Thank you for this very interesting series of articles on The Waste Land. It has been decades since I last read it, and your remarks renewed my interest in it, so much so that I spent several happy mornings and evenings reading it closely. When I say “close reading,” I do not mean the process of straining it through theory like a baleen whale looking for krill; I mean tracking down all the references and reading the originals. One can go down the rabbit hole with that approach, and The Waste Land is a very deep rabbit hole indeed.
After reading your introduction, I set myself the task of first reading the poem without referring to any of the footnotes or extensive scholarship available, just to see what I could pick up unaided, and only then peeking at the notes. Happily, I seem to have caught about 2/3 of the references. Your analysis focuses mostly on thematic questions, which is not my strong point, so thank you for that. My tendency is to put poems under a microscope and look at the poetics line by line (or word by word, or even syllable by syllable) like a jeweler looking at the workmanship of a brooch through a loupe. (A more congenial self-image than the whale above.)
Now one side-effect of spending a long time thinking about anything is that one ends up with a number of thoughts, in this case a great number of thoughts, and a possibly unfortunate desire to express them. To spare you (and anyone else who bothers to read this comment) a recital of what is well known, I will comment only of points which I have not seen raised elsewhere. Even so, I think I will make a series of posts with my observations on each section separately; otherwise this post will be extremely long.
1: Burial of the Dead
About the Cumean Sybil, I note that in some versions of the Orpheus myth, he suffers a similar fate, his head continuing to live and speak after he is torn apart by the Bacchae. This connects the poet and the seer into a single figure, although I doubt Eliot intended this specifically.
I differ with you about characterizing Chaucer’s opening line as a “plea,” since he is not asking anything of springtime, merely describing it as renewing life. Also, I read Marie as being frightened OF the hill, not frightened UNTIL taken sledding. This seems to me to be more in keeping with her character, which strikes me as a bit shallow in her recollections.
In the obviously Ezekiel-based section, the direction of the shadows in the morning and evening indicate the walker is traveling eastward all day. Is this direction significant? I don’t know. Also, while under the shadow of the red rock, one’s own shadow vanishes, canceled by the shadow of the rock. Again, I don’t know whether this is significant. "...fear in a handful of dust" is a gorgeous line, and recalls to me the funeral words “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the Ash Wednesday words “dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return,” and Macbeth’s words “the way to dusty death.” When I later looked up the first draft of these lines, I was amazed at how much the final draft had been improved. The poetics of the first draft are undistinguished, but the final draft is masterly.
I differ from you in reading the line starting “—yet when we came back,...” as being spoken by the male companion rather than by the hyacinth girl herself. Although the hyacinth girl is in the middle of a Tristan and Isolde sandwich, I see something else there. The latter portion starting with “I could not \ Speak…” is reminiscent of prophets being struck blind (or blindness as the price of prophecy) and of Saint Paul struck blind on the road to Damascus; but that is a minor point. Looking further east, this whole passage strongly reminds me of the Heart Sutra, in which all forms are marked by nothingness, the void. Although the Fire Sermon is the only Buddhist text explicitly mentioned in the poem, Eliot could not have avoided becoming familiar with the Heart Sutra in his study of Buddhism, since it is one of the central texts of that tradition. I think that for each of the many times this poem mentions “nothing” one should have the Heart Sutra in mind, in view of which “nothing” may be seen as a desirable state rather than a lack.
All of my best observations about Madame Sosostris turn out not to be original, leaving me with only two. First, “Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks” has more going on than the da Vinci painting. “Belladonna” echos “Madonna” of course, and in Italian means “beautiful lady,” but “belladonna” is a name for the poisonous plant also called “deadly nightshade.” In fact, its botanical name is “atropa belladonna” from “Atropos,” the member of the three Fates whose task is to clip the thread of life. Belladonna is the beautiful lady of fated death. This may go beyond what Eliot intended, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Second, Madame Sosostris uses both Tarot and horoscopes, which recalls the magical mishmash of practices of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a group Pound knew some members of. Whether that familiarity filtered through to Eliot is anyone’s guess.
Eliot’s note bases Unreal City on Baudelaire, while some have mentioned a nightmare recounted to Eliot by Bertrand Russell. I see an additional possible layer here, a wordplay on “unreal.” Given the Parsifal connection, I observe that the Holy Grail is, in the older French tellings of the legend, “san greal” which might also be parsed as “sang real,” since early manuscripts often did not set words off with spaces. This would mean “royal blood” (yes, this is the basis of some silly conspiracy theories a la Dan Brown, but that is not where I am going with this), “royal” being cognate with “real.” (There was a Spanish coin called a real because it was stamped with the king’s likeness, for instance.) Anyway, “real” can mean “king” and Unreal City can mean “city without a king,” which may relate to the Fisher King’s wound. I realize this is all wild speculation based on a French-English pun, but again, this is Eliot, and I wouldn’t put it past him.
On the poetics of the Unreal City section, I notice that “sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled” puts the action entirely in the passive voice, which reinforces the sense of the dead as no longer having volition. In the next two lines, “...each man… \ Flowed up the hill…” is interesting because “each” is individual but “flow” is necessarily collective—an individual cannot flow. This forces the individual dead soul to dissolve in the collective dead, so the dead no longer have either individuality or volition. All this nuance comes simply from the choice of words and phrasing, a remarkable piece of workmanship. The lines “There I saw… \ ...Mylae!” manage to reference Dante, but also recall both Aeneas and Odysseus, who also find old companions in the underworld, and introduce Carthage (indirectly) via Mylae. These lines are quite dense with allusion, even for The Waste Land.
To be continued in a separate post on 2: A Game of Chess.
The “decaying hole among the mountains” in the next stanza recalls the earlier “carious tooth,” but this time there is moonlight (for the first time in the poem, night is not dark and light is not burning the world to dryness), “the grass is singing” but this time it is not the dry grass, and the scene has the desolation of long abandonment, rather than the desolation of desert or despair. The dry bones are dry in a new sense: dry here means “fleshless;” Ezekiel encountered dry bones and they were re-clothed with flesh and brought back to life. That the bones “can harm no one” is in keeping with the general benignity of this place. These dead are not the overwhelmed victims of a world gone to wrack, but the carefully buried dead of an earlier time, whose graves once were tended, headstones erected, though tumbled now. If this is indeed the Chapel Perilous, it seems much less perilous than the world outside.
When the rooster crows, the lightning flashes, and the rain begins. The rooster is commonly the harbinger of dawn, but I feel the presence of another bird here: the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. After nearly dying of thirst at sea (but preserved to suffer because his spiritual state keeps him in a kind of living purgatory) he finally has a moment in which his heart shifts and he is able to pray. The albatross, which he has worn as a symbol of his guilt falls off into the sea, and it begins to rain. Here as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, rain is absolution, salvation, and resurrection, all three. This stanza absolutely had to be placed just here in the poem, because the world had become as dry as it is possible to be; there was no further to go in that direction, and so water must return or the world simply dies. If Part 4 was analogous to the volta of a sonnet, this stanza is analogous to the moment when a sick patient’s fever reaches its peak, and then suddenly the fever breaks and the patient begins to strengthen.
Next we are in India, and although there is still drought, there are clouds and thunder and rain will come, but we are not told of rain; instead of rain, the thunder speaks. Perhaps its words are the rain the world truly needs. Then come the four lines which are, to me, absolutely electric. They are the heart of the poem, or at least the part of it that most leaves me shaken. The rest of The Waste Land is poetry; these lines are prophecy, and I don’t intend the debased sense of “prediction” but the original sense of the voice of god speaking through man:
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’ surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, have we existed
(Others may see nothing much in these lines, but I have lived through that moment, and I can attest to the exactness with which these lines describe it, how it feels, the terror of it, the utter commitment it requires, then and forever, how it throws one’s life all at once into a new channel. No other poem has ever captured this for me. I have longed to write about it, but after thirty years, it is still too soon, still too raw. It may take another moment like it to turn me into the person who can write about it, or perhaps I will never be able to.)
When the thunder speaks of compassion, it is via a prison out of Dante. That it is a prison of the mind is indicated by “Thinking of the key \ each confirms a prison,” since by focusing on the key, which we have heard turn once in the lock, we conclude that we are locked in. The reference to Coriolanus not only brings up exile, but also his lack of compassion. Exile is a kind of inside-out prison, and the greatest flaw Coriolanus shows is his utter lack of compassion for the common people of Rome. He cannot lower himself to take their part or even to speak civilly to them; his patrician pride is the cause of his downfall, and so he is an excellent exemplar of the need for compassion and the prison of the mind which results from its lack.
When the thunder speaks of self-control, it is through the metaphor of a boat under the controlling hand of a master sailor. It is important here, I think, not to construe this control as an external thing. The boat and the sailor are one (after all, either without the other is not what its nature is made to be), so this is still self-control, not subjection. Similarly, “your heart” must be “invited,” which is not in any sense coercive. It “would have responded gaily” to the “controlling hands.” This is similar to some Stoic philosophy, in which it is said that the heart is happiest when it is guided by the mind. If one substitutes “guiding hands” for “controlling hands,” the overt sense is much the same, and I think that the intention here truly is self-control rather than control of others. The thunder speaks of self-control to the gods in the Upanishads; in The Waste Land, it is not clear which “you” is addressed in “your heart;” perhaps the gods, perhaps humanity, perhaps the individual reader.
Finally, we have the Fisher King, fishing, his back to the arid plain. Perhaps he has crossed the plain to arrive at last at the shore of the sea; if so, then he has been with us as we passed through the arid plain in reading The Waste Land. If he is now healed, he may set his lands in order, as the health of the king is the health of the land. The phrase also echoes “set my affairs in order,” which of course is preparation for death, but I do not think this interpretation fits well here. This is a king returning to health, and the comparison that comes to my mind is Odysseus returning to Ithaca after twenty years away. He, too, must set his kingdom in order.
The multilingual string of quotations has a sort of progression, from collapse (London Bridge) through purgatory, to a desire to be the one who stands up for the victim (Procne) rather than the victim herself (Philomela), finally to successfully recovering love from the abyss. These are the fragments “shored against my ruins,” and they are not mere cultural flotsam, although the phrasing suggests a shipwrecked mariner making do with whatever drifts ashore. They contrast with the “withered stumps of time” in Part 2; there, those bits of cultural baggage have lost their force, they are no longer sustaining and have become mere cultural detritus; here they are worthwhile, they provide support, they strengthen the structure, ruinous though it be. The final lines of course refer to The Spanish Tragedy and its play-within-a-play which was the model for Hamlet, and the sense I get from them is that these fragments hold up a fractured mirror to ourselves in which we see our brokenness in that of the mirror, and that is the method in the apparent madness.
The very end is the shortest sermon in the world:
Giving. Compassion. Self-control.
Peace peace peace
I do not want to try to make an overarching interpretation of the poem; I think it speaks for itself (although it requires some effort on our part to hear what it is saying). This has been tremendously enjoyable for me, and I am very glad that Liza’s essay gave me the prod I needed to reread this wonderful poem. Thank you.
Part 5: The opening stanza clearly recapitulates the Passion, starting with the soldiers arresting Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and continuing through the “thunder of spring” (the Gospels say that thunder was heard at the moment of his death, and Easter is in the spring). No mention is made of Jesus’ resurrection, but the fact that we “are now dying \ With a little patience” may indirectly point to a hope of our resurrection, which would explain the patience.
The next stanza seems to me to describe two things in parallel, as if they were one. First, we have a trek through dry mountains, but these are not the mountains where one feels free. There is no sense of spaciousness or peace, but instead the landscape presses in with ominous thunder and a desiccated, unforgiving atmosphere. (The “sterile dry thunder” may be something Eliot experienced personally as he was growing up, as this kind of dry thunder is common during summers in the American Midwest.) Note “we should stop to drink” rather than “we would stop to drink;” the difference in meaning is significant. “Would” expresses a hypothetical intention, while “should” expresses a hypothetical fact. Drinking would be a necessity, not an option, if only water were present; the thirst is not merely uncomfortable, but life-threatening, an actual bodily need without which life cannot continue.
However, some of the descriptive elements do not fit well with a trek through mountains, and instead seem to suggest the carrying of the cross to the place of crucifixion, which gives rise to the second (implied or embedded) narrative. The “sandy road” and “feet in the sand” do not describe any track through the mountains, but rather the dry and well-trodden path from Jerusalem to Golgotha. The
“Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth” recalls the meaning of “Golgotha,” the place of the skull. “Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think” and “Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit” both could describe the carrying of the cross under the lash of Roman soldiers, who will not allow one to stop or think or stand or lie or sit. The “red sullen faces” and the “mudcracked houses” would seem to be the crowd watching the condemned on their march to crucifixion, and the houses perhaps the kind of desert dwellings to be found outside the walls of Jerusalem. This is a beautiful duality of description: in the mountain trek, the sand and the sneering faces are hallucinations but the rocks and mountains are real; in the march to the crucifixion, the sand and faces are real, and the rocks and mountains are hallucinations. The two descriptions are tied together by their common elements: exhaustion and thirst.
The following stanza expresses the state of the mind under extreme thirst. Thoughts are fragmentary and return again and again to water, images of water, associations of water, sounds of water. No other thought is able to hold the mind, nor the mind able to hold any other thought. The thought of the hermit-thrush is a kind of betrayal, since its call resembles the sound of dripping water. It is a false hope; there is no water. Except for the thrush, even the sounds are dry sounds, and there is a kind of timeless suspension in this stanza, as the suffering mind beholds this single, elongated moment of thirst. There is no sense that the thirst will end; it has expanded to become the entirety of experience.
The walking scene which follows features a white road, which may come from the antarctic expedition which Eliot says inspired the supernumerary companion, but however that may be, a white road is also something found in a desert. It is another feature of a dry landscape. The hooded figure may be the risen Jesus here, but the hooded figures in the following stanza seem more connected to the flowing stream of the dead in the unreal city in Part 1. This is reinforced by the maternal lamentations high in the air, which, in the context of the foregoing messianic imagery, recall the slaughter of the innocents and the lamentations of Rachel which are often associated with it. If these endless plains are “Ringed by the flat horizon only,” then the question “What is the city over the mountains” can only refer to a mirage if we take it literally. “Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air” also recalls the wavering inconstancy of a mirage, a city hovering above mountains which are themselves illusory. This would be an unreal city indeed, or perhaps it is the Celestial City, the New Jerusalem, the towers of which are nevertheless falling, a very bad portent indeed. Or perhaps “over the mountains” means “beyond the mountains,” which makes the city real if too distant to see, but still leaves the status of the mountains unresolved. Or, finally, perhaps explication is beside the point, which is the evocation of the sense of masses shambling in numb despair, headed from nowhere to nowhere forever.
The next surreal stanza may be based, as is said, on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, but if so, this foray into ekphrasis cannot explain the final line, in which voices are singing. That they sing “out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” brings desiccation to its completion. Not only is there no water above ground, but all the water in the wells below ground is exhausted, and all water which may have been providently stored in cisterns against drought has been emptied. It is the absolute end of water.
About Dans le Restaurant, I can’t comment on the poetics of the original, since I do not read French, but I came cross Eliot’s earlier draft of this stanza (which would of course be his own translation) and again here it is striking how much the poetry improved from the draft to the final form. The description of Phlebas is ever so much tighter and more compelling in the final revision.
The name “Phlebas” of course means “blood,” as in phlebotomy. Blood is one of those things that can call up an infinity of associations and resonances: the sea, which is not capable of washing the blood from Lady Macbeth’s hands in her dream; the blood sacrifice, or bloodletting as an ancient cure for various ills. As he is a merchant, “profit and loss” are emblematic of the concerns of life in toto; this is a beautiful use of subtle synecdoche. This stanza my be compared with Shelley’s Ozymandias: the latter very heavy with the irony of a forgotten king who was sure his name would live forever; here in contrast, Phlebas forgets all the concerns of life, which makes of the sea a representation of the river Lethe, forgetfulness in death. This can be seen as making his death a kind of forward progress, as he moves to the next stage of death, unlike Ozymandias, who clings to the concerns of this world.
Since he “passed the stages of his age and youth” in that order, we can see his life unwinding like a tape run backwards, returning him to the unformed (and sinless, undegenerate) state of infancy. Beyond that, he enters the whirlpool, which is for me the central image here. This cannot be a literal whirlpool—it is at the bottom of the sea. But a whirlpool (or maelstrom), like a whirlwind, symbolizes primordial chaos, the unformed material from which the ordered world (“cosmos,” the opposite of “chaos”) is created. The whirlwind is then a womb image, since it is the womb from which the universe was brought forth. By regressing and finally returning to it, Phlebas is not just undoing his life, but preparing for a new birth.
The final stanza is very clearly the inscription on a headstone (or more likely a cenotaph, since Phlebas is lost at sea). First, there is the address “Gentile or Jew” which places the text in a public location where passersby unknown to the inscriber of the text will see and read it. The phrasing here emphasizes that it is unknowable in advance just who will be seeing this inscription, since “Gentile or Jew” encompasses everyone in the world, it is equivalent to saying “reader, whoever you may be.” Skipping the next somewhat puzzling line for the moment, we come to “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you,” which is very much the sort of sentiment one finds on a funerary inscription, enjoining the unknown reader to consider the reality of the deceased and to compare him to yourself, and hence come to the knowledge that you too will share his fate. It is a classic “memento mori” sentiment, but in this context, his fate is not merely death, but renewal and reincarnation, or perhaps resurrection. Thus the renewal of Phlebas foreshadows the renewal of the world.
The line “You who turn the wheel and look to windward” initially puzzled me, but after thinking through the message of the cenotaph, it appears that it is indicating that the inscription is addressed to other sailors, be they Gentile or Jew. This may seem to limit the universality of the death and renewal, but it may also merely be another point of similarity between the reader of the inscription and Phlebas, reinforcing the connection and the conclusion of renewal for sailors especially. Although the words may be addressed to sailors, the words of a funerary inscription speak to whoever reads them, without limitation, including readers of The Waste Land.
Therefore part 4 does in fact set the stage for the transition from the degradation of the first three sections to the renewal in the fifth section. The Waste Land has somewhat the form of a gigantic sonnet, with octave developing the theme of decay, then the volta at (the very brief) part 4, followed by the sestet, part 5, which resolves or reverses the theme of the octave. One need not think of a sonnet specifically of course. The octave/volta/sestet structure is a rhetorical scheme, not a verse form, and the same scheme can be seen writ large in The Waste Land, whether or not one notes that a Petrarchan sonnet fits in the same rhetorical envelope.
I am having great fun writing this, whether anyone reads it or not. Onward to part 5!
Liza, before I use up any more space talking about my views on The Waste Land, I want to take a moment to comment on your article. First, as I have already said, I appreciate it very much, as it is both insightful and motivating (it motivated me to re-read this fine poem after many years). I especially enjoyed your discussion of the line from Verlaine and all the connections which ramify out from it.
I also want to respond to your story in part 3 about the various unique takes different professors have on the Tiresias stanza. I have had for some time a whole historical-cultural perspective on just this sort of thing, which I have never bothered to set down in print; it would probably be more appropriate in the “Leave Literature Alone” or “Why I Am Not A PhD” comments, but here is where I happened to be when I thought to write it down, so here is where it is going to go.
The clickbait title for this would be something like “Bad criticism is all Isaac Newton’s fault.”
Both scientific and artistic endeavor have been going on for thousands of years, and for most of that time the arts had the upper hand. Not that scientific inquiry was disregarded (mathematics and astronomy did have their own Muse, after all), but it was a minor part of culture. With Galileo and especially Newton, the sciences became much more dynamic and the modern idea of progress was born from the observable progress of science. Progress is such a pervasive part of our culture now that it is hard to keep in mind that it was not always so.
Consider the octopus: it has a beak. But whence the beak? The octopus is a mollusk, and its distant ancestor resembled a clam. At the hinge of the shell was a small organ for grasping and anchoring. This organ developed over the course of time to become the entire exterior body of the octopus, the original shell being reduced to a small beak. The major became minor, and the minor major, and its tentacles now reach everywhere.
The hegemony of science arises from a confusion. The number of people who understand what pure science is is not much larger today than it ever was, but science begets technology, and technology begets prosperity (at least for the educated class), and so science, technology, progress, and prosperity are all conflated in the general outlook of our culture. The great mass of practical people who do not especially care about high culture or pure science then confer on science (as they misconceive it) the high prestige it has enjoyed for the last two centuries. Shelley said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world – how I wish that were true; but I fear that practical people are the unconscious legislators of the world, and there is little to be done about that. Perhaps nothing should be done.
Now loss of status is never comfortable, and this has produced a sense of grievance in the arts and a tendency to blame science for the loss. (C. P. Snow gives a good discussion of the antagonism between the arts and the sciences in “The Two Cultures.”) At the same time, the attempt to regain status tends to take science as a model, since it is the current paradigm of success. (This is of course misguided, since imitating the leader is no way to retake the lead.) This results in some of the practices of science being adopted in an area of culture where they are not only inappropriate but look like crude imitations made without understanding. Look to the cargo cults of some of the Pacific islands for an analogy to this behavior. I don’t mean to say that people in the arts are stupid, far from it; I mean that because this imitation of science is driven by culturally embedded and therefore unconscious perceptions of status, grievance, and success, it is not a conscious imitation. Even very intelligent people can act stupidly when they act unconsciously.
In what does this imitation of science consist? Primarily it is the conflation of two wildly different things, scholarship and research. Research is quite properly the main activity of working scientists and scholarship the main activity of students of the arts (creation is of course the main activity of practitioners of the arts). Research requires results to be new; there is no credit in being the second discoverer of a theoretical result. This is especially true in mathematics. For example, one of my classmates in graduate school had had three dissertations shot out from under her because some other mathematician somewhere in the world proved what she was working to prove, just a few weeks ahead of her. The value of her dissertation dropped instantaneously to zero, and she had to start over. She was working on her fourth dissertation when I knew her. This was one of the things that led me to take my master’s degree and go home.
This combination of factors, namely the status disparity driven by the conflation of prosperity with progress with science, the transfer of the norms and practices of science to the arts, and the resulting conflation of scholarship with research, leads to the current academic situation in the arts. Faculty are required to publish research, which is required to be new. Given how many people are analyzing how few classic works, there is a limited amount of “new” to go around, and three options present themselves. One may expand the canon (not a bad idea, and perhaps a reason why comparative literature is a little less ingrown that English literature); one may delve ever deeper into minutiae (strictly a band-aid of limited scope – one of my wife’s friends saw a PhD dissertation on Milton’s use of the comma, and just how much further could one go in this direction?); or one may develop ever newer critical theories, which is open-ended and seems to be the preferred option.
The content of the theories isn’t specified, only their newness, and there is not the empirical backstop enjoyed by the sciences to keep the theories honest. When everything sensible has been said before, the only way to say something new is to say something which is less sensible than what came before, and so on, eternally ratcheting the theory along a path leading directly away from sense. The whole system of publication-based tenure decisions then automatically filters out those who are not willing to play this game (and convince themselves that it is not a game). Then of course, this mad Laputan search for new ways to analyze works of art invites in any sort of external theory because novelty is in high demand. In a sense then, the academic arts have lost their immune system; there is no defense against any idea which purports to be a new method of analysis. These ideas are not pushing their way into the arts; they are being pulled in by the imperative of novelty.
The rife political postures which pass for critical theories are not, to my mind, the fundamental problem. They are more like opportunistic infections in an immunocompromised patient. That most of them come from the political left is to be expected, as the left has always generated more theories than the right because it strains toward change rather than stability. The battle for the soul of the arts cannot be won on the field of politics, because the conflict is not essentially a political one. If I were to apostrophize Arts as a person to whom I am giving counsel, I would say,
Arts, do not envy Science; it is not better than you.
Do not listen to the practical people who do not value you.
Do not mistake scholarship for research, which is the job of Science.
Arts, your job is to nurture generations of cultivated minds.
Newness comes from what you create, not from what you analyze.
What you offer has value in itself; teach each generation how to love it.
When the patient is healthier, the infection will be thrown off.
There, I got that off my chest. Now, back to The Waste Land.
In the first two lines, the “fingers of leaf \ Clutch” seems almost an answer to the question in part 1, “where are the roots that clutch?” Next, I must confess that I am perplexed by “the river’s tent is broken.” I feel strongly that there is some very specific meaning intended here by the word “tent” but I cannot sniff it out. Still, the Thames is sweet and does run softly until he ends his (Spenser’s) song, although the land is brown, the sounds are unheard and the nymphs are departed. Time is very confused here, as this is Spenser’s Thames surrounded by modern desolation but not by modern corruption (although the nymphs here may be not just nymphs but also the women companioning the heirs of the City directors in their assignation by the river). Once the song is finished with the last refrain, the spell of the past is broken; Time rights itself and shows up as a conflation of Time and Death much more explicitly than in Marvell, and immediately the river scene reverts to its fully modern squalor.
Now the canal is dull, no doubt with oily scum on the water, and we have rats, white bodies, bones, and again rats. These white bodies do not seem to me to represent anything pure or anything sexual. I see here only the pallor of deprivation and the bloodless white of death. One may imagine them drowned, washed up on the shore along with Ferdinand’s father. (Why father is changed to brother and a new separate father introduced is a puzzle to me. As with the broken tent, I sense something specific here that I am missing.) Then Marvell again breaks the spell, this time of Death, but immediately passes the baton to John Day, who pivots back to Eliot and we suddenly find Sweeny and Mrs. Porter in the midst of an Australian army song. Clearly, this rather low vitality is a step better than death, a restoration of the physical world but not the moral world to life. The concluding Verlaine line seems to me to be celebrating a greater healing than has been achieved so far and points toward a further, higher, purer state than the mere lust of Sweeny and Mrs. Porter. The immediate transition back to Philomel connects with the children in Verlaine via singing as well as thematically, since the nightingale is famous for its song.
(By the way, I just love your discussion of this stanza, especially your delving into both Verlaine and Wagner. I hear the line from Verlaine differently from what you suggest, but The Waste Land is a big boat with room for many passengers looking out different ports. Your view is, I think, more interesting than mine; mine is just what I see.)
Back in the Unreal City, the brown fog of dawn is still present at noon (if we didn’t already know this was London, that would tell us), and we meet Mr. Eugenides (whose name means “child of good birth,” and is one letter different from Eumenides, for what that’s worth). We don’t know whether he has one eye, but he is a merchant. The phrase “demotic French” is interesting because one usually hears the word “demotic” in the context of “demotic Greek,” where it is used to distinguish Greek as spoken now from classical Greek. Mr. Eugenides is of course Greek, but the Unreal City is connected to Baudelaire, so the substitution of “French” for “Greek” in the phrase ties the two together.
Next we have the “violet hour,” a phrase repeated twice in six lines (and again later in the poem there are violet air and violet light – Eliot seems to love violet) and a very somatic description of leaning back and looking away from a desk at the end of a long work session. This is virtually the only place in the poem where there is a bodily sensation rendered poetically; all other descriptions are of external senses (sight, hearing, smell), but there is precious little of touch in The Waste Land, and such touching as there is, is observed rather than felt.
The throbbing taxi that comes next is interesting because, besides the living biological sound of it, idling cars actually did throb at one time. I recall that older cars and trucks, when idling, often didn’t idle quietly and steadily like modern cars do, but had some more primitive system that let the engine wind down and then revved it slightly to keep it going. The result was a throbbing sound coming from the car engine, which I have heard for myself many times, especially on a cold day (such as a winter day with brown fog, for instance). The engine revving and subsiding actually made the car pulse visibly forward and back, so you could also actually see it throb. This is not to take anything away from the poem, but to mention that “the taxi throbbing, waiting” is an accurate concrete observation in addition to all the other ways it works as poetry.
With Tiresias looking on from his intersex perspective, the typist is visited by a young man. “Carbuncular” sounds like “avuncular,” which is a sound echo I hear because the latter word is so much more common in describing people. However, this young man merely has a bad complexion. Once he concludes his military-style assault on her sexual favors (of which she seems almost a detached observer herself), we have Tiresias parenthetically outlining his curriculum vita as a seer. But such a tawdry commonplace occurrence hardly requires a seer to act as museum guide. The bathos of this rather undercuts Tiresias as an authority, as if someone were to say “I am a Nobel-winning physicist, and I am here to tell you that water is wet.”
OK, the above came off as a little harsh. It’s not that I dislike this section of the poem; it’s more that the diminution of Tiresias here is obvious, and indicates in a new, indirect way, the degeneracy of the modern age: even the greatest seers have nothing to see here and now but passionless, disconnected liaisons. It is a wasteland to the vision of the seer as well as to the common person. The final blow to anything fine or high is the typist’s attitude after the young man leaves. Whereas the lines reference a woman beside herself with woe over her lost honor, the actual typist seems quite indifferent. She is so numb that she cannot even feel sullied: we are degenerate and we are so used to it that it has become invisible.
In the next section, almost everything I noticed has already been said. I only note that a mandoline is a musical instrument but also a device for slicing deli meat, and that neither one exactly whines. The choice of “whine” makes it seem more like a sitar, which perhaps connects the scene at the pub with Buddhism or Hinduism in a (more than usually) oblique way. As to the Ionian white and gold, it is easy to find pictures of the interior of Magnus Martyr, and it is indeed strikingly beautiful in a way that seems not quite to belong in London. Also, in the pictures, one can see the columns and their capitals, which are indeed of the Ionic architectural order, rather than the Doric of the Corinthian. The barges remind us of Cleopatra’s barge referenced in section 2, but this queen is Elizabeth of course. This connects with Das Rheingold not only through the Rhinemaidens’ song, but also since both Alberich and Elizabeth give up love for rulership (though Elizabeth only gave up marriages of state and probably cheated on the whole Virgin Queen image). The red sails of the barges, by the way, are characteristic of Phoenician ships, which famously used red sails.
Although the subsequent pair of rhyming quatrains has identifiable allusions (which I missed, so thank you, various websites) I notice that it also has the form of a traditional English riddle, a form which goes back to Anglo-Saxon times. In reading it, I almost expected the “… on the floor of a narrow canoe” to be followed by “What am I?” This form of riddle requires one to find a context in which all the clues make sense, an approach which is not inappropriate to The Waste Land as a whole. I interpret the scene as a woman having sex in a canoe (a descent from the glorious barge above), perhaps for the first time (hence “undid me,” as in the loss of status and respect of a woman who is “fallen”). The man feels that he has transgressed and apologizes (very different from the carbuncular young man), and the woman seems at the end rather unperturbed or detached (very like the typist); or perhaps she has merely given up.
Next we have the word “nothing” three times in four lines, again reminding me of the Heart Sutra. Finally, we come to Carthage and hear from Augustine and the Buddha. Carthage is such a dense nexus for this poem! Augustine comes to Carthage, and so does Aeneas (who then has the archetypal broken relationship with Dido, leaving love behind for his destiny of rulership, just as Alberich and Elizabeth did above), Mycenae was a sea battle between Carthage and Rome, Phoenicians founded Carthage, Dido burns, Carthage itself and its lands burn. And then the last four lines of this section burn. Perhaps the Lord plucks Augustine out of the Carthagenian flames, which represent the sin from which he wished to turn away.
At first I questioned the length of the description of the lady’s dressing table with its wretched excess of wretched taste, but then I realized that, in trying to evoke the overwhelming rococo confusion of decoration and scent, only too much is enough. The poor hapless breeze “freshening from the window” finds its freshness outgunned by the overpowering artificiality of the room and its contents. This woman is thoroughly denatured as only the wealthy can be. The scene of Philomel displayed “as though a window gave upon the sylvan scene” displaces any real exterior scene from consideration and further cuts off this room and its inhabitant from any contact with the natural world. This lady’s vanity table is the Vanity of Vanities (all is vanity). The allusion to Cleopatra’s barge underlines the bathos of this scene: the barge is presented by Enobarbus as honestly magnificent; this room is merely overdone. Further, the “other withered stumps of time” reconfirm that none of the cultural artifacts in this room retain any of the life with which they are expected to grace our existence. To me, this room seems more dead than the Unreal City, a complete soul death captured in a snapshot of decadent taste.
I imagine that as she brushes her hair, it stands out and crackles and sparks with each stroke of the comb. One might, if refusing delivery on the poetical elements here, simply say that she needs to use conditioner. However, the description is otherworldly, almost monstrous. She seems half gorgon, half goddess, and yet in the next stanza she is merely a decadent wealthy lady with the “nervous condition” of the too-sensitive, too-bored upper class matron. She does not appear to be able to communicate with her husband at all (if indeed those were his footsteps on the stair). There is nothing healthy here.
His answer to her initial questions seems to reference trench warfare (“rats’ alley”), which may indicate that his mind is elsewhere, on the recent war, or perhaps that he sees their marriage as a prolonged conflict in which he is unable either to advance or to retreat. Her next question, “What is that noise?”, is the typical question of a nervous, unsettled person; however after that, things get interesting, as the answers are “Nothing again nothing,” recalling the Heart Sutra. In fact, all of the answers to her next four questions are stated, point for point, in the second half of the hyacinth girl passage, to which the repetition of “Those were pearls that were his eyes” directs us back. The word “nothing” appears six times in seven lines here, making the Heart Sutra unavoidable, at least to me.
I haven’t seen anyone comment on the “Shakespeherian rag” line’s musicality. If you know what ragtime music sounds like, it is obvious that, besides any meaning one might assign to this line, the “O O O O” and the extra “he” in Shakespeare function to make the line scan as a ragtime lyric. Each “O” lands on a musical beat and they are equally spaced and equally weighted. The extra syllable is a common vocal styling for a ragtime singer, creating a syllable that can be hit hard just where the music requires a strong beat. I know I have heard other examples of this, but I can’t recall one just now. If this line is supposed to be an answer to the question “Is there nothing in your head?” the answer would appear to be “yes,” although it could also be taken as another example of a “withered stump” with Shakespeare reduced from great playwright to musical nonce tune.
The next few lines sound like a visit from Prufrock, with very similar style and tone, and a similar limp dithering over inconsequentialities. The game of chess itself may represent conflict, move and countermove, but in this couple we see very few moves at all. “Pressing lidless eyes” gives an image of players leaning over the board, hands to the sides of their faces, fingers pressing upward on the corners of their eyes, holding them open as they stare like lizards at the board. I have seen chess players adopt exactly this posture; it is a nearly motionless tableau.
In the next section, which appears to be straightforward pub gossip, I note that the short, uneducated sentences fall naturally into verse lines. Of course, this naturalness is artificial, but it is still striking to me how easily the verse line length accommodates the unelaborated thoughts of the speaker. The barman calls time like Gabriel sounding the Apocalypse, closing time = Closing Time. Or perhaps the line could be read as “Hurry up! It is I, Time!” making the barman something supernatural, but that seems improbable.
If you’ve read this far, thank you! I am thoroughly enjoying this process of setting my thoughts in order about this fascinating poem.
Thank you for this very interesting series of articles on The Waste Land. It has been decades since I last read it, and your remarks renewed my interest in it, so much so that I spent several happy mornings and evenings reading it closely. When I say “close reading,” I do not mean the process of straining it through theory like a baleen whale looking for krill; I mean tracking down all the references and reading the originals. One can go down the rabbit hole with that approach, and The Waste Land is a very deep rabbit hole indeed.
After reading your introduction, I set myself the task of first reading the poem without referring to any of the footnotes or extensive scholarship available, just to see what I could pick up unaided, and only then peeking at the notes. Happily, I seem to have caught about 2/3 of the references. Your analysis focuses mostly on thematic questions, which is not my strong point, so thank you for that. My tendency is to put poems under a microscope and look at the poetics line by line (or word by word, or even syllable by syllable) like a jeweler looking at the workmanship of a brooch through a loupe. (A more congenial self-image than the whale above.)
Now one side-effect of spending a long time thinking about anything is that one ends up with a number of thoughts, in this case a great number of thoughts, and a possibly unfortunate desire to express them. To spare you (and anyone else who bothers to read this comment) a recital of what is well known, I will comment only of points which I have not seen raised elsewhere. Even so, I think I will make a series of posts with my observations on each section separately; otherwise this post will be extremely long.
1: Burial of the Dead
About the Cumean Sybil, I note that in some versions of the Orpheus myth, he suffers a similar fate, his head continuing to live and speak after he is torn apart by the Bacchae. This connects the poet and the seer into a single figure, although I doubt Eliot intended this specifically.
I differ with you about characterizing Chaucer’s opening line as a “plea,” since he is not asking anything of springtime, merely describing it as renewing life. Also, I read Marie as being frightened OF the hill, not frightened UNTIL taken sledding. This seems to me to be more in keeping with her character, which strikes me as a bit shallow in her recollections.
In the obviously Ezekiel-based section, the direction of the shadows in the morning and evening indicate the walker is traveling eastward all day. Is this direction significant? I don’t know. Also, while under the shadow of the red rock, one’s own shadow vanishes, canceled by the shadow of the rock. Again, I don’t know whether this is significant. "...fear in a handful of dust" is a gorgeous line, and recalls to me the funeral words “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the Ash Wednesday words “dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return,” and Macbeth’s words “the way to dusty death.” When I later looked up the first draft of these lines, I was amazed at how much the final draft had been improved. The poetics of the first draft are undistinguished, but the final draft is masterly.
I differ from you in reading the line starting “—yet when we came back,...” as being spoken by the male companion rather than by the hyacinth girl herself. Although the hyacinth girl is in the middle of a Tristan and Isolde sandwich, I see something else there. The latter portion starting with “I could not \ Speak…” is reminiscent of prophets being struck blind (or blindness as the price of prophecy) and of Saint Paul struck blind on the road to Damascus; but that is a minor point. Looking further east, this whole passage strongly reminds me of the Heart Sutra, in which all forms are marked by nothingness, the void. Although the Fire Sermon is the only Buddhist text explicitly mentioned in the poem, Eliot could not have avoided becoming familiar with the Heart Sutra in his study of Buddhism, since it is one of the central texts of that tradition. I think that for each of the many times this poem mentions “nothing” one should have the Heart Sutra in mind, in view of which “nothing” may be seen as a desirable state rather than a lack.
All of my best observations about Madame Sosostris turn out not to be original, leaving me with only two. First, “Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks” has more going on than the da Vinci painting. “Belladonna” echos “Madonna” of course, and in Italian means “beautiful lady,” but “belladonna” is a name for the poisonous plant also called “deadly nightshade.” In fact, its botanical name is “atropa belladonna” from “Atropos,” the member of the three Fates whose task is to clip the thread of life. Belladonna is the beautiful lady of fated death. This may go beyond what Eliot intended, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Second, Madame Sosostris uses both Tarot and horoscopes, which recalls the magical mishmash of practices of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a group Pound knew some members of. Whether that familiarity filtered through to Eliot is anyone’s guess.
Eliot’s note bases Unreal City on Baudelaire, while some have mentioned a nightmare recounted to Eliot by Bertrand Russell. I see an additional possible layer here, a wordplay on “unreal.” Given the Parsifal connection, I observe that the Holy Grail is, in the older French tellings of the legend, “san greal” which might also be parsed as “sang real,” since early manuscripts often did not set words off with spaces. This would mean “royal blood” (yes, this is the basis of some silly conspiracy theories a la Dan Brown, but that is not where I am going with this), “royal” being cognate with “real.” (There was a Spanish coin called a real because it was stamped with the king’s likeness, for instance.) Anyway, “real” can mean “king” and Unreal City can mean “city without a king,” which may relate to the Fisher King’s wound. I realize this is all wild speculation based on a French-English pun, but again, this is Eliot, and I wouldn’t put it past him.
On the poetics of the Unreal City section, I notice that “sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled” puts the action entirely in the passive voice, which reinforces the sense of the dead as no longer having volition. In the next two lines, “...each man… \ Flowed up the hill…” is interesting because “each” is individual but “flow” is necessarily collective—an individual cannot flow. This forces the individual dead soul to dissolve in the collective dead, so the dead no longer have either individuality or volition. All this nuance comes simply from the choice of words and phrasing, a remarkable piece of workmanship. The lines “There I saw… \ ...Mylae!” manage to reference Dante, but also recall both Aeneas and Odysseus, who also find old companions in the underworld, and introduce Carthage (indirectly) via Mylae. These lines are quite dense with allusion, even for The Waste Land.
To be continued in a separate post on 2: A Game of Chess.
Liza, One of my favorite poems as well. John
(Part 5: continued)
The “decaying hole among the mountains” in the next stanza recalls the earlier “carious tooth,” but this time there is moonlight (for the first time in the poem, night is not dark and light is not burning the world to dryness), “the grass is singing” but this time it is not the dry grass, and the scene has the desolation of long abandonment, rather than the desolation of desert or despair. The dry bones are dry in a new sense: dry here means “fleshless;” Ezekiel encountered dry bones and they were re-clothed with flesh and brought back to life. That the bones “can harm no one” is in keeping with the general benignity of this place. These dead are not the overwhelmed victims of a world gone to wrack, but the carefully buried dead of an earlier time, whose graves once were tended, headstones erected, though tumbled now. If this is indeed the Chapel Perilous, it seems much less perilous than the world outside.
When the rooster crows, the lightning flashes, and the rain begins. The rooster is commonly the harbinger of dawn, but I feel the presence of another bird here: the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. After nearly dying of thirst at sea (but preserved to suffer because his spiritual state keeps him in a kind of living purgatory) he finally has a moment in which his heart shifts and he is able to pray. The albatross, which he has worn as a symbol of his guilt falls off into the sea, and it begins to rain. Here as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, rain is absolution, salvation, and resurrection, all three. This stanza absolutely had to be placed just here in the poem, because the world had become as dry as it is possible to be; there was no further to go in that direction, and so water must return or the world simply dies. If Part 4 was analogous to the volta of a sonnet, this stanza is analogous to the moment when a sick patient’s fever reaches its peak, and then suddenly the fever breaks and the patient begins to strengthen.
Next we are in India, and although there is still drought, there are clouds and thunder and rain will come, but we are not told of rain; instead of rain, the thunder speaks. Perhaps its words are the rain the world truly needs. Then come the four lines which are, to me, absolutely electric. They are the heart of the poem, or at least the part of it that most leaves me shaken. The rest of The Waste Land is poetry; these lines are prophecy, and I don’t intend the debased sense of “prediction” but the original sense of the voice of god speaking through man:
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’ surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, have we existed
(Others may see nothing much in these lines, but I have lived through that moment, and I can attest to the exactness with which these lines describe it, how it feels, the terror of it, the utter commitment it requires, then and forever, how it throws one’s life all at once into a new channel. No other poem has ever captured this for me. I have longed to write about it, but after thirty years, it is still too soon, still too raw. It may take another moment like it to turn me into the person who can write about it, or perhaps I will never be able to.)
When the thunder speaks of compassion, it is via a prison out of Dante. That it is a prison of the mind is indicated by “Thinking of the key \ each confirms a prison,” since by focusing on the key, which we have heard turn once in the lock, we conclude that we are locked in. The reference to Coriolanus not only brings up exile, but also his lack of compassion. Exile is a kind of inside-out prison, and the greatest flaw Coriolanus shows is his utter lack of compassion for the common people of Rome. He cannot lower himself to take their part or even to speak civilly to them; his patrician pride is the cause of his downfall, and so he is an excellent exemplar of the need for compassion and the prison of the mind which results from its lack.
When the thunder speaks of self-control, it is through the metaphor of a boat under the controlling hand of a master sailor. It is important here, I think, not to construe this control as an external thing. The boat and the sailor are one (after all, either without the other is not what its nature is made to be), so this is still self-control, not subjection. Similarly, “your heart” must be “invited,” which is not in any sense coercive. It “would have responded gaily” to the “controlling hands.” This is similar to some Stoic philosophy, in which it is said that the heart is happiest when it is guided by the mind. If one substitutes “guiding hands” for “controlling hands,” the overt sense is much the same, and I think that the intention here truly is self-control rather than control of others. The thunder speaks of self-control to the gods in the Upanishads; in The Waste Land, it is not clear which “you” is addressed in “your heart;” perhaps the gods, perhaps humanity, perhaps the individual reader.
Finally, we have the Fisher King, fishing, his back to the arid plain. Perhaps he has crossed the plain to arrive at last at the shore of the sea; if so, then he has been with us as we passed through the arid plain in reading The Waste Land. If he is now healed, he may set his lands in order, as the health of the king is the health of the land. The phrase also echoes “set my affairs in order,” which of course is preparation for death, but I do not think this interpretation fits well here. This is a king returning to health, and the comparison that comes to my mind is Odysseus returning to Ithaca after twenty years away. He, too, must set his kingdom in order.
The multilingual string of quotations has a sort of progression, from collapse (London Bridge) through purgatory, to a desire to be the one who stands up for the victim (Procne) rather than the victim herself (Philomela), finally to successfully recovering love from the abyss. These are the fragments “shored against my ruins,” and they are not mere cultural flotsam, although the phrasing suggests a shipwrecked mariner making do with whatever drifts ashore. They contrast with the “withered stumps of time” in Part 2; there, those bits of cultural baggage have lost their force, they are no longer sustaining and have become mere cultural detritus; here they are worthwhile, they provide support, they strengthen the structure, ruinous though it be. The final lines of course refer to The Spanish Tragedy and its play-within-a-play which was the model for Hamlet, and the sense I get from them is that these fragments hold up a fractured mirror to ourselves in which we see our brokenness in that of the mirror, and that is the method in the apparent madness.
The very end is the shortest sermon in the world:
Giving. Compassion. Self-control.
Peace peace peace
I do not want to try to make an overarching interpretation of the poem; I think it speaks for itself (although it requires some effort on our part to hear what it is saying). This has been tremendously enjoyable for me, and I am very glad that Liza’s essay gave me the prod I needed to reread this wonderful poem. Thank you.
Part 5: The opening stanza clearly recapitulates the Passion, starting with the soldiers arresting Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and continuing through the “thunder of spring” (the Gospels say that thunder was heard at the moment of his death, and Easter is in the spring). No mention is made of Jesus’ resurrection, but the fact that we “are now dying \ With a little patience” may indirectly point to a hope of our resurrection, which would explain the patience.
The next stanza seems to me to describe two things in parallel, as if they were one. First, we have a trek through dry mountains, but these are not the mountains where one feels free. There is no sense of spaciousness or peace, but instead the landscape presses in with ominous thunder and a desiccated, unforgiving atmosphere. (The “sterile dry thunder” may be something Eliot experienced personally as he was growing up, as this kind of dry thunder is common during summers in the American Midwest.) Note “we should stop to drink” rather than “we would stop to drink;” the difference in meaning is significant. “Would” expresses a hypothetical intention, while “should” expresses a hypothetical fact. Drinking would be a necessity, not an option, if only water were present; the thirst is not merely uncomfortable, but life-threatening, an actual bodily need without which life cannot continue.
However, some of the descriptive elements do not fit well with a trek through mountains, and instead seem to suggest the carrying of the cross to the place of crucifixion, which gives rise to the second (implied or embedded) narrative. The “sandy road” and “feet in the sand” do not describe any track through the mountains, but rather the dry and well-trodden path from Jerusalem to Golgotha. The
“Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth” recalls the meaning of “Golgotha,” the place of the skull. “Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think” and “Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit” both could describe the carrying of the cross under the lash of Roman soldiers, who will not allow one to stop or think or stand or lie or sit. The “red sullen faces” and the “mudcracked houses” would seem to be the crowd watching the condemned on their march to crucifixion, and the houses perhaps the kind of desert dwellings to be found outside the walls of Jerusalem. This is a beautiful duality of description: in the mountain trek, the sand and the sneering faces are hallucinations but the rocks and mountains are real; in the march to the crucifixion, the sand and faces are real, and the rocks and mountains are hallucinations. The two descriptions are tied together by their common elements: exhaustion and thirst.
The following stanza expresses the state of the mind under extreme thirst. Thoughts are fragmentary and return again and again to water, images of water, associations of water, sounds of water. No other thought is able to hold the mind, nor the mind able to hold any other thought. The thought of the hermit-thrush is a kind of betrayal, since its call resembles the sound of dripping water. It is a false hope; there is no water. Except for the thrush, even the sounds are dry sounds, and there is a kind of timeless suspension in this stanza, as the suffering mind beholds this single, elongated moment of thirst. There is no sense that the thirst will end; it has expanded to become the entirety of experience.
The walking scene which follows features a white road, which may come from the antarctic expedition which Eliot says inspired the supernumerary companion, but however that may be, a white road is also something found in a desert. It is another feature of a dry landscape. The hooded figure may be the risen Jesus here, but the hooded figures in the following stanza seem more connected to the flowing stream of the dead in the unreal city in Part 1. This is reinforced by the maternal lamentations high in the air, which, in the context of the foregoing messianic imagery, recall the slaughter of the innocents and the lamentations of Rachel which are often associated with it. If these endless plains are “Ringed by the flat horizon only,” then the question “What is the city over the mountains” can only refer to a mirage if we take it literally. “Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air” also recalls the wavering inconstancy of a mirage, a city hovering above mountains which are themselves illusory. This would be an unreal city indeed, or perhaps it is the Celestial City, the New Jerusalem, the towers of which are nevertheless falling, a very bad portent indeed. Or perhaps “over the mountains” means “beyond the mountains,” which makes the city real if too distant to see, but still leaves the status of the mountains unresolved. Or, finally, perhaps explication is beside the point, which is the evocation of the sense of masses shambling in numb despair, headed from nowhere to nowhere forever.
The next surreal stanza may be based, as is said, on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, but if so, this foray into ekphrasis cannot explain the final line, in which voices are singing. That they sing “out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” brings desiccation to its completion. Not only is there no water above ground, but all the water in the wells below ground is exhausted, and all water which may have been providently stored in cisterns against drought has been emptied. It is the absolute end of water.
(Continued on next post)
4: Death by Water
About Dans le Restaurant, I can’t comment on the poetics of the original, since I do not read French, but I came cross Eliot’s earlier draft of this stanza (which would of course be his own translation) and again here it is striking how much the poetry improved from the draft to the final form. The description of Phlebas is ever so much tighter and more compelling in the final revision.
The name “Phlebas” of course means “blood,” as in phlebotomy. Blood is one of those things that can call up an infinity of associations and resonances: the sea, which is not capable of washing the blood from Lady Macbeth’s hands in her dream; the blood sacrifice, or bloodletting as an ancient cure for various ills. As he is a merchant, “profit and loss” are emblematic of the concerns of life in toto; this is a beautiful use of subtle synecdoche. This stanza my be compared with Shelley’s Ozymandias: the latter very heavy with the irony of a forgotten king who was sure his name would live forever; here in contrast, Phlebas forgets all the concerns of life, which makes of the sea a representation of the river Lethe, forgetfulness in death. This can be seen as making his death a kind of forward progress, as he moves to the next stage of death, unlike Ozymandias, who clings to the concerns of this world.
Since he “passed the stages of his age and youth” in that order, we can see his life unwinding like a tape run backwards, returning him to the unformed (and sinless, undegenerate) state of infancy. Beyond that, he enters the whirlpool, which is for me the central image here. This cannot be a literal whirlpool—it is at the bottom of the sea. But a whirlpool (or maelstrom), like a whirlwind, symbolizes primordial chaos, the unformed material from which the ordered world (“cosmos,” the opposite of “chaos”) is created. The whirlwind is then a womb image, since it is the womb from which the universe was brought forth. By regressing and finally returning to it, Phlebas is not just undoing his life, but preparing for a new birth.
The final stanza is very clearly the inscription on a headstone (or more likely a cenotaph, since Phlebas is lost at sea). First, there is the address “Gentile or Jew” which places the text in a public location where passersby unknown to the inscriber of the text will see and read it. The phrasing here emphasizes that it is unknowable in advance just who will be seeing this inscription, since “Gentile or Jew” encompasses everyone in the world, it is equivalent to saying “reader, whoever you may be.” Skipping the next somewhat puzzling line for the moment, we come to “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you,” which is very much the sort of sentiment one finds on a funerary inscription, enjoining the unknown reader to consider the reality of the deceased and to compare him to yourself, and hence come to the knowledge that you too will share his fate. It is a classic “memento mori” sentiment, but in this context, his fate is not merely death, but renewal and reincarnation, or perhaps resurrection. Thus the renewal of Phlebas foreshadows the renewal of the world.
The line “You who turn the wheel and look to windward” initially puzzled me, but after thinking through the message of the cenotaph, it appears that it is indicating that the inscription is addressed to other sailors, be they Gentile or Jew. This may seem to limit the universality of the death and renewal, but it may also merely be another point of similarity between the reader of the inscription and Phlebas, reinforcing the connection and the conclusion of renewal for sailors especially. Although the words may be addressed to sailors, the words of a funerary inscription speak to whoever reads them, without limitation, including readers of The Waste Land.
Therefore part 4 does in fact set the stage for the transition from the degradation of the first three sections to the renewal in the fifth section. The Waste Land has somewhat the form of a gigantic sonnet, with octave developing the theme of decay, then the volta at (the very brief) part 4, followed by the sestet, part 5, which resolves or reverses the theme of the octave. One need not think of a sonnet specifically of course. The octave/volta/sestet structure is a rhetorical scheme, not a verse form, and the same scheme can be seen writ large in The Waste Land, whether or not one notes that a Petrarchan sonnet fits in the same rhetorical envelope.
I am having great fun writing this, whether anyone reads it or not. Onward to part 5!
Liza, before I use up any more space talking about my views on The Waste Land, I want to take a moment to comment on your article. First, as I have already said, I appreciate it very much, as it is both insightful and motivating (it motivated me to re-read this fine poem after many years). I especially enjoyed your discussion of the line from Verlaine and all the connections which ramify out from it.
I also want to respond to your story in part 3 about the various unique takes different professors have on the Tiresias stanza. I have had for some time a whole historical-cultural perspective on just this sort of thing, which I have never bothered to set down in print; it would probably be more appropriate in the “Leave Literature Alone” or “Why I Am Not A PhD” comments, but here is where I happened to be when I thought to write it down, so here is where it is going to go.
The clickbait title for this would be something like “Bad criticism is all Isaac Newton’s fault.”
Both scientific and artistic endeavor have been going on for thousands of years, and for most of that time the arts had the upper hand. Not that scientific inquiry was disregarded (mathematics and astronomy did have their own Muse, after all), but it was a minor part of culture. With Galileo and especially Newton, the sciences became much more dynamic and the modern idea of progress was born from the observable progress of science. Progress is such a pervasive part of our culture now that it is hard to keep in mind that it was not always so.
Consider the octopus: it has a beak. But whence the beak? The octopus is a mollusk, and its distant ancestor resembled a clam. At the hinge of the shell was a small organ for grasping and anchoring. This organ developed over the course of time to become the entire exterior body of the octopus, the original shell being reduced to a small beak. The major became minor, and the minor major, and its tentacles now reach everywhere.
The hegemony of science arises from a confusion. The number of people who understand what pure science is is not much larger today than it ever was, but science begets technology, and technology begets prosperity (at least for the educated class), and so science, technology, progress, and prosperity are all conflated in the general outlook of our culture. The great mass of practical people who do not especially care about high culture or pure science then confer on science (as they misconceive it) the high prestige it has enjoyed for the last two centuries. Shelley said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world – how I wish that were true; but I fear that practical people are the unconscious legislators of the world, and there is little to be done about that. Perhaps nothing should be done.
Now loss of status is never comfortable, and this has produced a sense of grievance in the arts and a tendency to blame science for the loss. (C. P. Snow gives a good discussion of the antagonism between the arts and the sciences in “The Two Cultures.”) At the same time, the attempt to regain status tends to take science as a model, since it is the current paradigm of success. (This is of course misguided, since imitating the leader is no way to retake the lead.) This results in some of the practices of science being adopted in an area of culture where they are not only inappropriate but look like crude imitations made without understanding. Look to the cargo cults of some of the Pacific islands for an analogy to this behavior. I don’t mean to say that people in the arts are stupid, far from it; I mean that because this imitation of science is driven by culturally embedded and therefore unconscious perceptions of status, grievance, and success, it is not a conscious imitation. Even very intelligent people can act stupidly when they act unconsciously.
In what does this imitation of science consist? Primarily it is the conflation of two wildly different things, scholarship and research. Research is quite properly the main activity of working scientists and scholarship the main activity of students of the arts (creation is of course the main activity of practitioners of the arts). Research requires results to be new; there is no credit in being the second discoverer of a theoretical result. This is especially true in mathematics. For example, one of my classmates in graduate school had had three dissertations shot out from under her because some other mathematician somewhere in the world proved what she was working to prove, just a few weeks ahead of her. The value of her dissertation dropped instantaneously to zero, and she had to start over. She was working on her fourth dissertation when I knew her. This was one of the things that led me to take my master’s degree and go home.
This combination of factors, namely the status disparity driven by the conflation of prosperity with progress with science, the transfer of the norms and practices of science to the arts, and the resulting conflation of scholarship with research, leads to the current academic situation in the arts. Faculty are required to publish research, which is required to be new. Given how many people are analyzing how few classic works, there is a limited amount of “new” to go around, and three options present themselves. One may expand the canon (not a bad idea, and perhaps a reason why comparative literature is a little less ingrown that English literature); one may delve ever deeper into minutiae (strictly a band-aid of limited scope – one of my wife’s friends saw a PhD dissertation on Milton’s use of the comma, and just how much further could one go in this direction?); or one may develop ever newer critical theories, which is open-ended and seems to be the preferred option.
The content of the theories isn’t specified, only their newness, and there is not the empirical backstop enjoyed by the sciences to keep the theories honest. When everything sensible has been said before, the only way to say something new is to say something which is less sensible than what came before, and so on, eternally ratcheting the theory along a path leading directly away from sense. The whole system of publication-based tenure decisions then automatically filters out those who are not willing to play this game (and convince themselves that it is not a game). Then of course, this mad Laputan search for new ways to analyze works of art invites in any sort of external theory because novelty is in high demand. In a sense then, the academic arts have lost their immune system; there is no defense against any idea which purports to be a new method of analysis. These ideas are not pushing their way into the arts; they are being pulled in by the imperative of novelty.
The rife political postures which pass for critical theories are not, to my mind, the fundamental problem. They are more like opportunistic infections in an immunocompromised patient. That most of them come from the political left is to be expected, as the left has always generated more theories than the right because it strains toward change rather than stability. The battle for the soul of the arts cannot be won on the field of politics, because the conflict is not essentially a political one. If I were to apostrophize Arts as a person to whom I am giving counsel, I would say,
Arts, do not envy Science; it is not better than you.
Do not listen to the practical people who do not value you.
Do not mistake scholarship for research, which is the job of Science.
Arts, your job is to nurture generations of cultivated minds.
Newness comes from what you create, not from what you analyze.
What you offer has value in itself; teach each generation how to love it.
When the patient is healthier, the infection will be thrown off.
There, I got that off my chest. Now, back to The Waste Land.
3: The Fire Sermon
In the first two lines, the “fingers of leaf \ Clutch” seems almost an answer to the question in part 1, “where are the roots that clutch?” Next, I must confess that I am perplexed by “the river’s tent is broken.” I feel strongly that there is some very specific meaning intended here by the word “tent” but I cannot sniff it out. Still, the Thames is sweet and does run softly until he ends his (Spenser’s) song, although the land is brown, the sounds are unheard and the nymphs are departed. Time is very confused here, as this is Spenser’s Thames surrounded by modern desolation but not by modern corruption (although the nymphs here may be not just nymphs but also the women companioning the heirs of the City directors in their assignation by the river). Once the song is finished with the last refrain, the spell of the past is broken; Time rights itself and shows up as a conflation of Time and Death much more explicitly than in Marvell, and immediately the river scene reverts to its fully modern squalor.
Now the canal is dull, no doubt with oily scum on the water, and we have rats, white bodies, bones, and again rats. These white bodies do not seem to me to represent anything pure or anything sexual. I see here only the pallor of deprivation and the bloodless white of death. One may imagine them drowned, washed up on the shore along with Ferdinand’s father. (Why father is changed to brother and a new separate father introduced is a puzzle to me. As with the broken tent, I sense something specific here that I am missing.) Then Marvell again breaks the spell, this time of Death, but immediately passes the baton to John Day, who pivots back to Eliot and we suddenly find Sweeny and Mrs. Porter in the midst of an Australian army song. Clearly, this rather low vitality is a step better than death, a restoration of the physical world but not the moral world to life. The concluding Verlaine line seems to me to be celebrating a greater healing than has been achieved so far and points toward a further, higher, purer state than the mere lust of Sweeny and Mrs. Porter. The immediate transition back to Philomel connects with the children in Verlaine via singing as well as thematically, since the nightingale is famous for its song.
(By the way, I just love your discussion of this stanza, especially your delving into both Verlaine and Wagner. I hear the line from Verlaine differently from what you suggest, but The Waste Land is a big boat with room for many passengers looking out different ports. Your view is, I think, more interesting than mine; mine is just what I see.)
Back in the Unreal City, the brown fog of dawn is still present at noon (if we didn’t already know this was London, that would tell us), and we meet Mr. Eugenides (whose name means “child of good birth,” and is one letter different from Eumenides, for what that’s worth). We don’t know whether he has one eye, but he is a merchant. The phrase “demotic French” is interesting because one usually hears the word “demotic” in the context of “demotic Greek,” where it is used to distinguish Greek as spoken now from classical Greek. Mr. Eugenides is of course Greek, but the Unreal City is connected to Baudelaire, so the substitution of “French” for “Greek” in the phrase ties the two together.
Next we have the “violet hour,” a phrase repeated twice in six lines (and again later in the poem there are violet air and violet light – Eliot seems to love violet) and a very somatic description of leaning back and looking away from a desk at the end of a long work session. This is virtually the only place in the poem where there is a bodily sensation rendered poetically; all other descriptions are of external senses (sight, hearing, smell), but there is precious little of touch in The Waste Land, and such touching as there is, is observed rather than felt.
The throbbing taxi that comes next is interesting because, besides the living biological sound of it, idling cars actually did throb at one time. I recall that older cars and trucks, when idling, often didn’t idle quietly and steadily like modern cars do, but had some more primitive system that let the engine wind down and then revved it slightly to keep it going. The result was a throbbing sound coming from the car engine, which I have heard for myself many times, especially on a cold day (such as a winter day with brown fog, for instance). The engine revving and subsiding actually made the car pulse visibly forward and back, so you could also actually see it throb. This is not to take anything away from the poem, but to mention that “the taxi throbbing, waiting” is an accurate concrete observation in addition to all the other ways it works as poetry.
With Tiresias looking on from his intersex perspective, the typist is visited by a young man. “Carbuncular” sounds like “avuncular,” which is a sound echo I hear because the latter word is so much more common in describing people. However, this young man merely has a bad complexion. Once he concludes his military-style assault on her sexual favors (of which she seems almost a detached observer herself), we have Tiresias parenthetically outlining his curriculum vita as a seer. But such a tawdry commonplace occurrence hardly requires a seer to act as museum guide. The bathos of this rather undercuts Tiresias as an authority, as if someone were to say “I am a Nobel-winning physicist, and I am here to tell you that water is wet.”
OK, the above came off as a little harsh. It’s not that I dislike this section of the poem; it’s more that the diminution of Tiresias here is obvious, and indicates in a new, indirect way, the degeneracy of the modern age: even the greatest seers have nothing to see here and now but passionless, disconnected liaisons. It is a wasteland to the vision of the seer as well as to the common person. The final blow to anything fine or high is the typist’s attitude after the young man leaves. Whereas the lines reference a woman beside herself with woe over her lost honor, the actual typist seems quite indifferent. She is so numb that she cannot even feel sullied: we are degenerate and we are so used to it that it has become invisible.
In the next section, almost everything I noticed has already been said. I only note that a mandoline is a musical instrument but also a device for slicing deli meat, and that neither one exactly whines. The choice of “whine” makes it seem more like a sitar, which perhaps connects the scene at the pub with Buddhism or Hinduism in a (more than usually) oblique way. As to the Ionian white and gold, it is easy to find pictures of the interior of Magnus Martyr, and it is indeed strikingly beautiful in a way that seems not quite to belong in London. Also, in the pictures, one can see the columns and their capitals, which are indeed of the Ionic architectural order, rather than the Doric of the Corinthian. The barges remind us of Cleopatra’s barge referenced in section 2, but this queen is Elizabeth of course. This connects with Das Rheingold not only through the Rhinemaidens’ song, but also since both Alberich and Elizabeth give up love for rulership (though Elizabeth only gave up marriages of state and probably cheated on the whole Virgin Queen image). The red sails of the barges, by the way, are characteristic of Phoenician ships, which famously used red sails.
Although the subsequent pair of rhyming quatrains has identifiable allusions (which I missed, so thank you, various websites) I notice that it also has the form of a traditional English riddle, a form which goes back to Anglo-Saxon times. In reading it, I almost expected the “… on the floor of a narrow canoe” to be followed by “What am I?” This form of riddle requires one to find a context in which all the clues make sense, an approach which is not inappropriate to The Waste Land as a whole. I interpret the scene as a woman having sex in a canoe (a descent from the glorious barge above), perhaps for the first time (hence “undid me,” as in the loss of status and respect of a woman who is “fallen”). The man feels that he has transgressed and apologizes (very different from the carbuncular young man), and the woman seems at the end rather unperturbed or detached (very like the typist); or perhaps she has merely given up.
Next we have the word “nothing” three times in four lines, again reminding me of the Heart Sutra. Finally, we come to Carthage and hear from Augustine and the Buddha. Carthage is such a dense nexus for this poem! Augustine comes to Carthage, and so does Aeneas (who then has the archetypal broken relationship with Dido, leaving love behind for his destiny of rulership, just as Alberich and Elizabeth did above), Mycenae was a sea battle between Carthage and Rome, Phoenicians founded Carthage, Dido burns, Carthage itself and its lands burn. And then the last four lines of this section burn. Perhaps the Lord plucks Augustine out of the Carthagenian flames, which represent the sin from which he wished to turn away.
2: A Game of Chess
At first I questioned the length of the description of the lady’s dressing table with its wretched excess of wretched taste, but then I realized that, in trying to evoke the overwhelming rococo confusion of decoration and scent, only too much is enough. The poor hapless breeze “freshening from the window” finds its freshness outgunned by the overpowering artificiality of the room and its contents. This woman is thoroughly denatured as only the wealthy can be. The scene of Philomel displayed “as though a window gave upon the sylvan scene” displaces any real exterior scene from consideration and further cuts off this room and its inhabitant from any contact with the natural world. This lady’s vanity table is the Vanity of Vanities (all is vanity). The allusion to Cleopatra’s barge underlines the bathos of this scene: the barge is presented by Enobarbus as honestly magnificent; this room is merely overdone. Further, the “other withered stumps of time” reconfirm that none of the cultural artifacts in this room retain any of the life with which they are expected to grace our existence. To me, this room seems more dead than the Unreal City, a complete soul death captured in a snapshot of decadent taste.
I imagine that as she brushes her hair, it stands out and crackles and sparks with each stroke of the comb. One might, if refusing delivery on the poetical elements here, simply say that she needs to use conditioner. However, the description is otherworldly, almost monstrous. She seems half gorgon, half goddess, and yet in the next stanza she is merely a decadent wealthy lady with the “nervous condition” of the too-sensitive, too-bored upper class matron. She does not appear to be able to communicate with her husband at all (if indeed those were his footsteps on the stair). There is nothing healthy here.
His answer to her initial questions seems to reference trench warfare (“rats’ alley”), which may indicate that his mind is elsewhere, on the recent war, or perhaps that he sees their marriage as a prolonged conflict in which he is unable either to advance or to retreat. Her next question, “What is that noise?”, is the typical question of a nervous, unsettled person; however after that, things get interesting, as the answers are “Nothing again nothing,” recalling the Heart Sutra. In fact, all of the answers to her next four questions are stated, point for point, in the second half of the hyacinth girl passage, to which the repetition of “Those were pearls that were his eyes” directs us back. The word “nothing” appears six times in seven lines here, making the Heart Sutra unavoidable, at least to me.
I haven’t seen anyone comment on the “Shakespeherian rag” line’s musicality. If you know what ragtime music sounds like, it is obvious that, besides any meaning one might assign to this line, the “O O O O” and the extra “he” in Shakespeare function to make the line scan as a ragtime lyric. Each “O” lands on a musical beat and they are equally spaced and equally weighted. The extra syllable is a common vocal styling for a ragtime singer, creating a syllable that can be hit hard just where the music requires a strong beat. I know I have heard other examples of this, but I can’t recall one just now. If this line is supposed to be an answer to the question “Is there nothing in your head?” the answer would appear to be “yes,” although it could also be taken as another example of a “withered stump” with Shakespeare reduced from great playwright to musical nonce tune.
The next few lines sound like a visit from Prufrock, with very similar style and tone, and a similar limp dithering over inconsequentialities. The game of chess itself may represent conflict, move and countermove, but in this couple we see very few moves at all. “Pressing lidless eyes” gives an image of players leaning over the board, hands to the sides of their faces, fingers pressing upward on the corners of their eyes, holding them open as they stare like lizards at the board. I have seen chess players adopt exactly this posture; it is a nearly motionless tableau.
In the next section, which appears to be straightforward pub gossip, I note that the short, uneducated sentences fall naturally into verse lines. Of course, this naturalness is artificial, but it is still striking to me how easily the verse line length accommodates the unelaborated thoughts of the speaker. The barman calls time like Gabriel sounding the Apocalypse, closing time = Closing Time. Or perhaps the line could be read as “Hurry up! It is I, Time!” making the barman something supernatural, but that seems improbable.
If you’ve read this far, thank you! I am thoroughly enjoying this process of setting my thoughts in order about this fascinating poem.