April Showers

In his poem "The Wasteland," T. S. Eliot wrote:

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
dull roots with spring rain..."

And if today's weather is any indication, he is right. Yesterday we had beautiful sunshine -- today is very blustery.

I had a great love affair with the poetry of T. S. Eliot my last year in high school. I even memorized "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (Let us go then you and I/ while the evening is spread out against the sky/ like a patient etherised upon a table...) I think that something like that would seem really pretentious, except that I also knew all of the lyrics to songs like Charma Chameleon by the Culture Club -- which I really don't brag about.

I bring up T.S. Eliot only as a sidebar to today's actual offering which is, perhaps, even more widely known. In "The Waste Land," Eliot references many other poems and stories and plays. This is a common occurence in poetry; it is part of the way that poets speak to us and to each other -- by conjuring up our own memories from the common experience of literature. Just as I carry within myself, almost as part of my own thinking, those lines of Eliot's, he carried other's words within himself.

One of the really fun references in "The Waste Land" is to Ariel's Song from Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Here is the song in part:

Full Fathom Five

Full fathom five thy father lies;
of his bones are coral made;
Those are the pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
but suffer a seachange
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding Dong
Hark now I hear them -- Ding Dong Bell.