While I was staring out the window, this came to mind.

Of course I was referring to the opening of Eliot's most famous poem, The Waste Land. I'm sure anyone who has even the most passing interest in poetry knows the line. Many who don't like poetry at all probably know the line.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain

Eliot was writing after the Spanish Flu pandemic and the Great War, and both of those undoubtedly influenced his poem. Europe had become a waste land after the war, and the following horror of the pandemic must have made the world look very bleak.

In the real world April is the season when nature is renewing herself and we are bewitched by her beauty, but in his world of the Waste Land it is the cruelest because the world is dead and thus bringing new life that into a doomed world is cruel; that most hopeful of month becomes the cruelest as it reminds the inhabitants that there is no hope left.

I am referring to his line in my haiku with some degree of humor, then, as the only thing wrong in my world was the inconvenience of a little spring downpour.

In that line Eliot was calling back to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which you may not know as well. I had to read that one both in high school and university so lines from it also pop into my head at the most unexpected times.

Translated into modern English, it opens:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;

Eliot may have been the most famous poet to respond to Chaucer in this way, but it's not an uncommon thing. This same thing is fairly common in Japanese poetry as well. Called honkadori (本歌取り) a great many classic haiku use this technique, sometimes not just responding to but completely copying the older haiku and just changing one word.

One of my favorite examples of honkadori was Santōka and Hōsai. In one of his bouts of loneliness and depression Hōsai wrote:

Some years later, Santōka wrote a response:

(I wrote about these two here)

Just like poets alluding back to and responding to Chaucer in the West, many other poets in Japan over the years have done the same to Hōsai and that haiku which is his most famous one.

It's a fun game in a manner of speaking, but in today's world such allusion doesn't work as well since the classics are no longer taught and people aren't as familiar with older works of literature as they once were. That said, I don't think explaining an allusion in a footnote (quite a long meandering footnote, like this one) is a bad thing.

What do you think?

Anyway, it was raining. I had the window cracked to let in a little of the resulting cool air and I was just watching, mind more or less blank, simply enjoying the sound of the rain, the smell of it, and the feel of the wind. Then that line from Eliot drifted into my head. No idea why. Maybe I had seen something earlier in the day that put the poem into my head and at that moment that I wasn't thinking it decided to pop up. Whatever the case may be, the rest of the haiku quickly fell in and I pulled out a notecard to write it down.

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.