Longfellow's April is a month with the danger taken out. He asks for no sudden showers, no late frost and no sulking sky, only "forest glades" that are "teeming with bright forms" and clouds that do not "foretell / The coming-on of storms." What he gives instead is one idealised day, followed from the first warm sun through sunset to moonrise. In the final stanza the focus widens, and April becomes a way of thinking about a whole life.
The poem hides its end in its beginning. The sun of the opening stanza is the one "that brings / Seed-time and harvest," so even in the first lines the year is already moving toward its close. The woods that follow are full of recovery. The sapling "draws its sustenance, and thrives," and the drooping tree, "stricken to the heart with winter's cold," revives. That phrase is the poem's one admission of pain, and it borrows the language of human suffering. Sound carries the argument as well, since "thrives" and "revives" rhyme and the two words end the stanza together.
Longfellow is a painter of light. The birds' "colored wings / Glance quick in the bright sun," and the verb makes them flashes, not creatures. The sun itself "moves along / The forest openings," and the sentence slides over the line break as the light slides from clearing to clearing. By sunset the woods are "silver," the green slope "throws / Its shadows in the hollows of the hills," and "wide the upland glows." Light and shadow share each line.
The most inventive stanzas are the sixth and seventh. In the lake, "the sky, o'er-reaching far, / Is hollowed out," as if the water were a bowl scooped from the heavens, and the crescent moon "dips her horn" into it. Then the scene flips: the gray rocks stand "inverted in the tide," and the trees "look over, side by side, / And see themselves below." Giving the trees the act of looking at themselves is a quiet piece of personification, and it prepares the poem's turn. The speaker is doing the same thing, gazing at April and finding his own life in it.
The form is orderly. There are eight quatrains rhymed ABAB, and in each the first and last lines are short, with three beats, while the two middle lines run to five. Each stanza therefore has a small intake of breath, a long middle and a short exhale. Because most stanzas end on a pause or a full stop, the poem reads like a row of framed views. There is one pleasing exception in the first stanza, where the woods are the place "where springs / The first flower of the plain." The verb sits at the end of its line and the flower arrives on the next, so the line break makes the flower spring up. The diction ("'T is," "eve," "o'er-reaching," "unto thee") is deliberately old-fashioned, and it gives the whole piece a calm, hymn-like dignity.
Only in the last stanza does the speaker address anyone directly: "Sweet April! many a thought / Is wedded unto thee, as hearts are wed." The marriage image suggests that memories and feelings fasten themselves to a season for good. They last "till, to its autumn brought, / Life's golden fruit is shed." The harvest from the first stanza returns, but now it is a human life that ripens and falls. The delay in the grammar matters too, because the main idea lands on the final word, "shed," like fruit dropping. The tone is untroubled. Autumn and the shedding are presented as the natural end of a cycle that April began.
Longfellow was one of the most widely read American poets of the nineteenth century, and this poem shows why a gentle, musical style could appeal to so many readers. It matters less for drama than for how it moves from careful description to feeling. Its reflections in the lake turn out to be the key to its design, since the poem looks at spring and sees a lifetime. It also offers a consoling view of time, in which the cold that strikes the tree is answered by revival and the final autumn comes as part of the same pattern.