Chicago: "The Wasteland" edition

I lived my life in warm Kentucky until age 21, spending even my college years not that far from home. There, in college, I first read TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Like the adage of March, “In like a lion, out like a lamb,” I didn’t really feel the opening line, “April is the cruelest month,” until I moved north, to Chicago.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

April pulls with desire for summer warmth, lures with promises of spring sweetness, but taunts with weather still cold and rainy. In April, one wants the hyacinth as a promise of respite from winter, but for TS Eliot, it was also a reminder that life goes on for the living, though grieving for the dead. Shades of the dead walk past the narrator in the poem, dragging him into their sadness, while April teases with early flowers. The narrator fears taking pleasure in life at the expense of grieving for the shades of those passed.

To me, April is the cruelest month because I yearn for rebirth in green buds and birdsong, but the weather torments me. It torments because the promise of spring is so near after surviving yet another taxing Chicago winter. Winter saps all my patience and tolerance, leaving me wicked and testy, whereas spring replenishes me and summer restores me. April taunts, “Almost time, Christine, but suffer still.”

Today, April 11, 2007,* it is snowing and raining and sleeting all at once. April spurns me. April rebuts me. “Life is hard, Christine,” April says, “get used to it.”

* 4-12-07, the tormenting weather continues.