April IS the cruelest month
Apr. 22nd, 2021 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamshark Every year about this time I wander around intoning "April is the cruelest month, breeding // lilacs out of the dead land, mixing // memory and desire, stirring // dull roots with spring rain." Because I became fascinated with T.S. Eliot in high school, even though I rarely had any idea what he was writing about. I did understand that the first stanza of The Waste Land was meant to be ironic; it's cruel because it is spring and spring is meant to be beautiful and hopeful, assuming you aren't so depressed that it just drives you deeper into despair. I couldn't make head nor tail out of the rest of the poem, but it was pretty clear that this was one seriously depressed poet.
Then I moved to Minnesota where April really IS cruel because it is supposed to be spring but it actually isn't, so it amused me to quote The Waste Land every April whenever it did something cruel like start sleeting. But this year the Internet has discovered that there is a new resonance to this poem: Why is April “the Cruelest Month”? T.S. Eliot’s Masterpiece of Pandemic Poetry. I had no idea that Eliot wrote this thing while he and his wife were recovering from the Spanish flu, in a Britain that had just lost 200,000 people to the pandemic. Think about that. 200,000 deaths out of a country of 20 million. 50 million deaths worldwide (for context, the global COVID death count just hit 3 million, to great fanfare and hand-wringing). As if World War I wasn't bad enough. No wonder he was depressed.
So in memoriam I decided to try one more time to understand this poem. It's a lot easier if you bring it up on one monitor while using the other to translate the snippets of German/French/Italian/Hindi and Google the references to Greek myth, Dante, James Joyce and so on. I even went off down the Fisher King rabbit hole and now I know a whole lot more about the various Percival and Grail stories, but I still don't actually see how the poem references the Fisher King. Any English majors out there want to enlighten me?
I have the phrase "A wounded king in a dead land" ringing in my head now, but that doesn't seem to be from The Waste Land. No doubt one of the other numberless resurfacings of that ancient myth, but what? The Last Unicorn, maybe??
ETA: the article I linked to cites "as many as 100 million" deaths from Spanish flu, but most sources say "at least 50 million" so I'll stick with that. Either way, it's a mind-numbing number in a time where the world population was less than 2 billion.
Then I moved to Minnesota where April really IS cruel because it is supposed to be spring but it actually isn't, so it amused me to quote The Waste Land every April whenever it did something cruel like start sleeting. But this year the Internet has discovered that there is a new resonance to this poem: Why is April “the Cruelest Month”? T.S. Eliot’s Masterpiece of Pandemic Poetry. I had no idea that Eliot wrote this thing while he and his wife were recovering from the Spanish flu, in a Britain that had just lost 200,000 people to the pandemic. Think about that. 200,000 deaths out of a country of 20 million. 50 million deaths worldwide (for context, the global COVID death count just hit 3 million, to great fanfare and hand-wringing). As if World War I wasn't bad enough. No wonder he was depressed.
So in memoriam I decided to try one more time to understand this poem. It's a lot easier if you bring it up on one monitor while using the other to translate the snippets of German/French/Italian/Hindi and Google the references to Greek myth, Dante, James Joyce and so on. I even went off down the Fisher King rabbit hole and now I know a whole lot more about the various Percival and Grail stories, but I still don't actually see how the poem references the Fisher King. Any English majors out there want to enlighten me?
I have the phrase "A wounded king in a dead land" ringing in my head now, but that doesn't seem to be from The Waste Land. No doubt one of the other numberless resurfacings of that ancient myth, but what? The Last Unicorn, maybe??
ETA: the article I linked to cites "as many as 100 million" deaths from Spanish flu, but most sources say "at least 50 million" so I'll stick with that. Either way, it's a mind-numbing number in a time where the world population was less than 2 billion.
