Poem of the Day: ‘The Waste Land’

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?The Burial of the Dead (Part I of The Waste Land)by T.S. EliotApril is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith 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 keine 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 growOut of this stony rubbish? Son of man,You cannot say, or guess, for you know onlyA 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. OnlyThere is shadow under this red rock,(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),And I will show you something different from eitherYour shadow at morning striding behind youOr your shadow at evening rising to meet you;I will show you fear in a handful of dust.Frisch weht der WindDer Heimat zu,Mein Irisch Kind,Wo weilest du?“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 notSpeak, and my eyes failed, I was neitherLiving nor dead, and I knew nothing,Looking into the heart of light, the silence.Od’ und leer das Meer.Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,Had a bad cold, neverthelessIs 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 findThe 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 hoursWith 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!”___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘The Waste Land’

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