speaker is "carried with me past all care / As to an isle in April lovelier / Than April's self." The title word, which was the subject of the first stanza, becomes a metaphor for something greater than itself. "Lovelier" also rhymes with "sweeter" and with the final word, "her," so the comparison and the person are tied together in sound. And the closing blessing changes in one small way: "God bless it" has become "God bless you." The speaker's reaction to the spring was awe at a distance, but his reaction to Emily is a direct address, a blessing spoken to someone he can hold.
What makes "April" worth reading is how lightly it makes its point. It could have praised nature at length. Instead it admits that one gentle human exchange, an apology for nothing and a smile in reply, can outdo the loveliest morning of the year.