Simon & Garfunkel / Sounds of Silence / 1966
April Come She Will
wistful, resigned, quietly mournful
A miniature calendar poem that compresses an entire love affair into six months, each given a single verb of arrival, settling, restlessness, departure, ending, and memory. Its brevity and nursery-rhyme cadence make the loss feel almost inevitable, like a season passing rather than a choice anyone made.
transience of love nature as metaphor for emotion inevitability and cyclical time memory and aftermath youth and aging of feeling
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses no one directly, speaking instead in a detached, almost proverbial voice about a love affair already over, remembered from a distance rather than relived in real time.
What happens
The song moves month by month: a relationship begins with a natural, almost seasonal inevitability, deepens into intimacy, then curdles into restlessness, escapes, dies, and is finally reduced to memory. There is no argument or event described, only the passage of time doing the work of ending things.
How it's built
Twelve short lines, two per month, form a compressed structure with no chorus or bridge, mimicking the passage of a calendar. The tight, singsong meter and internal near-rhymes give it the feel of a children's rhyme applied to adult heartbreak, and the poem's brevity is itself a formal statement about how quickly love can pass.
Section by section
April and May
The relationship opens with a natural image of renewal, rain swelling streams, before settling into a tender image of physical closeness. The pairing suggests love arriving with the same unwilled inevitability as spring.
June and July
“prowl the night”
The tone shifts sharply as the woman becomes restless and elusive; the predatory verb suggests she is reclaiming autonomy or seeking something else, while the narrator remains passive, only observing her retreat.
August
“die she must”
The starkest line in the song collapses metaphor and literal meaning together, the seasonal death standing in for the death of the relationship. The phrasing's formality, almost like a proclamation, gives the ending a fated, unresisted quality.
September
“a love once new has now grown old”
The final couplet steps outside the seasonal frame into direct reflection, revealing that the entire poem has been narrated retrospectively. What looked like present-tense description was memory all along, which recasts the earlier months as elegy rather than diary.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The love affair is mapped onto the changing seasons, so the woman's growing distance and eventual departure feel as natural and unstoppable as weather.
- personification
- The months themselves become almost agents, each one seemingly responsible for a change in the relationship, which shifts moral weight away from either lover.
- anaphora and structural repetition
- Naming each month in sequence at the start of its couplet creates a ritualistic, countdown-like rhythm that mirrors the sense of an ending foretold from the outset.
- understatement
- Major emotional events (falling in love, an affair ending, death of feeling) are delivered in clipped, plain phrasing rather than dramatized, which intensifies the melancholy through restraint.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a compact allegory for the natural lifespan of infatuation, using the calendar to suggest that decay is built into desire from the start rather than caused by any wrongdoing. A secondary reading hears the seasonal frame as a way of avoiding blame or specificity, letting the narrator soften a painful breakup by rendering it as impersonal as weather, which could also be read as a subtle evasion of responsibility for whatever happened between June and August.
Context
Written by Paul Simon and included on the 1966 album Sounds of Silence, the song is one of the duo's shortest and most formally spare compositions, closer to a folk fragment or art song than a pop structure. It has no confirmed specific biographical inspiration that I'm aware of, and its brevity and lack of chorus are unusual for the album's more expansive arrangements.
Listen for
- the shift in verb tone from settling to prowling to flight across the middle months
- the way the vocal melody stays gentle even as the lyrical content darkens
- the absence of any bridge or chorus, reinforcing the song's calendar-like inevitability
- the final line's shift into retrospective memory, recasting everything heard before it