The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922)

Everyone else calls April the kindest month; Eliot calls it the cruellest, because spring drags the half-dead back into wanting, stirring dull roots that would rather sleep. From there the poem fans out into a city of voices that never quite meet: a clairvoyante laying out her wicked pack of cards, a typist and her indifferent lover, women murmuring in a London pub at closing time, the Thames-daughters singing from a river that no longer carries anything holy. Nothing binds them but their nearness, and that is the terror and beauty of it: a whole civilization handed to you in overheard scraps, church bells fading into a snatch of song, the Grail legend crumbled to a handful of dust. It should not cohere, and it doesn't, and somehow it became the truest thing the century said about itself. At the end, in a parched land still praying for rain, the thunder speaks in a borrowed tongue and a voice gathers what is left, these fragments I have shored against my ruins, and holds them out to you like broken bread.