"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo." (translation)
Mostly I feel tired. It's only Thursday and I'm tired! Lent should be over. Winter should lift. When will the snow melt?
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. (source)
This time of year I often read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. I believe it's really a Triduum poem: caught in the dynamics of this difficult three days.
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience (source)
Yet it's a complicated resurrection Eliot presents to us. One of those already-not-yet paradox things.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain (source)
The poem eventually leaves us the flooded plane, wondering what to do in our little boats.
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon - O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour aboli
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
(source)
It's a complicated poem. I spent a lot of time studying it before it really started to make sense to me. Reading Dante helps (which, coincidentally, I have been doing this Lent). Yet there is much wisdom there--and plenty of heartache to go around.
Sigh. It's Maundy Thursday.
-t
1 comment:
1. And then on Holy Saturday the world stops in its tracks, or so it seems to us. But we surface to find the world going about its business as though nothing has happened.
2. Fifty years after my freshman year at McGill I am still amazed that some academic type decided that The Waste Land would be a good first text for English 100!
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