"April is the cruellest month..."
That line popped into my head on Tuesday, when I was thinking about a little scene I'd witnessed on Sunday morning: I'd sat down by the ground-floor window -- where the light's best -- to read my fat Sunday newspaper, when I noticed some movement on the driveway opposite. There was a stubby-tailed, unfledged thrush on the tarmac; big bright eyes, delicately speckled breast, sad-clown turned-down mouth, and fluffy feathers on its back that riffled in the breeze. It sat there, stock still, while a parent bird hopped around nearby. There was a bush nearby, but the flightless ball of fluff, on its stick legs, looked immensely vulnerable -- there are loads of cats down this road.
I watched the birds for a while, but started to feel anxious about the young bird's vulnerability, and how horrible it would feel to watch it being attacked/caught by a cat. I considered going out there and ushering it into the undergrowth, but then thought that they all have to take their chances. That's the way that nature works. So, instead, I took the paper upstairs to read, where I wouldn't have to watch the flightless thrush sit, helpless and flightless.
In my mind, that's why April is cruel: the juxtaposition of new life and remorseless death. (I've no idea what Eliot's poem is about, really, but I do know that "April is the cruellest month..." is the first line of The Waste Land.) I've decided to reread it, and have it dug it out of storage area 15b already. Maybe I'll pop into Blackwell's at the weekend and buy a big fat annotated edition, and get meself all learned, guv.
On the same note...I rode along a bit of the A44 tonight while I was out on my evening bike ride, and I was startled by the huge numbers of rabbits feeding on the verge (or just sitting in the warm evening glow). There were loads of baby ones, all scuttling off into the ditches/undergrowth as I clanked towards them. They were so full of energy. In contrast, the bodies of their peers lay in large numbers in the road, bodies flung, crushed, or mangled by the traffic.
Death/life. Life/death. I think there's something in one of Eliot's other poems about 'time past and time future being fused in time present'...which is all there is, innit?
4 comments:
...add the post above to the why you should keep blogging list. It's in storage unit 27F ;-)
RedOne
why, thank you.
My T.S.Eliot "Collected Poems" (Faber and Faber), cost £2.95, and the outer edges of the pages are brown and crinkly: old, old, old (and mostly unread, to my shame). It does have a barcode, though -- unlike some of the more 'elderly' books in my storage bays. I wonder if I can get a forklift via eBay?
your work of art sounds pithy and economical. i bet that teacher wanted 58-line sonnets, too.
A
Akin to a wildlife photographer watching in awe and sorrow as a mother-lioness closes upon the tiny impala, knowing just how hard that young creature struggled to get up on its thread-legs just a day earlier... That impala will never know or care that its life had meanining...
Akin to the time I watched a spider watching a struggling fly trapped in its web. I interfered: I sliced my finger through the web to release the fly. It was winter, and that was probably the last fly of the season for the spider...
As a cat owner and bird lover I do my utmost to limit the former's sadistic activities. I try to keep him in at night, at least. Sometimes, however, he thwarts my efforts. The carnage is not pleasant. Dissected heads of young rabbits, hindquarters of rodents, the innards of birds... Walking barefoot into the kitchen in the morning is not to be recommended. My only consolation is that I believe the physical pain of these creatures to be numbed by the adrenalin of fear, and the fear to be all instinctive rather than all-knowing.
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