Every year in April I am reminded of two monumental poetic works which begin with the Earth’s springtime renewal: The Canterbury Tales from 1400 and The Waste Land from 1922. 

1         Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
                  When April with its sweet-smelling showers
2         The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
                 Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
3         And bathed every veyne in swich licour
                 And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
4         Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
                 By which power the flower is created;
5         Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
                 When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
6         Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
                 In every wood and field has breathed life into
7         The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
                 The tender new leaves, and the young sun
8         Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
                 Has run half its course in Aries,
9         And smale foweles maken melodye,
                 And small fowls make melody,
10         That slepen al the nyght with open ye
                 Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
11         (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
                 (So Nature incites them in their hearts),
12         Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
                 Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
13         And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
                 And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores,
14         To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
                 To distant shrines, known in various lands;
15         And specially from every shires ende
                 And specially from every shire's end
16         Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
                 Of England to Canterbury they travel,
17         The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
                 To seek the holy blessed martyr,
18         That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
                 Who helped them when they were sick.

*

  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 arch-duke’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.

In the first, from the dawn of the bourgeois era, Chaucer expresses the wondrous rebirth of the natural world as the precondition for a group of pilgrims from the myriad social castes to set out to Canterbury: for the path of society towards God and divine perfection. 

In the second, from the twilight of bourgeois culture, Eliot inverts this image to express malaise and disillusionment with the ever-recurring character of a godless, directionless society: the ruins of civilization after the First World War. 

How are we to understand the five centuries contained in these bookends? The transformation of an attitude towards nature belies a transformation of the subject apprehending it. 

The identification of the pilgrims by their social function (how they interact with Nature, that is, their jobs) places them clearly on the path to modern subjectivity, as does their interruption of each other in spite of status; one sees in Chaucer’s abandonment of moral didacticism in favor of storytelling the first rays of enlightenment and its ethos of l’art pour l’art. 

Eliot’s polyglot cosmopolitan, educated to contain multitudes and purged of all remnants of feudal ignorance short of her own non-productive existence, cannot but look back longingly on a world not yet fractured into the bad summation of broken individuals, of which she is the prototype. 

However quaint the motley band of pilgrims seems to our over-cultured age, this says more about us than them. Chaucer’s faithful enumeration of their vices and virtues, their struggles and desires, renders them more human than Eliot’s lonely, déclassée aristocrat, erudite like a snow owl, and just as warm.

The image of travel which appears in both opening stanzas changes from a pilgrimage to heal one’s soul — to better one’s life — into the aimless and comfortable peregrination of the leisured class. The metaphor of leaving a place, and by extension leaving oneself (ex-stasis), refers not only to aesthetic or religious ecstasy, but modernity as such: freedom as self-transformation. What has become of our desire to leave?

If we are more prone today to gaze out a window and sigh than to embark on a journey, it is because social progress has become ambiguous, just as we’ve become ambivalent about its possibility. The line which connects these arch-bourgeois poets therefore traces the arc of modernity from its cheery origins in the unconscious pursuit of freedom to its gloomy ends in the conscious regret of ever having tried.

Eliot is already postmodern. Perhaps he was right in suggesting that people lived more meaningful lives serving God and Country than they did serving capital. What else remained after the horrors of mustard gas and trench warfare? 

Adorno warned that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Celan accused him of the arrogance of poetical description, the perspective of a nightingale. Transformation into the opposite: attrition.

What remains to be said about the memory of freedom?

Are we to regret the ever-new arrival of each year and day?

What remains to be done? //