‘April is the cruellest month.’1 It is 1922, and the world has been abruptly roused to the modernist wreckage of the Western Front. How could April be anything but cruel, wrenching lilacs from a ‘dead land,’2 perhaps better left to dormancy? T.S Eliot’s opening to The Waste Land stands as a subversion of Geoffrey Chaucer’s sweet April showers in his ‘General Prologue’ to The Canterbury tales:
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 flour3
Chaucer’s depiction is erotic, luxuriant even. Spring dances over the land and the earth rushes up to meet him, delighting in his sweet showers. For Eliot, this exchange is far less romantic as Spring wrenches new growth from dull, cracked earth.
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