For those of you that don’t know, I have a Master’s Degree in English. I love to read. Most believe April to be the month of spring. Even Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrator in the Canterbury Tales claimed that April is sweet compared to March’s drought. But T.S. Elliot in The Waste Land stated, “April is the cruelest month.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
There is so much I can talk about regarding APRIL. This April has been cruel, to say the least. It feels more like The Waste Land version compared to the sweet version of Chaucer. Life today feels a little uneasy, much like Eliot’s poem with words like breeding, mixing, stirring, dead, and dull. The action words ending in -ing also seem fitting for our days in quarantine, where we are covering, hoping, banning, waiting, obeying, and distancing.
But even more interesting about The Waste Land is what some critics think the entire poem means. Mind you, the poem is an odd read- full of different characters, languages, and Modernist writing experiments that at times makes it quite confusing. With that being said, the critic E.M. Forester claimed that The Waste Land is about the “fertilizing waters that arrived too late. It is a poem of horror” because the water was not able to come to give the resurrection and rebirth that happens in the spring (along with the rebirth and resurrection that happens with Easter). Additionally he claims that this is suppose to be a poem of barren and individual isolation. Other critics claim that it is a poem speaking directly to the life in Europe after WWI, barren landscapes and men both literally and metaphorically dead from war.
And here we are, in April, dealing with a pandemic- a war on a virus. Finding ourselves isolated, barren, and to some living in horror. I wonder who will write The Waste Land 2.0?
April is the Cruelest month in modern history, Distancing
Each other from loved ones, Losing
Jobs and income, Covering
our faces from the world, fearing
A virus that we don’t yet understand.
To read the full version of The Wasteland click here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land
And may we all find the sweet rebirth and resurrection that April is to bring soon, and it doesn’t come too late, leaving us literally and metaphorically dead.
