Though this one seems more Eliot than Chaucer
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.
So begins The Waste Land, where T.S. Eliot wrestled with his personal demons in shellshocked post-WWI Europe. Unhappily married, toiling away in a bank despite his studies at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford, and perhaps feeling at 33 that he was midway through an unfulfilled life, the poet suffered a breakdown and was recovering in a Swiss sanatorium when he wrote the work.
Rife with classical references, The Waste Land’s opening inverts the meaning Geoffrey Chaucer infused into springtime in his General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. As Tyler Malone notes in a guide to Eliot’s poem, Chaucer paints April as a month of restorative power, when spring rain brings nature back to life:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,/
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur/Of which vertú engendred is the flour … In modern English, that’s: “When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid by which power the flower is engendered/created.
By contrast, of course, Eliot gives us an April (in 1921) whose promise is little but hollow and mean-spirited deceit in a world rendered barren by war, a civilization ruined by cultural and physical desolation. His depressing spring reflected both widespread sentiment about a Western world gone awry and his personal mental crisis.
I’m reminded of all this because on the eve of Easter and midway through the Jewish celebration of Passover – both of which are all about hope and rebirth – we also seem immersed in a modern Waste Land.
Guided by an inept president who underestimated the enemy and a self-styled Secretary of War who is busily firing experienced military leaders, we are in a war whose course seems impossible to predict. An unsettling New York Times piece suggests that Iran could well become yet another of our country’s unresolved battlegrounds.
Writer Charles Homans notes that “never-ending wars” have become “the dominant condition of American foreign policy throughout the 21st century.” He holds that this is “a once-dystopian-seeming possibility that, somewhere in the long shadow of Sept. 11, became a quietly accepted reality.” Homans adds that the United States has been actively involved in military conflicts at home or abroad for most years of the 19th and 20th centuries and in the quarter-century since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
And with the Christian nationalist Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, at the helm, the current battle has taken on perverse messianic overtones. Of course, the former Army National Guard Major and ex-TV host not only knows better than his generals, but he’s happy to take on the foremost global leader of Christianity. Hegseth, a supporter of a peculiar Christian cult, has asked the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pope, has been having none of that. In a homily during a Mass on the Thursday morning before Easter, the pontiff said that the Christian mission had often been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” Earlier, in late March, the pope warned against invoking the name of Jesus for battle, saying in a Sunday homily that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
Meanwhile, there are plenty of other troubles to fret about both globally and in the U.S. The post-WWII order, particularly regarding NATO, is at risk. Democracy at home is in danger and our economy hangs in the balance, with 72 percent of Americans rating economic conditions as fair or poor and only 31 percent expecting better conditions in a year.
Oh, and masked and armed federal agents continue to round up immigrants across the U.S., shipping them off to detention camps by the tens of thousands (over 68,000 so far, many with no criminal backgrounds). So far, in such custody, at least 46 people have died. Two others, of course, were murdered by such agents in Minneapolis.
It is, indeed, difficult to see this as a hopeful spring.
Somewhere, no doubt, a modern Eliot is writing verse that captures this gloomy time (or perhaps he or she is doing a podcast about it all). Of course, we do have Substacker Heather Cox Richardson, the Boston College academic who regularly puts all this in historical context and calls out lies from Donald J. Trump. As she discussed it, his recent TV address about Iran marked a new low.
“Sounding tired and speaking in a monotone, Trump reiterated his claim that the U.S. doesn’t need the oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz and demanded that other nations who need the oil more force Iran to reopen it,” Richardson wrote. “In reality, the U.S. is tied into international oil markets, and prices not only of oil, but also of products that use oil to get to market, are already rising.”
She also noted Trump’s skewed priorities of late, referring to his comments about his new budget at an Easter lunch reception. “I said to [Office of Management and Budget director] Russell [Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare,’” Trump said. “That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have fifty states, we have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare.”
As Richardson suggested, kids are low on his list. Like Trump’s budget requests for 2026, his new budget calls for an enormous boost to the nation’s military spending, $1.5 trillion, to be paid for with cuts to domestic programs, the academic noted.
Of course, we’re very much in the early days of this Trumpian catastrophe. It’s as if we’re not even through the early German advances in the four-year-long world war that thrust Eliot and many of his generation into their funks. Things may yet turn upward for the U.S., perhaps with November elections that will repudiate the bleak national course Trump has set.
As for Eliot, his understandable pessimism about humanity never disappeared, though his personal life and attitudes did undergo big changes. Some years after writing The Waste Land, he dismissed the poem as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life…just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”
By then, his first wife had died and he was happily married to a second woman. He also had given up the Unitarianism of his American youth and converted to Anglo Catholic Christianity, while also becoming a British subject. His writing at that point focused on religious themes, notably The Four Quartets, regarded by some as the major Christian poem of the last century.
Redemption, in whatever form it will take, seems a long way off for us now. Still, Chaucer’s April is a far more welcome one than Eliot’s.