T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
(TWL), lines 1-7
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue: 1-4,12
(ca. 1372):
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
...Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
Where Chaucer, the Father of English Literature, commenced with gentle,
sweet rains and the first flowers of spring, Eliot, modern poetry’s progenitor,
felt the cruel end of a mindless winter and feared the season ahead.
APRIL, a time for pilgrimages and the month of spring and lilacs, is also when
Lincoln was shot, when Lent is observed and when Eliot lost a friend to war...
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Memories of President Lincoln 1
(1892):
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the Western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5.32-34 (1605):
GHOST:
...And duller shouldst thou be than in the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf
Wouldst thou not stir in this.
The Lethe is a river in Hades embanked by plants that cause forgetfulness
(see Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.616 (AD 8)).
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Shakespeare, The Tempest 4.1.156-158 (1611):
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
See also James B.V. Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night (1874):
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again;
Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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