Paul Simon / The Paul Simon Songbook / 1965
April Come She Will
wistful, resigned, quietly mournful
A miniature allegory that compresses an entire love affair into six months and twelve lines, using the calendar itself as the narrative engine. The relationship is never described directly; instead its birth, flourishing, restlessness, and death are mapped onto the changing seasons, so nature does the emotional work.
impermanence the seasons as metaphor for love inevitability and fate nostalgia loss of innocence
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator recalls a love affair after it has ended, addressing no one directly but reflecting inward. The voice is calm and accepting rather than bitter, which makes it feel reliable, if perhaps too composed to be entirely unguarded.
What happens
The song moves month by month: a woman arrives with the spring rains, settles into domestic warmth, then grows restless and finally leaves without notice as summer peaks. By autumn she is gone, and the closing month finds the narrator simply remembering what has passed. The arc is birth, bloom, decay, and death, compressed into a single season cycle standing in for the whole life of a relationship.
How it's built
Six couplets, one per month from April to September, each pinned to a mid-line personification (the month itself performing an action). There's no chorus or refrain — the structure is entirely linear and cumulative, mimicking a calendar's forward march. The lack of repetition or return reinforces the theme that this cycle cannot be reversed.
Section by section
Opening couplet (April)
The relationship begins with an image of rain-swollen streams, linking romantic arrival to seasonal renewal and fertility. The tone is anticipatory rather than dramatic.
May couplet
The high point of intimacy is rendered with domestic stillness, a brief plateau before the shift that follows..
June couplet
“restless walks, she'll prowl the night”
The mood turns nocturnal and predatory in diction, signaling dissatisfaction creeping into the relationship without any explicit accusation.
July couplet
Departure is framed as swift and unannounced, likening the end of the affair to a bird's migratory flight — natural, not malicious.
August/September couplet
“die she must”
The starkness of this phrase breaks from the softer natural imagery elsewhere, forcing the listener to confront the relationship's death directly before the song closes on quiet remembrance rather than grief.
Craft
- personification
- Each month is treated as if it were the woman herself, staying, prowling, flying, dying — collapsing the distinction between the seasonal cycle and the emotional one.
- extended metaphor
- The entire love affair is rendered as a single year's seasonal progression, so growth, restlessness, and decline are never stated outright but only implied through natural imagery.
- foreshadowing
- The verb choice describing her August fate arrives with unusual bluntness partway through an otherwise gentle lyric, signaling that the idyll was always temporary.
- elision
- The song skips explanation of cause — we never learn why she leaves — which keeps the piece feeling like an observed natural process rather than a psychological drama.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the poem as a meditation on the natural life-cycle of romantic feeling — love isn't destroyed by fault or betrayal, it simply runs its seasonal course like any living thing, and the narrator's calm suggests acceptance of that. An alternative reading hears something colder: a man narrating a woman's autonomy (her restlessness, her departure) as if it were preordained by nature, which subtly removes her agency and recasts her leaving as fate rather than choice. Both readings are supported by the text's refusal to assign blame.
Context
The song appeared on Simon's solo 1965 UK album The Paul Simon Songbook, recorded before Simon & Garfunkel's commercial breakthrough; a later version appeared on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. It reflects Simon's early interest in compact, folk-influenced miniatures built on a single conceit, distinct from the more sprawling narrative songs he'd write later.
Listen for
- The clipped, calendar-like phrasing that opens each line with a month name
- The shift in verbs from resting and staying to prowling and flying, tracking emotional deterioration
- The plainness of the word describing her death in August against the softer natural imagery surrounding it
- The song's brevity itself, which enacts the fleetingness it describes
- The absence of any chorus, reinforcing the one-way, non-repeating nature of the affair
About Paul Simon
Paul Frederic Simon is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, known for his solo work and his collaborations with Art Garfunkel. He and Garfunkel, whom he met in elementary school in 1953, came to prominence in the 1960s as Simon & Garfunkel.
b. 1941 / United States
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