The early 20th Century poet T.S. Eliot began his most well-known poem The Wasteland with the phrase “April is the cruelest month.” This might be the opposite of what you and I are feeling this spring, after the past year which often seemed like one long winter of discontent.
Certainly, with crocuses, daffodils and magnolia trees blooming, we might wish T.S. Eliot had stepped outside and breathed in some warm springtime air before writing that line.
But writers often pen something that seems contrary to reality in order to provoke readers to ponder life more deeply. And we all can agree that beginning a poem with “April is the cruelest month” makes every reader pause and say, “What in the world do you mean?”
To understand Eliot’s shocking phrase, we need to be sure that we don’t take the phrase the wrong way. Eliot isn’t saying that springtime is dreary or that nothing changes. In fact, Eliot believes that in springtime, more than any other time of year, we are surrounded by life blossoming. Frozen lakes thaw, leaves bud out on trees, flowers bloom, insects begin pollinating, animals come out of hibernation, the sun is warmer, and daylight grows longer.
None of that for Eliot is cruel. But the explosion of life in springtime, Eliot suggests, can feel cruel for one species — us humans. A major theme of The Wasteland is that many of us find everything in life around us changing, growing and blossoming with one exception — ourselves.
The cruelty that Eliot is describing is human stagnation, something he felt so strongly in his era, a feeling of being stuck in our lives, not growing. I suspect that many of us have felt stagnation during the past year of the pandemic. If the past 13 months don’t feel cruel, what does?
Even our language of “I can’t wait to get back to normal” suggests that we want to get past these months of being isolated. You’ve probably heard the same phrase that I have from people, that they can’t wait to “see the pandemic in their rearview mirror.”
This is where Eliot wishes to turn our thinking upside down. Like many a spiritual teacher, Eliot invites us to consider the opposite of what we think is true.
What is cruel for Eliot is the routine of what we call our normal lives, those habits that have us doing the same things, saying the same things to our same friends, reading the same kind of books, watching the same kind of TV shows and movies and thinking the same thoughts year after year. Eliot compares modern life in developed countries like ours to trees that never drop their leaves and never flower anew.
When we see a beloved tree in the spring, our first thought isn’t “Well, that tree is one year older.” No, what we think is “Look how that tree has grown; look how much more beautiful that tree is this year.”
What Eliot seeks to awaken within us with “April is the cruelest month” is the deep spiritual yearning we see mirrored in trees, flowers and insects. That yearning is to grow and become more than we have been, not in terms of possessions, but in terms of being.
Eliot’s advice after the pandemic is “Don’t return to normal. Think less of what you have stored up in your bank account and more about what you have stored up in your heart.”
David Carlson of Franklin is a professor emeritus of philosophy and religion. This column was first published in the Daily Journal, where Carlson’s columns regularly appear. Send comments to [email protected].
