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 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 Is The Cruelest Month Poem april is the cruelest month poem april is the cruelest month poem 19 Jan 2011 The now famous opening lines of the poem ?' April is the cruellest month , breeding ... Pound's note against this section of the draft is April Is the Cruelest Month | Life123 T. S. Eliot and Helen Hennessy Vendler - The Waste Land: And Other Poems - User April is the cruelest month . Written: Apr 03 '00 (Updated Apr 04 '00) Critical Mass - April is the cruelest month T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month in his poem "The Waste Land" It's a " April is the Cruelest Month " is a poem from The Waste Land, by T. S.. Poets Online Archive - April poems 27 Apr 2005 April 27, 2005 [feather] April is the cruelest month .

Here's an excerpt from a poem written by a Southern Connecticut State University April Is The Saddest Month - A poem by William Carlos Williams 31 Mar 2010 APRIL is the cruellest month , breeding As we did last year, we'll be featuring one poem every day by a local poet that will air just Is April the Cruelest Month ? Poetry question: 1922 Poem - April is the cruelest month ? Can you answer this question? ... April Is The Cruelest Month : April Is The Cruelest Month Poem The section begins with the words “ April is the cruellest month ,” which is perhaps one of the most remarked upon and most important references in the poem . The Millions : “ April is the Cruelest Month …” " 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 April is the cruelest month - T. S. Eliot and Helen Hennessy " 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 Eliot, T. S. 1922. The Waste Land April is the Cruelest Month (Especially on Tax Day) ..... and the two sexes Poetry Column: Everybody's got a pocket for their favorite poem The now famous opening lines of the poem —' April is the cruellest month , breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, ...'—did not appear until the top of the April Is the Cruelest Month - Ask.com Poetry question: Who wrote the poem April is the cruelest month breeding The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot as hypertext The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the Poets' Corner - T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land Eliot has a very superfluous style and his poems are so complex they border on incomprehensible. TS Eliot's poem starts " April is the cruelest month ," and The Waste Land Summary & Study Guide - T. S. Eliot - eNotes.com 14 Apr 2008 April is not the cruelest month .

Sure, to some, being awakened Even the mayor gets in on the festivities, reading a poem on the radio. 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 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 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 The Waste Land Summary - eNotes.com The Waste Land Summary Trivia The Waste Land Summary "The Waste Land" has long been considered T. S. Eliot's masterpiece. In its five sections, he delves into themes of war, trauma, disillusionment, and death, illuminating the devastating aftereffects of World War I. The poem's final line, however, calls for peace with the repetition of "shantih" (the Sanskrit word for "peace"). Part I opens with the famous line, "April is the cruellest month." The speaker, Marie, is a young woman who bears witness to the physical and emotional devastation caused by the war. Parts II and III describe the inside of a wealthy woman's bedroom and the garbage-filled waters of the Thames, respectively. Part IV eulogizes a drowned man named Phlebas.

In the fifth and final part of the poem, the speaker "translates" the thunderclaps cracking over an Indian jungle. The poem ends with the repetition of the Sanskrit word for peace: "Shantih shantih shantih." link Link The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece, is a long, complex poem about the psychological and cultural crisis that came with the loss of moral and cultural identity after World War I. When it was first published, the poem was considered radically experimental. Eliot dispenses with traditional verse forms and instead juxtaposes sordid images of popular culture with erudite allusions to classical and ancient literature and myths. The title is indicative of Eliot’s attitude toward his contemporary society, as he uses the idea of a dry and sterile wasteland as a metaphor for a Europe devastated by war and desperate for spiritual replenishment but depleted of the cultural tools necessary for renewal. The poem is deliberately obscure and fragmentary, incorporating variant voices, multiple points of view, and abrupt shifts in dramatic context.

The motif of moral degeneration, however, is prevalent throughout the poem, the premise being that contemporary Europe, obsessed with novelty, trends, materialism, and instant gratification, lacks the faith and substance to reaffirm its cultural heritage, to reestablish the sense of order and stability that historical continuity once provided. In an attempt to counter the cultural deficit of the present with the rich cultural heritage of the past, Eliot combines images from pagan rituals and religious texts with ancient fertility rituals and allusions to legends of the Grail. These images of ceremony and tradition are set against bleak images of modern life, where spiritual death breeds cultural death, and the ashen landscape reflects a barren world void of transcendental value. Describing a series of failed encounters between various men and women, Eliot creates composites of fertility archetypes who ironically are incapable of offering spiritual nourishment to a dying world. The characters drift in and out of meaningless relationships; the men and women are impotent, shallow, vain, excruciatingly ordinary.

Culture is reduced to common clichés; the well of redemption becomes a “dull canal.” The world is filled with “a heap of broken images” where “the dead tree gives no shelter.” The only salvation appears to be in personal responsibility, self-control, and a faith in cultural continuity based on common Western European values. The poem is an elitist document. Eliot provides copious footnotes, and the text is loaded with difficult literary, historical, and anthropological allusions; it is meant to be understood only by a few. As an account of the dilemma faced by the West of its being threatened by the loss of its privileged, white, patriarchal position of cultural dominance in the first half of the twentieth century, The Waste Land is indispensable. More Content: Summary (hide) link Link In order to understand The Waste Land—one of the most difficult poems in a difficult literary period—the reader might do well to envision the work as a much-spliced film or videotape, a montage of images and sounds. This imaginary film is, in a sense, a real-life documentary: There are no heroes or heroines, and there is no narrator telling readers what to think or how to feel.

Instead, Eliot allows multiple voices to tell their individual stories. Many of the stories are contemporary and portray a sordid society without values; other stories are drawn from world culture and include, among other motifs, Elizabethan England, ancient Greek mythology, and Buddhist scriptures. The poem is divided into five sections. In the first, “The Burial of the Dead,” the speaker is an old Austro-Hungarian noblewoman reminiscing about the golden days of her youth before the disasters of World War I. The second section, “A Game of Chess,” is set in the boudoir of a fashionable contemporary Englishwoman. The third, “The Fire Sermon,” mixes images of Elizabeth’s England, the Thames and Rhine rivers, and the legend of the Greek seer Tiresias. The fourth, “Death by Water,” is a brief portrait of a drowned Phoenician sea-trader. The fifth, “What the Thunder Said,” combines the above themes with that of religious peace. These parts combine in the poem’s overall montage to create a meaning that encompasses all of them.

Because the poem is so complex, that meaning must be left to the individual reader; however, many students of the poem have suggested that, generally, Eliot shows his readers the collapse of Western culture in the aftermath of the war. Part 1 is a natural beginning for Eliot’s overall panorama because the speaker, Marie, describes her memories of a key period in modern history. Clearly, her life has been materially and culturally rich. Now in old age, thoughts of the past seem to embitter her, and she spends much of her time reading. The following stanzas describe the visions of the Sibyl, a prophetess in Greek mythology, and compare these to the bogus fortune-telling of a modern Sibyl, Madame Sosostris. The section’s final stanza imagines a fog-shrouded London Bridge as a pathway in the Underworld, where souls fleetingly recognize one another. In part 2, a narrator describes the sensual surroundings of a wealthy woman’s bedroom—the ornate chair in which the woman sits, the room’s marble floor and carved fireplace, her glittering jewels and heavy perfumes.

She is bickering with a man, her husband or her lover, and complains that her “nerves are bad to-night.” Then a contrasting setting appears: a London pub. Two women are gossiping in Cockney English about a friend’s marriage gone bad. A description of the River Thames begins part 3. The narrator juxtaposes the pretty stream that Renaissance poets saw with the garbage-filled canal of the twentieth century. Most of the section tells the story of an uninspired seduction. The speaker, ironically, is the Greek sage Tiresias, who, in legend, was changed from a man into a woman. In this androgynous mode, Tiresias can reflect on both the male and the female aspects of the modern-day affair between a seedy clerk and a tired typist. This section ends with snippets of past songs about the Thames and the Rhine. The brief stanzas in part 4 picture Phlebas, a Middle Eastern merchant from the late classical period. The tone is elegiac: The speaker imagines the bones of the young trader washed by the seas and advises the reader to consider the brevity of life.

The final section, part 5, is set in a barren landscape, perhaps the Waste Land itself, where heat lays its heavy hand on a group of anonymous speakers. They seem to be apostles of some sacrificed god, perhaps Christ himself. The opening stanza’s description of confused “torchlight on sweaty faces” in a garden and an “agony in stony places” tends to suggest this Christian interpretation. Hope, however, has fled the holy man’s followers, who wander through the desert listening to thunder that is never followed by rain. Nevertheless, the thunder holds some small promise. The poem shifts setting again. Now the thunder crashes over an Indian jungle while the speaker listens and “translates” the thunderclaps. The thunder speaks three words in Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, which is also the language of Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. The first word is “Datta” (“given”), the second is “Dayadhvam” (“compassion”), and the third is “Damyata” (“control”). In this three-part message from the natural world, which tells of God’s gifts of compassion and self-control, the speaker finally finds cause for “peace”—the “shantih” of the closing line. link Link T. S.

Eliot, together with Ezra Pound, revolutionized the style and structure of poetry in the early twentieth century. Eliot was a modernist poet who, as Pound claimed, modernized himself. His reading of the French Symbolists, especially Jules Laforgue, and such seventeenth century metaphysical poets as John Donne, gave him models for the use of precise imagery and complex structures that contrasted with the softness of late Romantic poetry. With his first book of poems, Prufrock, and Other Observations (1917), a new voice appeared in poetry. Eliot was very successful as a poet and critic in his early years in London. He completed a doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley, the philosopher (though he never returned to Harvard to defend it), and in 1915 he married Vivienne Haig Wood. The marriage was unhappy, however, and in 1921 Eliot entered a sanatorium in Switzerland to recover from an emotional breakdown. It was during this disturbed period of his life that he wrote The Waste Land. Later that year, Eliot gave the poem to Pound, who cut it by half into its latest form.

Eliot’s original title for the poem was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” but Pound preferred emphasizing the mythic structure and cut the social satire. Upon publication in 1922, the poem was immediately recognized as a major if very difficult creation. The poet later described The Waste Land as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” It was read by most critics, however, as a social indictment rather than as a personal utterance. The poem begins with an epigraph from Petronius and a dedication to Ezra Pound as il miglior fabbro (the better maker), the tribute paid by Arnaut Daniel to Dante in Purgatory of La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). The epigraph portrays the Cumean Sibyl responding to the question “Sibyl, what do you want?” with the answer “I want to die.” This sets the mood of despair and hopeless resignation. In portraying the spiritual, sexual, and social emptiness of the post-World War I world, Eliot drew on Jessie L.

Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), on the medieval quest for the Grail, and on James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890-1915), especially the sections on a dying god who is resurrected. From its inception, the poem was centrally concerned with the myth of a dead land that needs to be renewed by a quester or a sacrificial god. The first section of the poem, “The Burial of the Dead,” is a reference to the burial service in the Anglican Church. The time is April, but instead of being a period of renewal it is “the cruelest month.” The outer renewal of the seasons is not matched by that within the speakers and characters in the poem. The imagery shifts to the dryness of the wasteland, a place “where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water.” The imagery of dryness becomes a central motif in the poem and is used to define the spiritual and social aridity of the time.

Knowledge and authority in this decayed world are found in “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante” and her pack of tarot cards rather than in the church or state. One of the cards in that deck, “the man with three staves,” represents the Fisher King, the wounded ruler whose disease causes the wasteland; the disease can be relieved only by the quester for the Holy Grail who successfully answers ritual questions at the Chapel Perilous. His answers complete the quest and bring fertility to the land. In the last part of this section, Eliot portrays the “Unreal City,” an allusion to Charles Baudelaire, with a crowd of dead crossing London Bridge and a corpse that is planted, which will not bloom or provide relief—a parody of renewal. The world of the wasteland is dominated by the living dead. In the next section, “A Game of Chess,” Eliot explores the social world of the wasteland.

First, he shows a nervous society woman who isolates herself among the “glitter of jewels” and “synthetic perfumes.” Her social life is a substitute for a meaningful one; her routine consists of “The hot water at ten./ And if it rains, a closed car at four.” The social world depicted here is similar to the fearful and frustrated world of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The section ends with a descent into a London pub where two women from the lower class discuss the return of Lil’s husband, Albert, from the war. He “wants a good time” upon his return, but Lil has no teeth, and she is a wreck since she took “them pills to bring it off,” a reference to her abortion. The sordid scene of sexual and personal sterility is presented in counterpoint with allusions to Ophelia’s farewell in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1603). Eliot consistently juxtaposes the decayed present with the heroic past, using allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, Richard Wagner, and other great sources of the past.

“The Fire Sermon,” the third section, is an allusion to the sermon preached by the Buddha against the fires of lust. Here, Eliot continues his analysis of the arid, meaningless sexuality that fails to bring life or renewal. He begins with negative images of the river Thames: “The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,/ silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends/ Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.” Eliot juxtaposes the sordid modern river with Edmund Spenser’s marriage song, “Prothalamion.” He also refers to the Fisher King, who is “fishing in the dull canal” and whom he merges with an allusion to the passage in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623) in which Ferdinand mourns the supposed death of his father. The song by Ariel to Ferdinand suggests a process in which the bones of his father are metamorphosed into beautiful objects such as “pearls.” Eliot contrasts these positive images of metamorphosis with the death-in-life of his world. Positive allusions are also contrasted with the gay-sex proposal of Mr.

Eugenides and the mechanical sexual scene between the carbuncular clerk and the typist. The sexual scene is mediated by Eliot’s use of Tiresias, the blind Greek prophet. Eliot claimed that “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ’character,’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. . . . What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” What Tiresias sees in that passage is the clerk engaging a “bored and tired” young typist in a sexual liaison that she neither desires nor resists.

“His vanity requires no response.” At the completion of the meaningless, mechanical act, she says, “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad its over.” These scenes are followed by one of the most positive images in the poem: There is music in a bar on Lower Thames Street “where fishmen lounge at noon.” Eliot expands the allusion to the Fisher King with a reference to a London church, Magnus Martyr, where the walls “hold/ Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.” This is then contrasted with the recurring images of the river that “sweats oil and tar.” Another sexual interlude is contrasted with the glorious past, this time with an allusion to Queen Elizabeth sailing on the Thames with her favorite, Essex. After the sexual act, “He wept. He promised ’a new start.’ I made no comment. What should I resent.” The section ends with images of burning and of the fires of lust not purged in the poem, slightly mitigated by an allusion to Saint Augustine, who achieved a purgation of these fires by asking God to deliver him from its ravages. The fourth section of the poem is as brief as it became controversial.

It deals with the death of “Phlebas the Phoenician,” who drowns in water rather than being renewed by it, and ends with a warning of the transitoriness of life: “Gentile or Jew/ O you who turn the wheel to winward,/ Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.” This passage resembles the burial of the body earlier, for this death, too, even though it is by water, brings no renewal. The last section of the poem, “What the Thunder Said,” begins with imagery associated with the Passion of Christ. Eliot chooses to show the death of Christ rather than his resurrection, but even that is preferable to death-in-life: “He who was living is now dead/ We who were living are now dying/ With a little patience.” This is followed by images of dryness and an allusion to the appearance of Christ to the disciples at Emmaus. After a reference to Hermann Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos (1920; In Sight of Chaos, 1923), which portrays the situation of Eastern Europe, the poem moves to the “empty chapel” where the quester passes the last test in the search for the Grail.

This leads to the change to which the poem is pointing from the beginning: “Only a cock stood on the rooftree/ Co rico co rico/ In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust/ Bringing rain.” The imagery of rain presumably renews the wasteland. Eliot then turns to the renewal of the individual, using allusions from yet another tradition, the Indian Upanishads. He cites the three principles of renewal from that text: give, control, and sympathize. Control can be achieved, but the other principles are yet to become a part of the individual’s life. Each individual remains locked within himself, unable to give to others or to sympathize with their plight.

The poem ends with images of leaving the wasteland behind: “I sat upon the shore/ Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/ Shall I at least set my lands in order?” The only order that can be brought about is through a baffling series of allusions and the limited assent: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The last lines again refer to the principles of individual renewal from the Upanishads and to the work’s ending, “Shantih,” which Eliot translates in a footnote as “The Peace that passeth understanding.” This blessing expresses a desire for enlightenment and peace, but in the poem it is only cited, not achieved. The Waste Land was recognized soon after its publication as a tremendously important work, one that both defined an attitude toward the period and established a model for other poets to follow. It was believed at the time that poetry needed to be complex, difficult, and filled with allusions to earlier writers, that its structure needed to be mythic and its style a dazzling juxtaposition of elements. The expectations and social role of poetry continually change, but The Waste Land continues to be regarded as a monumental achievement that challenges and rewards its readers.

link Link The most celebrated poem of the twentieth century, The Waste Land epitomizes modernism—its anxious usurpation of previous texts in the literary tradition, its self-conscious desire to be new, its bleak analysis of the present as a post-lapsarian moment between a crumbling past and an uncertain future. Composed of five separate poems, the overarching poem is, in poetic range and effect, greater than the sum of these parts. Eliot combines many of the themes and techniques he had examined in his earlier work, themes such as aridity, sexuality, and living death, and techniques such as stream-of-consciousness; narration; historical, literary, and mythic allusions; and the dramatic monologue. As in his earlier works, he is intent upon voice and vision, but not to the exclusion of the other senses. When he republished the poem in book form, also in 1922, he added more than fifty notes to it, some of which direct the reader to such sources as Jessie L.

Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890-1915), the former for its handling of the Grail Quest and the waste land motifs, the latter for its expositions of vegetation myths and rituals. Eliot’s note to line 218 helps explain the overall unity of the work and offers a useful starting place for a serious and necessary rereading of the poem by newcomers to the poem and to Eliot. “Tiresias,” he wrote, “although a mere spectator and not indeed a ’character,’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.” All the male characters become one, all the women, one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The poem’s title, derived from the medieval Grail Quest, holds a clue: The questing reader must ask the right question of the Fisher King (who merges into Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, and, indeed, into the poet).

The Greek and Latin epigraph concerns the Cumaean Sibyl who, asked by a boy what she wishes, states that she wishes to die—an impossibility, since she had asked of Apollo and been granted as many years as he had grains of sand in his hand. Unfortunately, she had not made the right first request: for eternal youth. One must, then, ask carefully. The Dantean dedication, to Ezra Pound, “the better craftsman,” fuses ancient, medieval, and modern at the outset of the poem, while acknowledging Pound’s role in shaping the work. “The Burial of the Dead,” part 1, contains a number of speakers, ranging from Marie to Madame Sosostris to Stetson, whose fragments of conversation in English, French, and German wind around ritual reenactments of burial and rebirth. From the Dantean vision of the dead walking over London Bridge to the dangerous business of doing a simple errand to the buttonholing last line from the French poet Charles Baudelaire, in which the reader is addressed directly as hypocrite and brother, the atmosphere is menacing.

Structurally, the poem contains varieties of motion to organize it: motion in time across days, months, seasons, years, and centuries, motion in change from youth to age, action to stillness, and death to rebirth, as Bernard Bergonzi has observed. Part 2, “A Game of Chess,” elaborates the themes of aridity and rebirth in the story of Lil’s barren sexuality and Philomel’s mythic reincarnation after sexual abuse, thus blending the mythic and the prosaic to reveal a relatively mindless luxury devoid of satisfying significance. Whether in the ornate boudoir which opens the sequence or the working-class pub which closes it, the pleasures of the world seem unsatisfying.

In a memorable phrase that has rung through every English pub since their Victorian regulation, the barman’s call for closing becomes, in the poet’s hands, an advent call for change or a hastening of some final, eschatological closure: “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” In part 3, “The Fire Sermon,” the poet deals with the refining fire of purgation, unites Western and Eastern mystical theology in Saint Augustine and the Buddha, and combines ancient and medieval literary tradition in Tiresias and the Fisher King. These higher quests are played off against the more sordid ones of Sweeney and Mrs. Porter, the typist and the carbuncular young man, and Mr. Eugenides (“well-born” but decadent), as Tiresias begins to tie elements of the poem together. The brief, ten-line “Death by Water,” part 4, presents water as destroyer, cleanser, and paradoxical life-giver in the case of Phlebas, the Phoenician sailor who passes, two weeks dead, backward through the stages of his age and youth and enters the whirlpool. This, too, Tiresias sees and possibly relates.

“What the Thunder Said,” part 5, brings rain and its promise of rebirth. The thunder reverberates with the words of the Upanishads (Hindu philosophic writings) for “give, sympathize, control,” keys to unlocking the prisons in which each individual is kept a solitary prisoner. The resolution offered to those journeying to Emmaus, to the Chapel Perilous, through “the present decay of eastern Europe,” depends upon the trinity of commands or counsels from the thunder and becomes “the peace which passeth understanding” (“shantih,” quoted from the Upanishads) repeated at the close of the poem. Eliot’s achievement in this highly sophisticated poem is the blending of the disparate elements of varied traditions into a unity that may itself be both an object lesson in and a plea for the necessity of artistic wholeness. This is one possible reading of the piece as a metapoetical work that points as much to itself as it does to the traditions in which it exists and which it, in turn, alters.

Question: Who wrote the poem that begins "April is the cruellest month"?
Answer: TS Eliot