Why April is "the cruellest month"

I've lost track of how many times I've seen T.S. Eliot's line "April is the cruellest month" quoted recently. This is partly, I suppose, because it's April and it makes a good opening line for an article, however out-of-context. But it's partly because we are in a pandemic (I'll explain).

It must be the most-quoted line from T.S. Eliot, or indeed from any modern poet, although I doubt many people could continue with the subsequent lines from The Waste Land:

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

(By the way, note the double "l" in "cruellest": Eliot may have been born in the US, but he moved to England at the age of 25, and all his major works were written there. He later renounced his US citizenship. Most of the articles I read "translate" it into North American, with a single "l".)

As to why he considered April to be the cruellest month, much of this is to do with the fact that Britain (and Europe and indeed the world) was just emerging from a global pandemic in 1922 when Eliot was writing The Waste Land. The Spanish Flu pandemic killed somewhere between 20 and 50 million people from 1918 and 1920, and infected almost a third of the world's population, making today's COVID outbreak look positively tame.

What Eliot is saying, then, is not that April in general is a cruel month. After all, April is traditionally a time of spring and renewal, a time of fecundity, hope and love. What he is suggesting is that, in the Europe of the early 1920s, ravaged by years of first war and then the Spanish flu, there seems to be little in the way of hope and renewal going on, so that the normally hopeful month of April seems doubly cruel, a mockery of unrealizeable possibilities. Don't take my word for it, someone else's blog explains it much better than I could.

So, you can see how that might resonate in April 2021, can't you? Here in Toronto, the daffodils and magnolias are blossoming, but we are still in lockdown, with no apparent end in sight. Cruel indeed.