"T.S Eliot Depicts a Bleak Inversion of the Beauty of the World, Taking Hope, Happiness and Rebirth and Recreating It Through Darker Eyes to Present a Harrowing Landscape of Grey Misery". Discuss.

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Eliot immediately starts the poem with an assertive tone, which straight away sets a dark, elegiac atmosphere that persists throughout the poem. The actual word “April” comes from the Latin word “aperire” that means to open, and therefore is a good way to open the poem. “April” is the start of spring and is the month of regrowth and birth, yet he still refers to it as the “cruellest month”. Birth eventually leads to death so life itself obviously loses value – this is Eliot showing the bleakness through even the most beautiful of things, in this case a new life. The word “cruellest” indicates that all of the other months are cruel to a certain extent, but April is apparently the worst. Through this, all months being cruel, Eliot shows that he thinks the beauty of life isn’t as beautiful as it seems. Eliot may have given April this name as the stirring of life and return of fertility is painful and repugnant as it is a reminder of the need for renewing your own life, linking back to the bleakness of birth and rebirth. Another reason Eliot may have chosen the word “cruellest” could be as it is nature taking its toll, the stirring of life. Are disasters a result of not valuing and appreciating life? This is personification of nature and the world – GO BACK TO PAPER – BETRAYAL – BLAH. We as society, in the eyes of Eliot, reject the pure aspects of nature. This line is also a reference to World War 1; spring (April) was a popular time among military commanders to launch new offensives – making men charge into no man’s land to then be killed. This supports the idea of April, a month of new life, becoming a time of death and less beautiful than first thought. The former World War 1 battlefields of France had a bloom of “lilacs” in 1919-20. The land had literally been fertilised with men who had died during the war, hence out of the “dead land”. This could be Eliot

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