[It was deep April, and the morn]

It was deep April, and the morn
          Shakspear was born;
The world was on us, pressing sore;
My Love and I took hands and swore,
   Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers ever more,
To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore,
To sing to Charon in his boat,
Heartening the timid souls afloat;
Of judgment never to take heed,
But to those fast-locked souls to speed,
Who never from Apollo fled,
Who spent no hour among the dead;
          Continually
          With them to dwell,
Indifferent to heaven and hell.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 18, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“[It was deep April, and the morn]” first appeared in Michael Field’s collection Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses (George Bell and Sons, 1893). Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper—lovers as well as two halves of the pseudonym Michael Field—composed the poem while traveling home from a wedding of which they strongly disapproved. As Kate Thomas, K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, writes in “‘What Time We Kiss’: Michael Field’s Queer Temporalities,” published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 13, nos. 2–3 (June 2007), “In their journals, Bradley and Cooper regularly attack heterosexual marriage and marriage rituals as evacuated and—notably—antiquated. [. . .] [T]hey make it clear that champagne and ‘stupid hopes’ may prance around in the language of ‘new conditions’ but do so while excluding truly ‘new forms or new freedom.’ [. . .] The contempt they feel for the wedding turns into poetic [a] expression of satisfaction in their own superior unity. [. . .] This poem that so celebrates their literary and erotic collaboration springs from the words of their vow and across the separation incurred by travel as if it were a Sapphic fragment, and from that vow Bradley writes the rest of the poem on the train to Dover.”