As everyone knows, April is the cruelest month, though even English majors sometimes forget why the poet said so. What’s wrong with lilacs coming out of the dead land? Something to do with a then-repressed Christianity and a bad marriage (or vice versa), a disinclination to have the spring rain stir dull roots, or anything else. Although, like Joseph Epstein in these pages, and Edward Mendelson in some others, I am inclined to think that after the Holocaust, T.S. Eliot mostly repented of his anti-Semitism, I still prefer Cole Porter (“I love you/Hums an April breeze”).
Of course, the specifically Christian backdrop of Eliot’s lines is the New Testament account of Jesus’ resurrection in springtime. Curiously, when, 50 or so lines later, Eliot gets to the famous tarot card stanza, “the hanged man” card is supposed to represent Jesus, along with Frazer’s pagan man-god, who must be slain and replaced so that the world can be renewed. I suppose that it is just a coincidence that the rabbis’ old polemical description of Jesus was “the hanged one.”
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