Irene Fisher's "April" looks slight at first glance: twelve short lines, a skipping meter, a speaker who cannot decide what she feels. But the poem is cleverer than its size suggests, because its real subject is not the month at all. It is the way a person can use changeable moods as a tool, half to protect herself and half to tease someone else.
The opening stanza promises a kind of carefree performance. "I shall sing / Of many a thing" has the loose, easy sound of someone with no fixed agenda, and "this April weather" supplies the excuse. April weather is proverbially unreliable, sun giving way to rain and back again, and the speaker borrows that unreliability as a mood-ring for herself. Whatever she feels, she can blame the season. Notice how little actual description of April there is, though. No blossoms, no showers, no birdsong. The month is a pretext, a backdrop against which the real drama, her feelings about "you", can play out.
That drama unfolds in the word "Maybe", which appears twice and dominates the middle of the poem. "Maybe I'll cry / Or perhaps sigh"; "Maybe I'll not / Care even a jot". The speaker lines up possibilities the way one might lay out dresses on a bed, none of them committed to. Yet the possibilities are not equal. Crying and sighing are tied to the wish "that we should be together", a longing she admits almost in passing, tucked into the end of a stanza. The second stanza's emotions point toward need; the third swings to the opposite pole, indifference. The shift from "sigh" to "not / Care even a jot" is quick, and the tiny, dismissive word "jot" does the work of shrugging her shoulders.
Then comes the turn, and it is the best moment in the poem. In the final stanza the speaker steps back from her own moods and names them: "That's just my way." The phrase is breezy, almost a throwaway, and it reframes everything we have just read. Was the sighing sincere? Was the indifference? Perhaps neither. Perhaps the changeability itself is the point, a habit, a game, a way of keeping the listener off balance. The closing line, "Poor man, how it would grieve you!", makes the game explicit. For the first time the poem addresses its listener's feelings rather than hers, and the tone is gently mocking. "Poor man" is affectionate and a little cruel at once. She imagines his distress with relish, and the exclamation mark seals the playfulness. The reader is left to wonder how much of the earlier longing was real and how much was staged for his benefit.
The construction supports this light, flirtatious touch. Each stanza is a tight triplet built on short lines, with the rhyme pattern running aabccb: "sing/thing", then "weather" at the end of line three, which finds its partner in "together" at the end of line six. That long-distance echo across stanzas is a neat trick. It links the weather to the wish for togetherness, as if the two were naturally connected, and the stanza-ending rhymes ("see you" and "grieve you") bring the poem home with a matching chime. The rhythm bounces rather than marches, with two or three beats in the short lines, which gives the speech a spoken, sing-song quality that suits the poem's opening promise to "sing". Even the diction is conversational: "a jot", "that's just my way". Nothing here sounds like a speech. It sounds like someone talking to a person she knows well.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it dramatizes uncertainty without becoming gloomy. Many poems about love and distance lean toward either yearning or bitterness. Fisher's speaker refuses to settle on either, and the refusal turns out to be her charm. The poem is small, but it catches a very human and very teenage-recognizable thing: the pleasure of keeping someone guessing, while quietly hoping he will keep guessing in your direction.