Rain

Rain is a very powerful symbol. Chaucer makes it, in fact, the great protagonist of the very first lines of his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. It’s April and the “sweet showers “ have soaked deep into the dry ground to water the roots of the flowers. The combination of this spring rain with Zephyrus, the god of the west wind, is so powerful that the “tender shoots” are quickly transformed into “buds”  under the eyes of a “young sun” and with the background music of birds singing. It is the joyful natural rebirth which also stirs man’s spiritual rebirth. That’s why spring was symbolically chosen as the perfect time of the year by Chaucer and his pilgrims to set on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Thomas Beckett. Chaucer, therefore, gives us an image of a man totally integrated and in harmony with the world and its natural forces. But that was more or less seven hundred years ago.

When The Waste Land  was published in 1922 , the world had just witnessed the horrors and follies of  World War I and what remained in the present was perceived only as a “heap of broken images”  on  a “dead land “. Among the ruins of the certainties and values of a glorious past, Eliot’s modern man is at loss, he is a “dried tuber”  forced to live a meaningless life. Therefore, the coming of the joyous spring produces a rather depressive mood, if man finds no reasons to live. What’s worse, if you have ever experienced such a state of the soul, than somebody that lightly tells you how wonderful life is, but you can’t see it?  It is not. It can’t be.

Eliot’s world is, in fact, deaf to the seasonal call to life. The feeble rain, which makes its presence in the first lines of the poem as in Chaucer’s Prologue, has, however, lost its invigorating power either on nature and on man.The drops of water try to stir the roots that seem to rest safely covered by the “forgetful” winter snow, but they are “dull“, hence, unwilling to put their heads out of the ground. That’s why April for Eliot is “the cruellest month”: man must emerge from his hibernation only to live in the desolate“stony rubbish” which is the present without the smallest idea of where to go and what to do. Eliot’s modern man, in fact, walks in circle and fixes “his eyes before his feet”, as there is no future to pursue.

Then there is a third option, that is, when men are ready to the natural call of life, and I am, but you feel depressed as you realize that it is the 23rd of March and there is still no spring at sight, only a lot of rain; it has been raining for an entire month, to be precise. So, my question is: “If winter comes can spring be far behind?”

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