{"id":12926,"date":"2022-04-03T11:18:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-03T09:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?p=12926"},"modified":"2022-05-01T16:21:42","modified_gmt":"2022-05-01T14:21:42","slug":"april-is-the-cruelest-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?p=12926","title":{"rendered":"April is the cruelest month&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8230;&#8217;tis indeed this year, 100 years after the publication of T.S. Eliot&#8217;s <em>The Waste Land<\/em> that famously so begins. And for some much more so than for others. Embedded below a wonderful recitation by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins (for <em>BBC Radio 4<\/em> presumably).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land (Jeremy Irons &amp; Eileen Atkins)\" width=\"840\" height=\"473\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sYROFY_Kh8M?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this early Spring 2022, my thoughts continue to be preoccupied with the once, and now again, &#8220;bloodlands&#8221; at the heart of Europe, and hope, pray even, that they will not be so for evermore. Reading the opening verses of Eliot&#8217;s immortal work anew, I am not wrapped in the memories of the Countess Marie and the Austro-German provinces, but think this time instead of other fertile lands in the here and now, one that produces food for the world, that would in any normal Spring be awakening from the long, cold winter and now instead perhaps just abandoned, a muddied quagmire left by monster tanks and trucks and man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-verse\"><em>I. The Burial of the Dead<\/em>\n\n  April is the cruellest month, breeding\nLilacs out of the dead land, mixing\nMemory and desire, stirring\nDull roots with spring rain.\nWinter kept us warm, covering\nEarth in forgetful snow, feeding\nA little life with dried tubers.\nSummer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee\nWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,\nAnd went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,\nAnd drank coffee, and talked for an hour.\nBin gar keine Russin, stamm\u2019 aus Litauen, echt deutsch.\nAnd when we were children, staying at the arch-duke\u2019s,\nMy cousin\u2019s, he took me out on a sled,\nAnd I was frightened. He said, Marie,\nMarie, hold on tight. And down we went.\nIn the mountains, there you feel free.\nI read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.\n\n  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow\nOut of this stony rubbish? Son of man,\nYou cannot say, or guess, for you know only\nA heap of broken images, where the sun beats,\nAnd the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,\nAnd the dry stone no sound of water. Only\nThere is shadow under this red rock,\n(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),\nAnd I will show you something different from either\nYour shadow at morning striding behind you\nOr your shadow at evening rising to meet you;\nI will show you fear in a handful of dust.\n                      <em>Frisch weht der Wind\n                      Der Heimat zu\n                      Mein Irisch Kind,\n                      Wo weilest du?<\/em>\n\u201cYou gave me hyacinths first a year ago;\n\u201cThey called me the hyacinth girl.\u201d\n\u2014Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,\nYour arms full, and your hair wet, I could not\nSpeak, and my eyes failed, I was neither\nLiving nor dead, and I knew nothing,\nLooking into the heart of light, the silence.\n<em>Oed\u2019 und leer das Mee<\/em>r.\n\n[...]\n\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poems\/47311\/the-waste-land\"><em>The Waste Land<\/em> by T.S. Eliot (1922)<\/a><\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The entire poem can be found all over the place of course. For instance, at the Poetry Foundation linked above and <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bartleby.com\/201\/1.html\" target=\"_blank\">this annotated version<\/a> at Bartleby.  Audio files of Eliot&#8217;s own reading are <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20040610201304\/http:\/\/town.hall.org\/Archives\/radio\/IMS\/HarperAudio\/011894_harp_ITH.html\" target=\"_blank\">here.<\/a>  And, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/campuspress.yale.edu\/modernismlab\/the-waste-land\/\" target=\"_blank\">this essay<\/a> by Pericles Lewis (adapted from his <em>Cambridge Introduction to Modernism<\/em>) is informative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;&#8217;tis indeed this year, 100 years after the publication of T.S. Eliot&#8217;s The Waste Land that famously so begins. And for some much more so than for others. Embedded below a wonderful recitation by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins (for BBC Radio 4 presumably). In this early Spring 2022, my thoughts continue to be preoccupied &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?p=12926\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;April is the cruelest month&#8230;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[148,332,325],"class_list":["post-12926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","tag-t-s-eliot","tag-the-waste-land","tag-ukraine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12926"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12995,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12926\/revisions\/12995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}