Eliot And Chaucer

A trivia quickie to poetry fans: "Of which vertu engendred is the flour" is arguably a basis for which Dylan Thomas poem? Tick, tick...

Less fun to remember, from Eliot's The Waste Land:

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.

Chaucer's people get a long walk, toward redemption no less! Stories, music, sex in the bushes. Eliot casts his beaten-down modernist shroud on the very same scene. If Disney had written Fantasia to recapitulate Chaucer and Eliot, Pan would splash the gardens of Arcadia with wild color, swollen flowers, happy rutting noises. Then Eeyore would saunter to the center of every clearing to take a dump.

The April months of my own experience seem to carry the argument to one side or the other, but this year it's a mixed bag. Approaching 43, the rise I get from Chaucer's sentiments feels nostalgic rather than shared. It's a subtle but ominous turn. I don't otherwise feel ready to patch my elbows. Eliot's view, although I do not care for it, was tolerable, if for no other reason than academic thoroughgoing. Now at time it feels like a grim knock on the door, a debt collector with plenty of time on his hands.

Perhaps what I am getting at here is a moment I think was the first sensing of my own mortality: April, 1998. I was watching military planes from Travis AFB fly over the Suisun Marsh, touch the landing strip, come up for another run.

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