I love the opening lines of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, the sense of force and vitality which drives the words:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

TS Eliot

Yet I cannot understand their sentiment, since I do not find April as “the cruellest month” at all. I find the boisterous opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales closer to my feeling about this time of year: