Joseph Pearce
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, » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/04/april-cruelest-month-joseph-pearce.html