Whereas Chaucer had depicted April as the bringer of life that lifts the hearts of the faithful, T.S. Eliot curses April for its cruelty in bringing back to life things and thoughts that were best left dead and buried.

April is the cruellest month….

The opening words of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot are amongst the most memorable and memorized in all of literature. They are as immortally ingrained and indelibly marked upon the imagination of the culturally literate as other immortal and unforgettable opening lines. They are as well known as the goddess who sings of the anger of Achilles, or as the truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife. They are recited as readily in the best of times and the worst of times, and are received with the same confident assurance that enables us to say, without hesitation, that in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Eliot selected these opening words as an intertextual nod of deference to another poet’s celebrated opening lines:

Whan that Aprille with her shoures sote

The droghte of Marche hath pierced to the rote…

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages….

Chaucer, commencing the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, evokes the sweet showers of April as the gift from heaven that baptizes the new life of spring and which enkindles in the hearts of the faithful a desire to go on pilgrimage. In choosing to connect the beginning of The Waste Land to the beginning of The Canterbury Tales, Eliot was framing his own poem, his own journey into the desert of the wasteland as a pilgrimage, or at least a pilgrimage of sorts, possibly a parody of a pilgrimage, or, as many thought at the time of the poem’s first publication, as an infernal inversion and perversion of a pilgrimage. Whereas Chaucer had depicted April as the bringer of life that lifts the hearts of the faithful, Eliot curses April for its cruelty in bringing back to life things and thoughts that were best left dead and buried:

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….

Eliot appears to emerge in the opening lines of The Waste Land as the modern iconoclast intent on destroying Chaucer’s literary icon and, by extension, all the cultural icons of pre-modern western and Christian civilization. Such a judgment, which was common at the time of the poem’s original publication in 1922, was a little premature. For such misjudgers of his work, Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholic Christianity five years after The Waste Land’s publication came as a shock. “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church… there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”

Clearly those who had seen and read The Waste Land as a work of anti-Christian iconoclasm had not seen or read it as the poet had seen and written it. In reality, the poem was a satire of the sort of godless modernism of which Virginia Woolf was a prime example and avowed advocate. It was showing, albeit obliquely, that there was something obscene in a dead person, lacking the life of faith, sitting in the fires of frustrating lusts and frustrated loves by not believing in God.

The first part, “The Burial of the Dead”, is an implicit condemnation of the rootlessness of modernity, which had fragmented the unity of Christendom, leaving only the broken pieces of the desecrated icon in the midst of a desiccated desert of lifeless culture:

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.

The second and third parts expose the sordid vacuity of lustful desire and casual fornication in modernity’s “unreal city”. Such sordidness is not restricted to any one social class but to all who succumb to the viciousness of sin. There is lust in the midst of opulence, in the presence of Cleopatra and Elizabeth I; lust in the bourgeois world of the middle class, in the casual coupling of the typist and “the young man carbuncular”; and lust among the poor in the discussion, at closing time in a London pub, of unwanted pregnancies and abortion. This section ends with an intertextual connection with Augustine’s Confessions, with its suggestive allusion to Augustine’s own struggles with the sins of the flesh and his final acknowledgment that all souls are restless until they rest in God.

The fourth and penultimate part is the shortest and the most blunt. It’s the turning point of the poem. Entitled “Death by Water”, it is a memento mori, the reminder of death which is meant to bring to mind the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. But, and crucially, it is also an allusion to baptism, the death by water that brings forth the resurrection into a life of grace.

The final part of the poem, “What the Thunder Said”, is the moment of the poet’s surrender to the living water that restores life to the desert, the watering of the wasteland with the light and life of Christ. The Waste Land ends, therefore, where The Canterbury Tales begins, with the sweet April showers piercing the drought of March to the roots. New life is enkindled in the heart of the poet and a desire to embark on the pilgrimage to Canterbury at which he would arrive five years later as a convert to Anglo-Catholicism.

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The featured image, uploaded by the Cincinnati Art Museum, is “Last Flowers” (1890) by Jules Bretonand, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.