April is cruel? Say no.

Despite what T.S. Eliot wrote, April is not the cruelest month. After all, ducks are waddlin’, spring has sprung, and, you know, warmth, even if it’s in fits and starts. How is that cruel?

Turns out that April is the cruelest month only in Eliot’s The Waste Land, which he wrote while recovering from the flu during the pandemic of 1918-1920. His ‘Waste Land’ was based on what was happening in parts of London, with many people sick and dying after two years of pandemic (and after four years of the Great War). It was a bleak time, and The Waste Land mirrors Britain’s social mood; there are even echoes of Dante’s Inferno scattered about the poem.

But April is only cruel in Eliot’s exhausted Waste Land. In our April, with its warmth and growth and potential for new life, with its shedding of the old and the promise of the new, April is all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.

So rejoice, all you April babies (and I am one of them); watch those ducks waddle and enjoy the blossoming of new life and the endless possibility that only April can offer.

 For a more informed take on Eliot’s brooding masterpiece, check this out.  

The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot

April is the cruelest 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.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.