A Quote From ... Archive

Thirty Days hath September

In the language of quotations, some months have a strong identity - "the merry month of May", for example, in the traditional ballad of "Barbara Allen". April, marked for Chaucer by its "shoures soote" [sweet showers], is "the cruellest month" to the poet T. S. Eliot. "August is a wicked month" contends the title of Edna O'Brien's novel, and Doris Lessing speaks of "October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month." Thomas Hood takes a bleak view of the succeeding month: "No fruit, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, - November!", and Shakespeare reflects in Sonnet 97, "What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December's bareness everywhere!"

Weather associations are often important: the American poet Wallace Stevens writes of "the distant glitter Of the January sun", and the critic and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch suggests that "The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February." Masefield's coaster is seen "Butting through the Channel in the mad March days." Coleridge's "leafy month of June" gives way to something much less promising: Byron's "Englishwinter - ending in July, To recommence in August."

September in the northern hemisphere is seen as the month in which summer ends and autumn begins: "And the days grow short when you reach September" says the American dramatist Maxwell Anderson in 1938. But it is also notable for appearing a comment by Groucho Marx, whose approval of the month was not founded on the season: "My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something."

Printer friendly version