Particular Places | English Photographs

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire…

Thus begins The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece that, along with Jame’s Joyce’s Ulysses, published earlier in that remarkable year, 1922, marked more than any other work a redefining of English literature and what passed for the literary canon.

The reference in Eliot’s opening line, as some of us know (we are not all literature students, which is probably a good thing) is to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales - not a quote, but an inversion of the lines in which the medieval poet refers to April as a time, not of loss and despair, but of hope and renewal:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droght of March hath perced to the roote -

‘When April, with his sweet showers, has pierced to the root the drought of March….’

At the grand young age of 71, with 72 bearing down fast, 75 around the corner, and my eighties (metaphorically speaking) just over the hill, April would seem to have the makings of a month both cruel and hopeful, marking in commensurate measure both happiness and loss.

But April this year was a time of blessings: the weather mild, the showers perhaps not sweet but not too much of a damper either, and the opportunity to visit my son and his family in England, to see our grandchildren, and catch up with old friends, bringing both sunshine and a renewal of the senses and emotions after a Canadian winter and too long an absence.

These photographs, I hope, capture a sense of both place and sentiment.