La Regina Avrillouse - Analysis

A spring queen who is more weather than woman

The poem’s central move is to make desire feel like a season: the speaker praises a lady who is also April itself, a presence made out of dew and rain, woodlands, breath, and warmth. Calling her Queen of the spring’s embrace isn’t just flattery; it announces a world where the beloved’s body and the landscape are interchangeable. Her arms are long like boughs of ash, the wood is her bower, and the hills are her dwelling-place. The love-object is deliberately too large to possess—she is not in nature so much as nature arranged into a single figure the speaker can address.

That scale gives the poem its particular tone: exultant and intoxicated, but also slightly overawed. Even the rain is personified as a spirit that’s unsure, as if April’s beauty is inseparable from quick shifts and half-promises. The speaker isn’t describing a stable romance; he’s summoning an atmosphere that keeps changing in the mouth as you try to name it.

The turn: from dreaming to taking

The most important hinge arrives with This will I no more dream; a line that tries to shove the experience out of fantasy and into the body. Immediately after it, the poem insists on warmth as proof: Warm is thy arm’s allure, and even before a kiss happens, the beloved’s breath arrives first, a gust that kisseth my cheek and speaks. That breath is both erotic and meteorological—wind that kisses—so the poem’s pledge to leave dreaming behind is complicated: the encounter is still made of elements, of something you can feel but not hold.

When the voice in the poem begins to speak in quotation marks, it sounds like April preaching its own gospel. The tone shifts from private rapture to public invitation: Here is the wine of mirth, Take ye the honey cup, Drink of the spring’s allure. The old-fashioned ye makes it ceremonial, as if the speaker is being initiated into a seasonal religion whose sacraments are taste and scent.

Wine, honey, and the appetite that never quite reaches the source

The repeated drinking imagery is not just about pleasure; it’s about urgency. Wine and honey suggest abundance that has to be consumed now, before it ferments away into memory. Yet the poem keeps placing satisfaction just ahead of itself. The beloved’s breath kisses ere thy lips meet mine; later it becomes soft breath that kisseth where / Thy lips have come not yet. Even at the height of sensuality, the poem lingers in the almost. That creates a key tension: the speaker declares the dream finished, but his desire remains structured as anticipation, as a hovering pre-contact.

The phrase Brown of the earth sing sure pulls the ecstasy back down into soil and body at once—brown as fertile ground, brown as flushed skin. The poem wants a joy that is unashamedly physical, but it also wants that physicality to feel sanctioned by the entire landscape.

Moss, mold, and a bed that’s also a grave

Late in the poem, pleasure takes on darker material: Moss and the mold of earth are named as the beloved’s couch of mirth. Mold is fertile and faintly decaying; it smells like beginnings and endings in the same breath. This is where the poem’s springtime intoxication gets its edge. April’s reign includes rot; the season’s lushness is built on what breaks down. The beloved as earth-queen offers delight, but her bed is the ground itself—comforting, elemental, and slightly frightening in its reminder of where bodies return.

Raised as a banner, impossible to keep

The ending turns the beloved into a standard the speaker wants to live under: Banner be you / Above my head, Glory to all wold display’d. It’s a triumphant gesture, but it also admits the problem: a banner is not something you embrace; it’s something you follow and look up at. The poem’s final chant of April-alluring tries to hold the season in language the way the blade / Of grass doth catch the dew and momentarily crown the sun. The crown, like the dew, won’t last—yet the poem chooses that fleeting brightness as its model for love: brief, radiant, and worth praising precisely because it cannot be secured.

A sharper question the poem keeps dodging

If April’s touch is a joy of earth, why does it need to speak like a command—Drain ye one goblet sure? The insistence sounds less like carefree pleasure than a refusal to admit how quickly the warmth and dew will be gone. The poem’s rapture may be, at bottom, a way of outrunning time by drinking faster.