#36 January Jottings

As months go ... for the speaker in T.S. Eliot's
Wasteland"--

APRIL is the cruellest [sic] month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow ... (1922)

Winters in London (the double-"l" gives the poet's expatriation away) are somewhat milder in temperature than than those in the poet's native Connecticut, but even more uncomfortable due to the island's inherent (gulf-stream) foggy/flaky clamminess (think Oliver Twist here).

Okay, he's making a symbolic point--in fact one of the clearest in that famously obscurantist poem. In an obvious thought-inversion of the Canterbury Tales' opening lines, the pessimistic speaker sees in nature's promise of renewed fecundity only disillusionment, as compared with the human world. Memory reminds him that budding desire has been re-deadened in the past, as perhaps a late April frost might kill off the new Lilacs. Can't blame the guy. T.S. Eliot was in a kind of "green-card" marriage gone bad in and around the time of the poem. No small thanks to free-loving philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had earlier bedded young Tom's terminally-neurotic English wife, Vivienne, who he admitted later was the poem's primary muse. (For a pop-version of this interesting story, Netflix 1994's Tom & Viv.)

But give me the unambiguous optimism of Chaucer's April, thank you. It's the linchpin of the Prologue, appearing in first few lines of the classic eighteen that I always had my students commit to memory by the end the term:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes ... (c. 1385)

Here the sweet showers of April pierce to Eliot's dull and drought-ridden roots of March, and, by "virtue" of this, the spring rains will with absolute certitude engender those Lilac-flowers. As well as all the other tender crops, because Chaucer's warm west-wind's sweet breath will bring no frost. The clever word-choice of generic vertu bounces us easily into the human world, taken up the lines following those above. "Inspired" also are those spiritually dried-up pilgrims "from every shires ende of Engelond" seeking to get a virtue-fix at Canterbury Cathedral. A little holy water in the presence of the Martyr should do the trick. (St. Thomas still resides there, I'll bear witness, in a lovely effigy-topped tomb, easily accessible to the pilgrims who keep on a-coming, over 600 years later.)

So ... for want of a better segue in getting back to the point--and pace Mr. Eliot--Kalendis Ianuarius still has to be the mostest cruellest month of all. To body and mind. In fact, even in the lower-temperate zone of Mediterranean Rome, the early Latins found the 30 days or so of deep winter so unspeakably unpleasant that (in addition to the next 30 or so for good measure) they remained nameless in the Roman calendar for hundreds of years! Along with the "washing-up" month of Februarius, the name of the two-faced god Janus was a relative late-comer to the yearly time-keeping instrument that has ruled the West for ages. (more)
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