A little bit of literature

“I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest 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.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’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.”

Vocabulary build-up

The adjective dull means “arousing little interest; lacking liveliness; boring; not bright, vivid, or shiny.”

The noun colonnade means “a series of columns placed at regular intervals; a structure composed of columns placed at regular intervals.”

Comments

Thomas Stearns Eliot, most commonly known as T. S. Eliot, was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. In the wake of World War I, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he lived until he passed away in 1965. Eliot was arguably the most influential poet of the twentieth century, and his 1922 poem “The Waste Land” is regarded variously as the greatest modernist poem, one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, and a powerful depiction of post-war despair and disillusionment. His experiments in vocal expression, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. In 1948, he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. With the publication in 1922 of his poem “The Waste Land”, Eliot won international reputation. “The Waste Land” expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. The poem’s style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to explain the work’s numerous quotations and allusions, a strategy that distracted some readers and critics from perceiving the true originality of the poem, which lay rather in its rendering of the universal human predicament of mankind’s desire for salvation.