Instructor: Prof. Cecilia Liu  

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THE WASTE LAND

The Waste Land Section I

The Waste Land Section II: "A Game of Chess"

The Waste Land Section III: "The Fire Sermon"

The Waste Land Section IV: "Death by Water"

Study Questions

Further Reading

Dry, Allusive, and Ambiguous: A Close Reading of "The Wasteland"


The Waste Land Section I

Summary

The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence ("I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter"). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste where the speaker will show the reader "something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust" (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines). The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a "hyacinth girl" and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered through quotations from Wagner's operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet's sins.

Form

Like "Prufrock," this section of The Waste Land can be seen as a modified dramatic monologue. The four speakers in this section are frantic in their need to speak, to find an audience, but they find themselves surrounded by dead people and thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars. Because the sections are so short and the situations so confusing, the effect is not one of an overwhelming impression of a single character; instead, the reader is left with the feeling of being trapped in a crowd, unable to find a familiar face.
Also like "Prufrock," The Waste Land employs only partial rhyme schemes and short bursts of structure. These are meant to reference--but also rework-- the literary past, achieving simultaneously a stabilizing and a defamiliarizing effect. The world of The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier time, but it cannot be approached in the same way. The inclusion of fragments in languages other than English further complicates matters. The reader is not expected to be able to translate these immediately; rather, they are reminders of the cosmopolitan nature of twentieth-century Europe and of mankind's fate after the Tower of Babel: We will never be able to perfectly comprehend one another.

Commentary 

Not only is The Waste Land Eliot's greatest work, but it may be--along with Joyce's Ulysses--the greatest work of all modernist literature. Most of the poem was written in 1921, and it first appeared in print in 1922. As the poem's dedication indicates, Eliot received a great deal of guidance from Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and to break up the rhyme scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot's wife, Vivien, also had a significant role in the poem's final form. A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe. A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem's epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl's predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former glory. Thus, the underlying plot of The Waste Land, inasmuch as it can be said to have one, revolves around Eliot's reading of two extraordinarily influential contemporary cultural/anthropological texts, Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough. Both of these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern thought and religion; of particular interest to both authors is the story of the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is the cause of his country becoming a desiccated "waste landˇ¨ Heal the Fisher King, the legend says, and the land will regain its fertility. According to Weston and Frazier, healing the Fisher King has been the subject of mythic tales from ancient Egypt to Arthurian England. Eliot picks up on the figure of the Fisher King legend's wasteland as an appropriate description of the state of modern society. The important difference, of course, is that in Eliot's world there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all. The legend's imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative (like religion or mythology) in the modern world.

Eliotˇ¦s poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poem's writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its apex in the Four Quartets. The overall range of allusions in The Waste Land, though, suggests no overarching paradigm but rather a grab bag of broken fragments that must somehow be pieced together to form a coherent whole. While Eliot employs a deliberately difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display his own intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the twentieth century.
The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. Marie's childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledding, and coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture.

The second episode contains a troubled religious proposition. The speaker describes a true wasteland of "stony rubbish"; in it, he says, man can recognize only "[a] heap of broken images." Yet the scene seems to offer salvation: shade and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only of nothingness--a handful of dust--which is so profound as to be frightening; yet truth also resides here: No longer a religious phenomenon achieved through Christ, truth is represented by a mere void. The speaker remembers a female figure from his past, with whom he has apparently had some sort of romantic involvement. In contrast to the present setting in the desert, his memories are lush, full of water and blooming flowers. The vibrancy of the earlier scene, though, leads the speaker to a revelation of the nothingness he now offers to show the reader. Again memory serves to contrast the past with the present, but here it also serves to explode the idea of coherence in either place. In the episode from the past, the "nothingness" is more clearly a sexual failure, a moment of impotence. Despite the overall fecundity and joy of the moment, no reconciliation, and, therefore, no action, is possible. This in turn leads directly to the desert waste of the present. In the final line of the episode attention turns from the desert to the sea. Here, the sea is not a locus for the fear of nothingness, and neither is it the locus for a philosophical interpretation of nothingness; rather, it is the site of true, essential nothingness itself. The line comes from a section of Tristan und Isolde where Tristan waits for Isolde to come heal him. She is supposedly coming by ship but fails to arrive. The ocean is truly empty, devoid of the possibility of healing or revelation.

The third episode explores Eliot's fascination with transformation. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris conducts the most outrageous form of "reading" possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into predictions, many of which will come true in succeeding sections of the poem. Eliot transforms the traditional tarot pack to serve his purposes. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work of magic and transformation in English literature, Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Those are pearls that were his eyes" is a quote from one of Ariel's songs). Transformation in The Tempest, though, is the result of the highest art of humankind. Here, transformation is associated with fraud, vulgarity, and cheap mysticism. That Madame Sosostris will prove to be right in her predictions of death and transformation is a direct commentary on the failed religious mysticism and prophecy of the preceding desert section.
The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland of the poem, the modern city. Eliot's London references Baudelaire's Paris ("Unreal City"), Dickens's London ("the brown fog of a winter dawn") and Dante's hell ("the flowing crowd of the dead"). The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker recognizes, is a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of ghoulish questions about a corpse buried in his garden: again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and fertility. This encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the tremendous slaughter of the first World War; however, it can also be read as an exercise in ultimate futility: as we see in Stetson's failure to respond to the speaker's inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights of history, tradition, and the poet's dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.

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The Waste Land Section II: "A Game of Chess"


Summary

This section takes its title from two plays by the early 17th-century playwright Thomas Middleton, in one of which the moves in a game of chess denote stages in a seduction. This section focuses on two opposing scenes, one of high society and one of the lower classes. The first half of the section portrays a wealthy, highly groomed woman surrounded by exquisite furnishings. As she waits for a lover, her neurotic thoughts become frantic, meaningless cries. Her day culminates with plans for an excursion and a game of chess. The second part of this section shifts to a London barroom, where two women discuss a third woman. Between the bartender's repeated calls of "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" (the bar is closing for the night) one of the women recounts a conversation with their friend Lil, whose husband has just been discharged from the army. She has chided Lil over her failure to get herself some false teeth, telling her that her husband will seek out the company of other women if she doesn't improve her appearance. Lil claims that the cause of her ravaged looks is the medication she took to induce an abortion; having nearly died giving birth to her fifth child, she had refused to have another, but her husband "won't leave [her] alone." The women leave the bar to a chorus of "good night(s)" reminiscent of Ophelia's farewell speech in Hamlet.

Form

The first part of the section is largely in unrhymed iambic pentameter lines, or blank verse. As the section proceeds, the lines become increasingly irregular in length and meter, giving the feeling of disintegration, of things falling apart. As the woman of the first half begins to give voice to her paranoid thoughts, things do fall apart, at least formally: We read lines of dialogue, then a snippet from a nonsense song. The last four lines of the first half rhyme, although they are irregular in meter, suggesting at least a partial return to stability.
The second half of the section is a dialogue interrupted by the barman's refrain. Rather than following an organized structure of rhyme and meter, this section constitutes a loose series of phrases connected by "I said(s)" and "she said(s)." This is perhaps the most poetically experimental section of the entire poem. Eliot is writing in a lower-class vernacular here that resists poetic treatment. This section refutes the prevalent claim that iambic pentameter mirrors normal English speech patterns: Line length and stresses are consistently irregular. Yet the section sounds like poetry: the repeated use of "I said" and the grounding provided by the barman's chorus allow the woman's speech to flow elegantly, despite her rough phrasing and the coarse content of her story.

Commentary

The two women of this section of the poem represent the two sides of modern sexuality: while one side of this sexuality is a dry, barren interchange inseparable from neurosis and self-destruction, the other side of this sexuality is a rampant fecundity associated with a lack of culture and rapid aging. The first woman is associated by allusion with Cleopatra, Dido, and even Keats's Lamia, by virtue of the lushness of language surrounding her (although Eliot would never have acknowledged Keats as an influence). She is a frustrated, overly emotional but not terribly intellectual figure, oddly sinister, surrounded by "strange synthetic perfumes" and smoking candles. She can be seen as a counterpart to the title character of Eliot's earlier "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," with whom she shares both a physical setting and a profound sense of isolation. Her association with Dido and Cleopatra, two women who committed suicide out of frustrated love, suggests her fundamental irrationality. Unlike the two queens of myth, however, this woman will never become a cultural touchstone. Her despair is pathetic, rather than moving, as she demands that her lover stay with her and tell her his thoughts. The lover, who seems to be associated with the narrator of this part of the poem, can think only of drowning (again, in a reference to The Tempest) and rats among dead men's bones. The woman is explicitly compared to Philomela, a character out of Ovid's Metamorphoses who is raped by her brother-in-law the king, who then cuts her tongue out to keep her quiet. She manages to tell her sister, who helps her avenge herself by murdering the king's son and feeding him to the king. The sisters are then changed into birds, Philomela into a nightingale. This comparison suggests something essentially disappointing about the woman, that she is unable to communicate her interior self to the world. The woman and her surroundings, although aesthetically pleasing, are ultimately sterile and meaningless, as suggested by the nonsense song that she sings (which manages to debase even Shakespeare).
The second scene in this section further diminishes the possibility that sex can bring regeneration--either cultural or personal. This section is remarkably free of the cultural allusions that dominate the rest of the poem; instead, it relies on vernacular speech to make its point. Notice that Eliot is using a British vernacular: By this point he had moved to England permanently and had become a confirmed Anglophile. Although Eliot is able to produce startlingly beautiful poetry from the rough speech of the women in the bar, he nevertheless presents their conversation as further reason for pessimism. Their friend Lil has done everything the right way--married, supported her soldier husband, borne children--yet she is being punished by her body. Interestingly, this section ends with a line echoing Ophelia's suicide speech in Hamlet; this links Lil to the woman in the first section of the poem, who has also been compared to famous female suicides. The comparison between the two is not meant to suggest equality between them or to propose that the first woman's exaggerated sense of high culture is in any way equivalent to the second woman's lack of it; rather, Eliot means to suggest that neither woman's form of sexuality is regenerative.

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The Waste Land Section III: "The Fire Sermon"

Summary

The title of this, the longest section of The Waste Land, is taken from a sermon given by Buddha in which he encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolized by fire) and seek freedom from earthly things. A turn away from the earthly does indeed take place in this section, as a series of increasingly debased sexual encounters concludes with a river-song and a religious incantation. The section opens with a desolate riverside scene: Rats and garbage surround the speaker, who is fishing and "musing on the king my brother's wreck." The river-song begins in this section, with the refrain from Spenser's Prothalamion: "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song." A snippet from a vulgar soldier's ballad follows, then a reference back to Philomela (see the previous section). The speaker is then propositioned by Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris's tarot pack. Eugenides invites the speaker to go with him to a hotel known as a meeting place for homosexual trysts.
The speaker then proclaims himself to be Tiresias, a figure from classical mythology who has both male and female features ("Old man with wrinkled female breasts") and is blind but can "see" into the future. Tiresias/the speaker observes a young typist, at home for tea, who awaits her lover, a dull and slightly arrogant clerk. The woman allows the clerk to have his way with her, and he leaves victorious. Tiresias, who has "foresuffered all," watches the whole thing. After her lover's departure, the typist thinks only that she's glad the encounter is done and over.
A brief interlude begins the river-song in earnest. First, a fisherman's bar is described, then a beautiful church interior, then the Thames itself. These are among the few moments of tranquility in the poem, and they seem to represent some sort of simpler alternative. The Thames-daughters, borrowed from Spenser's poem, chime in with a nonsense chorus ("Weialala leia / Wallala leialala"). The scene shifts again, to Queen Elizabeth I in an amorous encounter with the Earl of Leicester. The queen seems unmoved by her lover's declarations, and she thinks only of her "people humble people who expect / Nothing." The section then comes to an abrupt end with a few lines from St. Augustine's Confessions and a vague reference to the Buddha's Fire Sermon ("burning").

Form

This section of The Waste Land is notable for its inclusion of popular poetic forms, particularly musical ones. The more plot-driven sections are in Eliot's usual assortment of various line lengths, rhymed at random. "The Fire Sermon," however, also includes bits of many musical pieces, including Spenser's wedding song (which becomes the song of the Thames-daughters), a soldier's ballad, a nightingale's chirps, a song from Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, and a mandolin tune (which has no words but is echoed in "a clatter and a chatter from within"). The use of such "low" forms cuts both ways here: In one sense, it provides a critical commentary on the episodes described, the cheap sexual encounters shaped by popular culture (the gramophone, the men's hotel). But Eliot also uses these bits and pieces to create high art, and some of the fragments he uses (the lines from Spenser in particular) are themselves taken from more exalted forms. In the case of the Prothalamion, in fact, Eliot is placing himself within a tradition stretching back to ancient Greece (classically, "prothalamion" is a generic term for a poem-like song written for a wedding). Again this provides an ironic contrast to the debased goings-on but also provides another form of connection and commentary. Another such reference, generating both ironic distance and proximate parallels, is the inclusion of Elizabeth I: The liaison between Elizabeth and Leicester is traditionally romanticized, and, thus, the reference seems to clash with the otherwise sordid nature of this section. However, Eliot depicts Elizabeth--and Spenser, for that matter--as a mere fragment, stripped of noble connotations and made to represent just one more piece of cultural rubbish. Again, this is not meant to be a democratizing move but a nihilistic one: Romance is dead.

Commentary

The opening two stanzas of this section describe the ultimate "Waste Land" as Eliot sees it. The wasteland is cold, dry, and barren, covered in garbage. Unlike the desert, which at least burns with heat, this place is static, save for a few scurrying rats. Even the river, normally a symbol of renewal, has been reduced to a "dull canal." The ugliness stands in implicit contrast to the "Sweet Thames" of Spenser's time. The most significant image in these lines, though, is the rat. Like the crabs in Prufrock, rats are scavengers, taking what they can from the refuse of higher-order creatures. The rat could be said to provide a model for Eliot's poetic process: Like the rat, Eliot takes what he can from earlier, grander generations and uses the bits and pieces to sustain (poetic) life. Somehow this is preferable to the more coherent but vulgar existence of the contemporary world, here represented by the sound of horns and motors in the distance, intimating a sexual liaison.

The actual sexual encounters that take place in this section of the poem are infinitely unfruitful. Eugenides proposes a homosexual tryst, which by its very nature thwarts fertility. The impossibility of regeneration by such means is symbolized by the currants in his pocketˇXthe desiccated, deadened version of what were once plump, fertile fruits. The typist and her lover are equally barren in their way, even though reproduction is at least theoretically possible for the two. Living in so impoverished a manner that she does not even own a bed, the typist is certainly not interested in a family. Elizabeth and Leicester are perhaps the most interesting of the three couples, however. For political reasons, Elizabeth was required to represent herself as constantly available for marriage (to royalty from countries with whom England may have wanted an alliance); out of this need came the myth of the "Virgin Queen." This can be read as the opposite of the Fisher King legend: To protect the vitality of the land, Elizabeth had to compromise her own sexuality; whereas in the Fisher King story, the renewal of the land comes with the renewal of the Fisher King's sexual potency. Her tryst with Leicester, therefore, is a consummation that is simultaneously denied, an event that never happened. The twisted logic underlying Elizabeth's public sexuality, or lack thereof, mirrors and distorts the Fisher King plot and further questions the possibility for renewal, especially through sexuality, in the modern world.

Tiresias, thus, becomes an important model for modern existence. Neither man nor woman, and blind yet able to see with ultimate clarity, he is an individual who does not hope or act. He has, like Prufrock, "seen it all," but, unlike Prufrock, he sees no possibility for action. Whereas Prufrock is paralyzed by his neuroses, Tiresias is held motionless by ennui and pragmatism. He is not quite able to escape earthly things, though, for he is forced to sit and watch the sordid deeds of mortals; like the Sibyl in the poem's epigraph, he would like to die but cannot. The brief interlude following the typist's tryst may offer an alternative to escape, by describing a warm, everyday scene of work and companionship; however, the interlude is brief, and Eliot once again tosses us into a world of sex and strife. Tiresias disappears, to be replaced by St. Augustine at the end of the section. Eliot claims in his footnote to have deliberately conflated Augustine and the Buddha, as the representatives of Eastern and Western asceticism. Both seem, in the lines Eliot quotes, to be unable to transcend the world on their own: Augustine must call on God to "pluck [him] out," while Buddha can only repeat the word "burning," unable to break free of its monotonous fascination. The poem's next section, which will relate the story of a death without resurrection, exposes the absurdity of these two figures' faith in external higher powers. That this section ends with only the single word "burning," isolated on the page, reveals the futility of all of man's struggles.

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The Waste Land Section IV: "Death by Water"

Summary

The shortest section of the poem, "Death by Water" describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died, apparently by drowning. In death he has forgotten his worldly cares as the creatures of the sea have picked his body apart. The narrator asks his reader to consider Phlebas and recall his or her own mortality.

Form

While this section appears on the page as a ten-line stanza, in reading, it compresses into eight: four pairs of rhyming couplets. Both visually and audibly, this is one of the most formally organized sections of the poem. It is meant to recall other highly organized forms that often have philosophical or religious import, like aphorisms and parables. The alliteration and the deliberately archaic language ("o you," "a fortnight dead") also contribute to the serious, didactic feel of this section.

Commentary

The major point of this short section is to rebut ideas of renewal and regeneration. Phlebas just dies; that's it. Like Stetson's corpse in the first section, Phlebas's body yields nothing more than products of decay. However, the section's meaning is far from flat; indeed, its ironic layering is twofold. First, this section fulfills one of the prophecies of Madame Sosostris in the poem's first section: "Fear death by water," she says, after pulling the card of the Drowned Sailor. Second, this section, in its language and form, mimics other literary forms (parables, biblical stories, etc.) that are normally rich in meaning. These two features suggest that something of great significance lies here. In reality, though, the only lesson that Phlebas offers is that the physical reality of death and decay triumphs over all. Phlebas is not resurrected or transfigured. Eliot further emphasizes Phlebas's dried-up antiquity and irrelevance by placing this section in the distant past (by making Phlebas a Phoenician).

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The Waste Land Section V: "What the Thunder Said"

Summary

The final section of The Waste Land is dramatic in both its imagery and its events. The first half of the section builds to an apocalyptic climax, as suffering people become "hooded hordes swarming" and the "unreal" cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. A decaying chapel is described, which suggests the chapel in the legend of the Holy Grail. Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and the rains come, relieving the drought and bringing life back to the land. Curiously, no heroic figure has appeared to claim the Grail; the renewal has come seemingly at random, gratuitously.
The scene then shifts to the Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where thunder rumbles. Eliot draws on the traditional interpretation of "what the thunder says," as taken from the Upanishads (Hindu fables). According to these fables, the thunder "gives," "sympathizes," and "controls" through its "speech"; Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunder's power. The meditations seem to bring about some sort of reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting on the shore preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his imminent death or at least abdication. The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children's song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant of "Shantih shantih shantih"--the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as "the peace which passeth understanding," the expression of ultimate resignation.

Form

Just as the third section of the poem explores popular forms, such as music, the final section of The Waste Land moves away from more typical poetic forms to experiment with structures normally associated with religion and philosophy. The proposition and meditation structure of the last part of this section looks forward to the more philosophically oriented Four Quartets, Eliot's last major work. The reasoned, structured nature of the final stanzas comes as a relief after the obsessively repetitive language and alliteration ("If there were water / And no rock / If there were rock / And also water...") of the apocalyptic opening. The reader's relief at the shift in style mirrors the physical relief brought by the rain midway through the section. Both formally and thematically, then, this final chapter follows a pattern of obsession and resignation. Its patterning reflects the speaker's offer at the end to "fit you," to transform experience into poetry ("fit" is an archaic term for sections of a poem or play; here, "fit" is used as a verb, meaning "to render into a fit," to make into poetry).

Commentary

The initial imagery associated with the apocalypse at this section's opening is taken from the crucifixion of Christ. Significantly, though, Christ is not resurrected here: we are told, "He who was living is now dead." The rest of the first part, while making reference to contemporary events in Eastern Europe and other more traditional apocalypse narratives, continues to draw on Biblical imagery and symbolism associated with the quest for the Holy Grail. The repetitive language and harsh imagery of this section suggest that the end is perhaps near, that not only will there be no renewal but that there will be no survival either. Cities are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed, mirroring the cyclical downfall of cultures: Jerusalem, Greece, Egypt, and Austria--among the major empires of the past two millennia--all see their capitals fall. There is something nevertheless insubstantial about this looming disaster: it seems "unreal," as the ghost-filled London did earlier in the poem. It is as if such a profound end would be inappropriate for such a pathetic civilization. Rather, we expect the end to be accompanied by a sense of boredom and surrender.

Release comes not from any heroic act but from the random call of a farmyard bird. The symbolism surrounding the Grail myth is still extant but it is empty, devoid of people. No one comes to the ruined chapel, yet it exists regardless of who visits it. This is a horribly sad situation: The symbols that have previously held profound meaning still exist, yet they are unused and unusable. A flash of light--a quick glimpse of truth and vitality, perhaps--releases the rain and lets the poem end.

The meditations upon the Upanishads give Eliot a chance to test the potential of the modern world. Asking, "what have we given?" he finds that the only time people give is in the sexual act and that this gift is ultimately evanescent and destructive: He associates it with spider webs and solicitors reading wills. Just as the poem's speaker fails to find signs of giving, so too does he search in vain for acts of sympathy--the second characteristic of "what the thunder says": He recalls individuals so caught up in his or her own fate--each thinking only of the key to his or her own prison--as to be oblivious to anything but "ethereal rumors" of others. The third idea expressed in the thunder's speech--that of control--holds the most potential, although it implies a series of domineering relationships and surrenders of the self that, ultimately, are never realized.

Finally Eliot turns to the Fisher King himself, still on the shore fishing. The possibility of regeneration for the "arid plain" of society has been long ago discarded. Instead, the king will do his best to put in order what remains of his kingdom, and he will then surrender, although he still fails to understand the true significance of the coming void (as implied by the phrase "peace which passeth understanding"). The burst of allusions at the end can be read as either a final attempt at coherence or as a final dissolution into a world of fragments and rubbish. The king offers some consolation: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," he says, suggesting that it will be possible to continue on despite the failed redemption. It will still be possible for him, and for Eliot, to "fit you," to create art in the face of madness. It is important that the last words of the poem are in a non-Western language: Although the meaning of the words themselves communicates resignation ("peace which passeth understanding"), they invoke an alternative set of paradigms to those of the Western world; they offer a glimpse into a culture and a value system new to us--and, thus, offer some hope for an alternative to our own dead world.

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Study Questions

1. Think about Eliot's use of form and language. What is most "poetic" about his works? What linguistic devices does he use?
2. Describe Eliot's range of cultural references. How do references to Eastern religions fit in with allusions to Christ and Dante? Why does Eliot include untranslated bits from non-English works?
3. What is the place of religion in Eliot's work? How does this change over the course of his career?
4. What is the "Waste Land" Eliot describes? What other kinds of physical settings does Eliot use? How do they influence the messages of his poems?
5. Why is Eliot so fascinated with death imagery? What does the recurring imagery of drowning symbolize?

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Review Quiz on The Waste Land 

NAME: _____________ 
1. The first line of The Waste Land makes reference to which of the following canonical works? 
A) The Faerie Queene B) Piers Plowman C) Middlemarch D) The Canterbury Tales
2. In what city is The Waste Land primarily set? 
A) Rome B) London C) Vienna D) New York
3. Which poet is quoted in the last line of the first section of The Waste Land? 
A) Baudelaire B) Dante C) Browning D) Mallarme
4. Which of the following forms of weather does NOT figure prominently in The Waste Land? 
A) Drought B) Rain C) Snow D) Fog 
5. Which of the following lines from Shakespeare functions as a sort of refrain in The Waste Land? 
A) "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
B) "Out, out, damned spot!" C) "Why then I'll fit you." D)"Those are pearls that were his eyes."
6. The women in "A Game of Chess" are talking about their friend who has done what questionable thing? A) She has committed adultery. B) She has had an abortion. C) She has taken opium.
D) She has abandoned her children.
7. The nightingale in The Waste Land refers to the myth of: 
A) Philomela B) Venus C) Hero and Leander D) Philoctetes
8. The line "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song" comes from Spenser's Prothalamion, which is a: A) Funeral dirge B) Christmas song C) Coronation poem D) Wedding song
9. Which animal does Eliot use in The Waste Land to symbolize his poetic technique? 
A) A crab B) A rat C) A bird D) A locust
10. Eliot is interested in what kind of death in The Waste Land? 
A) Death by fire B) Starvation C) Drowning D) Murder 
11. Which of the following terms does NOT describe the last section of The Waste Land? 
A) Apocalyptic B) Prophetic C) Philosophical D) Conciliatory
12. The phrase "garlic and sapphires in the mud" is an example of what poetic technique? 
A) Chiasmus B) Juxtaposition C) Metaphor D) Slant rhym

Answer keys:
DBACD BADBA DB

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Further Reading

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 
Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1998. 
Howe, Elizabeth. The Dramatic Monologue. New York: Twayne, 1996. 
Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. London: Methuen, 1995. 
Lobb, Edward, ed. Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot's "Four Quartets." Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. 
Moody, A. David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 
Zwerdling, Alex. Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. Perseus, 1998.

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Dry, Allusive, and Ambiguous: A Close Reading of "The Wasteland"
by Theoderek Wayne July 25, 2002

T.S. Eliot peppers "The Wasteland," his apocalyptic poem, with images of modern aridity and inarticulacy that contrast with fertile allusions to previous times. Eliot's language details a brittle era, rife with wars physical and sexual, spiritually broken, culturally decaying, dry and dusty. His references to the Fisher King and mythical vegetation rituals imply that the 20th-century world is in need of a Quester to irrigate the land. "The Wasteland" refuses to provide a simple solution; the properties of the language serve to make for an ambiguous narrative and conclusion, one as confusing and fragmented as Eliot's era itself.

Eliot wastes no time drawing out the first irony of the poem. In the first lines of "The Burial of the Dead," the speaker comments on Jesus' crucifixion and Chaucer while using brutal sounds to relate his spiritual coldness in a warm environment. In "The General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer poetically writes "Whan that April with his showres soote/ The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,/ And bathed every veine in swich licour,/ Of which vertu engrendred is the flowr" (Norton Anthology to English Literature, sixth edition, vol. 1, p.81). For "The Wasteland's" speaker, "April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain" (Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition, p.1236, lines 1-4). The harsh "c's" and muted "d's" throughout point to the speaker's disenchantment with a world full of paradoxes and dichotomies. The "mixing" of "Memory and desire" only hurts him, as do all the verbs, which Eliot places at the ends of their lines to intensify their importance and action in an otherwise dead land.

The speaker continues his rants against the world and shows a personality at odds with normal conceptions of happiness. "Winter kept us warm" he says, as the delayed alliteration pairs up an unlikely couple (5). The speaker turns back time, and possibly changes identity, by reminiscing her childhood. Nostalgia is an essential component of "The Wasteland"; here, it relates a young girl's escapist techniques of reading in the mountains and flying "south for the winter" like a bird, while later Eliot imposes literary and historical significance upon the poem's allusions (18). Central to these allusion are images of the death of spirituality. 
In the second stanza, Eliot moves into a new motif, that of stones and broken idols. He questions what became of his landscape: "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images" (19-23). The roots, which were previously dull, now clutch in a sexually perverse image, and stem from a "stony rubbish" which is to be repeated later as a figure of dryness. The "Son of man," noted by Eliot as Ezekiel, lives in a pagan era of "broken images," and parallels modern man in "know[ing] only" such a corrupt time. Eliot develops the metaphor of stone as an object with "no sound of water. Only/ There is shadow under this red rock" (24-5). He again places "only" at the end of a line to draw the reader's attention to it, forcing his audience to consider its relation to the poem's character. Indeed, the speaker next addresses: "(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),/ And I will show you something different from either/ Your shadow at morning striding behind you/ Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you" (26-9). In "The Hollow Men," another meditation on broken spirituality, several stanzas use the word "between" to reflect its travelers paralyzed state between life and death: "Between the conception/ And the creation/ Between the emotion/ And the response/ Falls the Shadow" ("The Hollow Men," V.). Using this as a reference point, "The Wasteland's" next line explicitly suggests the inevitability of death: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" (30).

That oncoming death is ironically compared to Wagner's romantic opera, "Tristan und Isolde," and further distances the speaker from any emotional attachment. Wagner's sailor song shows love's dominance over distance‹"Fresh blows the wind/ toward home"‹and even though the "hyacinth girl," a love-object in the form of a vegetation ritual, has "arms full, andŠhair wet," the speaker confesses "I could not/ Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither/ Living nor dead, and I knew nothing" (footnote 8, 38-40). The girl's fertility and moisture fails on the nihilistic speaker who straddles between life and death, who struggles to see and to communicate. The theme of sight and communication continues in the next stanza with Madam Sosostris, a "famous clairvoyante" (43). 

"Sosostris" itself is a word of speech; the two instances of "os" in her name suggest the Latin word for "mouth." She commands her audience to regain his sight: "(ŒThose are pearls that were his eyes. Look!'") (48). One of her cards is a "one-eyed merchant" who "carries [something] on his back which" she is "forbidden to see" (53-4). This lack of depth perception, both the one-eyed man's and hers, leads her to issue the ironic command "Fear death by water" (55). Yet is it ironic, that one should fear a death that seemingly drenches the exsiccative landscape, or has even the Grail that the speaker searches for, water, failed him? Sosostris concludes with a vision of "crowds of people, walking round in a ring" (56). This ritual, devoid of any motion or meaning and similar to the children's recitation and encircling of the prickly pear in "The Hollow Men," favors the latter, that even a Fisher King or some other Quester is unable to help the land. 

Eliot shifts into less abstract terms as he describes London, the "Unreal City/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn" as a land of the marching dead. Again using irony to magnify the barrenness of the land, Eliot describes the crowd that "flowed over London Bridge, so many/ I had not thought death had undone so many./ Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled" (62-4). These breathless lives of exhalations only become the object of the speaker's sarcastic wrath: "'Stetson!/ ŒYou who were with me in the ships at Mylae!/ ŒThat corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ ŒHas it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?/ ŒOr has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?" (69-73). "Stetson," by association of his name and to the capitalist-driven battle at Mylae, ties modern commercialism to the death of rituals, in this case that of a corpse instead of vegetation. Jesse Weston, in "The Golden Bough," states that broken lands in need of a Quest fall under two categories: those where the infertility is precedent to the Quest, and those where it is caused by a Hero's failure to answer the call. Until this point, Eliot has refrained from fingering man as the root of the waste land's problem, but in his description of vapid London, he seems to blame man's own declining value system for his dying landscape. 
Along with man's flawed values comes a flawed sense of communication. In "A Game of Chess," a queen-like woman sits in furniture that fits her magnificent yet empty existence: "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,/ Glowed on the marble, where the glass/ŠDoubled the flamesŠ/ Reflecting light upon the table as/ The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it" (77-8, 82-4). The rich, seductive prose that lavishes words like "burnished," "glowed," and "glitter" onto the woman's possessions implies that her worth is as false as her "strange synthetic perfumes,/ Unguent, powdered, or liquid‹troubled, confused/ And drowned the sense of odours; stirred by the air" (87-89). The "ed" or "id" endings, as in "powdered," "troubled," and "drowned," connotes a passivity, as if the world is inflicting is troubles and confusions on the woman. In this midst, the "odours" now resemble the landscape from the first stanza as they, too, are stirred by the outside (as is the smoke from the candles, "Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling") (93). A conversation between the woman and her husband is enacted: "'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me./ ŒSpeak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak./ ŒWhat are you thinking of? What thinking? What?/ ŒI never know what you are thinking. Think'" (111-4). The flat, short sentences that withhold even the barest emotion in their questions and statement overtly shift the poem into the theme of inarticulacy between the sexes. A nihilistic component comes out their abysmal comments: "'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember/ Nothing?'" (121-2) The separation of "Nothing" is no accident, and allows Eliot to finish with his aristocratic duelists and explore a working-class example of desperate communication. 

Eliot uses colloquial slang to relate a one-sided conversation in a pub. This bustling scene at first seems like a reminder of how humans can communicate, and Eliot leads the reader to this suspicion by using the word "said" twice in the first two lines: "When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said‹/ I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself" (139-40). She is intermittently interrupted by the bartender, whose call to "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" carries ominous implications of death and comes at more rapid intervals. The woman tells of an abortion, and humanity's infertility that dominates its need to avoid loneliness is summed up in her question "What you get married for if you don't want children?" (164) 
That loneliness returns Eliot to the bleak landscape in "The Fire Sermon." Personification aids the comparisons between human and environmental death: "the last fingers of leaf/ Clutch and sink into the wet bank" (173-4). The Fisher King makes an appearance here, but in the middle of a corrupted ritual: "A rat crept softly through the vegetation/ Dragging its slimy belly on the bank/ While I was fishing in the dull canal" (187-9). The snake-like rat is reminiscent of man's Edenic fall, another example of man's bringing this "dull" plague on himself. Further accusations are made against man for his robotic nature: "the human engine waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting" (216-7). Tiresias, explained by Eliot as the joining of both sexes, is recalled again to witness the sexually grotesque meeting between a man and woman. The man's connections to a conqueror or colonizer comes through as he "assaults her at once;/ Exploring hands encounter no defence" (239-40). Following this encounter, "The Wasteland" becomes far less poetic; its lines shorten and make no effort at lyricism: "The river sweats/ Oil and tar/ The barges drift/ With the turning tide" (266-9). 

The climax of the poem call on a series of images of water. In "Death by Water," Madame Osostris's admonition, Eliot laments the passing of Phlebas the Phoenician, when "A current under sea/ Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell/ He passed the stages of his age and youth/ Entering the whirlpool" (315-8). Indeed, the genitive form of "os" is "ossis," meaning bones, and the clairvoyante's morbid vision has come to fruition in this nostalgic look at a man "who was once as handsome and tall as you" (321). In the final section, "What the Thunder Said," rocks and stones dominate: "After the agony in stony places/ŠHere is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water and the sandy road/ŠWhich are mountains of rock without water/ŠAmongst the rock one cannot stop or think/ŠIf there were only water amongst the rock" (324, 331-2, 334, 336, 338). The alternating lines that include "rock" layer an image of dryness without salvation in the narrative. Where once Marie felt free in the mountains, now "There is not even solitude in the mountains" (343). The speaker feels there must be an intruder that has caused this: "Who is the third who walks always beside you?/..I do not know whether a man or woman/ ‹But who is that on the other side of you?" (360, 365-6). Eliot again points to the "Falling towers" of "the city over the mountains" that "Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air" as the source of the problem. 

The desolate air is interrupted by "a damp gust/ Bringing rain," and the poem plants the translated words of "be restrained," "give alms," and "have compassion" much like the bartender shouted his closing call. The speaker concludes "The sea was calm, your heart would have responded/ Gaily, when invited, beating obedient/ To controlling hands" (421-3). Though the sea, which once separated lovers, is now a peaceful, wet arena for a gay heart, Eliot's word choice‹"beating obedient/ To controlling hands"‹suggests a more sinister intent. Perhaps the struggle is now gone, and with that a drugged complacence. Death still looms; the Fisher King takes over the role of speaker: "I sat upon the shore/ Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/ Shall I at least set my lands in order?" (424-6). This is an allusion to a Biblical quote that gives an ambiguous view of death: "Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live." Is the Fisher King merely tying up the loose ends before the world ends with a whimper, or is he permanently fixing his land? The final three words‹"Shantih shantih shantih"‹with their lengthy spaces and meaning ("The Peace which passeth understanding") hints that we will die first, then understand our folly, or that a peaceful death will supersede any hope of learning from our mistakes. In any case, the invocation of a spiritual chant returns the poem full circle, restoring the idea that a broken spirituality is the dull root of our wasted land. 

The cryptic allusions to more fertile times has placed "The Wasteland" at the head of 20th-century alienation poetry. Eliot himself passed it off as a "personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life," written during a hospitalized stay in the midst of the Lost Generation's spiritual decay. Though he contended that the function of the poet's mind is to present ideas and to withhold personal interaction, it is difficult to read "The Wasteland" without questioning authorial intent. Is the Fisher King in the last stanza, written in the first person, possibly the poet himself, come to rescue us in Nietzschean Über-Mensch form? Though he would certainly argue against the validity of such a self-enlarging statement (or maybe not), Eliot must have written "The Wasteland" with some hopes that it would somehow end his land's drought. In this sense, then, the writer is a type of Fisher King, and the new ritual is not vegetable harvesting, but writing. 

Works Cited:
Abrams et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, sixth edition, vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. 
Ferguson et al. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

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