I’ve received a question from a student of mine about the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, asking whether it signifies an iconoclastic nihilism on the poet’s part. Here’s my response:

Regarding the opening lines of The Waste Land, the key point is that the lines are not spoken in Eliot’s voice, i.e. presenting his own view of things, but in the disorientated voice of the Waste Land itself. It is an ironic reference to the opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, thereby setting up an intertextual parallel with the notion of pilgrimage. Remember that the poem, being a pilgrimage of sorts, starts in the darkness and dryness of the Waste Land, and ends, via the memento mori of “death by water”, signifying a reminder of the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven & Hell) and conveying in addition a suggestive allusion to baptism, to the final part of the poem in which the Waste Land receives the life-giving “rain” of faith and religious conversion. In short, the poem begins with a disdain for spring and ends with a desire for it.