The Pain of Resurrection: Lessons from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
By McGowin Grinstead ‘26
“April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.” (1)
There is something terrifically haunting about these famous first lines of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” The gerunds ‘breeding,’ ‘mixing,’ and ‘stirring’ rouse the reader into suspense—suddenly we begin to notice that something dangerous is afoot, that perhaps something so patterned that it has long since gone unnoticed has been poisoning us. The gloss of April’s springtime has deceived us; we grasped for lilacs but forgot the pain of resurrection.
The Russian formalists have a name for this phenomenon—ostranenie, or estrangement. It is the artist’s technique of presenting common objects in a strange way to make us think twice about what we may see as banal or mundane. In “The Waste Land,” Eliot represents us with an image of spring. Although many might overlook the annual eruption of buds from snow, Eliot reorients our gaze back to nature’s conundrums. Here, he says, is something worth considering. April is not as simple as we thought her to be—in her births are mysteries applicable to our own lives.
And that is the mystery of resurrection, made estranged by Eliot’s themes of suffering. On a literal level, he is reminding us that April is painful. And that pain sticks out in the poem like a knife. Weren’t we expecting April to be beautiful? Yet her slow purge from winter is all too often ignored. All too often, we paint resurrection as a scene of glory while forgetting the labor pains of creation.
Just as we overlook the maturation of springtime, how often do we as Christians forgo thoughts of the Cross in our habitual references to Christ’s resurrection? We commemorate His glory again and again, such that it threatens to become hackneyed and trite, yet life serves to remind us that every Easter is preceded by a Good Friday. The cross and the resurrection are entangled mysteries, and we cannot think of one without the other.
Alternatively, we can be tempted think only of the cross without remembering its glory. When T.S. Eliot published “The Waste Land” in 1922, he was only in the autumn of his 33rd year. The cross was ever before him—Europe had just endured WWI. Yet what does one do in seasons of despair? In seasons where suffering abounds, how does one remember resurrection?
To respond to such suffering, Eliot turned to the past—to the existential questions of Shakespeare, Dante, and Ovid. His contemporary world was a ghost town, yet the words of the classics were alive to him as ever; after all, if one believes in literature, time becomes quite fluid. The urgency of Hamlet taught Eliot that the woes of the human condition were not merely a fault of his generation, but are transposed across the centuries. He found hope in the repetition of human suffering. There is something noteworthy in cyclicality; our woes are not ours alone, but have been shared in different forms by men and women for generations preceding our existence.
Jan Kott’s famous book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (2) understands literature in a similar vein; his response to the struggles of living under the communist regime in 20th-century Poland was to see the same political strife mirrored in Shakespeare. Under the shadow of Soviet rule, Polish audiences viewed themes of surveillance and politics in plays like Hamlet not as ancient drama, but as a visceral reflection of their own environment. By stripping away Elizabethan romanticism, these productions transformed Shakespeare into a modern mirror of reality, reviving the timeless struggle for individualism against a regime.
So, too, if we turn to the stories of Scripture, we find them as alive as ever. In our own lives, we feel the burnout of Martha, the lust of David, the laughter of Sarah, and the sorrow of Jesus at the death of His friend, Lazarus. History is a canyon that carries the echoing call of God from age to age—from each Cross to each Resurrection. The salvation narrative steadies our contemporary anxieties in the bosom of those who have endured before us. The meter of our life is, perhaps, as Eliot later wrote in “Burnt Norton” in 1936: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.” (3)
Yes, the cross is daunting. But we live in the legacy of those who have carried it well before us, and in remembrance do we proceed onwards. Looking back at resurrection arcs in history, we learn that suffering is not only part of nature but also the sign of approaching glory.
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However, living in the cycles of history is no passive thing; Eliot reminds us that although springtime has occurred for eons, there is still a kind of pain in birthing lilacs from the dead soil of winter. Change is not easy, and creating beauty from a place of deadness is not without its difficulties. Something in us has got to die too—being ‘born again,’ even if we desire it, requires a kind of death of our old selves. Yet God will redeem the springtime in us; He has brought our dry bones back to life, and filled us with the breath of His Spirit.
Living in 21st-century America, it is hard to lift ourselves from our ‘dull roots.’ If the United States were “The Waste Land,” we’d be mass-producing lilacs such that we no longer relied on April to bring them forth. Lilacs would sell year-round at so low a price that every home would have one, and the flowers would sell as cheaply as dirt. It seems the words of Wordsworth still ring true today: “The world is too much with us; late and soon/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—/Little we see in Nature that is ours.” (4)
Rather than build up new life, D.H. Lawrence, in his book Studies in Classic American Literature, says, “The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny… and he’s got to do it secretly.” (5) We live in a culture addicted to creative destruction, antithetical to the cultivation of beauty. And America’s creative destruction doesn’t just apply to infrastructure. Leslie Fiedler, in his book Love and Death in the American Novel, points out that the classic American novel never ends in the harmonic marriage plot as the classic European novels do. (6) It seems the American novel responds to marriage with either death, divorce, or destruction. ‘Death do us part’ just isn’t in our nature.
But if America rejects an eternal gaze, what is our country to do with religion? Shall we try a new one on with each passing generation? Is Christianity doomed to become just another ghost town in our history books? We know that the hardest thing in life is to remain faithful. But in a culture that pushes progress without an eye to eternity, it’s hard to see the church as an anchor rather than a passing ship in the night.
This is not to say that America has not long been wrestling with Eden. We have created many Adams living in many empty gardens—although a Thoreau sans Eve is hardly a paradise. Rather, it seems America’s two natures are working against her: one—to always rebel and start anew—and the other—to hold fast to the morals and teachings she has inherited. Here, America discovers the pain of resurrection, the difficulty in rebirthing lilacs springtime after springtime after springtime: she must continually choose the moral good again and again, even if it causes her pain to mix in Christianity with her culture. How can she mother both identities? How can America always be rebelling and retaining?
Eliot almost seems to respond to this point a few lines later; when he is frightened, he is advised to “hold on tight” and “there you feel free.” (7) There can be freedom for American Christians if we hold onto what has been given to us. We must remain faithful; in times of despair, we must remember the heroic moments. There is a special challenge for American Christians to think often of salvation history, to remember the centuries the Israelites weathered in waiting for the Messiah. We must not let the allure of instantaneous progress deceive us into thinking that dull roots are without their springtime.
Let Eliot teach us something about the nature of resurrection: that it is painful and cyclical. We will never stop being reborn in Christ, and something of our old selves will be the ‘dull roots’ giving way to the baptizing ‘spring rain.’ But the Lord still whispers,
“O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord… And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.” (8)
Contributed by McGowin Grinstead. McGowin is a senior at Harvard College studying English.
Notes
T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” Poetry Foundation, 1922, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land, lines 1-4.
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., [200, 1964).
T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets: Burnt Norton,” allpoetry.com, 1936, https://allpoetry.com/Four-Quartets-1:-Burnt-Norton, lines 1-3.
William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” Poetry Foundation, 1807, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us, lines 1-3.
D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 122.
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Victoria, TX: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997).
“The Waste Land,” lines 15-16.
Ezek. 37 (KJV).
