Last week, when I read The Canterbury Tales with my students, I told them to look for other poems or stories that begin in April. This week, when I reviewed Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, I realized that the idealists who embark on an adventure at Blithedale Farm do so during an April blizzard.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…

From The Blithedale Romance:

[O]n an April afternoon, but with the fitful gusts of a wintry snow-storm roaring in the chimney […] Around such chill mockery of a fire, some few of us might sit on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards the imaginary warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew.