April 30, 2009: from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
from The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest 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, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With 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 grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A 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. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der 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 not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od’ und leer das Meer.
[The online annotated The Waste Land.
The full text of The Waste Land.
At last, I can’t resist posting an excerpt from my one and only love, and the origin of this mailing list’s name, The Waste Land. This is the beginning of the first of five parts of the poem, and right away you get so much of what it’s known for: a welter of different voices and languages and allusions: an aristocratic woman remembering her childhood, lines from Tristan and Isolde about longing, and water and death and life all tangled together, which comes up over and over and over again.
If you’d like to try to take this apart, this online annotated text is great for explaining and cross-referencing things. Or you can just appreciate it as it is, the sound and flow of it, Eliot being awesome. It’s a fantastic poem to read lots of times: new patterns and connections keep appearing.
And today is the last day of National Poetry Month! Thanks so much for sticking around, and I hope you’ll still be here next year. In the meantime, if you’d like to keep poetry-ing, I recommend checking out The Poetry Foundation’s website or NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, both of which do daily poems.
And of course the whole April Is archive is online here!
xo,
Martha]
A year ago today: from Five-Finger Exercises, T.S. Eliot
Two years ago: Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot
Two years ago: Preludes, T.S. Eliot
Three years ago: A Song for Simeon, T.S. Eliot
