April is the Cruelest Month (Especially on Tax Day) | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization. browse poems & poets April is the Cruelest Month (Especially on Tax Day) Posted Listen to Poetry on Your Commute "April is the cruellest month . . ." begins the first line of The Waste Land, the signature modernist poem by T. S. Eliot . The 15th of April could easily be named the cruelest day of April, as it is the annual deadline for Americans to mail their tax returns, and checks, to the Internal Revenue Service.

To mark National Poetry Month on past tax days, the Academy of American Poets and the American Poetry & Literacy Project distributed thousands of free copies of The Waste Land at selected post offices across the country to taxpayers rushing to make the deadline. Eliot's poem, a landmark of twentieth century poetry, was published in 1922 to a fire-storm of reviews—some praising the work for capturing the confusion of the "modern" age following World War I and some cursing its difficult, discontinuous voice. The poem's disconnectedness is clearly deliberate, but Eliot supplied guideposts for the reader in his extensive notes that accompanied the long poem (434 lines). A clue from Eliot about the poem was embodied in its original title, which was "He do the Police in Different Voices." The advice Ezra Pound gave, while making numerous deletions and editorial changes to the body of the poem, was to use instead "The Waste Land" as the title.

Words and images in the first line and elsewhere in The Waste Land echo Walt Whitman 's great poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Whitman's poem commemorates the death of Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated while lilacs were in bloom. The Waste Land also contains numerous allusions to the Holy Grail legend. Images of death and rebirth repeat throughout the poem, leading poets and critics to a continuing debate about whether this is a poem of despair or of salvation. more texts Great Lines: “April is the cruellest month” | Micah Mattix | First Things Great Lines: “April is the cruellest month” by Micah Mattix 4 . 5 . 13 In observance of National Poetry Month, every Friday of April Micah Mattix will be examining one great line of verse. -Ed. The famous first line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was almost certainly not written in April but in January.

In a letter on January 23, 1921, Eliot refers to the nascent poem as “the first writing of any kind I have done for six months.” Two weeks later, he showed the completed first section “in 4 parts” to Wyndham Lewis. (Eliot would add a fifth part in May, which he placed at the beginning of the poem, but he would later remove it at Ezra Pound’s suggestion.) These details, along with other material evidence, show, as Lawrence Rainey has argued in Revisiting “The Waste Land,” that the poem was most likely begun in January and completed sometime in December 1921. What makes the line great is its concision and ambiguity. As in mathematics, where formulas are reduced to their simplest, most “elegant” form, we find the economy of expression inherently pleasurable. This pleasure might be explained in neo-Darwinian terms. The economical sentence reflects our mostly economical world in which everything that exists has evolved because of its usefulness.

In Why Lyrics Last, Brian Boyd argues that the economy of expression (as well as patterned language) developed as a means of more effectively holding the attention of hearers, which, of course, is a useful skill for survival. This may or may not be true, but whatever the root of concision, the second attribute”a ambiguity”cannot so easily be explained in causal terms. In his classic Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson notes how ambiguity expresses a meaning that cannot be reduced to the denotative meaning of words alone. One type is when two ideas seem not to agree. This is the type we have in Eliot’s line, where “cruel” seems not to agree with the idea of spring (expressed in the metonymical “April”), which we associate with the positive attribute of life. For Empson, such ambiguities can be chalked up to the complexity of reality, the conflicted psyche of the poet, or error of expression. For Boyd, ambiguity evolved for the same reason that concision did: to develop our capacity for attention. But this is far from convincing.

There’s no doubt that ambiguity requires us to focus our attention on a particular problem (in this case, the meaning of the ambiguous line), but the question is what is the problem we are focusing on and why does it produce in us such a profound fascination. After all, ambiguity is not only a key characteristic of poetry but of all art. This is hardly novel, but it seems to me that ambiguity is an attempt to “name” spiritual or immaterial realities (love, goodness, God, the soul) that are expressed through the material world but that cannot be reduced to it. In this view, Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month” is not so much about his conflicted response to spring (rooted in some forgotten childhood trauma) or about creating a linguistic puzzle to help us develop our skills of attention but about hope. What makes April cruel in the poem (among other things) is that the hope of new life that spring evokes is, at least for Eliot at the time, always temporal.

Unfulfilled hope is the worst sort of pain, and the speaker of the poem initially claims that it is preferable to live in winter, covered in “forgetful snow.” Yet the rest of the poem is largely an act of remembering, as lines, characters, and scenes from the Bible, The Divine Comedy, Metamorphoses, Les Fleurs du mal, Augustine, Spenser, and Shakespeare are trotted out in an effort to temporarily recapture something of what Eliot considered the West’s vibrant (Christian) past. So we discover, if hope is always temporal, it is also inescapable. As sure as April returns every year, we cannot cease to hope. There is something in us that pushes us to hope in some final consummation, some final life in which there is no winter, no death. Thus, hope in an eternal spring is a fact of the human mind, and this fact either points to nothing, which makes us the most miserable of all the animals; or, as Eliot would later believe, it is a fact that corresponds to a spiritual reality, no less real for having no exact material equivalent.

In short, ambiguity affirms the reality of something we otherwise might see every reason to reject as nonsense according to the “grammar” or constraints of the material world but cannot. This is, as Geoffrey Hill put it, part of the “witness” of poetry. Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University. Become a fan of First Things on Facebook , subscribe to First Things via RSS , and follow First Things on Twitter . 0 In The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, why does he say, "April is the cruelest month"? | eNotes In The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, why does he say, "April is the cruelest month"? mrs-campbell | High School Teacher | (Level 1) Educator Emeritus Posted on September 27, 2010 at 1:28 AM According to Eliot, who wrote those famous opening lines to his poem "The Waste Land," April is cruel because it leaves you hoping and wishing that spring would come, but it never really follows through.

It is a time of year when people are sick of winter and cold and want the light and warmth again, and April usually delivers a few nice, sunny days just to tease us. But then, the rains and the cold come back--it is a cruel thing to do, to tease us with warmth and then be cold and muddy again. Later on, he uses seasonal imagery that is reflective of April, using it to symbolize society, and how it is not fulfilling, and it is empty. The imagery of April, "breeding Lilacs out of the dead land," and covering "dull roots with spring rain," indicates the potential for rebirth. But later on, in lines 19-24, he states that in April, there are only roots and no leaves, and that "the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter." It is not fully spring yet, and it is not fully still winter. So, we have empty trees and dried roots and no green, and sun that we can't shelter from in the leafy shade. This is all symbolic of Eliot's message about a people that feel lost and empty, wandering, and in search of meaning.

April was the month that he opened with to symoblize that. I hope that those thoughts help a bit; good luck! like 5 dislike 0 Eliot, The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead” | Introduction to Poetry (W) Introduction to Poetry (W) Eliot, The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead” Posted on by lnicolosi Explore the gothic imagery embedded within the first section of The Waste Land. Ponder its utility in opening up the poem and establishing its tone. Also, consider the spiritist and dystopian elements within this first section. This entry was posted in Uncategorized by lnicolosi . Bookmark the permalink . 17 thoughts on “Eliot, The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead”” May 16, 2014 at 4:15 am said: In the first section of his poem “The Waste Land”, Elliot uses vivid dark imagery to establish the depressing tone of his poem.

The poem begins by saying that “April is the cruelest month” (line 1) because it “breeds lilacs out of dead land” (line 2) and “stirs dull roots with spring rain” (line 3). Here, Elliot has taken images that are usually associated with beauty and life, such as the blossoming of flowers or spring rain, and instead associated them with darkness and death. In the next stanza, Elliot goes on to describe a dystopian environment where roots and branches cannot grow, the trees are dead and there is no water flowing in the streams. These images portray death. There is no life in this environment and the reader can sense the dark tone of the speaker. In the next stanza the speaker is visiting a fortune teller. Keeping with the rest of the poem’s tone, the tarot cards the speaker draws, such as the “drowned Phoenician Sailor” or the “one-eyed merchant” are all negative cards, predicting trouble ahead. The last stanza speaks of a city that appears to be for those that have died. This is evident through the lines “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many”.

Through Elliot’s dark images, mostly centered around death, he clearly establishes the depressing tone of the poem. May 16, 2014 at 3:13 am said: “The burial of the Dead” by T.S. Elliot is the first section of “the Wasteland” so its main purpose is to introduce the main themes of the poem. Even just from the first couple lines the reader is introduced to some of the main themes of the poem which are destruction and death. The author starts out with “April is the cruelest of months” even though most people would consider April a nice time of the year because it’s the start of spring; the author is saying it’s cruel. One reason is because April is the time of Easter which is the time of the death of Christ. Also the author mentions death and other synonyms of death so many times “dead land” (line 2), “dull roots” (line 4), “stony rubbish” “broken images” etc. In the middle of the section the author describes an encounter with some sort of fortune teller that is reading cards for him.

Obviously every card that the fortune teller sees has to do with death, and it brings a feeling of evil, especially when the reading is over and she urges him to “be so careful.” This section ends of with the words “Unreal city” (line 60) which again stresses this theme of darkness because instead of saying fantasy which can be something happy it says unreal which has a negative connotation. Then Elliot writes about a brown fog which covers the city which blocks the sun and creates more darkness. The author cries out to Stetson who has recently buried a corpse and asks him if anything has begun to grow in the soil on top of the corpse. This can also be talking about the city which Elliot is describing as a corpse with brown fog that could be soil and there is nothing growing in it yet because of all the darkness and death in the city. May 16, 2014 at 2:47 am said: In the first few lines of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, imagery is the first literary technique that we encounter. We can visualize the ugliness and desolation that the author so vividly describes which is gothic imagery.

April, which is a beautiful month of the year, is made ugly by speaking of lilacs growing out of dead land and dried up tubers. Lines 1 and 2, “April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land…” sets the entire tone of this poem. From these lines we can anticipate that nothing beautiful will be described. As the poem progresses, so does the imagery as evidenced in lines 22 and 23, “…where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief” and the mood of the poem remains the same emphasizing and continuing his discussion of destruction, decay and discomfort. The spiritist elements of this poem which is where the dead is communicating with the living can be found within this poem. Example: line 63, “I had not thought death had undone so many” and again line 70, “You were with me in the ships at mylae!” and on line 71 “that corpse you planted last year in your garden” are examples of the living speaking to a dead person. Dystopian elements which, by definition, is an imaginary place where life is bad is apparent in this poem too.

Example, line 20, “out of this stony rubbish,” and on line 23 “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,” are all descriptive of an imaginary place where the conditions are horrible and unfit to live. May 16, 2014 at 2:28 am said: The burial of the dead in T.S Eliots “The Waste Land” begins with these four lines “April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.” Right away we are given clues of the unknown speakers un happiness. Where for majority of the people April is one of the happiest months in the sense that the world begins to come alive after winter, from just these four lines I got a sense of quite the opposite from the speaker. His choice of wording also adds to the mood with words such as “Cruelest” or “dead land” and “dull roots” The next three lines, the speaker talks about the season of winter and how it has “kept him warm”.

So from these 7 lines what I got is that the speaker prefers the season of winter over spring, which is a bit strange because when you think of winter you think of all the things the speakers has discussed when referring to the month of april. The next couple lines we learned that the speaker is a sort of character in the poem but i doubt it is T.S Eliot himself. We learn that the speaker recollects his time spend with friends in Munich which is located in Germany. Its a bit funny but talking about his memories in Germany, munich per say for me corresponds with the same felling of winter which produces darkness and unhappiness. In general I have been to Munich and i got a vibe that was similar to the one i got from the poem. I think the tone of the poem is very easily established in the first few stanzas of the poem. As the we begin to see the gothic imagery, the poem has the same felling till the very end. May 15, 2014 at 2:09 pm said: T.S Elliot’s “The Waste Land”, conveys a very negative sense of imagery in the beginning of the poem.

The speaker who is unknown begins by saying that “April is the cruelest month” (line 1) which is counter-intuitive because we would think that April is the happiest of months as it is a time of blooming and love. The speaker goes on to say, “Winter kept us warm, covering Earth is forgetful snow..” (lines 5 and 6) as if to say that winter is the best time of year. Furthermore, the speaker goes continues by saying, “memory and desire, stirring (line 3) which probably means that people need both memory and desire in order to be able to come back and rebuild again. Due to the fact that he wrote this poem after World War One, he was probably wondering how people would progress to become part of one culture once again. May 15, 2014 at 1:35 pm said: In T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, “The Burial of the Dead” there is very dark and gothic imagery.

Right from the beginning Eliot starts by saying how April is a cruel month, because ” April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain”(Line 1-5). April is usually seen as month of freshness and renewal. But here it is put into a negative light. When Eliot says “dead land” I not only think that the land is dead due to the fact that winter has just passed and it is baron but also that the land could possibly be someplace where bodies are buried. And when the lilacs bloom they bring along with them memory and desire of those who have passed away. This can be also seen in the last stanza “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?”. That underneath those lilacs is a corpse. The dystopian elements can also be see through this because the corpse is buried in the persons garden. Usually bodies are buried in a location away from the home. May 15, 2014 at 12:25 pm said: T.S.

Eliot’s The Wasteland: The Burial of the Dead is filled with depressing imagery and words. It starts off by saying that April is the cruelest month. Perhaps the speaker is referring to the crucifixion of Jesus as the reference to lilacs in the next line would indicate. Lines 5-7 state, “Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding life with dried tubers”. During winter is was easy to forget the bad thing in life, they were covered in thick snow however, when spring comes, your problems rise to the surface once more like flowers peaking through the snow. The whole thing is really quite a negative view on the changing of the seasons. “Summer surprised us, coming over the starnbergersee with a shower of rain we stopped in the colonnade and went on in sunlight into the hofgarten and drank coffee and talked for an hour” New entities are brought into the poem at this point, At first the speaker was a singular person but now it is multiple people as indicated by the use of the word “us”. The stanza describes people talking about their memories, possibly of home, for an hour.

With the beginning of line 19, the language becomes even more depressing and gthic with words like rubbish, broken, beats, dead, dry, shadow, etc. “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),” The first line references Ezekiel when it asks what could grow from a person’s spirit if it is like stony rubbish. The second set of lines is based on Ecclesiastes. It is stating that all you really know is a “heap of broken images” you do not know anything about your life other than the superficial things. The poem states that the sun is beating down and yet the trees are dead this seems to be a contradiction because generally when there is sunlight the trees will grow. The speaker is describing a desert that is as arid as a desert can be they are surrounded by garbage, red rock, dead trees, etc.

May 15, 2014 at 11:46 am said: T.S Eliot’s “The Burial of the Dead” contains a lot of imagery throughout the whole poem. The title reveals how morbid of a poem it will be. The poem begins with the following line: “April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain” (1-4). The speaker seems to have a negative view of the month of April, which most people associate with the spring season; the season that brings nature back to life. However, he calls it the “cruellest month” as he describes how flowers surface from the “dead land”. The next line is a paradoxical statement, for it fully contradicts what the winter feels like. He says “Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow.” When I first read this line, I was confused because the winter does not keep anyone “warm”, it does just the opposite. That statement just seems illogical.

But when one reads between the lines one can see that the speaker sees the “earth” or the “land” as a “burial of the dead” just like the title states. So when he says “covering Earth in forgetful snow” he might not be only referring to the “Lilacs” or other flowers that blossom during spring but stay underground during winter; he might also be referring to the “memor[ies] and desire[s]” that stay hidden. Meaning that the things that we try to not remember and the things we long for emerge from the “land” when spring starts. The speaker despises the spring, for all the “snow” is no longer there “covering” his suppressed “memory and desire”. In line 71, someone asks the author ‘that corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”; this further supports my interpretation because the “corpse” can be seen as the speaker’s “desire[s]” and maybe even bad things that he might have done to arise from the hidden place.

May 15, 2014 at 4:47 am said: In “The Burial of the Dead” the speaker starts by saying “April is the curliest month” I found this interesting because April is a month in spring in which regrowth of life happens after winter. It is as if the speaker isn’t looking forward to spring. In line 5 the speaker says “winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow”. This makes me wonder if the speaker prefers winter over spring. Another thing that I find interesting is when the speaker says “Winter kept us warm,” Winter is cold, but the speaker is saying that it kept them warm. The speaker starts to describe childhood a memory. The memory is not like the beginning of the poem. In this memory they describe riding a sled and are enjoying their selves, while in the beginning of the poem they are sad and gloomy because of the arrival of spring. The speaker mention staying at the “archduke’s”. It is suggested that it is referred to Archduke Franz Ferdinand whose death caused World War I. The poem referring to that event. It is challenging to follow the tone and languages of the poem.

In order to fully understand it you would have to refer to history, past literature and biblical references. It can be the speaker’s way of trying to bring back these stories through poetry which maybe he feels have been forgotten. May 15, 2014 at 2:59 am said: “The Burial of the Dead” by T.S. Eliot is riddled with ominous imagery seeing that death is found throughout the piece. Considering that this poem was written after World War I, the tone reflects the speaker’s disillusionment with the world as well as hope for a rebirth. Though disillusionment and hope are contrasting ideas, they come together in this poem as images of death are juxtaposed with images of rebirth. Right off the bat, readers are faced with images of death from the title of the section alone. However, as we hit the first few lines, we see images of growth and spring. This is evidenced where the speaker states that “lilacs” are growing “out of the dead land” (lines 1-2). These spring-like images continue throughout this first section of the main poem while being accompanied with images of death.

When looking at the second stanza, death is shown in nature as the speaker describes a “dead tree” that “gives no shelter” (line 23). Again, this image is followed by another reference to flowers as a “hyacinth girl” and a “hyacinth garden” is mentioned (lines 35-37). The third stanza is just plain morose with its many images of death. We see a “drowned Phoenician Sailor” and a “hanged man” in the tarot reading while the speaker receives a warning to “fear death by water” (lines 37-55). However, as we move to the final stanza—which also has descriptions of winter and death—the images of life and spring follow suit once again. Here the image of rebirth is very clear as the speaker talks about a “garden” that seems to grow up from a “corpse…planted last year” (line 71). May 14, 2014 at 8:44 pm said: The title of first section of The Waste Land, The Burial of the Dead, gives me the impression that this is going to be a devastating poem about death.

But Eliot opens up the poem stating “April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.” When I think of April, I think of rain and flowers according to the idiom ‘April Showers, May bring flowers”. This idiom is not a dark idea though but I don’t think of April as a harsh month, unlike winter months that are cold; April does have a lot of rain, which breeds different types flowers. So Eliot opens up the poem creating an dark image of death but tries to include flowers, which is a metaphor resembling the living things. Memory and desire also further supports this metaphor by expressing about those who are dead that have memories, and the living who has desire, or wishes for things in their future, since they are still alive. Since this occurred after WWI, this opening describes a scenario of those who died, and those who survived from the war. The tone used to open this poem is not quite disturbing since Eliot uses a month, seasons and weather conditions to outline the emotional disturbance of death.

Eliot also describes the death journey in this section as well; “There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you” This shows the directional way which leads to the journey of death by having the shadow behind you and dying, or being led to your shadow after death in the next life. The rock is also a reference to the tombstone for one that is buried under. May 14, 2014 at 6:52 pm said: The Waste Land by T.S Eliot seem rather depressing when reading it for the first time its full with dead and dreadful imagery. While the poem is covered with mostly imagery of isolation and depression there are still signs of life that are left to explore in the poem. The form that the speaker wrote this poem was rather interesting he sets up depressive lines after another but still somewhere in between he puts up signs of life flourishing which may symbolize ‘ as hope. There are also contradictions that as a read I questioned, “winter kept us Warm” why would the coldest season keep anyone warm.

Than I read on and he states “covering in forgetful snow” could easily be interpreted as if there was something that they wish to forget. Since this was post WWI it could be that they wish to forget the war that just occurred. Also when they establish that life was being flourish feels as if they are speaking of America and part of Europe rebuilding from the war that just occurred. Overall things were very hard to understood I wasn’t able to get the full understand on what the speaker full point was in “The Waste Land”. May 14, 2014 at 2:30 pm said: T.S. Eliot begins his depiction of “The Wasteland” with “The Burial of the Dead.” Once we discussed this section in class, and the fact that this poem was written in the wake of WWI, the whole poem made much more sense. This first section is packed full of literary, religious and mythological references. Upon the first read, this poem is somewhat depressing; there are countless images of death, devastation, isolation, fragment and ruin. However, there are also signs of life and hope; not all has been lost.

At the end of WWI, the western world was broken and in need of repair, piece by piece. This poem in and of itself performs the task of repairing humanity and returning to our roots. Eliot takes fragments from literary references that span the gamut, as well as religious references and several different languages to piece this poem together. The poem opens with: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain. /Winter kept us warm, covering/Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/A little life with dried tubers.” This opening section throws the reader for a loop. I think instinctually we think of April as a kind month that brings warm weather and gives life back to the earth, but Eliot describes it as cruel. There is a religious reference here to Easter which involves a crucifixion and a resurrection. In line 2, there is a clear depiction of a resurrection with “lilacs out of the dead land.” We normally think of winter as freezing life with harsh cold, yet the speaker says “winter kept us warm.” (Line 4) It is interesting to think of winter as protecting life rather than harming it.

I connect this idea to the last section of “The burial of the Dead” where the speaker poses the idea of a dead body buried in the ground being like a seed buried in the ground (lines 74-75). Although there are countless images of death and despair, signs of life still peek through and all hope is not lost. An important point was made in class: in line 3, “memory and desire” refers to the memory and desire of humanity to repair the broken western world in the wake of the Great War. One more thing I want to mention is Eliot’s use of enjambment in the opening section, each though is carried over to the next line, which in a way makes the reader feel uneasy and incomplete, which is a part of the challenge of understanding this poem. May 14, 2014 at 12:37 pm said: The first section of The Waste Land starts off with a section called The Burial of the Dead. I think that this piece was beneficial to readers, because it gave an introduction that not only explains the reason for why this piece was written, but it exemplifies its own message.

The first stanza of this piece starts off with the explanation of what has been going. The first line, “April is the cruelest month,” already being a reference to an outside source. Eliot’s reason for writing this poem was to explain to people during his time, that they were not cultured as they once were before. That it was time to learn things they all once knew. He took it upon himself to write this poem that was intentionally challenging, so that when people read it they would need to go back and look up words, references, and even various languages. This way, it would be possible for people to start taking an interest in the literary arts again. Things would not be so bad then, it would be in everyone’s best interest to learn of such diversity, so we can understand each other, instead of fight, and this would be the way to end all wars, to learn we’re not so different. The tone that Eliot uses creates this need or desire for you to listen. It sounds stern yet concerning.

With anecdotes inserted throughout the poem showing a sentimental side, as to say he is describing the problems of today’s world but is still showing there is hope for everyone, that if we take these steps, that he has provided, that we will be alright, no need for panic. May 13, 2014 at 3:15 am said: T.S. Elliot begins his work “The Waste Land” with the first section “The Burial of the Dead”. This section begins in April but where as the spring is normally a time of happiness the speaker seemed to be missing the winter. The poem begin “ April is the cruelest month, breeding, Lilacs out of dead land” where one could infer that the poet chose to use the term ‘dead’ to describe how the land is after winter has passed in an effort to set a morbid tone. The land is not simply dry but rather it is dead lending to images that relate with death. Connecting this image of death latter in “The Burial of the Dead” Elliot wrote, “ I will show you fear in a handful of dust”.

Since the image is already set that the land is connected to the death it could be inferred that there is something about the land and death that people are supposed to fear. Later in the poem when the speaker says “ That corpse you planted last year in your garden “ the imagery of death and its relation to the ground comes full circle. When things die they are put into the ground therefore the land could be seen as dead as it is full of things that are no longer alive. The imagery connects to the beginning of the poem that begins in April where you expect things to be blooming in the garden but instead the terms breeding is used. The term breeding also relates negative emotions towards what is actually occurring in the garden. May 9, 2014 at 11:23 pm said: Eliot begins to sculpt his “Waste Land” in “The Burial of the Dead,” a collection of short narratives that serve to open up his dark, brooding poem.

Each vignette in “Burial” digs readers deeper down into a hole of depression, grief, and human misery, mainly with gothic images, harrowing literary allusions, and a dystopian view of modern society that Eliot pulled from classic works, and his own unfortunate experiences. These little mysterious stories, when combined, create an utterly grim, unsalvageable opening mood. Eliot throws us immediately for a loop when he dismisses the joy and bountifulness usually associated with the springtime. He writes, “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory with desire, stirring/Dull roots with rain,” giving us the indication that this season has brought nothing but unpleasant feelings and memories to the surface. (1-4) The contrast between the narrator’s grief and the oncoming beauty of Spring further tells us that this poem – this waste land – will not be what it seems, or anything we might have expected. Indeed, Eliot quickly shifts here, moving ahead to Summer before we can begin to consider the sinister undertones of his opening lines.

We continue to wander about in Eliot’s miserable landscape at Line 19 (Stanza 2), where biblical and literary allusions are brought in to emphasize our seemingly hopeless existence on Earth. “Son of man,” he writes, “You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/And the dead tree gives no shelter.” (20-23) It appears from this passage that we sons of man have been exiled to some intellectual and spiritual desert where our fragmented, if not ignorant disposition, is unable to put back together the pieces of our “broken” lives. And, with the symbolic “tree” dead, our only shelter lies under a “red rock,” an unforgiving geologic feature that has never, nor ever will, support life. Later, Eliots affirms his belief in human hopelessness by quoting Tristan und Isolde, the tragic German opera: “Oed und leer das Meer” – or, “Desolate and empty sea.” (42) The fragmentary nature of Eliot’s “Burial” was undoubtedly a purposeful creation meant to remind us of our own shattered, disorganized lives.

said: Alyssa Orgera In “The Burial of the Dead”, Eliot opens up with describing the seasons. The words he chooses to use are words that give you the image of desolation. For example, cruellest, dead land, and dull roots. April indicated the start of spring and blooming flowers, but not for this poem. The Spring’s rains makes way for dull roots. This gives us more evidence that the speaker is in depression. Using these depressing words, sets the poem’s tone as being sad and deserted. It is odd that the speaker says how the winter’s snow kept him warm even though the spring is the season that it starts to get warmer. We see more of the negative words used as the poem goes on. For example, in lines 22-24, the speaker uses broken images, dead tree, no relief, and dry stone no sound of water. These continue painting the image that we already have. The words used also link to the title. Just by seeing “The Burial of the Dead”, the readers can predict to read depressing and dark language. The poem is made up of four vignettes just like we see in “The Leaves of Grass”. Each brings up a different topic.

We still see this image drawn throughout all of “The Burial of the Dead”. The Waste Land Homework Help - eNotes.com The Waste Land Homework Help We’ve answered 319,197 questions. We can answer yours, too. Certainly scholars have compared the two texts, many seeing The Great Gatsby as a prose version of The Waste Land, and identifying similar themes, settings, motifs, and more. Water as a motif is... Asked by pons on April 7, 2016 at 3:38 AM via web 1 educator answer. The Waste Land "The Waste Land" reflects T. S. Eliot's perception of the state of the world after World War I. He sees the warfare among the European nations as an emblem of the fragmentation of tradition in the... Asked by user7076749 on April 2, 2016 at 11:49 AM via web 1 educator answer. The Waste Land There are a number of modern themes in both of these that give them commonality, despite the difference in time period for their settings. The themes of alienation, fear, ennui and decay are said...

Asked by user6087268 on February 18, 2016 at 3:30 PM via web 1 educator answer. The Waste Land I have changed your topic from "Literature" to "The Waste Land," which should make it easier for you to access all the excellent information about the poem available in the eNotes study guide. This... Asked by shamallagha on May 20, 2015 at 1:40 PM via web 1 educator answer. The Waste Land "The Waste Land" is a complex poem. Essentially T. S. Eliot is using the actual ruins of World War I and the many deaths of soldiers and civilians as an extended metaphor for the spiritual... Asked by paigergamer239 on May 8, 2015 at 7:13 AM via web ... Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, (The Waste Land, T. S....

Asked by tanialc on August 29, 2013 at 6:14 PM via web The river spoken of in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is the Thames River. Readers first see the name of the river in line 176. Here, it is named the "Sweet Thames." The once beautiful Thames is now... Asked by sailorjack on July 20, 2013 at 8:24 PM via web T S Eliot makes no attempt to simplify his poetry and expects the reader to approach it with an open mind. The Waste Land is typical of his style and his intention to introduce the reader to a... Asked by samanta187 on July 11, 2013 at 5:19 PM via web This section of the poem is definitely a confluence of Buddhism and Christianity as allusions to both of these religions are made to support Eliot's message of the sterile and unfulfilling nature... Asked by samanta187 on July 2, 2013 at 9:45 AM via web 1 educator answer.

The Waste Land It is important to realise the way in which this powerful work came to define Modernism as a literary movement. Indeed, some critics argue that stylistically it seeks to include all of the elements... Asked by samanta187 on July 1, 2013 at 5:38 AM via web "The Waste Land" was published in 1922, only a few years after the First World War had ended. Europeans were shocked and horrified by what had happened. They had believed that they had attained a... Asked by nanaahmed on April 26, 2013 at 11:37 AM via web Symbolism is a very powerful literary technique which makes use of symbols, which means presenting something (usually simplistic, physical, material and concrete) that represents something else... Asked by saumyabhasin on April 7, 2013 at 8:34 PM via iOS Tiresias is a figure from Greek mythology and literature, the blind soothsayer who appears in Book xi of The Odyssey. Being the most renowned prophet of the non-biblical world and cursed by the...

Asked by saumyabhasin on April 7, 2013 at 8:24 PM via web It is in the act of perception that American author and T.S. Eliot contemporary, William Carlos Williams in "Spring and All" parts company with the sensibility of "The Waste Land". On the surface... Asked by user4858760 on March 9, 2013 at 9:10 PM via web T.S. Eliot’s famous Wasteland turns his modernist perspective into a fictional, symbolic landscape, in which he sees the world as bereft of harmony or peace. Williams, on the other hand,... Asked by user4858760 on March 5, 2013 at 7:13 PM via web 1 educator answer. The Waste Land In order to answer this, we need to define our terms to orient our thinking because the terms relate to and depend on each other. Space is limited so, briefly, irony is the quality in words or... Asked by prettyellise on February 25, 2013 at 7:51 PM via web 1 educator answer. T.

S. Eliot Eliot's poetry focuses on developing a picture of contemporary life in Britain that paints a somewhat bleak picture of man and life. Key themes in his work are the alienation and loneliness of the... Asked by saulsarena on January 19, 2013 at 4:38 AM via web Datta, Dayadvam, Damyata and are Sanskrit terms. In his notes on The Wasteland, Eliot identifies the phrases as coming from the Brihidaranyaka Upanishad. (The Upanishads are are set of holy books... Asked by albulena on October 7, 2012 at 12:34 PM via web According to The Modernism Lab at Yale University, Ezra Pound "defined an epic as a “poem including history" (Lewis). The Waste Land definitely contains both modern and ancient history, as well... Asked by farhad33 on September 1, 2012 at 9:11 PM via web 2 educator answers. The Waste Land To understand poems by T. S.

Eliot, such as "The Waste Land" well, you need to be familiar with their cultural and literary context. Eliot is a highly allusive poet, who constantly refers to other... Asked by johnywalker420 on August 23, 2012 at 4:44 AM via web I gave a brief description of some of the key points of modern poetry in your "Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock" question, but just to recap on the most significant highlights that would correspond... Asked by nittoh-bittoh on July 4, 2012 at 6:59 PM via web The Waste Land is one of the richest poetic works of the early 20th century. The obvious answer to how Eliot viewed the modern world is that, throughout the poem, he expresses his disappointment... Asked by laylaaa on June 17, 2012 at 3:09 PM via web plz write down the name of the poem or whatever you are trying to ask?

Asked by leenachrist on May 4, 2012 at 3:25 AM via web The Waste Land DA Datta: DA Dayadhvam: DA Damyata: Shantih Shantih Shantih What Eliot implies by his allusion to the Indian mythology, is that the ruins of traditional ethics and and artistic standard... Asked by mahajanroohi20 on April 30, 2012 at 7:09 PM via web Figures of speech comprise two main categories. One category twists the meaning of words to wrest a new non-literal meaning from words that, when phrased together, have a very different literal... Asked by tayma27 on April 23, 2012 at 11:43 AM via web 1 educator answer. The Waste Land "The Waste Land" is a tricky compilation of Eliot's meanderings and responses to current events, mythology, and obscure texts. When faced with a difficult analysis, it may be helpful to go through... Asked by haaggus on April 19, 2012 at 5:22 AM via web 1 educator answer.

The Waste Land Perhaps the best poem by T. S. Eliot to use as an example of your statement that at the heart of any modern poem is an absence is “The Waste Land”, although “The Hollow Men” and many of his... Asked by ellyarvidsson on March 12, 2012 at 3:30 AM via web In his footnotes the “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot remarks upon the importance of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance for his work. Weston’s work, like Frazer’s Golden Bough,... Asked by rosalinnahar on January 24, 2012 at 4:17 PM via web “The Wasteland” is often used in works on interwar Britain because it is thought to express many of the major themes of literary modernism as they respond to the artistic and cultural... Asked by revpat on December 6, 2011 at 3:51 AM via web 1 educator answer. The Waste Land The entire poem is characterized by the principle of fragmentation with which modernist writers replaced the unified and chronological narratives of the past. To modernist writers and artists,...

Asked by philhumble on November 17, 2011 at 11:32 PM via web The Fire Sermon The title suggests the preachment of the Buddha against the fires of lust that keep men from regeneration. However, one of fire's potentialities is purgatorial and purifying. The... Asked by seuli on October 31, 2011 at 11:43 PM via web The Waste Land Eliot's views of tradition were reflected in the very disillusioned nature of the Wasteland. Like much of Europe and the world, Eliot felt that the traditional approach to politics and national... Asked by pglenn16 on October 27, 2011 at 11:30 PM via web SparkNotes: Eliot’s Poetry: The Waste Land Section I: “The Burial of the Dead” The Waste Land Section I: “The Burial of the Dead” → “The Love Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock” The Waste Land Section I: “The Burial of the Dead”, page 2 page 1 of 2 Summary The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence (“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter”). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader “something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines).

The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a “hyacinth girl” and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered through quotations from Wagner’s operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins. Form Like “Prufrock,” this section of The Waste Land can be seen as a modified dramatic monologue.

The four speakers in this section are frantic in their need to speak, to find an audience, but they find themselves surrounded by dead people and thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars. Because the sections are so short and the situations so confusing, the effect is not one of an overwhelming impression of a single character; instead, the reader is left with the feeling of being trapped in a crowd, unable to find a familiar face. Also like “Prufrock,” The Waste Land employs only partial rhyme schemes and short bursts of structure. These are meant to reference—but also rework— the literary past, achieving simultaneously a stabilizing and a defamiliarizing effect. The world of The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier time, but it cannot be approached in the same way. The inclusion of fragments in languages other than English further complicates matters. The reader is not expected to be able to translate these immediately; rather, they are reminders of the cosmopolitan nature of twentieth-century Europe and of mankind’s fate after the Tower of Babel: We will never be able to perfectly comprehend one another.

Commentary Not only is The Waste Land Eliot’s greatest work, but it may be—along with Joyce’s Ulysses—the greatest work of all modernist literature. Most of the poem was written in 1921, and it first appeared in print in 1922. As the poem’s dedication indicates, Eliot received a great deal of guidance from Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and to break up the rhyme scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot’s wife, Vivien, also had a significant role in the poem’s final form. A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe. A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem’s epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die.

The Sibyl’s predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former glory. Thus, the underlying plot of The Waste Land, inasmuch as it can be said to have one, revolves around Eliot’s reading of two extraordinarily influential contemporary cultural/anthropological texts, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough. Both of these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern thought and religion; of particular interest to both authors is the story of the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is the cause of his country becoming a desiccated “waste land.” Heal the Fisher King, the legend says, and the land will regain its fertility. According to Weston and Frazier, healing the Fisher King has been the subject of mythic tales from ancient Egypt to Arthurian England. Eliot picks up on the figure of the Fisher King legend’s wasteland as an appropriate description of the state of modern society.

The important difference, of course, is that in Eliot’s world there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all. The legend’s imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative (like religion or mythology) in the modern world. Eliot’s poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poem’s writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its apex in the Four Quartets. The overall range of allusions in The Waste Land, though, suggests no overarching paradigm but rather a grab bag of broken fragments that must somehow be pieced together to form a coherent whole. While Eliot employs a deliberately difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display his own intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the twentieth century.

The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. Marie’s childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledding, and coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture. 1

Question: According to the opening line of T.S. Eliot's poem 'The Wasteland', which is "the cruellest month"?
Answer: APRIL