The opening image of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is a poetic line almost everyone knows: “April is the cruelest month.” It pops up in goofy places—tax websites, the dreadful exams week at college, the clever meteorologist’s “it’s snowing” commentary. But Eliot wasn’t being goofy; he was setting the tone of his poem by bashing expectation right from the start. That April isn’t all hyacinths and baa-ing lambs, like we might expect a poem to tell us, clues you in to one of “The Wasteland’s” major themes: life is made out of death.
I’ve been thinking more about T. S. Eliot these days than I have since my time at college. Well, and about poetry in general, and about some specific poems and poets. It’s really Becky’s fault; a few weeks ago, way back on a dark March Friday, we were talking, and I was listing off all the books I’d read lately, making a point about why I was feeling dark and twisty. What hit me, when we got off the phone, is that I hadn’t told her about a single book of poetry, because I hadn’t read a single book of poetry in I-can’t-remember-how-long. I decided right then that in April—the cruelest month, but also National Poetry Month—I would only read poetry (in addition, of course, to my continually-trying approaches to daily scriptures). And, aside from one novel which I sort of had to read because I lucked into a copy without which I would have had to wait for months, I’ve done just that. Plus, I’ve tried to include some little (or bigger) bit of poetry in all my blog posts this month.
Eliot’s line continues to worm around my brain. Not just that first, well-known line, but the complete first image: “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.” Dull, dead, forgetful, dried; the way that winter kept us paradoxically warm and forgetful: this image is, to me, a powerful bit of writing, conveying depression without ever saying the word. And while my scripture-reading achieves something important, it’s only through the reading of poetry that I’ve realized how metaphorically winter-esque my spirit has been. April—or the thing that strives to wake you—is the cruelest because, as it mixes memory and desire, it creates hope (those blooming lilacs), and hope is painful.
None of this is to suggest that I’m needing a prescription for Prozac, but just to say that I needed waking up, needed to shed my winter, and it was re-reading Eliot’s poem that made me see my recent bout of dark-and-twisty. The only other writing that’s as curative as scripture, poems seem to achieve a focusing in me that is also scripture-esque. The idea goes that all the answers to life’s questions can be found in holy words and that, by studying and pondering, you find what you need to know. We hear the stories at church so often of someone opening their scriptures to a random spot, beginning to read, and discovering their answer. Over and over, I find that poetry
focuses my problems in the same way. Not, exactly, with answers, but with, at least, balms. Seamus Heaney says that one of the questions poetry tries to answer is “how with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?” How, in other words, is there room in the world for poems when so much is consumed by “rage”—war, poverty, starvation, cruelty? He says the answer is that poetry must offer “befitting emblems of adversity.” Poems, in other words, that don’t just describe the lilacs but give space for suffering; poems that use beauty to create an elegy for adversity. In my life, those emblems of adversity, like the random spot in the scriptures, arrive at the time I need them.
Take this example. Maybe six or seven months ago, Kendell and I had our annual “why do you spend so much time reading?” argument, the one that leaves me feeling stripped to my very core—my seemingly very faulty core. In the aftermath I found myself vaguely remembering a short story I’d once read, about a teenage girl whose mother had the unfortunate and bewildering (to the teenage girl) habit of running, in her very gauzy nightgown, through their neighborhood at midnight. I don’t remember the title or the author or even the point of the story, but I do remember that image: the slightly-off mother in her white gown and bare feet, racing nearly-naked down the street where she lived. It came to me in that moment of uncertainty because, for the first time in my life, I understood the mother’s impulse. I felt like running through the dark, completely naked, not in a spirit of joy or even of exhibition but because it felt like the response to have, felt like night against nakedness might be the thing to heal what was hurting.
A few days later (I managed, by the way, to not run around my neighborhood in any form of nakedness, something I am certain the neighbors are extremely grateful for), when I could read again without feeling guilty (recriminations and apologies and a few nights of sleeping on it having done their trick), I picked up an anthology of poems I’d brought home from the library, flipped through it without much purpose, and let it open where the spine was cracked. And it
happened to be this poem:
Naked
~ Jennifer Michael Hecht
The reason you so often in literature have a naked woman
walk out of her house that way, usually older, in her front garden
or on the sidewalk, oblivious, is because of exactly how I feel right now.
You tend to hear about how it felt to come upon such a mythical beast,
the naked woman on the street, the naked man in a tree, and that makes
sense because it is wonderful to take the naked woman by the hand
And know that you will remember that moment for the rest of your life
because of what it means, the desperation, the cataclysm of what it takes
to leave your house naked or to take off your clothes in the tree.
It feels good to get the naked man to come down from there by a series
of gentle commands and take him by the elbow or her by the hand and
lead him to his home like you would care for a bird or a human heart.
Still if you want instead, for once, to hear about how the person came to be
standing there, naked, outside, you should talk to me right now, quickly,
before I forget the details of this way that I feel. I feel like walking out.
There it was, exactly: the poem I needed to read and just the moment I needed it; the emblem of my small adversity offered up, beauty in the place of rage. Also: magic. I don’t know how the magic happens, how I stumble upon a poem I need when I need it, but it does. The poet
Brendan Kennelly (I seem to be stuck with the Irish poets today, don’t I?) writes that “Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one person's solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others.” There are many poetic-device things I love about Hecht’s poem—like the way most of it focuses on your response to the idea of the naked man or woman, how you might handle such a situation, rather than the elephant in the poem, the thing no one wants to look at but yet can’t stop eyeing, just from the periphery (and just as we might both look and not look, want to and not want to look, at an actual naked human striding around our suburban normalcy): the naked woman. By not ever telling us how the woman feels, but inviting us to ask her, the poem lets the reader connect. But I love even more that it simply exists, and that someone else has felt “this way that I feel.” And I love that the poem came to me at the right time, a balm.
I’m not sure exactly when I forgot I needed to read poems. I think it has to do with work, because when I do get a question that’s about books, it’s never (literally: never) about books of poems. I want to be able to quickly and confidently recommend a novel to a patron, want to have read more than I have, and reading poems in that context seems pointless. A waste of time. No one will ask me to recommend a poem to them. But I know this: I needed to be reminded. I needed the coincidence of a random anthology I took out from the library’s poetry section because (honestly) I liked the typesetting on the cover, and I liked the title; needed the random fact that “The Wasteland” was included in it. Needed T. S. Eliot’s work to be an emblem of the lack of feeling the lack of poetry engendered.