It Was Deep April, and the Morn

It was deep April, and the morn
      Shakspeare 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.

Background and Analysis of This Poem

Michael Field was the joint pen name of Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, an aunt and niece who wrote collaboratively and lived in a deeply intimate creative partnership. The Poetry Foundation notes that they published poetry and verse drama together in late nineteenth-century Britain, while the JSTOR Daily account of their collaboration explains how their shared masculine pseudonym helped form a single public literary identity. It Was Deep April, and the Morn, sometimes known as Prologue, appears in Underneath the Bough, their 1893 book of lyric poems. It is a short poem, but it carries a large private and artistic vow.

The poem begins in "deep April", on the morning Shakespeare was born. That date matters enormously. Shakespeare's birthday, traditionally observed on 23 April, becomes a kind of sacred literary dawn. Field places the speakers' own vow under Shakespeare's sign, as if their love and poetic ambition are being consecrated by the greatest figure in English dramatic poetry. April, with its spring associations of growth and renewal, gives the poem an atmosphere of beginning, but the reference to Shakespeare gives that beginning a grand inheritance. The speakers are not simply enjoying a pretty morning. They are stepping into a lineage.

At the centre of the poem is the pledge made by "My Love and I". They take hands and swear, "Against the world", to be "Poets and lovers evermore". That phrase is the poem's burning core. It joins artistic identity and romantic devotion so completely that they cannot be separated. To love is to write; to write is to remain faithful to the shared life of the beloved. For Bradley and Cooper, who composed as Michael Field, this fusion was not merely decorative. Their collaboration was both literary and personal, and the poem gives that union a mythic clarity. It is a manifesto in miniature.

The classical imagery deepens the vow. Lethe, Charon and Apollo place the lovers' promise within the landscape of Greek myth: forgetfulness, death, passage and poetic inspiration. The speakers imagine themselves laughing and dreaming by Lethe's shore, singing to Charon in his boat, and dwelling with souls who never fled Apollo. This is more than elegant allusion. It imagines poetry as a force strong enough to accompany souls across the boundary of death. The lovers will not merely write for the living. They will hearten the timid dead, or at least join the company of those who remain loyal to art beyond ordinary judgement.

The poem's most defiant note comes in its refusal of conventional judgement. The speakers declare that they will take no heed of judgement, heaven or hell. That is a startlingly bold claim, especially when read in light of Bradley and Cooper's intense private bond and the constraints placed on women, collaboration and same-sex love in Victorian literary culture. The Michael Field digital archive preserves the poem's text and shows how directly it frames love and poetry as a shared vocation Michael Field Archive. The poem is not merely saying that the world is difficult. It is saying that the lovers will answer the world's pressure by making an artistic world of their own.

For modern readers, It Was Deep April, and the Morn is powerful because it feels both intimate and ceremonial. It is a love poem, a poetic oath and a declaration of creative partnership. Its beauty lies in the way it turns a private clasping of hands into something almost epic, stretching from Shakespeare's April morning to the shores of the underworld. Michael Field asks us to imagine love and art not as separate pursuits, but as one shared act of resistance. The poem's vow is brief, but it shines with conviction: against the world, to be poets and lovers evermore.