"No days such honored days as these!" The exclamation puts the month on a pedestal before we know why it deserves one. The reason comes as a small story about naming. People once wanted something that would keep Aphrodite's memory alive, so they hid her name inside "lovely April's name" and left it there. Later, when her worship faded, April took on a new and "holier" meaning, tied to Christ's ascension and the spring flowers of Palestine. The old idea that April's name comes from Aphrodite is one scholars treat with caution, but the poem accepts it, and what interests Jackson is what the name can carry. Her central idea is that a month can work like a monument: a calendar keeps cultures alive, one layer on top of another, long after their temples have gone.
The form suits that idea. It is a sonnet in iambic pentameter, and the rhymes are tightly bound. The octave runs abba abba, with only two sounds, so *yet, set, forget, beget* chime against *wide, bide, hide, allied*. Those rhyme words are about permanence and concealment, and the repeated sounds make the poem feel as if it, too, is built to last. The sestet turns at line nine with "And when fair Aphrodite passed from earth," which marks the change from pagan past to Christian future. Its rhymes are looser and more interlocked (ccddcd), as though the neat pattern has opened up to make room for something new.
Jackson's vocabulary does a lot of quiet work. "Fair" appears again and again: "Fair Aphrodite," "some fair thing," "the fairest flowers," then "fair Aphrodite" once more. The repetition does more than decorate. It makes beauty the poem's currency, the thing people want to preserve. Alongside it sits a cluster of words about lasting: "forever bide," "no age could forget," "eternally allied." Then there are words from the workshop and the archive: "set / In fitting frame," "seal and sign." The name of April becomes an inscription, and the poem imagines the ancients as craftsmen choosing the right setting for a jewel. "Hide" is the cleverest verb. The goddess is not displayed in April's name but tucked inside it, like a signature in the corner of a painting.
The sestet complicates this tidy picture with a note of loss: Aphrodite's "shrines forgotten and her feasts of mirth." The memory survives, but the worship does not. Even so, Jackson never sneers at the old religion. Her phrase "beauteous memory" is generous, and the new symbol is called "holier *still*," which suggests addition more than replacement. The syntax adds suspense. The verb "took" is held back until line twelve ("Sweet April took"), after a long run of qualifying phrases, so we wait for April to receive its second meaning. The closing rhymes are also well chosen. "Earth" and "birth" echo each other across the sestet, tying departure to renewal. Aphrodite "passed from earth," Christ "ascended," and in the same breath the anemones are "born." The last line, "Of spring anemones, in Palestine," moves from vague legend to a named flower and a named place. The poem ends in a landscape rather than a doctrine, and the clustered stresses of its closing words give the line a soft, settled finish.
The poem is significant because it treats a month's name as a layered text. Because the title places it in "A Calendar of Sonnets," the poem seems to belong to a larger scheme of marking time through verse, and "April" gets a history as well as a season. Its argument is that beauty is remembered by being absorbed into new forms of meaning, not by standing still. For a student reader, it is a compact example of how a sonnet can hold an argument: the octave builds a claim, the turn shifts it, and the final line fixes it in an image of spring.