Weather plays a key role in TS Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land. Its centenary is being celebrated now, even though it was published in October 1922, because of the poem’s famous opening line: “April is the cruellest month ...”
April is notoriously changeable and can bring anything from warm sunshine to plant-killing frost. Eliot finds it cruel, though, because it forces the world, which has slept peacefully through winter, back to life, “stirring dull roots with spring rain”.
Rain is generally absent in the rest of The Waste Land. The poem is dominated by images of drought. There are landscapes of dust, red rock without water, cracked mouths, dry bones, beating sun and “dry sterile thunder without rain”.
Eliot’s Waste Land is a desert. One of the poem’s central figures is the Fisher King, a character borrowed from Arthurian legend, whose kingdom is stricken with drought as punishment for unspecified sins. Rain comes at last when the poem reaches the chapel housing the Holy Grail.
Eliot may have intended these images of a desiccated land as a warning about how the arid mechanised age was destroying culture. A century on, as ecological awareness grows, we see a much more literal risk of turning our world into a Waste Land by our own actions.
