Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) or T S Eliot (1888-1965) have seldom been the object of comparative analyses. The reason for this might well lie in the cohesion and richness of their respective literary productions, as both writers stand out as unclassifiable poets and similarities with other poets of their generations are not immediately obvious.

According to Albert Manent, Eliot’s poetry influenced a number of Catalan poets, writing in Spanish or Catalan, from the 1940s onwards. Among the latter, he mentions Carles Riba, Pere Gimferrer ans Narcís Comadira, but surprisingly makes no reference to Espriu. We know that the Anglo-American poet was very fond of Provençal poetry and that he met Marià Manent in London: an occasion that the translator’s son recalls:

On the other hand, Espriu’s connections with English literature are scarce and somewhat anecdotal. In an interview, he was once asked what books he wished he had written. The only two English works he mentioned were Utopia, by Thomas More and The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (Batista 39). We may assume that he was familiar with the English classics: a quote from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, for example, opens Mrs Death.

It is unlikely, therefore, that the two poets influenced each other. An influence would most probably have shown formally, and Eliot’s philosophical tone has little in common with Espriu’s lyricism and economy of style.

If there is no biographical connection between Espriu and Eliot so, if their poetic technique is so different, what are the grounds for a comparative approach? The reasons why their works may be contrasted are related to content (rather than form) and their idea of poetry. The fixation with war and its frustrations, the opposition between the temporal and the eternal, life and death - and the human experience of time -, for example, are preoccupations common to both authors. Also of note in this respect are the acknowledged sources of deliberation ranging from the Bible and the stories of classical and Egyptian mythology, to the Divina Commedia and the Spanish Baroque (especially St John of the Cross). Last but by no means least is the belief they shared that poets should be familiar with the work of previous poets, in order to make a significant contribution to the whole that tradition constitutes.

Much could be said about any of these three points, but our scope here is narrower. In our comparative speculation we will focus on two works: Espriu’s Cementiri de Sinera (1946) and Eliot’s The Waste Land (1921). There are a number of reasons which justify this selection. These tours de force constitute the first works by the two poets to be universally appreciated. Additionally, it is also evident that they have come to sum up the mood of a generation: a nation in turgid reflection after the Great War in the case of the American and the despair of the post- Civil War period with regard to the Catalan.

Hopelessness underpins both poems: it is expressed through extremely rich imagery, drawing significantly on the world of nature. From time immemorial, poets have associated natural phenomena and processes to feelings; Eliot and Espriu do this in a very effective way. Rain and spring have traditionally stood for hope, a new beginning. In this respect, we will now move on to see how people in Sinera and the Waste Land (2) suffer the effects of drought, and how, by way of contrast, they react to the advent of spring.

Unusually, there is little hope for regeneration both in the isolated Sinera which surrounds the cemetery (see poem I (3) ) or in a world which has become a spiritual wasteland. The lack of water and vegetation, the barren earth, the dangerous fauna, the suffocating heat could all be listed under what Northrop Frye calls “demonic imagery,” an anticipation of the degradation and eventual vanishing of the power and success that the neighbouring nations of Israel enjoyed:

Frye’s “you-just-wait demonic” could be illustrated with a number of verses from the books of the Old Testament, but also with lines quoted from any section of The Waste Land; the ones below (“What the Thunder Said,” ll. 331-342), part of the recreation of the biblical journey to Emmaus, are a good example. They are connected to other images in the poem: the polluted Thames and the rat running about a pile of human bones in “The Fire Sermon,” might exemplify this contention adequately. (5)

Demonic imagery builds up towards a confusing conclusion: an avalanche of literary allusions in different languages, held back by a benediction in Sanskrit. But rain is announced in the end ("Then spoke the thunder," l.400), as part of a reference to a Hindu fable about the meaning of the voice of thunder, included in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (V.ii.1 - V.ii.3). The Waste Land is framed by references to rain: April showers at the beginning of "The Burial of the Dead" and thunder at the end "What the Thunder Said."

In the fable, gods, men and demons have completed their training with Prajapati, their father and instructor. Each group asks to be taught further, and Prajapati summarises his teachings to them with the syllable "da." Each group consider the syllable to be the beginning of a different Sanskrit word, and so interpret their master's answer in a different way, according to their characteristic weakness. Gods are rebellious by nature, so they take "da" to mean "damyata," that is, "control yourselves;" men are naturally greedy, so they think "da" stands for "datta" ("give"); finally, demons, feared for their cruelty, think their teacher meant "dayadhvam" ("be compassionate"). Prajapati approves of each interpretation, but explains that all three make up an only message, valid for each and every group. Thunder becomes a metaphor for Prajapati's teaching:

But why did Eliot include such a reference in the final part of his poem? Thunder stands for the teacher's voice, the expression of wisdom; it reminds those listening how they should behave in order to preserve harmony. "What the Thunder Said" expresses how difficult this is, how unusual exemplary behaviour is. The three words in Sanskrit are repeated just before the benediction ("Shantih shantih shantih," meaning something close to "Peace be with you"), the very last line. Evidently, Eliot thought Prajapati's message was not totally unsuitable for Europeans in the early twenties.

Does thunder bring hope to Sinera as well? Espriu's land seems to have gone through a continued drought too: rain is either longed for or remembered in the first poems of the book. Espriu uses the word "rial" repeatedly, suggesting that rivers have long dried out and have become lanes (8). However, Sineran life is now frozen and carts are no longer to be heard along those lanes:

Rain appears later in the book, but not as a blessing for Sineran vineyards. In Espriu's poetry, rain is often linked to sadness and melancholy (CASTELLET 68). It is also a destructive agent in some poems of Cementiri, quoted below: just as rain stirs dull roots in the first part of Eliot's poem, flowers in Sinera are killed by an inexhaustible rain in poem IX; in poem X, raindrops are compared to an army. Another symbolic interpretation for rain is oppression, which causes fear and frustration: bad weather ("el temps dolent," see poem XXIV) and darkness ("la nit de fosca," poem XXV) are used as images of Franco's dictatorship; in poem XXV, rain prevents the poet from sailing, which we might consider a symbol of freedom:

April showers, as part of the natural year, introduce the spring and are welcome, especially by those who work and live on the land. Spring, like rain, is central to the imagery of both The Waste Land and Cementiri de Sinera, where references to nature are connected to collective or individual states of mind.

Much has been written about the opening lines of "The Burial of the Dead," quoted below (1-4). They have traditionally been considered an echo of the "General Prologue" to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (late 14th cent.):

Interestingly, Eliot never acknowledged this influence with a note -as he did with all the rest when The Waste Land first appeared in book form in 1922, providing specific references to dilute critical confusion. "The Burial of the Dead" begins, therefore, with the negation of a long-established literary cliché: the celebration of spring as a time of natural renewal mirrored in human souls, a time for joy and love.

James W. Wilhelm noted how love and spring were solidly associated in troubadour poetry, so important for the golden age of Catalan literature, for Espriu's tradition. Inner feelings are in concord with the external world, when nature is at its best; "the microcosm joined to the macrocosm when both are at their most brilliant moments of fulfilment.(9)" Wilhelm relates the spring motif to the locus amoenus of pastoral literature and studies its evolution from classical Latin poetry to mediaeval French (Provençal) and Italian lyrics, from which, he suggests, it reached English literature and Chaucer (Introduction xiii, xvi)(10) .

In his notes to Chaucer's most popular work, Michael Alexander states that "a Spring opening was a tradition of mediaeval romance writing. Here Chaucer combines it with a chronographia, an indication of time by means of an astronomical periphrasis, favoured by Dante."(11) In his Divine Comedy, Dante is very clear about the time of year wherein he got lost in the "selva selvaggia," the drawing-room of hell. His adventure commences in the morning of Good Friday, in spring:

John D Sinclair explains that "creation was supposed to have taken place and the stars to have been 'set in motion' in spring, when the sun was in the Ram, on the same date as the Incarnation and the Crucifixion." (13) He shows how deeply rooted the idea that Creation happened in spring was in medieval thinking by referring to a song that we would also like to quote, given its relevance to our subject matter:

Spring is the beginning of the natural year, generally considered the happiest, not the cruellest, part of it, and Chaucer chose to refer to it at the beginning of the "General Prologue," keeping with tradition:

In the beginning of The Waste Land, spring rain carries an eroding violence that makes the soil infertile: Eliot uses the verb 'stir;' six centuries earlier, Chaucer had used the verb 'perced'. The "Hooste" of the Southwark inn where the pilgrims meet and decide to make the journey to Canterbury together to see the tomb of St Thomas Beckett insists that they should do so in high spirits. That is why he suggests a storytelling competition that meets everyone's approval:

The happy mood of the pilgrims matches the spring setting celebrated by Chaucer in the lines quoted: the mild breeze, the sun, the singing birds... the reverse of Eliot's "Waste Land," of Espriu's dying Sinera, of Frye's "demonic imagery" and of the impending decay that will make "the days of darkness" unbearable, according to the Preacher in Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes was one of our authors' favourite books in the Bible. Chapters 11 and 12 convey a grim vision of old age, "the days of darkness:" no hopes, death drawing near, a world that is falling apart. Espriu used verse 4 from chapter 12 to open Cementiri: he was establishing a parallelism with the ban on the use of Catalan, taking "the daughters of musick" as a metaphor for the use of the language in literature. This chapter contains rather unusual metaphors: for example, old age as spring, a flourishing almond tree as an old man with white hair. These might also have played a part in inspiring Eliot to begin his poem with an unconventional portrayal of spring:

But this apparent break with tradition (giving negative connotations to spring) had already quite a long tradition in the twentieth century. Wilhelm traces it back as far as the late Latin poem Pervigilium Veneris (Vigil of Venus, the poem quoted by Eliot at the end of The Waste Land, where spring produces a bitter-sweet feeling (Introduction xv).

David B. Dickens has coined the term "negative spring" for the poetic image we are concerned with. Its roots, as it is used in contemporay literature, are to be found in the works of 17th century German poets (2) (16). The image is described in Eliotic critical terms: "... the poetic image of the negative spring is, as a more restricted symbol, the objective correlative for an entire complex of feelings that we have seen associated with it from the late sixteenth to well into the twentieth century." (17)

Dickens refers to an essay by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), where poets are divided into two categories: (a) naive, those whose feelings are in harmony with nature, and (b) sentimentalische, those whose emotional processes are detached, or even opposed to natural processes (6) (18). We think the adjective "classical" would suit the first group, whereas "modern" would be adequate for the second. According to Wilhelm, the Christian worldview underlying romance literature introduces a more complex vision of man, nature and their relationship, as opposed to the stereotypes of antiquity (Introduction xvi).

In The Waste Land, April, the coming of spring, fails to uplift souls which is a cause for melancholy since the time when spring and happiness were inseparable is missed. Nature cyclically reminds us of past happier times, it ultimately reminds us of our childhood, all of which makes up an idealised "paradise lost," gone forever. This paradise, the garden of Eden, is obviously the opposite of the Waste Land and Sinera. The following lines about the German poet Clemens Brentano (1778-1842) apply to Eliot as well:

The idea that poets long to go back to their "paradise lost" is also related to Espriu's poetic world. His poetry has always been described as elegiac: he laments over a mythical nation that never actually existed. In the first poems of Cementiri de Sinera especially, images of nature and childhood memories are combined to evoke a state of ideal purity:

The Sineran poet is especially sensitive to the plight his people are going through, because the April sun seems to highlight it. Using Wilhelm's terms: the microcosm (suffering caused by political oppression) and the macrocosm (April, spring, and all the natural processes associated with) are confronted; they are discordant and, as a result, the former is thrown into relief and appears much more poignant:

Carles Miralles has drawn attention to the fact that Espriu began to write his first book in March and it is likely that he did most of the writing during the month of April. The changes in the Sineran scenery are far from being reflected by the disheartened people:

Poem XXI in Cementiri is dedicated to spring: it shows how the Sinerans cannot rejoice at its arrival because the natural changes it brings are only superficial, their lives remaining stagnant. In the first stanza there is a celebration of spring, a sense of freedom and action: horses galloping along a stretch of beach, people beating drums and singing... Given Espriu's choice of verse 4 from chapter 12 of Ecclesiastes to begin this book and the tone of the previous poems, the spring festival is most probably not taking place, but simply being remembered; in any case, it would not be a spontaneous reflection of people's true feelings:

The second stanza produces the opposite effect: celebration comes to a standstill and is replaced by silence and monotony. The movement of the waves is compared to the passing of time -things might remain the same forever:

In the poems that follow, also set in the month of April, other things carrying important symbolic connotations happen: time stops (in darkness) and singing dies out. In other words, Catalan people are no longer allowed to make their own decisions or to express themselves freely:

The imagery of both Cementiri de Sinera and The Waste Land has multiple facets that refer the reader to the authors' biographical circumstances and their literary interests: the shocking experience of war, wisdom literature of the Old Testament, plot elements in Grail stories, the idea of resurrection in Egyptian mythology... all conform these constructs of imagery.

We have had a close look at imagery related to nature. Sinera and the Waste Land are comparable spatial settings were people are lost and unhappy. Drought in "the little homeland" stresses the idea that people are being strangled; rain only arrives as part of storms that are frightening and have devastating consequences. In the Hindu fable that Eliot included in his poem, rain symbolically offers an opportunity for redemption from the kind of behaviour that often leads to war: violence, avarice and cruelty (the opposite of Prajapati's message: control yourselves, be generous and merciful).

Even though poets have traditionally associated spring with love and joy, examples of a different perception of the season can be found in classical and mediaeval literature. Realising that spring arrives as every year, irrespective of the crisis the poet and the world around him are going through, increases his sorrow. In April, the poets are reminded of a time when souls used to mirror the vitality of spring, but this time is gone forever and they are overpowered by a sense of loss.

The study of the complex imagery in The Waste Land and Cementiri de Sinera provides examples of how striking similarities can be found in the works of two poets often considered very distant or self-contained.