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The Waste Land






(1922)

The Waste Land was published in the same year as two other seminal modernist texts— Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. It is perhaps Eliot’s best-known work, and certainly his most difficult. It is crucial to have an edition of the poem that is effectively footnoted in order to follow the myriad allusions. Much of the poem’s difficulty stems from its lack of a coherent narrative; it instead presents a series of scenes and images from which a reader must attempt to extract meaning. Its overwhelming message (and its legacy) is of the barrenness and decay of the modern Western world, and the fragmentation of the poem reflects the confusion and uncertainty Eliot (and other modernist writers) believed characterized modern existence.

Eliot, in a general note to the poem, acknowledged that much of the work’s symbolism was suggested by a book by Jessie L. Weston, in which she linked ancient fertility myths to Christianity, focusing on the archetypal story of the Fisher King. The Fisher King, whose death or illness produces drought and desolation in the land and who can only be revived by a knight who finds some form of the Grail, was, according to Weston, parallel to the Christian God. In the poem, “Eliot, following Weston, thus uses a great variety of mythological and religious material, both Occidental and Oriental, to paint a symbolic picture of the modern Waste Land and the need for regeneration”.

The dedication to Ezra Pound, “the better craftsman, ” is in thanks for the enormous amount of assistance Pound provided in editing the poem for Eliot. The epigraph refers to the Cumaean Sibyl in Greek mythology, who was granted immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth. This is why she says, in this passage, “I want to die, ” and her desire for escape is fitting as an introduction to the poem and its portrayal of the entrapments of a modern wasteland. There are suggestions throughout the poem of being trapped, some of which explicitly evoke the Sibyl’s dilemma: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing”. Tiresias is also in this type of in-between state: “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, / Old man with wrinkled female breasts...”. Perhaps this entrapment in a difficult luminal state is one result of the modern wasteland.

The poem’s bleak imagery begins immediately. The opening suggests that “April is the cruelest month” because it provides false hope; although there are “lilacs, ” the land is still “dead”. This desolation is also suggested by “this stony rubbish” and the suggestion in the following lines that man knows “only / A heap of broken images” and that the landscape is marked by “the dead tree” and “the dry stone”. The references to dryness continue throughout, culminating just before the thunder speaks in stanza 5 in its “empty cisterns” and “exhausted wells”. Here even the sacred river Ganges—bathing in which (Hindu legend held) would give renewal to a person—is dried up.

Imagery specifically relating to London occurs in the last stanza of part 1, where Eliot compares the businessmen fl owing over London Bridge during the morning commute to Dante’s flow of the damned into hell, and again in the descriptions of the Thames in part 3. In the last half of the “Unreal City” stanza, the use of first person, the reference to “one I knew”, and the use of Baudelaire’s phrase “mon semblable—mon frè re” [my likeness—my brother] all suggest that the speaker is in fact one of these businessmen, and Eliot himself would have known this daily ritual well from his time working at Lloyd’s Bank. In part 3 Eliot takes his refrain (“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song”) from Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion, a marriage song, adding irony to his descriptions of the river as filled with garbage and infested with rats.

The City returns in part 3 with an idyllic description of St. Magnus Martyr, a church near London Bridge: “the walls / Of Magnus Martyr hold / Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold”; however, this seems to be but a brief glimpse of a lost world, and the following stanzas (which Eliot called the “Song of the Thames-daughters”) return to the dingy imagery of the river.

The sterility of the wasteland world extends to the fruitlessness or lack of fulfillment in sexual encounters. This is evident in the relationship between Lil and Albert in the last stanza of part 2 (in which Lil seems to have lost her youthful good looks as a result of a drugstore abortion) and in the mention of the doomed relationship between Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester in the second Thames-daughter’s song in part 3. The final Thames-daughter also describes an unfulfilling sexual encounter in a canoe on the river. Tiresias observes this type of encounter between the typist and the “young man carbuncular”; the typist’s reaction after the exit of her “departed lover”—“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over”—illustrates a modern indifference to sexual coupling and hints at the meaningless of life in general. Even conversations are fruitless, as in the dialogue in part 2, a representative line of which is “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head? ”.

Despite its lack of narrative, the poem does feature several distinct characters. Madame Sosostris, the fortune-teller, is introduced in part 1 of the poem, reading the tarot cards for an unidentified listener. Her reference to “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” anticipates the “Death by Water” section of the poem. “The Hanged Man” symbolizes the self-sacrifice of the fertility god, who is killed so that his resurrection can generate fertility; therefore, her inability to locate this card is another indication of the barrenness of the modern world.

Tiresias makes his appearance in part 3, and Eliot, in a note, called him “the most important personage in the poem, ” claiming that “what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” Using Tiresias as an observer is somewhat ironic, since he is blind, but in his literary appearances (as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex) Tiresias is often portrayed as able to see (metaphorically, through his gift of prophecy) more clearly than others, despite his literal blindness. Here he “Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest”. Tiresias is a particularly fitting observer for this modern wasteland, as he had previously observed the tragic events leading to the years of plague and desolation in the city of Thebes. Indeed, parallels like this between the historical (or mythical) and the modern are created throughout the poem, suggesting that the emptiness described here has in fact been evident throughout history.

Phlebas the Phoenician is mourned in the brief part 4 of the poem, and his “death by water” is often seen by critics as a death without resurrection. The final line of this section provides a warning of mortality for all readers. In part 5 of the poem, as earlier, there is no water (although it is imagined: “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop”); there is merely “dry sterile thunder without rain”. Ironically, the only time there is sufficient water in this wasteland, it produces death.

The final two stanzas of part 5 of the poem contain the most significant allusions to Eastern philosophy, which was a particular interest of Eliot’s, although it is also referenced in the title of part 3. The Fire Sermon was preached by the Buddha against the fires of passions that, he argued, prevent people’s regeneration. The title of part 5 refers to a Hindu fable in which different groups interpret the divine voice (expressed as thunder) saying DA in different ways: Datta, “to give alms”; Dayadhvam, “to have compassion”; Damyata, “to practice self-control.” In the poem, these interpretations of the thunder’s “DA” seem to provoke its listeners to question whether they have in fact performed any of these honorable actions: “ Datta: what have we given? ”. Then, after a final stanza that may be spoken by a Fisher King figure wondering whether he can “set [his] lands in order”, the poem ends with the repetition of “Shantih shantih shantih”, a traditional benediction, but one that is unfamiliar to any Western audience, perhaps suggesting that any final blessing is ultimately beyond our understanding.

 


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