Post by Webster on Apr 2, 2020 0:43:04 GMT -5
(The Guardian) A lot of people are quoting TS Eliot’s The Wasteland at the moment, because it starts “April is the cruellest month,” but none so well as – strangely enough – the chair of Columbia University’s surgery department, who wrote in an update: Writing on April 1, late in the day, I can’t possibly be the first person to shout out the first four lines of “The Wasteland” (TS Eliot). But first or not, I can’t resist: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” The rest of the poem is much too long, too grim and overwrought for my taste. The line-breaks that highlight three verbs (breeding, mixing, stirring) are a nice writerly touch, but I admire it most for one phrase—mixing memory and desire. In an April that may be apocalyptically cruel, that is how we are poised, desiring spring.
