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 Eliot, T. S. 1922. The Waste Land Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rèves, Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant. 63 . Cf. Inferno, III. 5557: si lunga tratta di gente, chio non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta navesse disfatta. 64 . Cf. Inferno, IV.

2527: Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, non avea pianto, ma che di sospiri, che laura eterna facevan tremare. 68 . A phenomenon which I have often noticed. 74 . Cf. the Dirge in Websters White Devil. 76 . V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal. II. A GAME OF CHESS 92 . Laquearia. V. Aeneid , I, 726: dependent lychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt. 98 . Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV . 140. 99 . V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, Philomela. 192 . Cf. The Tempest, I, ii . 196 . Cf.

Day, Parliament of Bees: When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear, A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring Actaeon to Diana in the spring, Where all shall see her naked skin  199 . I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken; it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia. 202 . V. Verlaine, Parsifal. 210 . The currants were quoted at a price carriage and insurance free to London; and the Bill of Lading, etc. were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft. 218 . Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a character, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.

The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest: Cum Iunone iocos et maior vestra profecto est Quam, quae contingit maribus, dixisse, voluptas. Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota. Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem Vidit et est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae, Dixit ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet, Nunc quoque vos feriam! percussis anguibus isdem Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.

Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte, At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore. 221 . This may not appear as exact as Sapphos lines, but I had in mind the longshore or dory fisherman, who returns at nightfall. 253 . V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield. 257 . V. The Tempest, as above. 264 . The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wrens interiors. See The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches: (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.). 266 . The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here.

From line 292 to 306 inclusive they speak in turn. V. Götterdämmerung, III, i: The Rhinedaughters. 279 . V. Froude, Elizabeth, Vol. I, ch. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain: In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. (The queen) was alone with Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be married if the queen pleased. 293 . Cf. Purgatorio, V. 133: Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia; Siena mi fe, disfecemi Maremma. 307 . V. St. Augustines Confessions : to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears. 308 .

The complete text of the Buddhas Fire Sermon (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warrens Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the occident. 309 . From St. Augustines Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident. V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Westons book), and the present decay of eastern Europe. 357 . This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats.

Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequaled. Its water-dripping song is justly celebrated. 360 . The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackletons): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted. 366 76. Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos: Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligem Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen. 401 .

Datta, dayadhvam, damyata (Give, sympathise, control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the BrihadaranyakaUpanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussens Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489. 407 . Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi:  theyll remarry Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs. 411 . Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46: ed io sentii chiavar luscio di sotto allorribile torre. Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346. My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it.

In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul. 424 . V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King. 427 . V. Purgatorio, XXVI, 148. Ara vos prec, per aquella valor que vos guida al som de lescalina, sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor. Poi sascose nel foco che gli affina. 428 . V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III. 429 . V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado. 431 . V. Kyds Spanish Tragedy. 433 . Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. The Peace which passeth understanding is a feeble translation of the content of this word.

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 April is the Cruelest Month Where does the quote "April is the cruelest month" come from? The Answer: This is the first line of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." Some consider this poem, published in 1922, to be the greatest of the 20th century. Here is the beginning of the poem.

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. T.S. Eliot, American | The American Conservative Tweet illustration by Michael Hogue Whether they read him in college or never heard of him, millions of Americans quote T.S. Eliot at least once a year: “April is the cruellest month.” Inspired by the April 15 income tax deadline, this might be the most rarefied popular joke in American life, given its source. The line opens T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and if you did study the poem in college, you might recall that the poet is here offering a dark rejoinder to the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, whose famous prologue also begins with a line about April, only Chaucer is celebrating the springtime return of hope to the world.

Reading Eliot as a great poet responding to another great poet across centuries of literature and historical experience, all of it signalled by a provocatively despairing five-word opening line: what’s gone wrong, to make someone regard the beginning of a fresh season of new life as the cruellest possible time of the year? This kind of question has been a staple of studying Eliot for decades. And it keeps with a generally held sense of Thomas Stearns Eliot as an arch, reedy-voiced Anglophile writer much given to dry, brilliant lamentations, in verse and prose both, about the wreck of Western civilization and the poet’s all-but-religious responsibility to bear the burden of tradition and higher truths through the godless technocratic darkness of the modern age. In other words, this is not someone who would seem much given to jokes about death and taxes, never mind jokes about these inevitabilities made by way of the opening line from the most important poem he ever wrote. Yet one of the great advantages of reading Robert Crawford’s accomplished first entry in his new two-part biography of Eliot is that you can actually imagine him getting a kick out of this unexpected connection of his grand poem to ordinary grousing about the IRS.

After all, this was someone who shocked and entertained his Harvard classmates in the early 1900s by writing dirty ditties about sex, poop, and European monarchs, all set to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and later in life would maintain a wry affection for what he liked to describe as “Amurrican culchur,” even as he moved about elite literary and intellectual circles in London and Paris, mixing it up with Ezra Pound and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the like. About that Amurrican culchur: Eliot was born in 1888 into a well-to-do St. Louis family. Unitarians, they had deep American roots reaching back to the Puritans. New England played a strong part in Eliot’s own early days, as the family vacationed in seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts, whose stark granitic grandeur figures throughout Eliot’s verse, as Crawford details, and most famously in his late masterpiece of religious conversion, “Four Quartets.” But Eliot’s American origins matter as far more than mere childhood memories turned into place-markers in his poetry.

While other Eliot biographers and scholars have gone over this material to worthy effect, Crawford particularly emphasizes the special importance of St. Louis at the turn of the 20th century as a crucible of pluralist American experience that Eliot experienced firsthand: With a population of around 600,000, by 1900 St. Louis was its nation’s fourth largest urban settlement: ‘too far north to be a Southern city, and too southern in its social characteristics to be a Northern city; with all the polish and finish of an Eastern center, and yet toned by all the warmth and spirited verve of a Western metropolis.’ Its French past was still discernible in local street names … but by the late nineteenth century German and Irish influences mixed with African American and Jewish culture. Growing up in a city like this, privileged to move around it as he did, Eliot could just as easily hear ragtime as he could hear Wagner, Crawford observes. That he likely heard both and took in much else during his time in St.

Louis, as he did during his many summers in New England and later during his semi-maturation in the hothouse culture of wealthy Harvard College life, matters to our sense of Eliot not as a great poet but as an American great poet. For the longest time we’ve celebrated the democratic American sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Saul Bellow, not least because they themselves celebrated these sensibilities through paeans to their wildly pluralist visions of national life. Eliot was never so brash in his American-ness, or really in anything else. Unlike the gregarious, sprawling and brawling Whitman and Bellow, Eliot was a shy and cerebral man more prone to melancholy and rumination. He was intellectually and aesthetically attracted to the force and shape of ideas, particularly about knowledge and perception, while autobiographically he was drawn to considering the possibility of meaningful human relationships between uncertain, even psychically damaged people. First and last, he was motivated by his firm belief that poetry had a special capacity to explore and reflect on the difficult realities of belief, knowledge, and action for ordinary people living in a modern era that was moving ahead, ambivalently, amid much ruin and rubble from civilizations past.

This motivation to make sense of modern life through poetry is the bright line threading throughout Crawford’s effort, from Eliot’s boyhood through his undergraduate time at Harvard, where Eliot participated in high- and low-minded hijinks and read with great intensity a series of fin-de-siècle French poets, whose penchant for shady Parisian settings and strange lyricism inspired him to try for something along these lines in his own early verse, even as he evoked areas around Harvard: “Setting out to write about the lower-class area of North Cambridge, but taking motifs and rhymes from Laforgue, Verlaine and others, in his notebook he would deploy seedy urban images with conviction for the first time,” Crawford observes, before declaring, “Tom was writing French American poetry. Practising for Paris, he was finding his style.” As much is evident in important earlier work like “Preludes,” which begins, “The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passageways. / Six o’clock.

/ The burnt-out ends of smoky days.” This discovery of a dark, starkly evocative style took greater shape while Eliot pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, with a particular interest in the work of British idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley. In turn he felt torn between the sturdy life of an academic—Harvard wanted him to teach there, and his family was keen for this as well—and the riskier, ultimately more meaningful life of a writer, to which Eliot was always more drawn. As a working writer, however, he was, inevitably, always worried about money and about the effects of having to make money on his capacity to make poetry. By comparison, he was more resolutely drawn to life in England, which began as a fellowship year at Oxford, 1914-1915, by which point he’d already written his first major poem, the brilliantly affecting crabwise romantic monologue “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with the protagonist’s mundane name taken from a St. Louis furniture company.

Keen to write more, and sensing, not least from the example of Henry James, that life as an American writer transplanted in England was the best way to make this happen, Eliot remained there, at first only incidentally—because of the treacheries of transatlantic transit during World War I—and then because of a hasty marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an unstable woman who was far more faithful to his literary career than to their marital vows. Shortly after marrying Eliot, and even while ardently encouraging his literary ambitions, she began a barely concealed affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Crawford points out that while it’s unclear how much Eliot knew, or when, the poetry that he wrote during his early married life is suffused with evocations of betrayal and shabby intimacies, while later Eliot himself would write of his marriage, “it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” Poor Eliot the husband, and fortunate Eliot the poet.

Indeed, the back half of this biography is almost entirely concerned with exploring the personal elements that figured in Eliot’s coming into that very state of mind and thereby composing “The Waste Land,” set against his parallel emerging professional life as a noted young man of letters—essayist, critic, editor, and of course poet of great promise. Meantime, to make ends meet and have some assuring regularity to life, he worked as a London banking clerk, where his exposure to polyglot European clients also contributed to “The Waste Land”’s multilingual textures. Indeed, Crawford’s primary point in this book, which culminates with the publication of “The Waste Land,” is that everything important in Eliot’s life led up to and made possible that work, very much including his American formation but most especially his marriage. On this latter point, Crawford devotes a great deal of time to tracking Eliot and Vivienne’s matching capacities for vague but overpowering illnesses, related bouts of exhaustion, and accompanying episodes of sullenness and competing passive aggression.

Sometimes, in fact, Crawford appears comparatively less interested in advancing readings of Eliot’s verse, which, when these happen, are very fine, both directly in literary terms and in biographical terms. (Crawford is himself a poet, biographer of Robert Burns, and noted scholar of Scottish poetry.) But these are relatively brief compared to how much he attends to Eliot’s congenital bleakness in the period that produced “The Waste Land,” right down to the proportionate heaviness of Vivienne’s menstruations, which Crawford effectively correlates to her state of mind, and in turn to Eliot’s. After a great deal of this, Eliot and his wife begin to feel like characters out of a bad Victorian melodrama, if not monstrously mopey graduate students. But Crawford is never so critical; really, he’s nothing but focused—like Eliot himself, as Crawford represents him—on all and everything that mattered to Eliot the great-poet-in-the-making. And for all of the originality on display in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the later religio-intellectual power and lyrical beauty of “Four Quartets,” “The Waste Land” is Eliot’s major accomplishment.

A five-part sequence, it substantially benefited from extensive and thoughtful editing by Eliot’s great encourager, Ezra Pound, who among other things deleted an opening set in New England. With Eliot’s entire personal and intellectual formation making this work possible, in Crawford’s framing of it, the poem draws together literary references and cultural experiences both high and low, ideas from Eastern and Western traditions, figures of pagan myth and Christian motifs, personal laments and philosophical problems. All of this, in Eliot’s sure and keenly felt handling, simultaneously articulates and explores the universal modern condition circa 1922: alienated, despairing, exhausted, fragmented, but more—the poem’s speaker voices a frustrated but persistent longing for some means of deliverance, transcendence, connection.

In the meantime, this is the best he can do, by poem’s end: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In the years following the publication of “The Waste Land,” Eliot would separate from his wife, renounce his American citizenship for British citizenship, undergo a religious conversion and become an Anglo-Catholic, and also become the dominant figure in 20th-century English literature, a Nobel laureate, and a conservative-minded critic of Western civilization’s post-religious decline. In other words, even if that ole Amurrican culchur doesn’t matter so much to the second major phase of T.S. Eliot’s life, its significance, as evidenced in this book, certainly made it possible for him to move in those directions, where there is a great abundance of life, ideas, and poetry for Crawford to make sense of in his biography’s concluding volume. Randy Boyagoda, a professor of American Studies at Ryerson University, is a novelist, critic and the author, most recently, of Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square . MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR 9 Responses to T.S.

Eliot, American AJ April is the Cruelest Month Where does the quote "April is the cruelest month" come from? The Answer: This is the first line of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." Some consider this poem, published in 1922, to be the greatest of the 20th century. Here is the beginning of the poem. 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. April - Wikiquote April August · September · October · November · December April is the fourth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. April is commonly associated with the season of spring in the Northern hemisphere and autumn in the Southern hemisphere, where it is the seasonal equivalent to October in the Northern hemisphere and vice versa.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Oh to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England - now! Robert Browning , Home Thoughts from Abroad Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour. Geoffrey Chaucer , The Canterbury Tales (opening lines) 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. T. S.

Eliot , The Waste Land (opening lines) By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Of all the months that fill the year Give April's month to me, For earth and sky are then so filled With sweet variety ! Letitia Elizabeth Landon , The London Literary Gazette (5th April 1823), 'April'. Also included in The Vow of the Peacock (1835). Will you not come home, brother? you have been long away, It's April, and blossom time, and white is the spray; And bright is the sun, brother, and warm is the rain, -­ Will you not come home, brother, home to us again? I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain: I have seen the lady April bringing the daffodils, Bringing the springing grass and the soft warm April rain. Buddy de Sylva , Song: April Showers April, April, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations[ edit ] Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p.

38-39. When April winds Grew soft, the maple burst into a flush Of scarlet flowers. The tulip tree, high up, Opened in airs of June her multitude Of golden chalices to humming birds And silken-wing'd insects of the sky. Old April wanes, and her last dewy morn Her death-bed steeps in tears; to hail the May New blooming blossoms 'neath the sun are born, And all poor April's charms are swept away. John Clare , The Village Minstrel and Other Poems, The Last of April Every tear is answered by a blossom, Every sigh with songs and laughter blent, Apple-blooms upon the breezes toss them. April knows her own, and is content. Now the noisy winds are still; April's coming up the hill! All the spring is in her train, Led by shining ranks of rain; Pit, pat, patter, clatter, Sudden sun and clatter patter! * * * * * All things ready with a will, April's coming up the hill!

Mary Mapes Dodge , Now the Noisy Winds are Still The April winds are magical, And thrill our tuneful frames; The garden-walks are passional W. H. Gibson , Pastoral Days, Spring Make me over, Mother April, When the sap begins to stir! When thy flowery hand delivers All the mountain-prisoned rivers, And thy great heart beats and quivers, To revive the days that were. For April sobs while these are so glad April weeps while these are so gay,— Weeps like a tired child who had, Playing with flowers, lost its way. The children with the streamlets sing, When April stops at last her weeping; And every happy growing thing Laughs like a babe just roused from sleeping. Lucy Larcom , The Sister Months I love the season well When forest glades are teeming with bright forms, Nor dark and many-folded clouds foretell The coming on of storms. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , An April Day, line 6 Sweet April! many a thought Is wedded unto thee, as hearts are wed; Nor shall they fail, till, to its autumn brought, Life's golden fruit is shed.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , An April Day, Stanza 8 Sweet April-time—O cruel April-time! Year after year returning, with a brow Of promise, and red lips with longing paled, And backward-hidden hands that clutch the joys Of vanished springs, like flowers. The Waste Land - Poems | 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 sign up to receive a new poem-a-day in your inbox sign up Nocturne: Beheaded by Saeed Jones History by Linda Hogan read poems by this poet Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He lived in St.

Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank. It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound , who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde.

With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world. As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (most notably John Donne ) and the nineteenth century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post–World War I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism.

His major later poetry collections include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party. He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He died in London on Janurary 4, 1965.

Selected Bibliography The Complete Poems and Plays (1952) Four Quartets (1943) Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) Prose Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954) The Three Voices of Poetry (1954) Poetry and Drama (1951) Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949) The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942) The Idea of a Christian Society (1940) Essays Ancient and Modern (1936) Elizabethan Essays (1934) The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) After Strange Gods (1933) Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929) Dante (1929) Murder in the Cathedral (1935) The Rock (1934) "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβυλλα τι θελεις; respondebat illa: απο

θανειν θελω." For Ezra Pound I.

The Burial of the Dead 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. 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. Bin gar kine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. 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), 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; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind "You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; "They called me the hyacinth girl." –Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed' und leer das Meer. Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days. Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson! "You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! "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?

"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! "You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!" II. A Game of Chess The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing) Doubled the flames of seven branched candelabra Reflecting light upon the table as The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, From satin cases poured in rich profusion; In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. Huge sea-wood-fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantel was displayed. As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug" to dirty ears. And other withered stumps of time Were told upon the walls; staring forms Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair. Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Clawed into words, then would be savagely still. "My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. "What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think." I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones. "What is that noise?" The wind under the door. "What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?" Nothing again nothing. "You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember "Nothing?" Those are pearls that were his eyes.

"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?" But O O O O that Shakespearean Rag— It's so elegant "What shall I do now? What shall I do?" "I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street "With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? "What shall we ever do?" The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said— I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.

And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert, He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said. Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said. Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said, Others can pick and choose if you can't. But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you don't want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon, And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot— HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Goodnight Bill. Goodnight Lou. Goodnight May. Goodnight. Ta ta. Goodnight. Goodnight. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept. . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother's wreck And on the king my father's death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year. But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc'd. Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants C.i.f.

London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole. At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire, The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit. . . She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over." When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.

"This music crept by me upon the waters" And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. O City city, I can sometimes hear Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. The river sweats Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. V.

What the Thunder Said After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses If there were water A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you? What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree Co co rico co co rico In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust Bringing rain Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavant. The jungle crouched, humped in silence, Then spoke the thunder Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus DA Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. Datta.

Dayadhvam. Damyata. NOTES ON "THE WASTE LAND" Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies. I. The Burial of the Dead Line 20. Cf. Ezekiel II, i. 23. Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v. 31. V. Tristan und Isolde, I, verses 5-8. 42. Id, III, verse 24. 46.

I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the "crowds of people," and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself 60. Cf. Baudelaire: "Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, "Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant." 63. Cf. Inferno III, 55-57: "si Iunga tratta di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta." 64, Cf.

Inferno IV, 25-27: "Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, "non avea pianto, ma' che di sospiri, "che l'aura eterna facevan tremare." 68, A phenomenon which I have often noticed. 74, Cf. the Dirge in Webster's White Devil. 76. V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal. II. A Game of Chess 77. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, I. 190. 92. Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I, 726: dependent Iychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt. 98. Sylvan scene, V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 140. 99. V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, Philomela. 100. C£ Part III, I. 204. 115. Cf, Part III, I. 195. 118. Cf.

Webster: "Is the wind in that door still?" 126. Cf, Part I, I. 37,48. 138. Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women beware Women. 176. V. Spencer, Prothalamion. 192. Cf. The Tempest, I, ii, 196. Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress. 197. Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees: "When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear, "A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring "Actaeon to Diana in the spring, "Where all shall see her naked skin . . . " 199. I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia. 202. V. Verlaine, Parsifal. 210. The currants were quoted at a price "carriage and insurance free to London"; and the Bill of Lading etc. were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft. 218.

Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a "character," is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, se1ler of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so a1l the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias, What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest: '. . .

Cum Iunone iocos et maior vestra profecto est Quam, quae contingit maribus,' dixisse, 'voluptas.' Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota, Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem Vidit et 'est yestrae si tanta potentia plagae: Dixit 'ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet, Nunc quoque vos feriam!' percussis anguibus isdem Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.

Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte, At pater omnipotens (neque enim Iicetinrita cuiquam Facta dei fecisse deo) pro Iumine adempto Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore. 221. This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, but I had In mind the "longshore" or "dory" fisherman, who returns at nightfall. 253. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield. 257. V. The Tempest, as above. 264. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren's interiors.. See The Proposed Demolillon of Nineteen City Churches: (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.). 266. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here.

From line 292 to 306 inclusive they speak in tum. V. Götterdämmerung, III, i: the Rhine-daughters. 279. V. Froude, Elizabeth, Vol. I, ch. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain: "In the aflemoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. (The queen) was alonne with Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be married if the queen pleased." 293. Cf. Purgatorio, V, 133: "Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia; "Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma." 307. V. St. Augustine's Confessions: "to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears." 308.

The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident. 309. From St. Augustine's Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident. V. What the Thunder Said In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book) and the present decay of eastern Europe. 357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) "it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats. . . .

Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled." Its "water-dripping song" is justly celebrated. 360. The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted. 367-77, Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos: "Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligem Wahnam Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Burger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen." 402. "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata" (Give, sympathise, control).

The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka – Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen's Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p, 489. 408. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi: ". . . they'll remarry National Poetry Month – League of Canadian Poets NPM ARCHIVES National Poetry Month began in the US in 1996, spearheaded by the Academy of American Poets on the steps of a post office in New York City. There, the story goes, Academy staff members handed out copies of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “ The Waste Land ,” which begins, “April is the cruellest month…” to individuals waiting in line to mail their tax returns. Established in Canada in 1998, NPM now brings together schools, publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, and poets from across the country to celebrate poetry and its vital place in Canada’s culture. April also celebrates Poem in Your Pocket Day each year!

The day encourages people to select a poem, carry it with them, and share it with others throughout the day. For more information about this initiative, visit poets.ca/pocketpoem . Poem in Your Pocket Day 2017 will take place on Thursday, April 27. — To think of time–of all that retrospection! To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward! From “To Think of Time” by Walt Whitman Find more NPM17 visual materials here ! This National Poetry Month, we celebrate time: its gifts, its history, its potential. We celebrate your ten-thousand-hour dedication to mastery. We celebrate your drafts, your notes, your failed projects, your future success. We celebrate the journey. We invite you to join us in celebrating the timeless journey of poetry this April: share the most important moments from your literary history, or tell us about the most exciting parts of your literary future. From songs and the oral tradition to the page and beyond, time has traversed language, culture, and progress to give us an invisible and unbreakable framework for everything we do.

As Canada celebrates its 150th birthday, time perseveres: language, land, and community celebrate an ongoing history of their own. We want to take this National Poetry Month to reflect on time and all of its gifts, to acknowledge the past and look forward to what will come next. The League is excited to be planning a month of time-related content on our blog and social media, and we encourage you to join in! We’ve prepared some suggestions on popular ways to get involved with NPM, which you can find here or you can download and share. Like us on Facebook, join us on Twitter, or check back here for regular updates and guest posts throughout April! Take part by tagging us @CanadianPoets , or using the hashtags #NPM17 or #poeticmoment . Find our official poster, bookmark, and other time-themed visuals here ! Contact nicole@poets.ca if you are interested in receiving physical bookmarks or posters for your classroom, library, office, or event. We encourage everyone to celebrate National Poetry Month this April regardless of theme: if you are hosting an event, planning a project, or spearheading an initiative this April for National Poetry Month, please let us know!

Submit your event details using this contact form or email info@poets.ca and we’ll add you to our NPM events calendar! We love seeing how poets and groups interpret and use our theme, but we are also excited to see anywhere National Poetry Month takes you this year. NPM17 UPDATES

Question: """April is the cruellest month"" is the opening line of which poem by T S Eliot?"
Answer: THE WASTELAND-