TWL, Lines 1-7: For Those That Follow

1       April is the cruellest month, breeding
2       Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
3       Memory and desire, stirring
4       Dull roots with spring rain.
5       Winter kept us warm, covering
6       Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
7       A little life with dried tubers.

1. APRIL: See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue: 1-4,12 (ca. 1372):

“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
...Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”

Where Chaucer, the Father of English Literature, commenced with gentle, sweet rains and the first flowers of spring, Eliot, modern poetry’s progenitor, felt the cruel end of a mindless winter and feared the season ahead.

April, a time for pilgrimages and the month of spring and lilacs, is also when Lent is observed, when Lincoln was shot and when Eliot lost a friend to war...

2. LILACS: See Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Memories of President Lincoln (1892) 1:

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the Western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.”

WHITMAN, and especially Memories of President Lincoln, is alluded to extensively throughout this poem.  For Memories, see notes 2, 8, 61, 186, 202, 214, 291, 322, 357, 380, 384 and 403.  See also note 214 for a reference to These, I, Singing In Spring, another poem from his  Leaves of Grass.

4. DULL ROOTS: See the Ghost, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5.32-34:

“...And duller shouldst thou be than in the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf
Wouldst thou not stir in this.”

The Lethe is a river in Hades embanked by plants that cause forgetfulness (see Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.616).

Roots also appear at lines 7 and 19; see also notes 12, 22, 71, 176 and 324, and compare the “thirty good” passage at lines 331-359 (see note 331).

7. A LITTLE LIFE: See Prospero, in Shakespeare, The Tempest 4.1.156-158:

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

See also James B.V. Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night (1874):

“This little life is all we must endure,
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again;
Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.”