The First Eighteen Lines of the Waste Land (1989)

Summary

The First Eighteen Lines of The Waste Land Illustration by Tyler Varsell THIS CENTENNIAL OCCASION encourages me to begin with a quotation from William Empson’s commentary on some excised passages from The Waste Land: “Half the time,” writes Empson in Using Biography, “when the impressionable English were saying how wonderfully courageous and original he was to come out with some crashingly reactionary remark, he was just saying what any decent man would say back home in St. Louis.” Empson was trying to face, though not quite squarely, the bedeviling topic of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which I must leave for another time. At this time I want to address only the first eighteen lines of the first section of The Waste Land, the opening of “The Burial of the Dead.” April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith 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. These must be the most familiar opening lines of any poem in the twentieth century. I have made a few earlier comments on them, especially as regards the stasis of the participial present tense (breeding, mixing, covering, feeding, coming); the sad intimations of a past and a future in “memory” and “desire,” both unspecified, therefore muted; and our growing sense, confirmed with Baudelairean accusation at the end of the section, that it is precisely we who are the cadavers of “The Burial of the Dead.” B...