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 hogarten, 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 arch-duke'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 mountain, 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. Oed' und leer dos Meer. Madame Sostoris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look !) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days. Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnorth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson! You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? 0h keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!'
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Eliot probably is conscious of the parallels with the opening of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, (Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote / ... Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.") and the beginning of the season of Easter and pilgrimage and, therefore, spiritual optimism. There are also, of course, the traditional associations of April as the season of Spring and Rebirth. Here, however, April is not a time for a "new start", but rather a savage re-initiation of the cycle of life-from-death. In the Notes to the poem Eliot comments on his indebted to the tradition of vegetation and fertility myths, and this would bring additional significance to the importance of the underlying notions of the seasonal cycles of Birth and Death.
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a walkway covered with columns
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The reference here is heavily ironic. Not only does it confirm the speaker's aristrocratic origins, but further provides a wry comment on the War: arch-duke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in 1914, this being one of the immediate causes of the War. It is also, of course, yet another reference to death, and the need to cope with bereavement amongst those who still survive.
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Possibly a reference to Countess Marie Larisch, whom Eliot met in 1913.
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This mini-section concludes with further reference to the landscape of winter and of death. Clearly the speaker, once so assured in character and background, is now effectively an exile, unable to sleep, and continually in transit. This becomes, for Eliot, a means of reinforcing the sterility and rootlessness of the post War world, with its troubled psyche and uneasy dreams. Eliot's choice of speaker is, however, extremely illuminating in terms of identifying his Conservative preferences: we are left to lament the state of affairs which has condemned once self-assured European aristocrats to cultural and social exile, making this in turn emblematic of the plight of the post-War world.
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The "stony rubbish" is, of course, the waste land of the modern world, a world which is barren, dry and arid - this echoes the declamatory tone of the poem's opening lines. The lack of water in this modern waste land becomes powerfully symbolic throughout the rest of the poem.
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Eliot notes the allusion to Ecclesiastes XII, v.
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We are not told who is being referred to here, and neither is it clear who is speaking. The hyacinth girl image, with her romantic memories of a very different landscape from that of the arid waste land, conveys a sense of romantic hope. Hyacinths are traditionally associated with resurrection, because of their growth from the blood of the slain youth Hyacinthus. This, then, is yet another flower reference, alongside the lilacs of the poem's second line, and carries with it associations of new growth and fertility. The Hyacinth's Girl's memory of herself, in a state of romantic suspended animation, is quite different from the "dull roots" of the poem's opening lines. Return to Burial of the Dead
A second reference to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, but this time to the end rather than the beginning of the opera. "Waste and empty is the sea", the lines declare, allowing this mini-section to conclude on a note of emptiness and despair.
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Madame Sostoris is a character from Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow (1921), a highly fashionable novel charting the lives of the "bright young things" in the immediate post-War world. She is a fortune-teller and clairvoyante, who uses her Tarot cards and psychic talents as seer to counsel affluent Europeans, possibly even 'Marie'. Her introduction into the poem at this point is both dramatic and unnerving, all the more so for the prosaic detail of her "bad cold". She does serve, however, to introduce also a sense of a mythological or ritual undercurrent to the world of the waste land: the references to various Tarot cards does suggest certain reference points to details later in the poem. An alternative view would be , however, that the figure of Madame Sostoris makes an emphatic point about the sorry state of faith and belief in the modern world - a rich heritage of Christian belief has now been usurped by a phoney religion based upon charlatans and other psychic mumbo-jumbo. Eliot's own notes at this point provide the following (and generally unhelpful) commentary:
I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later [Section V]; also the 'crowds of people', and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself."
It is worth noting, at this point, Eliot's general introductory remarks in the Notes, in which he confirms the extent to which he has been influenced by Jessie L Weston's From Ritual to Romance and Frazer's The Golden Bough. Both books, in their marriage of anthroplogy and mythology, were familiar to readers of the period, Frazer's profoundly so, mainly because of their emphasis on the ritualistic and symbolic roots of human culture. Eliot comments that anyone who has read either work will "immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies", which does seem a little improbable, if not fanciful. However, the point remains that Eliot is seeking, in the poem as a whole, to find ritual and mythological foundations to the poem's diagnosis of the present situation of the West. The figure of the Hanged Man, for example, who is crucified and hung upside down, suggests a return to the realms of the unconscious and this, in part, is what Madame Sostoris is also offering.
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A quotation from Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the play Ariel tells the grieving son Ferdinand that his father, King Alonso, has drowned, and been transformed into "something rich and strange". Yet again the motif of death and transfiguration is emphasised here.
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Presumably the tarot card , "Three of Rods".
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The 'Wheel of Fortune' card, traditionally a symbol of the cycles of birth and death, decline and fall, prosperity and poverty. Within the context of the whole poem the reference also carries associations with the natural cycles presented in the opening lines of the poem, with the further suggestion that these patterns are also to be found in the rise and fall of civilisations - the rise and present decline of the West?
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As the earlier note suggested the Hanged Man has traditional associations with regeneration achieved through the sacrifice and death of one Man, such as Christ within the Christian faith. This, in turn, leads on to the poem's use of the 'Hanged Man'/'Fisher King' motif: the lands are currently sterile and dead, and salvation can only be achieved through death and regeneration. It is significant that the literally-minded Madame Sostoris does not comprehend these mythological depths.
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This is a recurrent motif throughout the poem, and it can be found also in Eliot's earlier poem Prufrock ("till human voices wake us, and we drown"). Death by water has some association with Baptism and, from that, with regeneration and rebirth. Here, however, it is something to fear.
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another client of Madame Sostoris. The reading is now drawing to its close.
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This is a heavily ironic line, drawing together the sense of anxiety, fear and uncertainty which characterises this section of the poem. In the world of the Waste Land there appears to be an air of continual and all-pervading angst, a neurotic uncertainty concerning the future, which becomes part of the character of the age.
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The poem draws back at this point, to survey the modern urban landscape from a panoramic perspective. 'Unreal' is associated, in this context, with illusions and false appearances, and Eliot draws our attention to Baudelaire's poem 'The Seven Old Men': "Swarming city, city full of dreams, where the ghost, in broad daylight, stops the passer-by." It is a landscape which Eliot had earlier charted in Prufrock and Preludes, and characterises it as a world of anonymity and fear. The phrase reappears in later sections of the poem, most notably in Section V.
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A reference to Dante's Hell, Canto III: "such a long stream of people that I should have never believed that death had undone so many". In Eliot's vision, however, the commuting pedestrians belong to a modern-day reincarnation of Hell, of death-in-life. Incidentally, it's worth noting the effect achieved of the words "flowed" and "death": echoes, perhaps, of Madame Sostoris' warnings about 'death by water'?
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Again there are allusions to Dante here, this time from Canto IV of Hell, and the description of limbo: "Here, so far as I could tell, there was no lamentation except sighs...". Note the effect of the use of the passive voice here - people do not sigh, rather sighs were exhaled - it creates a sense of depersonalisation and anonymity.
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Eliot refers us to John Webster's The White Devil, and to Cordelia's lament for the "friendless bodies of unburied men". This macabre image is a disturbed reflection of the death-and-rebirth motif which predominates in this section of the poem.
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"Hypocrite reader, my fellow-man, my brother!". The words are from the introductory poem, addressed 'To The Reader', in Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, a collection of late nineteenth century poems which speak of hypocrisy, corruption and 'ennui', a state of spiritual boredom. The implication is, from the allusion, that Eliot is speaking of his, and our, complicity in bringing about the spiritual lethargy and emptiness of the Waste Land. This, however, implies a need for sympathy rather than condemnation on the part of the writer.
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