The cruelest month

Well, April may or may not be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot tells us in The Waste Land, but it is National Poetry Month. And I intend to celebrate it by posting a poem a day, the poems in mind being ones that have particular meaning to me.

Prepare for a cultural assault such as you’ve never encountered in this blog.

To start us off, I’ll give you a few lines from The Waste Land:

 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(If you'd like to chow down on the whole thing, you can find it all over the place, including here.)

The thing about Eliot is that he’s exactly the poet you want to be reading in high school, when you’re ready to be so full of cynicism and world-weariness. He makes you want to go totally Goth.

Plus—high school is the period where you’re most likely to have the bleeding excess of energy necessary to read The Waste Land all the way through, and then actually discuss it.

Since this is April Fool’s Day, I’ll soften the weltschmerz with a sop from Ogden Nash:

 The Hippopotamus

Behold the hippopotamus!

We laugh at how he looks to us,

And yet in moments dank and grim,

I wonder how we look to him.

Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!

We really look all right to us,

As you no doubt delight the eye

Of other hippopotami.

That’s the beauty of poetry—you can cover so much ground with so few words. If you do it right.