What can one do with such verse but ride it to its conclusion, experiencing both its modern forms and its description of a modern world that is broken, built of fragments, shored against our ruin?
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It’s hard to think of a more famous opening in 20th-century poetry than “April is the cruellest month” — which continues, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” That’s “The Waste Land,” of course: the 1922 poem by T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) that became the fundamental work of modernism in English poetry. How could we not run it here in the Sun for the final entry in a week of poetry about April?
Not that the poem is easy. Like much of modernist literature, it’s better to take “The Waste Land” as a toboggan ride rather than, say, a step-by-step guide to forensic accounting. You just hop onto the poem and try to hang on as barrels down the bumpy mountain run. The first section, reproduced today as the Poem of the Day, is titled “The Burial of the Dead,” and it sleds from its famous opening to overheard conversations at a lake resort near Munich (Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch: “I am not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, I am a real German”) — and from there straight into a slalom that is biblical in its language and apocalyptic in its tone: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
With a quotation from Richard Wagner’s 1865 opera, “Tristan und Isolde” (Mein Irisch Kind / Wo weilest du?: “My Irish child, / Where do you tarry?”), we are suddenly tumbled into remembrance of “the hyacinth girl,” followed by the bone-rattling irony of the interests of the kind of soi-disant socialites who attend tarot readings: “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, / Had a bad cold, nevertheless / Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe.”
And from there the poem jumps into a description of a living city as populated by ghosts, “I had not thought death had undone so many” — only for the speaker of the poem to engage those ghosts as dead Romans, murderers, and, in a final slide through reference (this time to Baudelaire’s 1857 “Fleurs du Mal”), as “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”: You! Hypocrite reader!—my fellow,—my brother!
What can one do with such verse but ride it to its conclusion, experiencing both its modern forms and its description of a modern world that is broken, built of fragments, shored against our ruin?
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By GEORGE WILLIS
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By BRADLEY CORTRIGHT
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By A.R. HOFFMAN
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