TWL - Key Quotes Flashcards
1
Q
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
A
- opens with a pastiche
- reworks the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
- “Aprille with his shoures soote”
- creates the undertones of fertility and awakening
- could say this creates a contrast with the themes of desolation and death OR directs our attention to a more positive interpretation that April retains the ability to revitalise even when all seems lost
- also potentially casts pastiche and drawing on aspects of cultural history itself as the source of revival (suggests that poetry becomes a means through which there will never be a “Burial of the Dead” because whatever catastrophic events occur, it is a practice that retains its heritage - poetry will always be a form of resurrection)
2
Q
April is the cruellest month, breeding
A
- the simple syntax and vocabulary contribute to the documentary style - all speech becomes an assertion of fact
- scenes are surveyed from an apparently detached and omniscient vantage point (different from the opening of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - immediately personal for both author and reader)
- “breeding” - part of the lexical field of scientific language - implies a Frankensteinian quality - unnatural, artificial and synthetic
- possibly related to the artificiality of the probing of memory in experiences of re-registering trauma - requires an artificial provocation with a painful but eventually worthwhile result
3
Q
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
A
- “lilacs” - connection to the god Pan - fell in love with a nymph who disguised herself from him in the form of a lilac, he came looking for her, found the shrub and cut it into pan pipes
- could suggest that spring has raised these beautiful plants but it is inevitable that they will come to be tragically destroyed
- “out of the dead land” - possibility that something is still growing even in a land that looks barren OR there is an unearthing of what is already dead - any resurrection is also paradoxically a ‘burial’ because what appears to be full of life has always the potential for death
4
Q
Memory and desire, stirring
A
- “memory and desire” - painful intermingling, they belong semantically to different temporal states - past memory and future desire
5
Q
Dull roots with spring rain.
A
- “Dull roots” - exposes the cultural death of society - disillusionment, anguish, and disconnection
OR - they are dull in appearance, not in condition, they have the potential to be revitalised after the war - culture has the potential to return but in a different form - cannot return to culture as it was, it will have to be resurrected rather than just awakened
(perhaps this is why “Son of Man you cannot say or guess” because as a figure of Christ he comprehends the ease of resurrection in a way that mortals cannot - does not appreciate the “fear” that comes with not knowing if this is possible, encapsulated in the “handful of dust” ie. the potential ashes of what is permanently dead) - “spring rain” - light shower, not penetrating, very superficially revitalising
- “roots” become a metaphor for culture
6
Q
Winter kept us warm, covering
A
- continued theme of subversion
- more painful to have to face the attempt at awakening rather than accepting the comfort of the stasis and numbness that snow promises
- suspension of the rules of society - “go south in the winter” - promises an escape that spring doesn’t
7
Q
A little life with dried tubers.
A
- “dried tubers” - connects to the theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari - uses the rhizome as an image of thought: a pluralistic, non-hierarchical approach
- could be that all lives have been diminished into a “little life” due to the non-hierarchical impact of war
- is he then saying that for society to be reawakened we need to redraw these dividing lines or we have to unite in order to overcome this - (perhaps in the same way that doing the ‘Police in different voices’ diminishes the division between an institution and the common man by reappropriating their voices)
8
Q
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
A
- because they have been so used to a ‘cultural winter’ - numbness and grief
9
Q
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.
A
- separation of verbs suggests measured quality of time spent
10
Q
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Lituan, echt deutsch.
A
- disturbs the first stanza
- “really German” - links to ideas of Pan-Europeanism, displaced identity and the idea of nomadism
- raises an ambiguity - how many characters are there?
- what conversation is the reader not privy to?
- perhaps even the poet’s voice has been subsumed due to the overwhelming incoherency of the text
11
Q
He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
A
- does this mean that we are hearing the voice of Marie? - highlights that we always assume the author to be the voice of the poem whereas in reality they can take on personas
- or that we have shifted into another mode of literature ie. the autobiography of an aristocratic woman
12
Q
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read much of the night and go south in the winter.
A
- if the character is chased by memories and pain then this is them fleeing to a more bearable condition
- enagaging with literature becomes a distraction - engagement of the creative imagination
- reflective of what Eliot is aiming towards with his reader in order to reinvigorate culture and creativity
13
Q
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.
A
- childhood memory
- repressed part of the psyche re-emerging
- every memory begins to flow back uncontrollably (perhaps there is not a triggering point, or perhaps everything is triggering?)
- in relation to “they called me the hyacinth girl” - each memory eludes presentation and is not fully formed, remains fragmentary and enigmatic
- identified as a post-war world not because of any inherent shift in the ‘arch-duke’ but actually because of the new connotations
14
Q
I will show you fear in a handful of dust
- “Frisch weht der Wind…”
- followed up later at the end of the second vignette with “Oed’ und leer das Meer” - also from Tristan and Isolde - at the point where Tristran is waiting for Isolde to come and heal him - she is supposed to be coming by ship but fails to arrive
A
- direct address to the ‘Son of Man’ - he will be shown his own redundancy because in the modern condition he “cannot say, or guess” - religion can no longer account for the occurrences (especially with the use of the Bible as a source - reflects the fact that this is all religion has to make recourse to)
- OR - might take this as a direct address to the reader - that what we should truly fear is that the modern condition can be characterised by what exists in the void, and that when we spurn religion we are not transcending it but we are being self-defeating
- modal verb use - threateningly prophetic tone
- followed by a passage from Tristan and Isolde - tragedy of a desire that cannot be fulfilled
- also the language change recalls the Tower of Babel - the message being that we will never achieve perfect comprehension
15
Q
Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A
- allusion to Baudelaire - overlays the scene of London with scene from ‘Les Fleurs de Mal’ - blends the antithetical themes of decadence and eroticism with melancholy drudgery
- creation of unreality by using juxtaposed metalepsis/ allusion - creates new realms of narrative possibility that combine both reality of the narrative and the overlayed allusory connotations
- “He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe” - could be the “yellow fog” or “yellow smoke” that pervades the scene in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
