Simon Jäger / Sounds Of Silence
April Come She Will
wistful, resigned, quietly melancholic
Video: Simon & Garfunkel - Topic on YouTube
Lyrics
April, come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May, she will stay
Resting in my arms again
June, she'll change her tune
In restless walks, she'll prowl the night
July, she will fly
Showing 7 of 12 lines -- this excerpt supports the analysis alongside it.
Lyrics via LRCLIB (community-contributed). Rights remain with the songwriters and publishers.
Timed (LRC) version available
A synced lyric was found for this track and is stored with the record.
The analysis
A miniature allegory that maps the arc of a love affair onto the months of a calendar year, from spring arrival to autumn dissolution. Each month gets a single clause of action, and the compression makes the relationship feel both inevitable and impersonal, like watching a season pass rather than a person leave.
impermanence the natural cycle as metaphor for love loss and memory inevitability seasonal decay
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses no one directly; the beloved is spoken about in the third person as 'she,' and the listener overhears a private reflection after the fact. The voice seems reliable but emotionally distanced, as though the speaker has already made peace with the ending before the song begins.
What happens
The piece moves in strict chronological order, April through September, tracing a woman's arrival, settling, restlessness, departure, and metaphorical death, ending on the narrator's memory of her once the affair has become the past.
How it's built
Six two-line stanzas, one per month, each opening with the month's name and a rhyming action verb (comes, stay, tune, fly, must, remember). The rigid, almost nursery-rhyme regularity of the form contrasts with the emotional content, giving the song a deceptively simple, singsong surface over a genuinely sad subject.
Section by section
April-May
The opening establishes arrival and contentment: rain and swollen streams suggest renewal and fertility, and the woman's presence is described as settled, physically close. This is the honeymoon phase, rendered without irony.
June-July
The tone shifts to unease. Restlessness and nocturnal wandering signal growing distance, and the abrupt, unannounced departure in July marks the emotional turning point of the song -- the volta, if there is one, arrives quietly rather than dramatically.
August-September
The affair is described as ending in near-literal death, aligned with autumn's chill, and the final stanza pulls back into retrospect: the narrator is no longer inside the story but remembering it, which reframes everything before as already lost.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The entire song sustains a single conceit -- love as a woman personified by the seasons -- so that her behavior in each month stands for a stage of the relationship's arc.
- personification
- The passing months and their weather are given her human qualities (restlessness, flight, dying), collapsing the distinction between natural cycle and human relationship.
- anaphora
- Each stanza's fixed pattern of month-name-then-verb creates a chant-like repetition that reinforces the sense of fated, unstoppable progression.
- euphemism
- Words like 'die' and 'fly' stand in for emotional abandonment and the end of intimacy rather than literal events, softening the blow while still landing it.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the poem as a compressed life-cycle of romantic love, using seasonal change to naturalize heartbreak -- love ends the way summer ends, not through anyone's fault. An alternative reading takes the 'she' more literally as a specific woman, with the seasonal language functioning ironically to mask a real betrayal or infidelity behind pastoral imagery; the euphemistic verbs (flying without warning, dying) support this if read as a breakup narrative rather than pure allegory. Both readings coexist because the text never resolves whether the seasons are metaphor or simply frame the timeline.
Context
This is Paul Simon's early composition, later recorded by Simon & Garfunkel; it draws on a long folk tradition of using seasonal or floral cycles to allegorize romance, similar to English folk ballads. I don't have reliable specific details about its composition history or biographical origin, so I'm not asserting any beyond general genre context.
Listen for
- the shift in verb tone from 'stay' and 'resting' to 'prowl' and 'fly'
- the way the meter stays sing-song and nursery-rhyme-like even as the content darkens
- the final stanza's move from present action to retrospective memory
- how little concrete detail is given about the woman herself, keeping her more symbol than character