Eliot And Chaucer
Essay Preview: Eliot And Chaucer
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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 Eliots 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.
Chaucers 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 its a mixed bag. Approaching 43, the rise I get from Chaucers sentiments feels nostalgic rather than shared. Its a subtle but ominous turn. I dont otherwise feel ready to patch my elbows. Eliots 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.