On the two
modernist poems that exemplify alternative, contrasting, yet ultimately complementary
narratives of hope.
When it comes to
literary images of spring, the first work that (pardon me) springs to mind is
William Carlos Williams’ poem “Spring and All”
(1923). Created at least in part in response to Williams’ work
as a doctor (hence the “contagious hospital” in the opening line), and more
exactly his experiences dealing with at-risk young patients whose very
existence and future were in doubt, the poem transcends any specific contexts
to become both a realistic and yet an idealistic depiction of spring itself: of
what it means for new life to make its struggling, haphazard, threatened, perennial,
inspiring journey to the surface of a world that had been cold and lifeless (in
terms of blooming things, anyway) only days before. Making the best use of an
unpunctuated last line since Emily Dickinson, Williams’ closing line captures
perfectly the precise moment of “awaken[ing],” as both an uncertain transition
to whatever comes next yet also a miraculous achievement in its own right.
Williams at
times consciously positioned himself and his poetry in
contrast to high modernist contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, and it’s
difficult to imagine a more direct contrast to “Spring and All” than the
opening lines of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). “April
is the cruelest month,” Eliot’s poem begins, and in case the reader thinks he’s
upset about Tax Day or something, the speaker goes on to make clear that it is
precisely spring’s rebirths to which he refers: “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.” Where Williams’ poem focuses on the season’s partial and
uncertain but still powerful moves toward a future, Eliot’s thus looks back at
a past, one that would be better left buried yet that is instead brought back
with every new blossom. And where Williams creates images of awakening new
life, of spring as birth, Eliot portrays the season as a painful re-awakening, back
into identities already (it seems) too much in the world.
Those contrasts
are genuine, and again reflect more overarching distinctions between these two
poets as well. Yet I think in at least one significant way the two poems (particularly
when we take all of Eliot’s into consideration, not just his opening line)
complement rather than contrast each other. After all, one clear
way to describe the modernist literary project is as an attempt to
represent life in the aftermath of disaster, destruction, death, doubt, all
those characteristics so amplified within a post-WWI world. To that end, we can
see both poems’ speakers as struggling with that question, and trying to
imagine whether and how new life and possibilities can or should emerge into
such an inhospitable world (whether represented through a contagious hospital
or a barren wasteland). The poems do differ greatly in tone, but it’s possible
to argue that the very act of writing is in both cases a hopeful one, a pushing
through the wintry ground into some evolving new form. “These fragments I have shored
against my ruins,” Eliot writes in his poem’s final lines—and what is spring (he
said at the tail end of a New England winter) but a fragmentary yet inspiring
annual rebirth of a ruined world?
Next spring
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on these poems? Other images of spring you’d highlight?
In his essay "Uncle Tom's Shantih," which can be found in the collection Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (2003), the American poet Anthony Hecht focuses on the first 18 lines of The Waste Land. Through a contextualization of those first lines, Hecht's excellent close-reading shows how important Eliot's allusions are to an introduction and set up of the themes of exploitation, sexual and otherwise, that play out in many other parts of the poem before those repeated words of hope that are uttered in the poem's final line.
ReplyDeleteJeff Rñ