Some famous lines in T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land include “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land.” These are the poem’s opening lines, and they subvert those of the prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400). Other famous lines in The Waste Land are “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” and “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,” which appears five times in the poem.