18. T S ELIOT'S THE WASTE LAND- for TSPSC JL/DL

 

18. T S ELIOT'S THE WASTE LAND- for TSPSC JL/DL

Biography of T.S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a family with prominent New England heritage. Eliot largely abandoned his Midwestern roots and chose to ally himself with both New and Old England throughout his life. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate in 1906, was accepted into the literary circles, and had a predilection for 16th- and 17th-century poetry, the Italian Renaissance (particularly Dante), Eastern religion, and philosophy. Perhaps the greatest influences on him, however, were 19th-century French Symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephene Mallarme, and especially Jules Laforgue. Eliot took from them a sensual yet precise attention to symbolic images, a feature that would be the hallmark of his brand of Modernism.

Eliot also earned a master's degree from Harvard in 1910 before studying in Paris and Germany. He settled in England in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, studying at Oxford, teaching, and working at a bank. In 1915 he married British writer Vivienne Haigh-Wood (they would divorce in 1933), a woman prone to poor physical and mental health; in November of 1921, Eliot had a nervous breakdown.

By 1917 Eliot had already achieved great success with his first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, which included "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a work begun in his days at Harvard. Eliot's reputation was bolstered by the admiration and aid of esteemed contemporary poet Ezra Pound, the other tower of Modernist poetry. During Eliot's recuperation from his breakdown in a Swiss sanitarium, he wrote "The Waste Land," arguably the most influential English-language poem ever written.

Eliot founded the quarterly Criterion in 1922, editing it until its end in 1939. He was now the voice of Modernism, and in London he expanded the breadth of his writing. In addition to writing poetry and editing it for various publications, he wrote philosophical reviews and a number of critical essays. Many of these, such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent," have become classics, smartly and affectionately dissecting other poets while subliminally informing the reader about Eliot's own work. Eliot declared his preference for poetry that does away with the poet's own personality and uses the "objective correlative" of symbolic, meaningful, and often chaotic concrete imagery.

Eliot joined the Church of England in 1927 and his subsequent work reflects his Anglican attitudes. The six-part poem "Ash Wednesday" (1930) and other religious works in the early part of the 1930s, while notable in their own right, retrospectively feel like a warm-up for his epic "Four Quartets" (completed and published together in 1943). Eliot used his wit, philosophical preoccupation with time, and vocal range to examine further religious issues.

Eliot wrote his first play, "Murder in the Cathedral," in 1935. A verse drama about the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket, the play's religious themes were forerunners of Eliot's four other major plays, "The Family Reunion" (1939), "The Cocktail Party" (1949), "The Confidential Clerk" (1953), and "The Elder Statesman" (1959). With these religious verse dramas cloaked in secular conversational comedy, Eliot belied whatever pretensions his detractors may have found in his Anglophilia. He wrote "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" in 1939, a book of verse for children that was eventually adapted into the Broadway musical "Cats."

 As one might expect from his work, Eliot was unhappy for most of his life, but his second marriage in 1957 proved fruitful. When he died in 1965, he was the recipient of a Nobel Prize (1948), the author of the century's most influential poem, and arguably the century's most important poet. Perhaps due to the large shadow he casts, relatively few poets have tried to ape his style; others simply find him cold. Still, no one can escape the authority of Eliot's Modernism - it is as relevant today as it was in 1922. While Eliot may not have as much influence on poets today as some of his contemporaries, the magnitude of his impact on poetry is unrivaled.

 He was the greatest poet of Modern Age. Known as “Arnold of the 20^th century”.  He shows the influence of the Hindu and the Buddhist. defined poetry as “Poetry is mot turning loose emotion but an escape from emotion’

               He met Ezra Pound, whom he called as “il Miglior Fabbo”(=the better craftsman), since he has edited his poem The Waste Land and made him to win the Noble Prize in 1948.Eliot dedicated this poem to Ezra Pound.

1.      Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917: opening line of this poem is: “Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table; initially named it as Prufrock among women, but change it after the Kipling’s “Love song of Hardayal”. It is about a lady’s advances towards Prufrock, who is shy. Contains a famous quote: “I am not Prince Hamlet”

2.      The Waste Land 1922: first published it in “The Criterion” and “ The Dial”. It is a 434-line modernist poem about the cultural and spiritual wasteland, where people are living a kind of death in midst of their everyday lives. He used many allusions and references to various texts from English, Greek, Latin, German, Sanskrit etc. and made it too obscure and complex. Eliot originally considered entitling the poem He do the Police in Different Voices. The Waste Land is based on 2 anthropological works (i) From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L Weston and (ii) Golden Bough by Frazer. This poem is in 5 parts:

i)         The burial of the dead: Title drawn from Anglican Burial Service. opening line ‘April is the cruelest month’. Speaker’s journey into a desert which threatens him “I will show you fear in a Hand full of Dust”. Madam Sosostris, fortune teller, reads tarot cards and makes predictions. Speaker walks through the London populated by Ghosts of the dead, where he asks a ghost named Stetson, “The corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” Unreal city is a section in the last part, which denotes the corruption and materialism of the society.

ii)       A game of Chess: Title from Middleton’s play Game at Chess. This section is about the failure of love and sexuality in the modern world. Story of Philomel, a maiden raped by Tereus and cuts her tongue. Two women meet at London bar where they discuss about taking pills, childless and unhappy married life. Bar keeper shouts at them “Hurry up please its time”. Ends with“Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night”- From Ophelia’s song in Hamlet

iii)      Fire sermon: Longest of the poem’s 5 sections. Speaker sat on the banks of Thames river singing “Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song- From Spencer’s Prothalamion”. Fisherman’s daughter sings “Weilalaleila  Waillala Leialala”- nonsense song. Tiresias is a hermaphrodite (one who is male and female) and is blind but can see into future. Tiresias propositioned Mr.Eugenides(homosexual theme). Tiresias watches a female typist having sex with a clerk without any emotions. He compares the old sweet pleasant Thames to ugliness of the present river, and old love in human relations replaced by sex.

iv)      Death by water: shortest of the poem’s 5 sections.  Describes Phlebas, the merchant who died by drowning.

v)       What the Thunder said: “Hieronimo is mad again”- from Elizabethan drama; Speaker is lamenting for water in desert. The scene shifts to Ganges river. The thunder speaks in the single syllable “DA” which means “Datta(give), Dyadhvam(sympathizes) and Dhamyatha(controls)”- from Bruhadaranyaka Upanishad;  The speaker sits on the bank of Thames and trying to reorder his lands. Poem ends with “London bridge is falling down”- Nursery rhyme; and “Shantih Shantih Shantih”-final words.

 

3.      The Hollow man 1925

4.      Ash Wednesday 1930- based on Dante’s Purgatario. (part3 in Divine Comedy)

5.      Four Quartets 1945: four places Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding related to Eliot’s life. Famous quote: “Our beginning is our end, and our end our beginnings”

6.      Hamlet and His Problems1919: critical essay- He says Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Antony & Cleopatra are artistic success, but Hamlet is an artistic failure. He popularized the concept of Objective Correlative.

The Revival of Poetic Drama: T. S. Eliot who firmly established the conventions and traditions of poetic drama.

1. Murder in the Cathedral

2. The Family Reunion

3. The Cocktail Party

4. The Confidential Clerk

" all poetry tends towards drama, and all drama towards poetry."- T.S.Eliot

The Wasteland- Short Summary

The poem begins with a section entitled "The Burial of the Dead." In it, the narrator -- perhaps a representation of Eliot himself -- describes the seasons. Spring brings "memory and desire," and so the narrator's memory drifts back to times in Munich, to childhood sled rides, and to a possible romance with a "hyacinth girl." The memories only go so far, however. The narrator is now surrounded by a desolate land full of "stony rubbish."

He remembers a fortune-teller named Madame Sosostris who said he was "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" and that he should "fear death by water." Next he finds himself on London Bridge, surrounded by a crowd of people. He spots a friend of his from wartime, and calls out to him.

The next section, "A Game of Chess," transports the reader abruptly from the streets of London to a gilded drawing room, in which sits a rich, jewel-bedecked lady who complains about her nerves and wonders what to do. The poem drifts again, this time to a pub at closing time in which two Cockney women gossip. Within a few stanzas, we have moved from the upper crust of society to London's lowlife.

"The Fire Sermon" opens with an image of a river. The narrator sits on the banks and muses on the deplorable state of the world. As Tiresias, he sees a young "carbuncular" man hop into bed with a lonely female typist, only to aggressively make love to her and then leave without hesitation. The poem returns to the river, where maidens sing a song of lament, one of them crying over her loss of innocence to a similarly lustful man.

"Death by Water," the fourth section of the poem, describes a dead Phoenician lying in the water -- perhaps the same drowned sailor of whom Madame Sosostris spoke. "What the Thunder Said" shifts locales from the sea to rocks and mountains. The narrator cries for rain, and it finally comes. The thunder that accompanies it ushers in the three-pronged dictum sprung from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata": to give, to sympathize, to control. With these commandments, benediction is possible, despite the collapse of civilization that is under way -- "London bridge is falling down falling down falling down."

About The Waste Land

"The Waste Land" caused a sensation when it was published in 1922. It is today the most widely translated and studied English-language poem of the twentieth century. This is perhaps surprising given the poem's length and its difficulty, but Eliot's vision of modern life as plagued by sordid impulses, widespread apathy, and pervasive soullessness packed a punch when readers first encountered it.

Of course, "The Waste Land" is not quite the poem Eliot originally drafted. Eliot's close friend and colleague, Ezra Pound, significantly revised the poem, suggesting major cuts and compressions. Thanks to Pound's heavy editing, as well as suggestions (specifically about scenes relevant to their stormy, hostile marriage) from Haigh-Wood, "The Waste Land" defined Modernist poetry and became possibly the most influential poem of the century. Devoid of a single speaker's voice, the poem ceaselessly shifts its tone and form, instead grafting together numerous allusive voices from Eliot's substantial poetic repertoire; Dante shares the stage with nonsense sounds (a technique that also showcases Eliot's dry wit). Believing this style best represented the fragmentation of the modern world, Eliot focused on the sterility of modern culture and its lack of tradition and ritual. Despite this pessimistic viewpoint, many find its mythical, religious ending hopeful about humanity's chance for renewal.

Pound's influence on the final version of "The Waste Land" is significant. At the time of the poem's composition, Eliot was ill, struggling to recover from his nervous breakdown and languishing through an unhappy marriage. Pound offered him support and friendship; his belief in and admiration for Eliot

were enormous. In turn, however, he radically trimmed Eliot's long first draft (nineteen pages, by some accounts), bringing the poem closer to its current version. This is not to say Eliot would not have revised the poem on his own in similar ways; rather, the two men seemed to have genuinely collaborated on molding what was already a loose and at times free-flowing work. Pound, like Eliot a crucible of modernism, called for compression, ellipsis, reduction. The poem grew yet more cryptic; references that were previously clear now became more obscure. Explanations were out the window. The result was a more difficult work -- but arguably a richer one.

Eliot did not take all of Pound's notes, but he did follow his friend's advice enough to turn his sprawling work into a tight, elliptical, and fragmented piece. Once the poem was completed, Pound lobbied on its behalf, convincing others of its importance. He believed in Eliot's genius, and in the impact "The Waste Land" would have on the literature of its day. That impact ultimately stretched beyond poetry, to novels, painting, music, and all the other arts. John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer owes a significant debt to "The Waste Land," for example. Eliot's take on the modern world profoundly shaped future schools of thought and literature, and his 1922 poem remains a touchstone of the English-language canon.

 

Character List

The Narrator

The most difficult to describe of the poem's characters, he assumes many different shapes and guises. At times the Narrator seems to be Eliot himself; at other times he stands in for all humanity. In "The Fire Sermon" he is at one point the Fisher King of the Grail legend, at another the blind prophet Tiresias. When he seems to reflect Eliot, the extent to which his ruminations are autobiographical is ambiguous. 

Madame Sosostris

A famous clairvoyant referred to in Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow and borrowed by Eliot for the Tarot card episode. She suffers from a bad cold, but is nonetheless "known to be the wisest woman in Europe, / With a wicked pack of cards."

Stetson

A friend of the Narrator's, who fought in the war with him. Which war? It is unclear. Perhaps the Punic War or World War I, or both, or neither. 

The Rich Lady

Never referred to by name, she sits in the resplendent drawing room of "A Game of Chess." She seems to be surrounded by luxury, but unable to appreciate or enjoy it. She might allude to Eliot's wife Vivienne.  

Philomela

A character from Ovid's Metamorphoses. She was raped by Tereus, then, after taking her vengeance with her sister, morphed into a nightingale. 

A Typist

Lonely, a creature of the modern world. She is visited by a "young man carbuncular," who sleeps with her. She is left alone again, accompanied by just her mirror and a gramophone. 

Mr. Eugenides

A merchant from Smyrna (now Izmir, in Turkey). Probably the one-eyed merchant to whom Madame Sosostris refers. 

Phlebas

A Phoenician merchant who is described lying dead in the water in "Death by Water." Perhaps the same drowned Phoenician sailor to whom Madame Sosostris refers.

Major Themes

Death

Two of the poem‟s sections -- “The Burial of the Dead” and “Death by Water” --refer specifically to this theme. What complicates matters is that death can mean life; in other words, by dying, a being can pave the way for new lives. Eliot asks his friend Stetson: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” Similarly, Christ, by “dying,” redeemed humanity and thereby gave new life. The ambiguous passage between life and death finds an echo in the frequent allusions to Dante, particularly in the Limbo-like vision of the men flowing across London Bridge and through the modern city. 

Rebirth

The Christ images in the poem, along with the many other religious metaphors, posit rebirth and resurrection as central themes. The Waste Land lies fallow and the Fisher King is impotent; what is needed is a new beginning. Water, for one, can bring about that rebirth, but it can also destroy. What the poet must finally turn to is Heaven, in the climactic exchange with the skies: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” Eliot‟s vision is essentially of a world that is neither dying nor living; to break the spell, a profound change, perhaps an ineffable one, is required. Hence the prevalence of Grail imagery in the poem; that holy chalice can restore life and wipe the slate clean; likewise, Eliot refers frequently to baptisms and to rivers – both “life-givers,” in either spiritual or physical ways. 

The Seasons

"The Waste Land" opens with an invocation of April, “the cruellest month.” That spring be depicted as cruel is a curious choice on Eliot‟s part, but as a paradox it informs the rest of the poem to a great degree. What brings life brings also death; the seasons fluctuate, spinning from one state to another, but, like history, they maintain some sort of stasis; not everything changes. In the end, Eliot‟s “waste land” is almost seasonless: devoid of rain, of propagation, of real change. The world hangs in a perpetual limbo, awaiting the dawn of a new season. 

Lust

Perhaps the most famous episode in "The Waste Land" involves a female typist‟s liaison with a “carbuncular” man. Eliot depicts the scene as something akin to a rape. This chance sexual encounter carries with it mythological baggage – the violated Philomela, the blind Tiresias who lived for a time as a woman. Sexuality runs through "The Waste Land," taking center stage as a cause of calamity in “The Fire Sermon.” Nonetheless, Eliot defends “a moment‟s surrender” as a part of existence in “What the Thunder Said.” Lust may be a sin, and sex may be too easy and too rampant in Eliot‟s London, but action is still preferable to inaction. What is needed is sex that produces life, that rejuvenates, that restores – sex, in other words, that is not “sterile.” 

Love

The references to Tristan und Isolde in “The Burial of the Dead,” to Cleopatra in “A Game of Chess,” and to the story of Tereus and Philomela suggest that love, in "The Waste Land," is often destructive. Tristan and Cleopatra die, while Tereus rapes Philomela, and even the love for the hyacinth girl leads the poet to see and know “nothing."

 

Water

"The Waste Land" lacks water; water promises rebirth. At the same time, however, water can bring about death. Eliot sees the card of the drowned Phoenician sailor and later titles the fourth section of his poem after Madame Sosostris‟ mandate that he fear “death by water.” When the rain finally arrives at the close of the poem, it does suggest the cleansing of sins, the washing away of misdeeds, and the start of a new future; however, with it comes thunder, and therefore perhaps lightning. The latter may portend fire; thus, “The Fire Sermon” and “What the Thunder Said” are not so far removed in imagery, linked by the potentially harmful forces of nature. 

History

History, Eliot suggests, is a repeating cycle. When he calls to Stetson, the Punic War stands in for World War I; this substitution is crucial because it is shocking. At the time Eliot wrote "The Waste Land," the First World War was definitively a first - the "Great War" for those who had witnessed it. There had been none to compare with it in history. The predominant sensibility was one of profound change; the world had been turned upside down and now, with the rapid progress of technology, the movements of societies, and the radical upheavals in the arts, sciences, and philosophy, the history of mankind had reached a turning point.

Eliot revises this thesis, arguing that the more things change the more they stay the same. He links a sordid affair between a typist and a young man to Sophocles via the figure of Tiresias; he replaces a line from Marvell‟s “To His Coy Mistress” with “the sound of horns and motors”; he invokes Dante upon the modern-day London Bridge, bustling with commuter traffic; he notices the Ionian columns of a bar on Lower Thames Street teeming with fishermen. The ancient nestles against the medieval, rubs shoulders with the Renaissance, and crosses paths with the centuries to follow. History becomes a blur. Eliot‟s poem is like a street in Rome or Athens; one layer of history upon another upon another.

 Summary and Analysis of Section I: "The Burial of the Dead"

"The Waste Land" begins with an excerpt from Petronius Arbiter‟s Satyricon, in Latin and Greek, which translates as: “For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, „Sibyl, what do you want?‟ she answered, „I want to die.‟” The quotation is followed by a dedication to Ezra Pound, Eliot‟s colleague and friend, who played a major role in shaping the final version of the poem.

The poem proper begins with a description of the seasons. April emerges as the “cruellest” month, passing over a desolate land to which winter is far kinder. Eliot shifts from this vague invocation of time and nature to what seem to be more specific memories: a rain shower by the Starnbergersee; a lake outside Munich; coffee in that city‟s Hofgarten; sledding with a cousin in the days of childhood.

The second stanza returns to the tone of the opening lines, describing a land of “stony rubbish” – arid, sterile, devoid of life, quite simply the “waste land” of the poem‟s title. Eliot quotes Ezekiel 2.1 and Ecclesiastes 12.5, using biblical language to construct a sort of dialogue between the narrator –- the “son of man” -– and a higher power. The former is desperately searching for some sign of life -– “roots that clutch,” branches that grow -- but all he can find are dry stones, dead trees, and “a heap of broken images.” We have here a forsaken plane that offers no relief from the beating sun, and no trace of water.

Suddenly Eliot switches to German, quoting directly from Wagner‟s Tristan und Isolde. The passage translates as: “Fresh blows the wind / To the homeland / My Irish child / Where do you wait?” In Wagner‟s opera, Isolde, on her way to Ireland, overhears a sailor singing this song, which brings with it ruminations of love promised and of a future of possibilities. After this digression, Eliot offers the reader a snatch of speech, this time from the mouth of the “hyacinth girl.” This girl, perhaps one of thenarrator's (or Eliot's) early loves, alludes to a time a year ago when the narrator presented her with hyacinths. The narrator, for his part, describes in another personal account –- distinct in tone, that is, from the more grandiloquent descriptions of the waste land, the seasons, and intimations of spirituality that have preceded it –- coming back late from a hyacinth garden and feeling struck by a sense of emptiness. Looking upon the beloved girl, he “knew nothing”; that is to say, faced with love, beauty, and “the heart of light,” he saw only “silence.” At this point, Eliot returns to Wagner, with the line “Oed‟ und leer das Meer”: “Desolate and empty is the sea.” Also plucked from Tristan und Isolde, the line belongs to a watchman, who tells the dying Tristan that Isolde‟s ship is nowhere to be seen on the horizon.

From here Eliot switches abruptly to a more prosaic mode, introducing Madame Sosostris, a “famous clairvoyante” alluded to in Aldous Huxley‟s Crome Yellow. This fortune-teller is known across Europe for her skills with Tarot cards. The narrator remembers meeting her when she had “a bad cold.” At that meeting she displayed to him the card of the drowned Phoenician Sailor: “Here, said she, is your card.” Next comes “Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,” and then “the man with three staves,” “the Wheel,” and “the one-eyed merchant.” It should be noted that only the man with three staves and the wheel are actual Tarot cards; Belladonna is often associated with da Vinci‟s "Madonna of the Rocks," and the oneeyed merchant is, as far as we can tell, an invention of Eliot‟s.

Finally, Sosostris encounters a blank card representing something the one-eyed merchant is carrying on his back – something she is apparently “forbidden to see.” She is likewise unable to find the Hanged Man among the cards she displays; from this she concludes that the narrator should “fear death by water.” Sosostris also sees a vision of a mass of people “walking round in a ring.” Her meeting with the narrator concludes with a hasty bit of business: she asks him to tell Mrs. Equitone, if he sees her, that Sosostris will bring the horoscope herself.

The final stanza of this first section of "The Waste Land" begins with the image of an “Unreal City” echoing Baudelaire‟s “fourmillante cite,” in which a crowd of people –- perhaps the same crowd Sosostris witnessed –- flows over London Bridge while a “brown fog” hangs like a wintry cloud over the proceedings. Eliot twice quotes Dante in describing this phantasmagoric scene: “I had not thought death had undone so many” (from Canto 3 of the Inferno); “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled” (from Canto 4). The first quote refers to the area just inside the Gates of Hell; the second refers to Limbo, the first circle of Hell.

It seems that the denizens of modern London remind Eliot of those without any blame or praise who are relegated to the Gates of Hell, and those who where never baptized and who now dwell in Limbo, in Dante‟s famous vision. Each member of the crowd keeps his eyes on his feet; the mass of men flow up a hill and down King William Street, in the financial district of London, winding up beside the Church of Saint Mary Woolnoth. The narrator sees a man he recognizes named Stetson. He cries out to him, and it appears that the two men fought together in a war. Logic would suggest World War I, but the narrator refers to Mylae, a battle that took place during the First Punic War. He then asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted last year in his garden has begun to sprout. Finally, Eliot quotes Webster and Baudelaire, back to back, ending the address to Stetson in French: “hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!”

Analysis

Eliot‟s opening quotation sets the tone for the poem as a whole. Sibyl is a mythological figure who asked Apollo “for as many years of life as there are grains in a handful of sand” (North, 3). Unfortunately, she did not think to ask for everlasting youth. As a result, she is doomed to decay for years and years, and preserves herself within a jar. Having asked for something akin to eternal life, she finds that what she most wants is death. Death alone offers escape; death alone promises the end, and therefore a new beginning.

Thus does Eliot begin his magisterial poem, labeling his first section “The Burial of the Dead,” a title pulled from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. He has been careful to lay out his central theme before the first stanza has even begun: death and life are easily blurred; from death can spring life, and life in turn necessitates death. Cleanth Brooks, Jr., in “The Waste Land: An Analysis,” sees the poem‟s engine as a paradox: “Life devoid of meaning is death; sacrifice, even the sacrificial death, may be lifegiving, an awaking to life.” Eliot‟s vision is of a decrepit land inhabited by persons who languish in an in-between state, perhaps akin to that of Dante‟s Limbo: they live, but insofar as they seem to feel nothing and aspire to nothing, they are dead. Eliot once articulated his philosophy concerning these matters in a piece of criticism on Baudelaire, one of his chief poetic influences: in it, Eliot intimated that it may be better to do evil than to do nothing at all -- that at least some form of action means that one exists.

This criterion for existence, perhaps an antecedent to Existentialism, holds action as inherently meaningful. Inaction is equated with waste. The key image in "The Waste Land" may then be Sosostris‟s vision of “crowds of people, walking round in a ring.” They walk and walk, but go nowhere. Likewise, the inhabitants of modern London keep their eyes fixed to their feet; their destination matters little to them and they flow as an unthinking mass, bedecking the metropolis in apathy.

From this thicket of malaise, the narrator clings to memories that would seem to suggest life in all its vibrancy and wonder: summer rain in Munich, coffee in a German park, a girl wearing flowers. What is crucial to the poem‟s sensibility, however, is the recognition that even these trips to the past, even these attempts to regain happiness, must end in failure or confusion. Identities are in flux. The Hofgarten memory precipitates a flurry of German: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm‟ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.” Translated, this line reads roughly as: “I‟m not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German.” It is not clear who the speaker is, but whatever the case the line is nonsensical; three distinct regions of Europe are mentioned, though Lithuania arguably has far more to do with Russia than with Germany. The sentence itself depends on a non sequitur, anticipating by almost a century Europe‟s current crisis of identity, with individual nations slowly losing ground to a collective union. In Eliot‟s time, that continent was just emerging from the wreckage of World War I, a splintered entity teetering on chaos; Germany, in particular, suffered from a severe identity dilemma, with various factions competing for authority, classes that were distrustful of one another, and the old breed of military strong-men itching to renew itself for the blood-drenched decades to come.

The historical considerations will only go so far. Biographical interpretation is a slippery slope, but it should nonetheless be noted that Eliot was, at the time of the poem‟s composition, suffering from acute nervous ailments, chief among them severe anxiety. It was during his time of recuperation that he was able to write much of "The Waste Land," but his conflicted feelings about his wife, Vivienne, did not much help his state of mind. The ambiguity of love, the potential of that emotion to cause both great joy and great sorrow, informs the passage involving the hyacinth girl – another failed memory, as it were. In this case, Eliot describes a vision of youthful beauty in a piece of writing that seems at first to stem more from English Romanticism than from the arid modern world of the rest of the poem: “Your arms full, and your hair wet.” Water, so cherished an element and so lacking in this desolate wasteland, here brings forth flowers and hyacinth girls, and the possibility of happiness, however fleeting. That very vision, however, causes Eliot‟s eyes to fail, his speech to forsake him; love renders him impotent, and he is left “neither living nor dead” – much like the aforementioned residents of Limbo. The paradox is that such joy and human warmth might elicit such pain and coldness. Eliot sums it up with the line: “Looking into the heart of light, the silence.” Using Wagner‟s Tristan und Isolde as a book-end device – - the first such quotation alluding to the beginnings of love, the second describing the tragedy of a love lost –- Eliot traces a swift passage from light to darkness, sound to silence, movement to stasis. (Tristan begins on a boat, with the wind freshly blowing, and ends on the shoreline, awaiting a boat that never comes.)

The same paradox is there at the very beginning of the poem: April is the cruelest month. Shouldn‟t it be the kindest? The lovely image of lilacs in the spring is here associated with “the dead land.” Winter was better; then, at least, the suffering was obvious, and the “forgetful snow” covered over any memories. In spring, “memory and desire” mix; the poet becomes acutely aware of what he is missing, of what he has lost, of what has passed him by. Ignorance is bliss; the knowledge that better things are possible is perhaps the most painful thing of all. Eliot‟s vision of modern life is therefore rooted in a conception of the lost ideal.

It is appropriate, then, that the narrator should turn next to a clairvoyant; after gazing upon the past, he now seeks to into the future. Water, giver of life, becomes a token of death: the narrator is none other than the drowned Phoenician Sailor, and he must “fear death by water.” This realization paves the way for the famous London Bridge image. Eliot does not even describe the water of the Thames; he saves his verse for the fog that floats overhead, for the quality of the dawn-lit sky, and for the faceless mass of men swarming through the dead city. Borrowing heavily from Baudelaire‟s visions of Paris, Eliot paints a portrait of London as a haunted (or haunting) specter, where the only sound is “dead” and no man dares even look beyond the confines of his feet. When the narrator sees Stetson, we return to the prospect of history. World War I is replaced by the Punic War; with this odd choice, Eliot seems to be arguing that all wars are the same, just as he suggests that all men are the same in the stanza‟s final line: “You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!”: “Hypocrite reader! – my likeness, – my brother!” Weare all Stetson; Eliot is speaking directly to us. Individual faces blur into the ill-defined mass of humanity as the burial procession inexorably proceeds.

 

Summary and Analysis of Section II: "A Game of Chess"

The second section of "The Waste Land" begins with a description of a woman sitting on a beautiful chair that looks “like a burnished throne” -– a nod to Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. She occupies a splendid drawing room, replete with coffered ceilings and lavish decorations. The setting is a decidedly grandiose one. We are not sure who the woman is: perhaps Eliot‟s wife Vivienne, perhaps a stand-in for all members of the upper crust, perhaps simply an unnamed personage whiling away the hours in a candlelit kingdom. Eliot writes of “satin cases poured forth in profusion,” “vials of ivory and coloured glass,” an “antique mantel” and “the glitter of […] jewels.” Both the woman and the room are magnificently attired, perhaps to the point of excess.

One of the paintings in the room depicts the rape of Philomela, a scene pulled from Ovid‟s Metamorphoses. In the original story, King Tereus‟s wife bids him to bring her sister Philomela to her. Upon meeting Philomela, Tereus falls instantly and hopelessly in love; nothing must get in the way of his conquest. Racked with lust, he steals away with her and rapes her in the woods –- the "sylvan scene” Eliot mentions. He then ties her up and cuts off her tongue so that she may not tell others of what has happened. He returns to his wife, but Philomela is able to weave on a loom what has befallen her; she gives the loom to her sister, who, upon discovering the truth, retrieves Philomela, slays Tereus‟s son, and feeds his carcass to the king. When he finds out that he has been served his son for dinner, Tereus flies into a rage, chasing both Philomela and his wife out of the palace, and all three of them transform into birds. The speechless Philomela becomes a nightingale.

Snatches of dialogue follow. It seems plausible that the woman in the room is addressing the narrator. She complains that her nerves are bad, and requests that he stay with her. When she asks him what he is thinking, the narrator retorts, “I think we are in rats‟ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones.” Still more harried questions follow; the woman demands to find out whether the narrator knows “nothing,” then asks what she should do now, what they should do tomorrow. The narrator answers with a rote itinerary: “The hot water at ten. / And if it rains, a closed car at four. / And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.”

The last stanza of the section depicts two Cockney women talking in a pub at closing time – hence the repeated dictum: “HURRY UP PLEASE IT‟S TIME.” The subject of conversation is a certain Lil, whose husband Albert was recently released from the army after the war. He gave Lil money to get a new set of teeth, but she has hesitated: “You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique [...] I can‟t help it, she said, pulling a long face." Lil is apparently on pills, unhappy in her marriage, and mother to none. The dialogue grows more fractured and the closing time announcements become more frequent, and finally the stanza devolves into a quotation from Hamlet: Ophelia‟s final words to Claudius and Gertrude, “Good night ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.”

Analysis

This section once again ushers in the issue of biographical interpretation. It is tempting to read the woman on the “burnished throne” as Eliot‟s wife, Vivienne; the passage then becomes a dissection of an estranged relationship. Some of the details point to failed romance or failed marriage: the “golden Cupidon” who must hide “his eyes behind his wing,” the depiction of Philomela‟s rape –- an example of love cascading into brutality and violence -– and even the woman‟s “strange synthetic perfumes” drowning “the sense in odours.”

Again the word “drowned” appears, and with it comes the specter of death by water. In this case, the thick perfumes seem to blot out authentic sensations, just as the splendid decorations of the room appear at times more menacing than beautiful. The trappings of a wealthy modern life come at a price. The carving of a dolphin is cast in a “sad light.” The grandiose portraits and paintings on the wall are but “withered stumps of time.” By the end of this first stanza, the room seems almost haunted: “staring forms / Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.” The woman, for her part, is a glittering apparition, seated upon her Chair (Eliot capitalizes the word as if it were a kingdom) like a queen, recalling Cleopatra -– and thus yet another failed love affair.

First Tristan and Isolde, now Cleopatra: twice now Eliot has alluded to tragic romances, filtered from antiquity through more modern sensibilities -– first that of Wagner, the great modernizer of opera, and then that of Shakespeare, perhaps the first “modern” dramatist. Quotation and allusion is of course a quintessential component of Eliot‟s style, particularly in "The Waste Land"; the poem is sometimes criticized for being too heavily bedecked in references, and too dependent on previous works and canons. The poet‟s trick is to plumb the old in order to find the new. It may seem at first ironic that he relies so much on Ovid, the Bible, Dante, and other older works of literature to describe the modern age, but Eliot‟s method is an essentially universalist one. Just as the Punic War is interchangeable with World War I -– the truly “modern” war of Eliot‟s time -– so can past generations of writers and thinkers shed light on contemporary life. Eliot‟s greatest model in this vein was probably Ulysses, in which James Joyce used Homer‟s epic as a launching pad for a dissection of modern Dublin. In contrast to modernist poets such as Cendrars and Appollinaire, who used the choot-choot of trains, the spinning of wheels, and the billowing of fumes to evoke their era, or philosophers such as Kracauer and Benjamin, who dove into the sports shows and the arcade halls in search of a lexicon of the modern that is itself modern, Eliot is content to tease modernity out of the old.

This is not to say that "The Waste Land" is free of the specifics of 1920s life, but rather that every such specific comes weighted with an antiquarian reference. When Eliot evokes dance-hall numbers and popular ditties, he does so through the “Shakespeherian Rag.” When he imitates the Cockney talk of women in a pub, he finishes the dialogue with a quotation from Hamlet, so that the rhythms of lowerclass London speech give way to the words of the mad Ophelia.

That said, “A Game of Chess” is considerably less riddled with allusion and quotes than “The Burial of the Dead.” The name itself comes from Thomas Middleton‟s seventeenth-century play A Game of Chess, which posited the said game as an allegory to describe historical machinations –- specifically the brewing conflict between England and Spain. What might the game allegorize for Eliot? He offers it up as one of several activities, when the woman demands: “What shall we ever do?” Simply a slot in a strict numerical ordering of the day, chess recalls “lidless eyes,” as its players bide the time and wait “for a knock upon the door.” We are not far removed from the masses crowding London Bridge, their eyes fixed on their feet. Modern city-dwellers who float along in a fog are neither dead nor living; their world is an echo of Dante‟s Limbo. Chess belongs therefore to this lifeless life; it is the quintessential game of the wasteland, dependent on numbers and cold strategies, devoid of feeling or human contact. Interaction is reduced to a set of movements on a checkered board.

 

Summary and Analysis of Section III: "The Fire Sermon"

Eliot opens this section with the image of a river, wind crossing silently overhead. We are on the banks of the Thames, and Eliot cites Spenser‟s “Prothalamion” with the line: “Sweet Thames, run softly, till Iend my song.” The river is empty; “the nymphs" of Spenser‟s poem have departed, as have “their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors.” Eliot unspools imagery that evokes modern life – “empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends” – by describing what is not in the river. In other words, the Thames has become a kind of stagnant slate, devoid of detritus but also of life. The narrator remembers sitting by “the waters of Leman” –- French for Lake Geneva, where the poet recuperated while writing "The Waste Land" -– and weeping. His tears are a reference to Psalm 137, in which the people of Israel, exiled to Babylon, cry by the river as they remember Jerusalem.

Suddenly the death-life of the modern world rears its head. “A cold blast” is sounded, bones rattle, and a rat creeps “through the vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly on the bank.” Rats appear several times in "The Waste Land," and always they carry with them the specter of urban decay and death –- a death which, unlike that of Christ or Osiris or other men-deities, brings about no life. At this point, the narrator, “fishing in the dull canal,” assumes the role of the Fisher King, alluding to Jessie L. Weston‟s From Ritual to Romance and its description of the Grail legend. According to this study, of critical importance to the entirety of "The Waste Land," the Fisher King -– so named probably because of the importance of fish as Christian fertility symbols -– grows ill or impotent. As a result, his land begins to wither away; something akin to a drought hits, and what was once a fruitful kingdom is reduced to a wasteland. Only the Holy Grail can reverse the spell and save the king and his land. A typical addendum to this legend involves a prior crime or violation that serves as cause for the Fisher King‟s malady. By association, the rape of a maiden might sometimes lie at the root; hence Eliot‟s allusion to the tale of Philomela in “A Game of Chess.”

The allusion to the Grail is doubled by a possible reference to Wolfram von Eschenbach‟s Parzival, a version of the Percival stories; in this account, the brother of the Fisher King (Anfortas) tells Parzival: “His name all men know as Anfortas, and I weep for him evermore.” Eliot‟s lines “Musing upon the king my brother‟s wreck / And on the king my father‟s death before him” seem to combine the Percival legend with The Tempest, in which Ferdinand utters the verse: “Sitting on a bank, / Weeping again the King my father‟s wreck.” (North, 11) Eliot has already twice quoted The Tempest – “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” in “The Burial of the Dead” and “A Game of Chess” –- and here he links Shakespeare‟s fantastical drama, and the accompanying image of water racked by turbulent weather, with Grail mythology.

As the impotent Fisher King, Eliot describes the wasteland that stretches out before him. “White bodies [lie] naked on the low damp ground,” and bones are scattered “in a little dry garret, / Rattled by the rat‟s foot only, year to year.” This last line echoes verses 115-116 in “A Game of Chess”: “I think we are in the rats‟ alley / Where the dead men have lost their bones.” In both cases, the setting is one of death, decay, a kind of modern hell. Eliot proceeds to allude to John Day‟s The Parliament of Bees, a seventeenth-century work that describes the tale of Actaeon and Diana: the former approaches the latter while she is bathing, and, surprising her, is transformed into a stag and killed by his own dogs. Here Actaeon is “Sweeney” – a character familiar from some of Eliot‟s other poems, and Diana is Mrs. Porter. It is springtime, suggesting love and fertility –- but also cruelty, in Eliot‟s version -– and Sweeney visits the object of his affection via “horns and motors.” Again ancient mythology is updated, recast, and remolded. The stanza concludes with a quotation from Verlaine‟s “Parsifal,” a sonnet describing the hero‟s successful quest for the Holy Grail.

Next come four bizarre lines: “Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc‟d. / Tereu.” We recall “Jug jug jug” from “A Game of Chess,” in which the onomatopoeia described the sound of Philomela as nightingale; “Twit twit twit” likewise seems to represent a bird‟s call. So we have returned to the tale of the woman who was violated and took her revenge, and “So rudely forc‟d” refers to that violation. “Tereu,” then, is Tereus.

“Unreal City” reprises the line from “The Burial of the Dead,” evoking Baudelaire once more and bringing the reader back to modern London. Mr. Eugenides, a merchant from Turkey (and probably the one-eyed merchant Madame Sosostris described earlier) invites the narrator to luncheon at a hotel and to join him on a weekend excursion to Brighton. In the stanza that follows, the narrator, no longer himself and no longer the Fisher King, takes on the role of Tiresias, the blind prophet who has lived both as aman and a woman, and is therefore “throbbing between two lives.” Tiresias sees a “young man carbuncular” -- that is, a young man who has or resembles a boil –- pay a visit to a female typist. She is “bored and tired,” and the young man, like Tereus, is full of lust. He sleeps with her and then makes off, leaving her alone to think to herself: “Well now that‟s done: and I‟m glad it‟s over.” She plays music on the gramophone.

The music seems to transport the narrator back to the city below. “This music crept by me upon the waters” is another quote from The Tempest, and Eliot proceeds to describe a bustling bar in Lower Thames Street filled with “fishmen.” This account paves the way for another vision of the river itself: sweating “oil and tar,” a murky, polluted body replete with barges and “drifting logs.” Eliot quotes Wagner‟s Die Gotterdammerung, in which maidens upon the Rhine, having lost their gold, sing a song of lament: “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala.” A quick allusion to Queen Elizabeth‟s boat-ride with her suitor the Earl of Leicester, described in James Anthony Froude‟s History of England, contains references to the rich woman of “A Game of Chess” (“A gilded shell”) and another description of the sounds of the city -– “The peal of bells / White towers.”

Finally, one of the “maidens” raises her own voice, recounting her proper tragedy. “Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew / Undid me”: in other words, she was born in Highbury and lost her innocence in Richmond and Kew. Bitterly she recalls how the man responsible promised “a new start” afterwards; as it now stands, the maiden “can connect / Nothing with nothing.” The stanza ends with references to St. Augustine‟s Confessions and Buddha‟s Fire Sermon –- in each case to a passage describing the dangers of youthful lust.

Analysis

The central theme of this section is, to put it simply, sex. If death permeates “The Burial of the Dead” and the tragically wronged woman -– be it Philomela or Ophelia -– casts a pall over “A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon” is in essence a sermon about the dangers of lust. It is important to recognize that Eliot culminates this passage with an invocation of both Eastern and Western philosophy; he even says so himself in his notes. “To Carthage then I came” refers to Augustine; “Burning burning burning burning” recalls Buddha‟s Fire Sermon, in which “All things, O priests, are on fire.” Both Augustine and Buddha warn against purely physical urges, as they must inevitably serve as obstacles or barriers to true faith and spiritual peace. The image of fire, familiar from countless representations of Hell in Christian art, is here specifically linked to the animal drives that push men and women to commit sinful acts.

Of course, to interpret Eliot‟s poetry this moralistically is to miss much of its nuance and wit. While recalling the strictest of religious codes, Eliot is at his most literately playful here, spinning Tempest quotations into odes to Wagner, littering Spenser‟s Thames with “cardboard boxes” and “cigarette ends,” replacing Actaeon and Diana with a certain Sweeney and a certain Mrs. Porter. There is a satirical edge that cuts through this writing -– and perhaps real indignation as well. Much has already been made of the episode involving the typist and the carbuncular man. What is particularly fascinating about it is the way in which Eliot mixes and matches the violent with the nearly tender: the young man‟s first advances are “caresses” and he is later described as a “lover.” At the same time, however, “he assaults at once,” his vanity requiring “no response.” It is close to a scene of rape, and the ambiguity makes it all the more troubling.

Eliot offers a voyeuristic glimpse of a young woman‟s home, her sexual liaison with a man, and her moments alone afterwards. Ironically, he presents this Peeping Tom‟s account from the narrative perspective of the blind Tiresias: the “Old man with wrinkled female breasts.” The decrepit prophet who once lived as a woman recalls his encounters with Antigone and Oedipus Rex (“I who have sat by Thebes below the wall”) and Odysseus in Hades (“And walked among the lowest of the dead”) while witnessing a quintessentially modern bit of business. That Eliot resurrects ancient tropes and characters within such a vulgar scene is an act of audacity that was shocking in 1922, and still packs a punch. Readers today are perhaps less surprised by the episode, but it is hard not to be moved; quoting from Oliver Goldsmith‟s eighteenth-century novel The Vicar of Wakefield, Eliot describes the post-coitalwoman pacing about her room: “When lovely woman stoops to folly.” An image of potential perfection has been spoiled; all that is left now is a mirror and a gramophone.

It was surely this kind of scene that so stirred John Dos Passos, and it does indeed find numerous echoes in Manhattan Transfer. Eliot‟s poem was a crucial inspiration for Dos Passos‟ epic portrait of New York. An American transplanted to Europe, Eliot's narrator floats through London in “The Fire Sermon,” beginning by the Thames and returning there to listen to the cry of the Rhine-maidens as they bemoan their fate: “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala.” Whether quoting older sources or capturing the rhyme and texture of modern life, Eliot is dealing in sadness; a sense of loss imbues the writing, bubbling to the surface in the maiden‟s account of her lost innocence. Just as the narrator “knew nothing” when looking upon the hyacinth girl, so is the maiden faced with “nothing”: “I can connect / Nothing with nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands. / My people humble people who expect / Nothing.”

From the typist to this last suffering woman, lust seems to portend sorrow, and that sorrow seems in turn to be an integral feature of the modern world. The typist is never named because she is ultimately a "type," a representation of something larger and more widespread. Eliot is diagnosing his London and his world with a disease of the senses, through which sex has replaced love and meaningless physical contact has subsumed real emotional connection. Ironically, the Fisher King‟s impotence then results from an excess of carnality. The image of the river sweating oil recalls a Biblical plague, and the “burning” at the end of the section brings Hell to mind. Through it all the river courses, carrying history along with it. All the poet can do, it seems, is weep.

 

Summary and Analysis of Section IV: “Death by Water” and “What the Thunder Said”

“Death by Water” is by far the shortest of the poem‟s five sections, describing in eight lines “Phlebas the Phoenician” lying dead in the sea. An echo of the “drowned Phoenician” Madame Sosostris displayed in “The Burial of the Dead,” Phlebas is apparently a merchant, judging by the reference to “the profit and loss.” Now “a current under sea” picks his bones.

“What the Thunder Said,” the final section of "The Waste Land," picks up the same thread, referring in the first stanza to the passion of Christ, another famous deceased. The “torchlight red on sweaty faces” perhaps indicates the guards who come to take Christ away; the “garden” is Gethsemane; “the agony in stony places” refers to the torture and the execution itself; and “of thunder of spring over distant mountains” describes the earthquake following the crucifixion. From Christ‟s death springs life; similarly, the Phoenician is killed by water, that life-giving force, that symbol of fertility and rebirth. As in “The Burial of the Dead,” life and death are inextricably linked, their borders blurred at times: “He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience.”

The second stanza describes a land without any water: only rocks, sand, “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth.” The thunder brings no rain and is therefore “sterile.” “Red sullen faces sneer and snarl” at the poet as he makes his way through this desolate land – another wasteland. The poet laments the absence of water, thirst imbuing his verse with longing; he imagines the “drip drop” of water on rocks, but concludes by acknowledging that, alas, “there is no water.”

What follows is an allusion to Luke 24, as well as to a passage in Sir Ernest Shackleton‟s South; two travelers walk upon a road, and seem to be accompanied by a third, unnamed wanderer. Does this “third” exist, or is he merely an illusion? Shackleton‟s passage involves three men imagining a fourth by their side; in the Biblical scene, two travelers are joined by the resurrected Christ, but do not at first recognize that it is Him.

Eliot then moves from the individual to the collective, casting his gaze over all Europe and Asia, seeing “endless plains” and “hooded hordes.” It is a nearly apocalyptic vision; the great ancient cities of the Mediterranean (“Jerusalem Athens Alexandria”) and Europe (“Vienna London”) all seem “unreal,” as if they were already phantoms. Eliot refers to the “violet air,” echoing the “violet hour” of “The Fire Sermon,” but also suggesting the twilight not just of a day, but of all Western civilization. “Violet” is one of the liturgical colors associated with baptism; Eliot might be alluding to the Perilous Chapel in Jessie L. Weston‟s From Ritual to Romance, through which the knight must pass in order to obtain the Grail and which represents a sort of liminal passage or baptism. Certainly the next stanza, with “voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” and “bats with baby faces," suggests the Perilous Chapel –- a nightmarish place that tests the knight‟s gall and instills dread. Eliot describes towers that are upside down, and a woman who plays music with her hair, recalling the rich woman in “A Game of Chess” whose “hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words,” and “tumbled graves.” (In some versions of the Grail legend there is likewise a perilous graveyard.)

Finally, a “damp gust” brings rain. Immediately Eliot invokes the Ganges, India‟s sacred river (“Ganga” in the poem), and thunder, once sterile, now speaks: “Datta,” “dayadhvam,” and “damyata." The words the thunder offers belong to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and describe the three dictums God delivers to his disciples: “to give,” “to control,” and “to sympathize.” This profoundly spiritual moment of communication between men and God, of a dialogue between the earth and the Heavens, seems to promise a new beginning. Civilization is crumbling -– “London bridge is falling down falling down falling down” –- yet the poem ends with a benediction: “Shantih shantih shantih."

 

Analysis

The final stanzas of "The Waste Land" once again link Western and Eastern traditions, transporting the reader to the Ganges and the Himalayas, and then returning to the Thames and London Bridge. Eliot‟s tactic throughout his poem has been that of eclecticism, of mixing and matching and of diversity, and here this strain reaches a culmination. The relevant Upanishad passage, which Eliot quotes, describes God delivering three groups of followers -– men, demons, and the gods -– the sound “Da.” The challenge is to pull some meaning out of this apparently meaningless syllable. For men, “Da” becomes “Datta,” meaning to give; this order is meant to curb man‟s greed. For demons, “dayadhvam” is the dictum: these cruel and sadistic beings must show compassion and empathy for others. Finally, the gods must learn control – “damyata” – for they are wild and rebellious. Together, these three orders add up to a consistent moral perspective, composure, generosity, and empathy lying at the core.

Recalling his earlier allusion to Buddha‟s Fire Sermon, Eliot links “Datta” with a description of lust, of the dangers of “a moment‟s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract.” This, it would seem, is the primary sin of man. Crucially, however, Eliot notes that “By this, and this only, we have existed” -– reminding the reader of his work on Baudelaire, and his argument that an evil action, because it signifies existence, is better than inaction, which signifies nothing. Man‟s lustful deeds are “not to be found in our obituaries”; they remain intangible to some degree, not to be committed to paper or memory. But they linger on nonetheless, haunting the doers but also imbuing them with a sense of self; for once, Eliot almost seems to suggest the value of “a moment‟s surrender,” of giving up control for one fleeting instant, no matter the consequences. Indeed, such an act is perhaps preferable to that which the “beneficent spider” -– a reference to Webster‟s The White Devil, according to Eliot‟s notes –- allows; “empty rooms” and a “lean solicitor” cannot hope to understand the impulses that lead to an act of “folly.” Is “an age of prudence” even worth the trouble?

Next comes sympathy –- “dayadvham” -– as if Eliot were reminding the reader to show compassion for lustful men and women. We cannot help but remember the grief-stricken maiden of “The Fire Sermon” or the lonely typist with her gramophone; at the root of such tragedy is, after all, a sincere love for humanity. Eliot cares for these characters he has created, these refractions of his own modern world. The sermonizing of previous stanzas here gives way to a gentler view, albeit in the form of spiritual commandments. “I have heard the key / Turn in the door once and turn once only” refers to Dante‟s Inferno, in which Count Ugolino starves to death after being locked in a tower for treason. The subsequent allusion to “Coriolanus” completes the cycle: a Roman who turned his back on Rome, Coriolanus is another example of an outcast. These distinctly male visions of loneliness and removal echo the female counterpart of the typist, alone in her room at night. Eliot asks us to sympathize with these figures, and to acknowledge their pain.

The following stanza lifts the spirits; after the wreckage of lust and the torment of isolation, “Damyata” invites a happier perspective. The boat responds “Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar,” like the boat upon which Isolde hears the sailor‟s song in “The Burial of the Dead.” We have returned then to the beginnings of love, the promise of a joyful future. “Your heart” is perhaps even an address to Eliot‟s wife, begging the question of whether their romance might be rekindled. It is worth noting the tense Eliot employs: “would have responded” implies a negative. It is possible that what we are seeing is merely a token of what might have been, and not what is.

More direct is the past tense the narrator uses in the next stanza, in which he sits upon the shore, fishing. He is once again the Fisher King, impotent and dying, and he is flanked by an “arid plain.” We are unable to fully escape the wasteland. Eliot tempers the hope of the previous lines with this evocation of despair. “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” the narrator asks. The end is drawing near. The world is collapsing: London Bridge falls, Dante is quoted yet again, and an excerpt from Nerval involving “Le Prince d‟Aquitaine” points to a crumbling or destroyed tower –- “la tour abolie.” The hellish imagery of earlier parts of the poem returns here, complete with another view of modern-day London, with its towers and bridges. The word “ruins” is of particular importance: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The narrator is still attempting to stave off destruction...or perhaps he has at last surrendered, accepting his fate and that of the world.

“Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo‟s mad againe” is a reference to Thomas Kyd‟s The Spanish Tragedie, a late sixteenth-century text in which Hieronymo lapses into insanity after his son is murdered. The brutality and violence of man come to mind. What became of control, sympathy, and generosity? As if to answer the question, Eliot repeats the Eastern dictum: “Datta. Dayadvham. Damyata.” Against the ills of the modern (and pre-modern) world, those three words still hold out the promise of salvation. “Shantih shantih shantih” is an acknowledgment of that salvation; it may be interpreted as a blessing of sorts, putting to rest the sins, faults, trials and tribulations that have preceded it. Redemption remains a possibility. Interpretations of "The Waste Land" as unrelentingly pessimistic do little justice to the hopefulness, however faltering, of these last lines. Rain has come, and with it a call from the heavens. The poem ends on a note of grace, allying Eastern and Western religious traditions to posit a more universal worldview. Eliot calls what he has assembled “fragments,” and indeed they are; but together they add up to a vision that is not only European but global, a vision of the world as wasteland, awaiting the arrival of the Grail that will cure it of its ills. The end of the poem seems to suggest that that Grail is still within reach.

 

"The Waste Land" and the Holy Grail

As part of a foreword to his notes on "The Waste Land," Eliot writes: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston‟s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge).” Eliot proceeds to claim that he is deeply indebted to Weston‟s book, and that its subject matter informs much of his poem.

From Ritual to Romance is a scholarly work that studies in great detail the various legends of the Holy Grail. In it Weston uses such terms as “Fisher King” and “Waste Land,” and also delves into the importance of the Tarot pack –- which Eliot uses as a prop in the Madame Sosostris episode. Most important to Weston‟s book is the Grail itself: the famed cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper, and which was used to collect his blood after the crucifixion. Many stories involving the Grail exist. In one such tale, the man with the lance who pierces Jesus‟s side on the cross is cured of blindness by the blood in the cup. Endowed with restorative powers by its association with Christ, the Grail becomes one of the great relics, sought after by kings and knights for centuries.

Weston focuses in particular on medieval accounts of the Grail legend, but links these tales to earlier traditions. For example, some of the Mystery cults during the Roman Empire -– hidden sects, each dedicated to a single God –- practiced baptismal rites by blood, reminiscent of the life-giving powers the blood in the Grail offers. Fertility, restoration, and rebirth are the key themes; they constitute the promise of the Grail, its capability to save an individual and even an entire land from calamity.

In the archetypal version of the story, a king falls ill or becomes impotent. As a result, his kingdom turns desolate. The ravaged lands, wasting away, need a remedy. So a brave knight heads off on a quest to obtain the Holy Grail, which will bring life and fruitfulness back to the kingdom. The knight must face numerous obstacles, and near the end of his journey passes through the Perilous Chapel, a nightmarish place that represents his biggest challenge yet. When he finally finds the Grail, it restores the king and his kingdom. Rejoicing follows.

Wagner and Verlaine have plucked at this tale, and Eliot borrows from their versions. For the most part, however, the poet invokes that original template which Weston seeks in her own work; he even casts himself as the Fisher King at several points, and describes the rains come to cleanse the wasteland at the poem‟s end. Of course, how happy an ending Eliot offers is up to debate. There is little in the way of specific reference to the Grail itself in the poem. Eliot refers to those elements and figures that surround the holy chalice in the various tales –- the impotent king, the wasteland, the perilous chapel and cemetery, the rejoicing of the restored kingdom -– but rarely to the cup as an object. The Grail does not magically appear in the final stanzas, come to rescue us all; instead, Eliot suggests, it is up to mankind to construct our own salvation. 

 

 

THE WASTE LAND SUMMARY(shoomp)

The Burial of the Dead

It's not the cheeriest of starts, and it gets even drearier from there. The poem's speaker talks about how spring is an awful time of year, stirring up memories of bygone days and unfulfilled desires. Then the poem shifts into specific childhood memories of a woman named Marie. This is followed by a description of tangled, dead trees and land that isn't great for growing stuff. Suddenly, you're in a room with a "clairvoyant" or spiritual medium named Madame Sosostris, who reads you your fortune. And if that weren't enough, you then watch a crowd of people "flow[ing] over London Bridge" like zombies (62). Moving right along…

A Game of Chess

You are transported to the glittery room of a lavish woman, and you notice that hanging from the wall is an image of "the change of Philomel," a woman from Greek myth who was raped by King Tereus and then changed into a nightingale. Some anxious person says that their nerves are bad, and asks you to stay the night. This is followed by a couple of fragments vaguely asking you what you know and remember. The section finishes with a scene of two women chatting and trying to sneak in a few more drinks before closing time at the bar.

The Fire Sermon

Section three opens with a speaker who's hanging out beside London's River Thames and feeling bad about the fact that there's no magic left in the world. The focus swoops back to the story of Philomel for a second, then another speaker talks about how he might have been asked for weekend of sex by a "Smyrna merchant" (209). Next, you're hearing from Tiresias, a blind prophet from myth who was turned into a woman for seven years by the goddess Hera. You hear about a scene where a modern young man and woman—both not much to look at—are having this really awful, loveless sex. Finally, you overhear someone singing a popular song, which in the context of this poem just sounds depressing.

Death By Water

In a brief scene, you watch as a dead sailor named Phlebas decays at the bottom of the ocean, and the poem tells you to think of this young man whenever you start feeling too proud. Good tip, T.S.

What the Thunder Said

Section five takes you to a stony landscape with no water. There are two people walking, and one notices in his peripheral vision that a third person is with them. When he looks over, though, this other person disappears (it's like one of those squiggly lines that dance in the corner of your eye). In a dramatic moment, thunder cracks over the scene, and its noise seems to say three words in Sanskrit: Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata, which command you to "Give,""Sympathize," and "Control." This is followed by a repetition of the word Shantih, which means "the peace that passeth all understanding." After all that slogging, T.S. maybe gives us a little hope with this final word. Then again, maybe not.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD SUMMARY

Lines 1-4

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

An unknown speaker claims that "April is the cruellest month," even though we might usually think of spring as a time of love (1). But if you're lonely, seeing flowers blooming and people kissing might make you even more depressed about your "Memory and desire" (3). The spring rain might normally bring new life, but for you it only stirs "Dull roots" (4).

Also, you might want to note how Eliot really works the poetic technique of enjambment to carry each phrase over the line breaks with extra participles or -ing words (i.e., breeding, mixing, and stirring).

These lines are also written in almost-perfect iambic meter, which is really supposed to give you a sense of stability in a poem. But Eliot's enjambment keeps making it unstable by making every thought seem unfinished.

So right off the bat, he suggests that traditional forms of art might not bring the sense of closure and certainty they once did.

 

Lines 5-7

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

The speaker says that instead of spring being the best time of year, "Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow" (5-6). These lines show that when it comes to feeling bad, it's better to be forgetful and almost numb in your emotions, surviving on the little bits of joy in your life as if they were "dried tubers" from you potato cellar (7).

Uplifting, yes?

Also, the iambs of the first three lines have started to break down, although you're still getting those enjambed participle -ing words at the end of each line. Eliot is thematically showing you here that an unfinished thought has a way of infecting our sense of certainty and nibbling away at it like a termite.

 

 

 

Lines 8-12

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bing gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

These lines talk about how "summer surprised us," meaning that the poem's speaker has a crowd they hung out with in the past, but we're not clear who "us" is. At this point, you suddenly realize that you're probably dealing with a dramatic monologue, meaning that the poem is being spoken by a specific character.

This isn't Eliot, or some third person narrator yakking away. Think of the speaker as a character here.

"[C]oming over the Starnbergersee" makes the location of the memory more specific, because Starnbergersee is the name of a lake that's just a couple miles south of Munich, Germany.

The speaker then talks about how the group walked past a bunch of fancy columns and ended up in a city park in Munich known as the Hofgarten (10). They drank coffee and talked for an hour.

Then you have strange line in German that says "I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German" (12). Um, thanks for the info? What this line tells us is that the speaker was having a conversation about who counts as a "true" German, and suggests that a true German can come from the country of Lithuania, which has Germanic historical roots.

See? This poem isn't so hard, right? Right…

But rest assured that even if you can't read German, a perfect translation is less important than the fact that we readers are eavesdropping on a conversation.

We're getting snippets of life in Europe in the early 20th century, and that notion's more important than what's actually being said in those snippets. Stay tuned for more.

 

Lines 13-18

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,

My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

These lines continue on with the speaker's memories of childhood. And hey—they're not so bad.You find out that the speaker is the cousin of an archduke, which means that he or she probably came from a pretty ritzy background. And they went on swanky vacays to boot.

The archduke took the speaker out on a sled and told her not to be frightened. You find out at this point that the speaker's name is Marie.

It turns out Eliot's actually alluding to a real, historical figure named Marie Louise Elizabeth Mendel, a Bavarian woman who was born into a family with royal roots, and became Countess Larisch when she was nineteen. She was also the cousin of Archduke Rudolph, the Crown Prince of Austria.

It's not entirely clear why Eliot inserts Marie into the beginning of his poem, but there are a couple running theories.

First, there was a widespread scandal in 1889 (Eliot would have been less than a year old) when the archduke was found dead with his mistress, leaving a gaping hole in the Austrian royal line of succession. Whoops. This story could set off the motif of dead royalty that Eliot uses in this poem to symbolize the collapse of traditional forms of government and the "rule of the mob" in the 20th century. Yikes. (More on that coming soon.)

Also, the countess Marie also barely avoided being killed when a socialist workers' movement swept across Bavaria and encouraged the killing and imprisoning of anyone of Marie's high class. Once again, we've got notes of the decline of traditional, high culture in a modern sea of stupid, violent, and worst of all, average people (cue Eliot's sneer).

Either way, legend has it that Eliot and Marie once met, so maybe he's just using their brief encounter as poetic fodder, and nothing more. Shmoop's guess is as good as yours.These lines close with Marie talking about how awesome and free you feel in the mountains, to which we say obvi.

She ends on a weird note, though, telling you that she likes to read during the night and travels south in the winter, which makes her sound like a bookwormy goose. This could mean that now that she's old, she gets her enjoyment from books and doesn't go to the snowy mountains anymore, choosing instead to "go south in winter" (18) like an old fogey headed to Fort Lauderdale.

Lines 19-26

    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, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

It's not Marie who's talking anymore, but someone else. These lines throw you three verses from the Bible, and they basically talk about how your soul is like soil without water, which is, yes, as awful as it sounds.

The first allusion is in lines 19-20. It's based on Ezekiel, and it asks you what could possibly grow from your spirit, which is like "stony rubbish" (20). (Son of man, by the way, is a phrase commonly used in the Bible.)

Lines 21-23 allude to Ecclesiastes, and they say that you probably don't know the answer to this last question, because all you really know about life is "a heap of broken images" (22), meaning that you live your life on a superficial level and don't bother to draw your thoughts together into any meaningful ideas.

You (meaning whomever the speaker is speaking to) live in a world that is as hard on you as a beating sun, but your trees (meaning your ideas and your spirit) are dead, and they can't comfort you or give you shade.

You're dying from spiritual thirst, and there is "no sound of water" (24). All you're going to get is a half-hearted comfort, like shadow under a "red rock" (25).

Hmm. We're starting to get the feeling that Eliot's a bit of a negative Nelly. But we guess we saw that coming, what with the poem's title and all.

The next line (alluding to Isaiah) invites you into this shadow, since it's the best you're going to get.

These are the lines when that whole waste land concept really gets some juice. Eliot's speaker describes a desert, and it's just about as awful as deserts can get—no water, dead trees, red rock. Wherever we are, we're surrounded by stony rubbish, whether real or figurative, and our speaker is Not Happy.

 

Lines 27-30

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;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

These next three lines are totally creepy, because the speaker suddenly promises to "show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you" (27-29). Well, what other shadows are there, buddy?

Eliot's use of parallelism in lines 28 and 29 suggests a certain mirroring effect in the two shadows, which gives you a confused sense of traveling into two opposite directions at once.

We like to think this was on purpose, since it enhances the sense of not knowing where you're going (in a symbolic sense) in the modern world. As in, "hey if no one's reading Homer anymore, what are we all doing here, anyway?" Fair question.

But let's break this down even further. Your shadow is the trace that you're always leaving on this world, but it doesn't last long. At the end of the day, time passes as each morning and night goes by, and when all's said and done, you're going to die just like everyone else. Bummer.

And that's when the speaker drops this doozy on us: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" (30). We're shaking in our Shmoop boots over here (shmoots?). The reason dust is so scary is because that's exactly what you're going to turn into some day, but you should probably try not to think about it too much.

Except that it's hard not to. Hey, nothing gets you wondering about the health of your soul more than knowing that you're going to die.

 

Lines 31-34

             Frisch weht der Wind

             Der Heimat zu

             Mein Irisch Kind

             Wo weilest du?

These lines are written in German and taken from Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde, which tells the story of two doomed lovers. They're spoken by a sailor who thinks sadly about a girl he's left behind in his travels, kind of like this guy.

At this point, the poem takes on a tone of mourning for a love that was once great, but is now kaput. (F.Y.I., you should probably get used to this idea of mourning, because you're in for a couple hundred more lines of it.)

Another big reason for this tone of mourning is no doubt the fact that World War I had ended only four years before Eliot published "The Waste Land." The Great War was awful, blood mess, and during the four years that it lasted, over nine million soldiers were killed. Needless to say, it set off a huge sense of despair all across Europe, as people became convinced that the so-called "sophistication" of the Western world had come to a bitter end with young men shooting each other over political goals from which they were far removed.

This sense of despair made artists realize that if there was going to be any way forward, they were going to have to radically rethink how they created art, and this is definitely part of what's informing Eliot's experimental style in this poem.

From a formal sense, Eliot also really starts upping the ante on the fragmentary aspects of his poem at this point (hint: it's only going to get more fragmented).

Throughout this poem, Eliot's always taking bits and pieces from the "high culture" that people in the Western world don't fully appreciate anymore and mixing them up with surprising images and other snippets.

But Eliot is convinced that this culture, like it or not, used to provide a common point of reference for everybody, and now that it doesn't have the power to unite people anymore, daily experience seems more disconnected from any sense of meaning. That's why we only get those bits and pieces, instead of complete allusions.

Lines 35-42

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

They called me the hyacinth girl."

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Yours arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.         

Oed' und leer das Meer.

It seems like a woman is speaking again in these lines, and she remembers a time when she was young and someone gave her nice hyacinth flowers, all romantic-like.Eliot uses the poetic technique of apostrophe here, meaning that the woman is addressing another person who doesn't seem to be present in the poem at this point.

Or, more creepily, she might actually be talking to herself, which would suggest a deep sense of longing or mourning for something that's gone. And a little break with sanity, too.

Somewhere in the woman's distant memory, something went really really wrong. She remembers how suddenly, without warning, her love went south, so to speak. She felt she "was neither / Living nor dead, and [she] knew nothing" (39). It's like her soul just up and died.

These lines finish with another line in German from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde opera, which translates as "Waste and empty is the sea." This basically means that the sea—which is supposed to bring your lover to you, when your lover's a sailor and all—is basically a big fat hole. No water? No sailor.The gist here? At some point in the speaker's life, there was a great love; but that time is gone, and her soul is now empty.

Lines 43-46

    Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe.

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

The speaker shifts again and tells you about a fortune-teller named Madame Sosostris, who "Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe" (45), even though she gets a "bad cold" like everyone else.

Sosostris is a literary allusion to Madame Sesostris, a fortune-telling fraud from Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow, a satire of high British culture which was published a year before "The Waste Land."

This woman also has a "wicked pack of [tarot] cards" that she uses to tell fortunes. Tarot cards are special hand-held cards that people have been using to predict the future since the 1400's in Britain and elsewhere.

In these lines, the speaker seems to be really critical of this woman's superstitious schemes (especially since he seems to think a mere cold would throw off her skills), but the speaker goes on to take some of the images in her tarot cards pretty seriously, as you'll see soon enough. And with all the crazy stuff that's going down in this poem, that's probably a good idea. You don't wanna mess with those tarot cards.

Lines 47-50

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Sosostris pulls cards, and the first one shows "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" (47). The Phoenicians were a group of people from around 1,000 B.C.E. who really knew their way around a boat.

The next line has Sosostris telling you that "Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!" (48). This line is taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest, and it describes how a person lying at the bottom of the sea for a long time has had his eyeballs turn into pearls.

Eyes are windows into the soul, and if a person's eyes have hardened into pearls, it's a logical assumption that the soul is completely hardened and dead, too.

The next card Sosostris pulls is "Belladona," meaning "Beautiful Lady" in Italian, but also referring to a type of poison called nightshade. Yeah, it's as scary as it sounds.

Of course, the "Belladonna" is not actually a tarot card—Eliot's just pulling that out of…somewhere. Some folks think this is an allusion to Leonardo's famous painting, Madonna of the Rocks, which gives us a distinctly Christian way to read these lines. After all, in the Christian tradition, rocks symbolize the foundation that the Christian church provides for your life.

So we get a weird combo of associations here—Christian faith and poison. Yikes. Maybe that's why the woman is called "the lady of situations": she can be either beautiful or dangerous, depending on what's going down. Kind of like swans: so pretty, but so very mean.

That's the last time we let T.S. read our fortune.

 

Lines 51-55

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

 

More tarot cards.

Next, Sosostris pulls you "the man with three staves" or three staffs, which is an actual card that represents famine and drought in the land, and relates back to the "stony rubbish" that the poem compares your soul to in line 20 (yes, this poem can be a bit judgmental).

Then there's "the Wheel," which represents the wheel of fortune or rota fortunae, a medieval symbol of how life and death keep going in an endless circle and how good and bad fortune often come to us for reasons we can't control.

After this, Madame pulls "the one-eyed merchant" (another totally made up tarot card), and then finally, just when you're about tarot-ed out, there's one last card that shows someone carrying something on his back, but you can't see what it is.

Sosostris says she does not find "The Hanged Man," which sounds like a good thing at first, but this card actually would've symbolized spiritual rebirth, as all you tarot buffs out there know. So you lose again. Sorry. And as if that weren't bad enough, the lady tells you to fear death by water (hey, that's a familiar phrase). You might normally think this means drowning, but don't forget, you can also die by lack of water…like in a waste land.

By the way, now that we're done with that tarot disaster, Shmoop's gonna give you a little heads up: watch out for these tarot figures—the Phoenician sailor, the merchant, and even the Hanged Man—who'll show up later in the poem in some form or other (the Hanged Man will be the hardest to spot, but Eliot associates him with the hooded figure who appears at the beginning of "What the Thunder Said"). Eliot may be totally making these cards up, but in the world of the waste land, they've got all kinds of symbolic significance.

Lines 56-59

I see crowds of people, walking around in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

The worst tarot session in the history of tarot sessions may be over, but Sosostris is not done fortune-telling. Suddenly, she has a vision of people "walking around in a ring" (56), which could go back to the wheel of fortune image. Or, as the line suggests, these folks are walking around, either trapped inside a circle or circling around it. Either way, it sure doesn't sound like they have much direction.

And finally, it could also refer to the circles of hell that make up Dante's Inferno, a classic of 14th-century Italian literature that describes every little detail of life in hell. This book no doubt inspired Eliot not only because of its subject matter, but because of the sheer detail that Dante uses to describe hell, thus giving his religious beliefs a complex, yet cohesive sense of order and stability. This kind of faith-based stability is exactly what the modern world lacks in Eliot's eyes. Plus, dude used it in his famous epigraph of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

After Sosostris has done her thing, she asks you to give a message to one of her other clients (Mrs. Equitone), saying that she'll deliver a horoscope herself to make sure it doesn't get stolen. Because at the end of the day, a fortune teller's gotta get paid like everyone else.

Lines 60-68   Unreal City.

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

The speaker shifts again, this time to someone who's peering out over an "Unreal" or fake modern city whose "brown fog" suggests that it isn't the cleanest of places.

The phrase "Unreal City" is actually a reference to Charles Baudelaire, a 19th-century French poet whose collection, Fleurs du Mal (1857), brought light to the unsavory sexual practices and indulgent lifestyles of the poet's time (just like Eliot does in "The Waste Land").

The speaker remembers watching a crowd flowing over London Bridge like zombies, and says he "had not thought death had undone so many" (63). Here, Eliot is definitely talking about the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno (he's basically quoting the poem here), and is comparing modern life to living in hell, you know, where all the dead people are.

The people in this scene are sighing and staring (more Inferno allusions) only at the ground in front of their feet. They seem pretty unsatisfied with their undead lives, if you ask Shmoop. Maybe they should take a zombie self-actualization course at the local Zen center.

The speaker mentions a landmark street in London, and notes how a church bell (of an actual church—St Mary Woolnoth) let out a "dead sound on the final stroke of nine" (68). There we go again, associating religion and death.

In a formal sense, you should also notice how every now and then, Eliot will throw you a little rhyming couplet, like he does with "feet" and "Street" or "many" and "many" (nice one, T.S.). Again, these sudden bursts of classic, recognizable form help remind us of the overall sense of cultural fragmentation that Eliot is trying to convey in this poem.

Or in other words, we still have reminders of the structured, orderly world that once existed in Europe (ah, yes, the bygone days of the heroic couplet), but reminders are all they are, since they've been shattered into pieces and scattered over the waste land of modern intellectual and emotional life. Phew.

Lines 69-76

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!

You were with me in the ships at Mylae!

The corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

Oh keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men,

Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!

You hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!"

 

"The Burial of the Dead" ends on a pretty gruesome note, in which the speaker claims that he saw someone he knew from an ancient war (named Stetson) in the flowing zombie-crowd and asked him if the "corpse [he] planted last year in [his] garden" has begun to sprout" (72).

Normally, we think of burying the dead in order to get them out of sight. But this speaker is so demented that he thinks planting a body in the ground is like planting a seed that's supposed to grow. The speaker then gives the Stetson man advice about keeping the dog and the frost away from where the corpse is planted.

Um, what? Has this speaker gone nuts? Probably. But he's also alluding to John Webster's The White Devil, which contains the same lines as 74 and 75 above.

His final words are from Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, a poem published in 1857 that dealt with themes of modern eroticism and decadence, basically calling people out for many of the same things Eliot is in "The Waste Land." Sure, plot-wise, this is our latest speaker calling out his zombie buddy named Stetson, but you might also look at it as Eliot calling out the reader for being a lazy hypocrite.

The speaker more or less admits that he's no better by calling you "mon frère" or "my brother" in French. So after reading all this stuff about how awful the world's gotten, you get to find out that the speaker of the poem personally blames you, himself, and pretty much everybody for what's happened.

 

A GAME OF CHESS SUMMARY

Lines 77-84

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of the sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

"A Game of Chess" opens with a description of a woman sitting inside a really expensive room. The "burnished throne" in line 77 is a reference to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, which heightens the queen-like sense of the room the speaker is describing to you.

Line 78 mentions marble, line 79 gives us "fruited vines," line 80 describes a Cupidon (or one of those little cherub guys), and 82 talks about "sevenbranched candelabra," or a candle holder with seven holes to fit candles. Finally, the mention of "the glitter of her jewels" (84) fills out this description of luxury that seems like it could come out of an ancient Greek play. This lady's living the life. We'll see how long that lasts.

Also, Eliot chooses to open this section of the poem with unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, which is a pretty classic, common meter in English poetry—recognizable enough to seem stable and easy to follow. It's only later in "A Game of Chess" that this fragile sense of order starts to break down. Which makes sense, because society's undergoing a bit of cultural and spiritual breakdown in the modern world. Or at least that's Eliot's take.

Lines 85-93

From satin cases poured in rich profusion.

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered or liquid—troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring a pattern on the coffered ceiling.

 

These lines continue the description of the lavish room, telling us that stinky perfumes are oozing from vials and up to the ceiling (laquearia refers to a fancy, paneled ceiling. Yeah, we watch HGTV).

We don't know about you, but we're starting to notice that everything sounds kind of fake and tawdry, too: "In vials of ivory and coloured glass / Unstoppered, lurked their strange synthetic perfumes, / Unguent, powdered, or liquid" (86-88).

Yeah, we don't like the word unguent, either. But it's the word "synthetic" that especially seems to point to the unnaturalness of modern chemicals and even modern beauty.

When the speaker suggests that the smell of these things "drowned the sense of odours" (89), it could mean that modern products are just too much sometimes, too overwhelming. You know what we're talking about: haven't you ever been stuck in an elevator with a dude who's wearing too much cologne?

 

Lines 94-96

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.

The speaker follows the smoke from the candles to the room's ceiling, and find that it is made of "sea-wood fed with copper" (94), which makes it burn green and orange. As weird as it sounds, in the wayback days, a lot of ceilings were copper, so the image isn't all that strange.

The speaker finds that in the room's "sad light a carvèd dolphin swam" (96). This line really shows how the room has taken the image of something natural and vibrant—a dolphin—and turned it into a dead carving. It's like the room wants to remind everyone of nature (it's trying really hard!), but it can only do this in a superficial way, not, ahem, unlike the modern world.

 

Lines 97-103

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.

These lines describe some sort of painting or tapestry that's on the wall of the lavish room, which depicts the transformation of the mythical heroine Philomela into a nightingale, which takes place in a "sylvan scene." That phrase is an allusion to John Milton's Paradise Lost, where he uses the phrase in Book IV, line 140.

The transformation of whom into what? Here's the scoop:

The myth of Philomela, which is featured in the poetic Metamorphoses written by the Roman named Ovid (just one name, kind of like Cher) around the time of Christ, tells the story of Philomela, who was raped by her sister's husband, King Tereus. He then cut out her tongue so she wouldn't tell on him (yes, those ancient Greeks and Romans loved their gruesome stories).

As the story goes, Philomela managed to tell her sister the truth by weaving her story into a tapestry. Then the two of them iced Tereus' son and fed the boy to Tereus without the king knowing. After Tereus found out, Philomela escaped by transforming into a nightingale, which is a handy trick when you're in a bind.

As these lines suggest, we can still hear Philomela's voice in the songs of nightingales, but because we don't study classical stories anymore, this song just sounds like "'Jug Jug' to dirty ears" (103), a.k.a. uneducated ones.

Lines 104-110

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

When the poem speaks about "other withered stumps of time" (104), it's probably talking about the withered stump that was left after Tereus cut out Philomela's tongue. Much like Philomela, modern people don't know how to truly express themselves in beautiful ways, so we're all dumbly silent in our own way.  Or you might read it saying that these tapestries are like fragments, or "withered stumps" from the past that are "told upon the walls."

Whatever the case, the figures in these tapestries are leering at the lady sitting on her throne. They're surrounding her. Eliot uses personification in these lines to describe how from all around the tapestry on the wall, other objects and carvings "Lea[n] out," meaning that other stories and artifacts from our past are just dying to be heard. Too bad we don't have the classic education to hear or understand them.

The scene concludes with an image of the woman of the room brushing her hair into "fiery points," which seem to have something to say. They "glowed into words" after all. But then they're still, so whatever story they had to tell, we're not going to hear it, because someone's coming on the stairs.

Lines 111-114

"My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

   What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think."

Hush up, the lady's talkin'. She is clearly not happy in this room. In fact, she kind of sounds like a neurotic crazy lady as she frantically questions whomever she's speaking to.

Formally, here's where the structured iambics of "A Game of Chess" really start to go off the rails, which makes sense. It's not a stretch to say that this kind of neurotic behavior is way more common in modern times than it was in the past, as far as Eliot's concerned, and that neurotic behavior is reflected in the off-kilter meter of these lines.

In a formal way, you can even say the structure of the poem experiences a breakdown the same way the character speaking seems to have a mental breakdown. Without tradition to help us structure our lives in meaningful ways, there's nothing to save us from mental and emotional collapse, which seems to be happening to the speaker in this instance.

Lines 115-116

   I think we are in rats' alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

When the speaker suddenly says, "I think we are in rats' alley," he might be referring to one of the awful trenches that soldiers lived in during World War I.

Military companies would often give morbid nicknames to these trenches, and this would explain why this is a place where "the dead men lost their bones."

Whether the military reference holds up or not, though, we can tell that rats' alley is probably a very unpleasant place, and it continues the rat motif that symbolizes modern decay throughout this poem. Look for it later, in line 195.

Lines 117-123

"What is that noise?"

         The wind under the door.

"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"

         Nothing again nothing.

         Do

You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

Nothing?"

These lines give us snippets of a conversation. And it's kind of a crappy one.

Lines 117-120 show someone being really paranoid about he sound of wind coming through a doorway (which include another allusion to John Webster. This time, Eliot's referencing The Devil's Law Case, which contains the line "Is the wind in that door still?").

Hey, it's just wind, buddy. We're thinking this is a return to the really stressed out neurotic person we were just hearing from in lines 111-114.

Luckily, we've got the speaker of the poem to reassure this person. And when the speaker of the poem insists that it is "nothing again nothing," that line jumps out as being Very Important to Shmoop. The repetition of the word "nothing" might hint toward the overall nothingness of modern life with all its shallowness.

This is followed by another set of anxious questions about whether or not the speaker of the poem actually knows nothing.

As you can see with the placement of "Do" way inside the margin, the structure of the poem continues to get more wonky as it reflects the collapsing mind of the person speaking.

 

 

Lines 124-126

   I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

These lines again ask you if you know nothing, but they also splice in that line from The Tempest about a drowned person's eyes turning into pearls.

Remember that from earlier in the poem—the Madame Sosostris exchange?

Eliot would really hope his audience would get a famous Shakespeare reference like this, but many people might not have, which kind of proves his point about the whole modern-society-blows thing.

This image of a hardened, dead soul leads back into the question of whether you (the reader) are even alive or not. This poem constantly brings up zombie-like images of the undead as a metaphor for modern life. For Eliot, our society has gotten so spiritually numb that we can't even really say if we're alive or dead anymore. Our eyes are too glazed and pearly from watching all those episodes of Love in the Wild.

It's also worth noting that these lines are a callback to lines 37 and 48 of this very poem—remember the pearls-for-eyes sailor? And that existential crisis in the hyacinth garden? Yep, it's all going down all over again.

 

Lines 127-134

  But O O O O that Shakespearean Rag—

It's so elegant

So intelligent

"What shall I do now? What shall I do?

I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

What shall we ever do?"

After all the complaining the speaker has just done about how terrible the modern world and modern people are, the poem cuts in with a "But," which makes you think that we're about to hear something redeeming about ourselves.

Not so fast. Instead of giving us this, though, the poem launches into a riff on a popular Irving Berlin song from Eliot's time. The song was called "That Mysterious Rag," only the speaker refers to "that Shakespearean Rag," perhaps alluding to his mention of The Tempest two lines above.

In any case, the speaker sounds more than a little pretentious calling the song/play "elegant" and "intelligent." Yes, very astute. Anything else to add, Sherlock?

This is followed by a repetition of the question "What shall I do?" or "What shall we do?" When this leads to the question, "What shall we ever do?" you get a strong sense that the people in this poem really don't know what to do with their time, since they don't even know what activities are worthwhile or meaningful.

This section could also refer to the loss of religion and spirituality in modern life, which leaves people speechless when it comes to figuring out what to do with their lives.

Lines 135-138

                                  The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

 

What shall we do? How about hot water at ten, a closed car, and a game of chess?

These lines speak about how people wish to kill time in their lives, staying up all night and playing a game of chess. In this sense, maybe Eliot means that without spirituality, modern life is just a long game we play with ourselves, always competing, setting goals, and strategizing simply for the sake of "playing the game."

Also, the "game of chess" here is an allusion to the English playwright Thomas Middleton, who wrote a play called A Game at Chess. He also wrote another play called Women Beware Women, in which a game of chess represents all of the moves a man makes while cornering and seducing woman, which will come up later in "The Waste Land" in the story of the "young man carbuncular." Stay tuned.

This whole time, though, the speaker is "pressing lidless eyes," which suggests a lack of sleep, and "waiting for a knock upon the door" (138), which could mean that he's waiting for something or someone to walk into his life and give it meaning. In this sense, modern life just seems like a long wait for something that never seems to come.

Formally speaking, this is also the last little bit of ordered rhyme ("four" and "door") that you get before the structure of the poem totally collapses into the conversation at a pub. This could represent a last gasp of sorts of classic culture before it totally gives way to filthy barroom shenanigans. Or something.

Lines 139-149

    When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear. I can't bear to look at you.

And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.

These lines (and the rest of "A Game of Chess") focus on one woman telling a story of a conversation she had to an audience of acquaintances at a bar.

One woman is explaining how she told her friend to make herself look good because her (the friend's) husband was coming back from the war. Instead of saying, "go get yourself a nice dress," though, this woman tells her friend to get all of her gross teeth pulled out and to buy herself a new set.

She then tells her friend the ugly truth: her teeth look totally disgusting. She caps off this amazing demonstration of friendship by saying that if the friend doesn't get herself together, some other woman's going to swoop in and catch her husband's eye. Wow, some friend.

The phrase "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME" is a standard thing for bartenders to say in the U.K. when the bar is closing for the night, and Eliot uses this phrase as a refrain to punctuate and interrupt the woman's rehashing of her conversation. It's a creepy refrain, adding a sense of urgency and desperation that this woman doesn't seem to feel.

Lines 150-157

Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.

Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can't.

But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

We're still in this recap of the totally awkward conversation the speaker at the pub had with her friend Lil.

At this point, the friend named Lil finally takes a shot of her own and accuses the first woman of wanting to sleep with her (Lil's) husband. This is what is means when she says "Then I'll know who to thank" and gives her friend "a straight look" (151).

The first woman basically says "Fine, but don't say I didn't warn you," when the poem reads "But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling" (155).

Finally, the first woman tells her friend that she should feel ashamed to look so old at thirty-one.

We recommend that you don't try talking to your own friends this way.

 

Lines 158-164

I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don't want children?

Lil says that she "can't help it," meaning that she can't help looking so old. She's been really messed up by the pills she took "to bring it off" (159). The phrase "bring it off" in this case means aborting a baby. Basically, any pill from the 1920's that could make you abort your baby was going to have a pretty strong chemical reaction in your body.

The first woman mentions at this point that Lil has had five babies already, and nearly died during one of her pregnancies. Lil then talks about how the pharmacist said the drug was okay, but she complains that she's "never been the same" since taking the abortion pill.

The first woman doesn't relent at all, but just keeps hammering away and calling Lil a fool. It seems like Lil is not all that interested in having sex, but the first woman says "What you get married for if you don't want children?" In other words, Lil is trapped in her crummy life.

In this scene, Eliot is really giving us a snapshot of how crappy things have gotten in English society. This is the type of conversation he might have overheard while living in England, and it reflects the theme of infertility that comes up over and over again in this poem.

Just as the symbolic landscape of the world can no longer give life, you've got lower class women half-killing themselves to abort their babies.

Lines 165-172

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Goodnight Bill. Goodnight Lou. Goodnight May. Goodnight.

Ta ta. Goodnight. Goodnight.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

 

That refrain is gaining strength as the woman in the bar wraps up her story. But she's not done.

In these lines, the subject of the women's conversation completely changes to normal everyday stuff, like visiting someone's house and having a really nice ham or "hot gammon" (167). But that story will have to be finished another day, because the barkeep is practically yelling now. The scene ends with everyone saying goodnight to one another as though they're all very pleasant and polite. And we finally get to learn who these folks in the bar are: Bill, Lou, and May.

The phrasing of "good night, sweet ladies" seems especially inappropriate, considering the type of conversation we just overheard, but hey, what's a little inappropriateness between friends?

This final repetition of "good night" is also a reference to Ophelia, the young woman who drowns herself in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

But you already knew that, right? Eliot definitely hopes so.

 

THE FIRE SERMON SUMMARY

Lines 173-175

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

In these lines, Eliot vividly paints a picture of someone sitting on the bank of the famous Thames River in London. Leaves have fallen and have "s[u]nk into the wet bank" (174). That's what he's referring to the river's tent's being broken. There are no longer any leaves overhead, acting as a canopy.

The overall tone, as you might expect, continues to be pretty dreary. But there's a lot of wetness in this scene, compared to the dryness and drought-like quality of earlier sections with all those shadows and red rock.

The most significant part of these lines comes with the phrase, "The wind / Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed" (175). The nymphs he's talking about are probably the Naiads, or nymphs of the river, according to Greek mythology. This line tells us that the magic is now gone from what used to be a very magical place, a place that inspired poets to write about love and beauty.

Now, you've just got an empty wind in an empty place.

Lines 176-181

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer night. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

Allusion alert. The line "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song" is a line from a poem called "Prothalamion" by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) that celebrates marriage along the Thames.

Eliot is suggesting to us, though, that Spenser's Thames was very different than the one of Eliot's time, which is polluted with "empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends" (177-178).

Yeah, we know: Eliot says, "the river bears no [litter]" (emphasis added), but that's actually a sarcastic remark, meaning that all the litter is there now, but wasn't in Spenser's time. That Eliot's a confusing guy.
But he's not so confusing that he's writing a poem called "The Waste Land" about a river that's...clean.

The people who've left this stuff behind aren't just the riff-raff, either, but are probably the "heirs of city directors" (180), meaning that even people of privilege have turned to slobs in the 20th century.

And along with the litter replacing the scenic riverbank, the nymphs have been replaced by these city directors, who sound way less awesome, seeing as how they make the river all polluted and gross.

Welcome to the Modern World, everyone. Wear close-toed shoes, please.

 

Lines 182-186

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

Eliot's speaker claims, "By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…" (182), which might hint at the weeping that the Hebrews did when they stopped by the rivers of Babylon and remembered Zion, the homeland they were exiled from. Check out Psalm 137 for more.

But Lac Léman, or Lake Geneva, is also a very important lake western Switzerland, so Eliot could be alluding to that as well, although we don't know what anyone in Switzerland has to weep about. They've got great chocolate.

If you want to go the more general route, this line could also just be the speaker of this poem being really depressed about the world. The use of ellipsis (…) at the end of this line also contributes to the overall lack of closure that you get throughout. The speaker is trailing off, unsure of where he's going.

After this, you get the line from the Spenser poem repeated twice, followed by a sudden mention of "But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear" (185-186).

There's something super creepy about these lines, as though some violent person is standing right behind the speaker, ready to do something awful, and enjoy it. Yikes.

And there's also something eerily familiar…but we'll get to that in just a bit.

 

Lines 187-192

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother's wreck

And on the king my father's death before him.

 

A disgusting, slimy rat crawls into the Thames while the speaker is fishing and thinking about "the king my brother's wreck" (191).

While the rat provides the pitch-perfect image for the decay that's going on in society in Eliot's time, we're more interested in this wreck.

It turns out that this line refers to an early scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which the magician Prospero summons an insane storm to wreck his brother's ship. Prospero takes revenge because his jealous brother marooned him on an island twelve years earlier so that he (the brother) could be king.

This reference conveys the sense of being stranded, just as Eliot feels stranded and without hope in the modern world.

 

Lines 193-195

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.

The "White bodies naked on the low damp ground" (193) could refer to the people killed by Prospero's storm, or actual dead bodies lying along the bank of the Thames.

Then you hear about the bones that are scattered in a "low, dry garret" somewhere, a garret being a little attic.

These bones mostly just gather dust, and are disturbed by "the rat's foot only, year to year" (195). So in case you haven't gotten the point yet, Eliot really wants you to know that the Thames and London is no longer the awesome beautiful place that some poets have made it out to be. Now it's got litter and dead bodies. Lovely.

Lines 196-202

But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs Porter in the spring.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter

And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water

Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Allusions abound! Let's break 'em down.

The speaker says that sometimes, he hears the sound of horns and motors, which will bring someone named Sweeney to someone named Mrs. Porter in the spring.

These lines pretty directly allude to a play called Parliament of Bees by John Day. The lines in the play describe Actaeon stumbling upon Diana bathing in the woods, drawn there by a noise of horns and hunting. Only here, Sweeney is figured as a modern-day Actaeon, and instead of Diana, we get Mrs Porter, who's bathing in soda water, rather than, you know, a lovely river.

But the phrasing here is also a nod to a very famous poem, "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, which has a line in it that goes, "But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying hear." Plus, it's an echo of line 195.

Sweeney is a not-so-likeable character from an earlier Eliot poem called "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," and Mrs. Porter is from a popular song that was sung by Australian troops during World War I.

Lines 199-201 are taken from this song, and once again they show a sort of mediocre stupidity that keeps ruining or drowning out the things in the world that are truly great.

More than any other section of the poem, "The Fire Sermon" includes bits of popular songs to showcase how low culture has sunken, just like leaves into the filthy banks of the Thames.

Line 202 is written in French, and translates as "And O those children's voices singing in the dome!" This comes from a work by French poet Paul Verlaine about a knight named Parsifal, who has to resist all sorts of sexual temptations so he can drink from the Holy Grail. This line might ironically symbolize the fact that modern people always give in to temptation; they have no resistance or dignity, and this is one of the reasons the world's been ruined.

Lines 203-206

    Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc'd

Tereu

These lines go back to the story of Philomela, which Eliot alluded to way back in lines 99-103.

That brings us back to the idea of sex as something horrible and violent, as you can see with the repetition of "so rudely forced" (205).

And Philomela's nightingale song continues as well, with a few new notes, too—"twit." To be fair, the "twit" sounds might also refer to the moronic twits who populate the modern world. Or maybe that's just Shmoop's take.

In any case, it's clear that the modern world, with its crappy, polluted rivers, is no place for a beautiful song. So instead of the high notes, we get ugly the ugly onomatopoeias of "twit" and "jug."

Formally, this sudden fragment also has the effect of refrain, because it's a phrase that Eliot returns to so he can remind us of the fact that beauty might still be around us, but we're unable to see or hear it (i.e., just as we don't realize that the nightingale's song is actually Philomela trying to be heard).

Lines 207-214

    Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

 

We return to the idea of the phony, superficial "Unreal city," which is covered by a filthy "brown fog of a winter noon" (208).

We hear a story about some merchant (remember the merchant from the tarot deck?) from Smyrna (a port city in modern-day Turkey, now known as Izmir) who is "Unshaven" and keeps a bunch of dried fruit in his pockets. Guess he's a snacker.

This man asks the speaker in terrible "demotic French" if the speaker would like to join him for lunch at the Cannon Street Hotel / Followed by a weekend at the Metropole" (213-214).

These two places were notorious in Eliot's time for being secret meeting places where men would hook up with one another sexually. In all likelihood, the puritan Eliot found this kind of sex request disgusting, and is using it here as yet one more sign of how awful Western culture has gotten. There's also a strong hint of racism in the representation of this guy from Turkey.

Needless to say, we're not meant to look too kindly on this guy.

Lines 215-217

    At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

 

These lines set up the coming scene with the blind prophet Tiresias by talking about the hour when people look up from their desks and are just "throbbing" to get home from work.

In this instance, you really get a sense of what beautiful poetry Eliot can write. He uses cadence here to help this image flow off the page, rather than relying on more obvious tactics like alliteration or meter.

 

Lines 218-221

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

 

Enter Tiresias, a prophet from Greek myth whom Eliot calls in his notes "the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest."

As the story (which you can find in Ovid's Metamorphoses) goes, Tiresias was walking along one day, and after he saw two snakes having sex in his path, he hit them with a big stick, which turned out to be a huge oh-no-no. The goddess Hera didn't like that so much, so she transformed him into a woman for seven years. Awkward.

After Tiresias changed back, Hera made a bet with Zeus about who enjoyed sex more, women or men. Tiresias said that women did, and Hera totally freaked out and struck him blind. Zeus felt bad about this, but his hands were tied, so he tried to make up for it by giving Tiresias the power of prophecy.

Weird story, right? So why did Eliot pick this dude as the most important personage in the poem? It's probably best to hear it from the horse's mouth, so here's what Eliot had to say about his inclusion of Tiresias in "The Waste Land": "Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees in fact, is the substance of the poem."

So Eliot uses Tiresias in this poem as a sort of removed observer who can see visions from all over the world and see how awful the world really is. He's a universal kind of guy. In fact, it's totally possible that the speaker of this entire poem is actually Tiresias, but that's just one going theory.

Tiresias is "throbbing between two lives" because Eliot portrays him in this poem as a hermaphrodite, a person who is male and female at the same time. This is what makes him an "Old man with wrinkled female breasts" (219).

Of course that "throbbing" at the "violet hour" is a call back to lines 215-217, allying Tiresias with these average Joes at their office desks (it's also the hour that Sappho writes about in her poem "Hesperus, you bring back again," to which Eliot alludes here). He's really the everyman of the poem. And he can see something. What, we're not sure, so we'll have to keep right on reading.

 

Lines 222-227

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

 

Tiresias offers us one of his/her visions, and talks about a young woman being home from work at teatime and "Lay[ing] out her food in tins" (223), while her laundry dries out the window.

Seems like an everyday image—woman, home, and doing chores. But there's something oddly depressing about it.

For one thing, she's alone. And for another, she's a bit of a slob (she left her breakfast out? and her underwear is lying around?).

Lines 228-234

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

 

Just to up the uncomfortable ante, Tiresias makes sure to mention his wrinkly old breasts again before telling us that he already knows what's about to happen in this young woman's apartment. This might be because he's a prophet (thanks, Zeus!) or because the scene is painfully predictable.

Strutting through the front door, "the young man carbuncular arrives" (231). Carbuncular is a fancy word for really pimply, which means this guy's probably not all that much to look at. He doesn't have a very high-paying job, but he's got a "bold stare" (232) and is way more self-assured than he's got reason to be.

This seems to be another pet peeve of Eliot's: people with no real achievements in life thinking they're totally awesome. For realsies, thank goodness this man did not live to see the days of reality TV.

At this point in the poem, you also find a pretty strong return of rhyming in Eliot's poem. This might be because Eliot is satirizing the scene as an example of "modern romance," and using a traditional sense of rhyme to show how pathetic and gross the scene actually is.

It certainly isn't rhyme-worthy, that's for sure. The idea here is that the young man carbuncular fancies himself a classic sexual conqueror (and is as self-assured as a millionaire, even though he's basically a secretary), but he's just a pimply-faced kid with a pathetic job and a boring girlfriend.

 

Lines 235-238

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

 

The ugly young man decides that it's time to make his move on the girl, since she's probably tired and sluggish after eating her meal. Yeah, super romantic.

Moving in, he "Endeavours to engage her in caresses" (237). The girl doesn't really want to have sex with him, but she basically says "meh" and doesn't really put up a fight.

As you can probably tell, Eliot doesn't think much of modern romance. It's all just a bunch of poor, uneducated people having their ugly sex. Hey, he said it, not Shmoop.

Lines 239-242

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

The guy goes ahead and "assaults at once" (239), loving the fact that the girl doesn't care one way or the other, as long as he gets what he wants.

The rhyming of the lines is as consistent as anywhere in the poem, allowing Eliot to really satirize the fantasy of heroic masculinity that the young man has made for himself.

Clearly this guy thinks he's the cat's meow, and since this typist lady couldn't care less, there's no one around to tell him any different. So Eliot makes it clear that this guy's actually a schlub with his ironic use of end-rhymes.

Lines 243-248

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronizing kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit …

 

The gist here is that Tiresias wishes that he didn't have to watch this sex scene as it plays out, but his "gift" of visions isn't something he can turn on and off.

Tough break, buddy.

He talks about how in the days of ancient Thebes, he used to prophesize by the marketplace's wall and "and walked among the lowest of the dead" (246), which may be an allusion to the Odyssey or the Inferno, in both of which Tiresias shows up in the underworld to help a brother (both Odysseus and Dante in turn) out. And did we mention that Tiresias was also given seven lives by Zeus?

At this point, he gives us one last look at the pimply young man and his roll in the hay with the typist. Now that the young man is finished with his business, he gives the girl a meaningless "patronizing kiss" (247), and just like the blind prophet, "gropes his way" down the stairs because the light is out.

Tiresias is able to see what's going on anywhere in the world, and as Eliot shows us, this is mostly what it is: bad sex between bad people. A little harsh, don't you think? Well, Eliot didn't seem to think so.

Lines 249-252

    She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."

 

Aw, did you think Eliot was done? No way, he's just getting started.

Now that the pimply dude has left, the girl "turns and looks a moment" in her mirror, "hardly aware of her departed lover" (249-250). Calling the guy a "lover" in this scene is Eliot's way of sarcastically demolishing the idea of modern love, which in his mind is disgusting.

The girl is not all that bright, and her brain only "allows one half-formed thought to pass," which is " 'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over'" (252). Gee, how romantic.

Eliot is trying to tell us that this girl has no deep thoughts of any kind, and she doesn't even have enough intelligence to resist sex that she doesn't want. She's completely passive in every way, blowing through life like a shopping bag in the wind.

 

Lines 253-256

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

 

In line 253 Eliot quotes from Oliver Goldsmith's novel The Vicar of Wakefield by quoting a song in which the main character sings of being seduced and then ditched. Turns out it's a bit of a bummer.

And that corresponds pretty well to our typist's situation. Now that she's alone again, the woman just sort of walks around the room without thinking, "smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone" (255-256).

The gramophone (or record player) hints at the idea that popular culture is part of what makes the girl's life so passive and superficial.

If Eliot wrote this poem today, he'd probably have the girl throw on an episode of Chopped: All Stars.

Lines 257-265

"This music crept by me upon the waters"

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandolin

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

 

The Tempest strikes again. Finally finished with the young man and woman, Tiresias quotes another line from Shakespeare's play, which is from a scene of mourning (this whole poem is sort of about mourning for Eliot—mourning for a better time, now lost).

Tiresias goes on to talk about how he often hears music coming out of bars and "the pleasant whining of a mandolin" (261), which comes with the "clatter and chatter from within" the bar.

It seems here that Eliot is giving us a vision of the better time in history he often hints at. In this world, the fishermen enjoy their music within a world held together by religious belief, as Eliot goes on to talk about Magnus Martyr, which is a church with "Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold" (265).

The ornament of this church is a testament to classic beauty, and Eliot suggests here that even uneducated people are perfectly capable of participating in this kind of world, as long as they are humble and god-fearing, not full of themselves like the young man carbuncular.

 

Lines 266-278

            The river sweats

     Oil and tar

     The barges drift

     With the turning tide

     Red sails

     Wide

     To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

     The barges wash

     Drifting logs

     Down Greenwich reach

     Past the Isle of Dogs.

                  Weialala leia

                  Wallala leialala

 

In these lines, Eliot takes a song from Götterdämmerung, the last opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle and replaces all the German references with English ones.

Here's the deal:

The song is about women by a river, and in the Wagner version the river is the Rhine, and the song is all about beauty.

In Eliot's version, though, you're back to talking about the Thames, and how "The river sweats / Oil and tar" (266-267), which is not so beautiful.

Yep, the motif of pollution that Eliot constantly uses to talk about the moral and spiritual pollution of the modern world has reared its ugly head.

And before you go thinking our speaker has gone totally around the bend with lines 277-278, we should tell you that the "Weialala leia" part is from Wagner's original.

It's also worth noting that the form has taken a sharp turn for the short—line, that is. We'll see that trend continue for quite a while, so you might want to think about the effect of that change.

 

Lines 279-291

            Elizabeth and Leicester

       Beating oars

       The stern was formed

       A gilded shell

       Red and gold

       The brisk swell

       Rippled both shores

       Southwest wind

       Carried down stream

       The peal of bells

       White towersWeialala leiaWallala leialala

 

These lines talk about a scene from the life of Queen Elizabeth I and her "lover," Lord Robert, the Earl of Leicester. The scare quotes around "lover" are necessary because it's well-known among historians that this was a bit of a go-nowhere relationship for the Queen, just as the young typist's relationship with the pimply guy is going nowhere.

Eliot got this scene from a famous biography of the queen, The Reign of Elizabeth. The book, written by a famous British historian named James Anthony Froude, recounts a moment between Elizabeth and Lord Robert on a barge on the Thames in which they discuss a potential (but obviously impossible) marriage.

And we all know what Wagner has to say about that: "Weialala," that's what.

 

 

Lines 292-295

"Trams and dusty trees.

     Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

     Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

     Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe."

In these lines, Eliot parodies part of Dante's Purgatorio, and gives us a few images of the speaker acting lazy and lying down in a canoe as he floats through ritzy parts of London.

The lines in Dante describe a figure named Pia Tolomei, who describes where she's from and how she was killed (on the orders of her husband, no less).

But in Eliot's poem, the speaker is unidentified, floating, relaxed in a canoe.

Whoever the speaker is, their tour of London sounds pretty awful. The raised knees on the floor of a narrow canoe, and the word "undid" seems to indicate that this tour was a sexual one, resulting in unsatisfying encounters with strangers all over modern London.

 

Lines 296-299

"My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

      Under my feet. After the event

      He wept. He promised 'a new start.'

      I made no comment. What should I resent?"

Our speaker—could it be Queen Elizabeth, transported to modern times?—continues her jaunt through London, although now she's at a modern subway station called Moorgate (it's also the name of a street). Whether she's on a street or in a tube station, her heart is under her feet, indicating that it's underground, trampled on, or maybe even in (gasp) Hell.

She mentions some "event" (possibly sex) that happened and made someone else, maybe the Lord Robert, the Earl of Leicester, weep.

Whoever this someone else is, he promises the speaker "a new start," but she just sits there silently (299). It's possible that Eliot is referring here to the discussion of marriage that supposedly happened between Elizabeth and Leicester way back on that barge ride they took together—according to Mr. Foude, of course.

Yep, sounds like this romance is just as doomed as the one between the typist and the young man carbuncular.

For Eliot, the idea of a "new start" was probably a cliché he'd heard enough of, since he believed that the modern world had very little interest in making a fresh start of anything.

 

Lines 300-307

"On Margate Sands.

     I can connect

     Nothing with nothing.

     The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

     My people humble people who expect

     Nothing"

                         la la

        To Carthage then I came

 

Another speaker talks about hanging out on a rich-people's beach near the mouth of the Thames (Margate sands), and says that when he's there he can "connect / Nothing with nothing" (301-302). Sounds like an existential crisis to Shmoop—kind of like the one the world is undergoing in Eliot's eyes.

According to him, people have no ability to "synthesize" ideas anymore, or to think big. All you're left with is bits and pieces of thought, which are like "The broken fingernails of dirty hands" (303).

This speaker then takes a moment to say that he comes from humble people and expects nothing. By this point, you might have noticed that the word "nothing" is repeated a lot in this poem. Which is fitting because that's exactly what Eliot though modern life had going for it—nothing.

After another, almost unrecognizable snippet from Wagner, Eliot tosses another allusion our way: line 307, which reads "To Carthage then I came," is taken from the Confessions of St. Augustine.

In the original passage, the saint talks about how much he lusted for sex when he was young. That's why he went to Carthage (an ancient city in modern-day Tunisia), which Augustine describes as a "cauldron of unholy loves" (Book III).

In this line, Eliot talks about how the modern man, however humble, is tempted to an almost insane degree by the modern world, which throws sex in your face at just about every opportunity. Ever seen a rap video?

Lines 308-311

      Burning burning burning burning

  O Lord Thou pluckest me out

  O Lord thou pluckest

  burning

Eliot alludes to the Buddha's "Fire Sermon," which describes the burning of passion, attachment, and suffering.

Then he takes a sharp left straight into Christianity, with an allusion to Augustine's Confessions. "Oh Lord Though pluckest me out" is taken straight from Book V, and they talk about the pain of hellfire that the saint sometimes feels doomed by.

But why shift suddenly from Buddhism to Christianity? The answer might lie in Eliot's notes, which tell us that he thinks of the "Fire Sermon" as the equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount. Eliot's bringing in Eastern traditions, too, to illustrate the decline of Western civilization in the modern world.

In Eliot's words, "The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident." To put that more simply: squishing together Eastern beliefs on detachment and Western beliefs on the same was intentional. It means something to Eliot. Any theories?

And with that, you've got the end of The Fire Sermon. Now that we've got that part covered, it's time to talk about water.

 

DEATH BY WATER SUMMARY

Lines 312-314

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

 

Welcome to the shortest section of the poem, called "Death by Water."

These lines tell us that some guy named "Phlebas the Phoenician" is the one who's been killed by water. He's been dead for two weeks, or a "fortnight" (though if he really is a Phoenician, he's been dead a lot longer than that).

Phlebas is probably connected to the "drowned sailor" from Madame Sosostris's tarot pack, and for Eliot, the image of him drowning is…well…unclear.

You could say that Phlebas' death is necessary before spiritual rebirth can happen; you could also say that death is death, and that's it.

When these lines talk about how the dead Phlebas "Forgot the cry of gulls […] And the profit and loss" (313-314), they suggest that Phlebas, now dead, doesn't really worry about worldly things like making money anymore. Eliot will expand on this idea in the coming lines, so stay tuned, Shmoopers.

Formally, "Death by Water" is definitely the most organized and structured of the five sections of "The Waste Land." It's spaced as ten lines, but when you read it out loud, you can hear quite a few rhymed pairs in it ("swell/fell,""Jew/you"). The language of the section is also pretty formal and old-timey, since this section is basically like a classic parable or story intended to teach us an important lesson about pride. Don't worry—we'll get there.

Lines 315-318

                                       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.

 

Just imagine that hollow, droning sound of the ocean as your dead bones get picked clean by "whispers" of seawater for years and years. So creepy, right?

The next lines say that Phlebas "passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool" (317-318). This might refer to the idea of "your whole life passing before your eyes" that usually gets associated with the moment right before you die.

This could further refer to the human brain and how it tries to make sense of your life only after it's too late to do anything about it.

For Eliot, the same might be true of modern people; it's only after they're on the brink of death that they finally take stock of their lives and think deeply (about just how shallow they really are).

The image of the whirlpool could be the drain that modern culture is slowly circling around, ready to sink down into darkness forever.

Lines 319-321

                                       Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

 

The speaker makes a call to people of any religion, whether "Gentile or Jew," and says to anyone who sails confidently over the sea of life (or "look[s] to windward"), "consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you" (321).

In this case, Phlebas becomes a cautionary figure for anyone who walks around thinking they're awesome, since there are many people just like them who've died in the prime of their lives. It wouldn't

WHAT THE THUNDER SAID SUMMARY

Lines 322-330

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was now living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Thanks to Eliot's notes, we know that "In the first part of Part V three themes pop up: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book), and the present decay of eastern Europe." That means that in the coming lines, we should expect allusions to the resurrection of Christ (Emmaus is the ancient town in which Jesus appeared to two of his disciples after he was resurrected), a traditional trope from Medieval romances, and eastern Europe. Keep a weather eye out, intrepid Shmoopoets.

These lines in particular refer to the moment that has come after the death of Christ, but before his rebirth on Easter Sunday. In other words, the lines mark a moment of waiting and wondering, because we're not sure if any rebirth is going to come this time around.

Instead we just wander in spiritual darkness, our "torchlight red on sweaty faces" (322) after we've witnessed Christ's "agony in stony places" (324). Christ is the one being spoken about in "He who was living is now dead" (328).

We modern folks are in a similar position as Christ, but instead of being dead, we live in a sort of half-death, as "We who were living are now dying / With a little patience" (329-330).

Our decline is not sudden or glorious, like Christ's; it's slow and undignified. There's something so ironic about that "with a little patience" line. As if Eliot's saying, don't worry, folks, this miserable mess will all be over eventually. Just wait it out.

Lines 331-345

   Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

 

This long-ish section continues with the theme of dry land with no water, symbolizing a spiritual waste land where no hope or belief can bloom.

Eliot puts this in stark, direct terms when he writes, "Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road" (331-332).

In case you can't really feel the dryness of the landscape, Eliot continues like this for a while. He wishes there were water, because "If there were water we should stop and drink," but at the end of the day, "Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think" (335-336). Stopping for a drink of water is compared to stopping and thinking deeply about life, and neither can really happen in the "waste land" of the modern world.

Eliot goes on to add that "Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit," basically meaning that there is no comfortable position you can get into in the waste land.

It'll always be uncomfortable. If you want to go deep, on a symbolic level, standing might represent standing up for your beliefs; lying might mean becoming cynical and not caring; and sitting might refer to a Zen-like meditation. But none of these options are available in the waste land, which doesn't allow you to do anything comfortably.

You don't even get the peacefulness of silence, since the waste land is filled with "dry sterile thunder without rain" (342). This image gives us a sense of unfulfilled hopes. We anticipate the rain because we hear the thunder, but the rain isn't coming.

There's no solitude, either, but just ugly faces sneering at you from crummy "mudcracked houses" (345). In this line, Eliot whips out alliteration to really show you how animal-like these people are, as you can see in all the S sounds in "sullen faces sneer and snarl."

 

Lines 346-359

If there were water       

And no rockIf there were rockAnd also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rockIf there were the sound of water onlyNot the cicada

And dry grass singingBut sound of water over a rockWhere the hermit thrush sings in the pine treesDrip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

 

Here, set in from the rest of the text, you get yourself a little moment of fantasy, imagining yourself in a place that isn't so horrible.

The speaker wonders to himself, "If there were water / And no rock" or even "If there were rock / And also water […]" (346-349).

At this point, you might want to lean in and say, "Yes? Well what if?" But Eliot just gives you some more unfulfilled images of "the sound of water over a rock" or "Drip drop drip drop […]," before finally pulling the rug out from under you again by saying, "But there is no water" (359). This almost seems like the giddy hallucinations of someone who's been wandering in a spiritual desert for a long time, and can't seem to find his way out. We're betting those mirages aren't helping.

Lines 360-366

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapped in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman—But who is that on the other side of you?

 

Eliot says in a footnote that the scene in these lines was inspired by a story that came from one of the expeditions to Antarctica that happened in Eliot's time.

The story is about how the explorers, caught in the freezing cold, were constantly hallucinating that there was one extra person in their group.

These lines, though, could also refer to a story from the Bible (the book of Luke), in which Christ appeared beside his disciples during a journey, but the disciples were unable to recognize him (360).

So when the speaker of the poem asks "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" it could suggest that Christ is still present in people's lives today, but people do not have the spiritual insight they need to recognize him.

The speaker can only see Christ from the corner of his vision, "When [he] look[s] ahead up the white road" (362). Christ appears in this scene like one of those floating squiggly lines that pop up in the corner of your eye, but which always dances away when you try to look at it directly.

It's also worth noting that, in his notes, Eliot draws an unspecified connection between this hooded figure and the Hanged Man tarot card from the first section.

Lines 367-377

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

The speaker hears a sound "high in the air/ Murmur of maternal lamentation" (367-368), which could refer to Mary's weeping over the death of her son, Jesus.

The speaker then asks about the "hooded hordes swarming/ Over endless plains" (369-370), which might refer to the hordes of rude, uneducated, and filthy people who pollute the modern world, if we're looking at the big picture.

It could also refer to the troops of World War I sweeping across Europe and destroying everything. These images are followed by scenes of "Falling towers" and the fall of great cities, both ancient and modern: "Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London" (275-276). And what's Eliot's favorite word for summing up what's happened to all of these places in modern times? You got it: "Unreal" (377). (He also brings back that violet hour from line 215, only this time it's the "violet air.")

However you choose to interpret these lines, we know for sure that Eliot's making yet another allusion. This time, it's to an essay by German writer Herman Hesse called The Brothers Karamazov or The Downfall of Europe, which appeared in his book Blick ins Chaos.

In the essay, Hesse decries the fact that "at least half of Eastern Europe is already on the road to chaos," a sentiment with which we're betting Eliot agrees.

Lines 378-385

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were toward

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

 

This waste land sure is a creepy place, don't you think?

In a strange move, the poem shifts to talking about a woman with "long black hair" (378), which she pulls tight and then uses to play fiddle music.

We don't know who she is or why she's doing this, but in a really Halloweeny moment, Eliot says that "bats with baby faces in the violet light / Whistled, and beat their wings / And crawled head downward down a blackened wall" (380-382).

These baby-faced bats might actually represent us, the readers, as modern folks. We've become monstrous in our desire for simple, superficial pleasures, and we just keep crawling down a wall head-first without even realizing that we're heading down instead of up.

This poor sense of direction seems to infect the rest of the world, too, as towers are described as being "upside-down in air" (383).

All the while, we still hear that horrifying music of damnation, which comes from "voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells" (385). As you can probably tell by now, this singing is not a good thing, but a symbol of our society's decline.

And once again, we're reminded that this world is waterless (those cisterns and wells are plumb empty), and the sun's setting (it's the violet hour). We're headed nowhere good in this waste land.

 

 

Lines 386-395

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

Coco rico co co rico

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

Bringing rain

Now we find ourselves inside a "decayed hole among the mountains" which is filled with "tumbled graves" (386, 388). Here we find a chapel, and thanks to Eliot's notes, we know that this is the Chapel Perilous.

The what? The Chapel Perilous appears in Arthurian legend and other Medieval romances, sometimes figured as the place where the Holy Grail is kept, and sometimes figured as just a weird, creepy church at which a knight has to hang out while on a quest.

Unfortunately, this chapel is totally empty, as "only the wind's home" (389). There are no windows, "and the door swings" (390), which suggests that the chapel of hope, kind of like Eliot's hope for humanity, is both literally and symbolically abandoned. It's also extra creepy, since it's surrounded by graves (which is true of the traditional Chapel Perilous, too).

There might be a little bit of hope here, though, because in the original version of the Grail legend, the sight of the empty chapel is actually the final test that the questing knight has to pass before finally drinking from the grail.

This is the final test because after slaying every beast and resisting every temptation (mostly involving good-looking women), the knight has to confront the greatest test of all—the possibility that there is no God. It is only after finding the empty chapel, and continuing forward anyway, that the knight can know true immortality in Christ.

As the passage continues, it talks some more about dry bones and images of death. The final images you're left with are those of a rooster crowing and "a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust / Bringing rain" (394-395).

There's something promising in both these images, since the rooster is supposed to chase the evil night away with his crowing, and the coming of rain might suggest the rebirth of the waste land.

We mean, we've been waiting for rain for ages, and it's finally here.

But don't get your hopes up just yet. After all, it's when the cock crows in the Gospels, that Saint Peter denies Jesus Christ (as predicted). That's not exactly a shining moment—could Eliot be alluding to it? After all, it seems like Peter would have failed the Chapel Perilous test, so such an allusion would be in keeping with the theme of these lines.

Lines 396-399

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

These lines begin the final moments of the poem, which center on images from India and the religion of Hinduism.

Line 396 mentions that "Ganga," or the Ganges River in India, "was sunken," meaning that the river was low and dried up, as "the limp leaves / Waited for rain" (396-397).

There are black clouds gathering in the distance, over the "Himavant," which is both another term for the Himalayas, and also the name of the Hindu god of snow (fitting).

But even though black clouds usually promise rain, there's something ominous about dark clouds, which usually symbolize danger approaching.

The uncertainty of what the dark clouds mean is shown in the Indian jungle, which "crouche[s]" in a defensive position and waits "in silence" (399) for what's about to happen.

Lines 400-410

Then spoke the thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

Finally, the thunder gets to put in his two cents. We've been waiting with bated breath.

At this point, the poem shows you why this final section is called "What the Thunder Said." This final section is inspired by a story from the Hindu faith, which talks about how the gods, men, and demons of India asked their father how to live well. The father answered each of them with the sound of thunder, which was heard as the onomatopoeic "DA."

Each of the three groups interpreted this sound in a different way. The gods thought it was the word Datta, which means to give; the men thought it was Dayadhvam, which means to have compassion; and the demons heard it as Damyata, which means to have self-control. If you're looking for the original version of this fable, check out the Upanishads.

After we get the first "DA," in line 401, the speaker of the poem tackles the first possible meaning of what the thunder said, and asks us to reflect on what we've given to others in our lives—"what have we given?"

It goes on to say that "By this, and this only, we have existed" (406), meaning that it is only through charity and giving that humanity has managed to reach the cultural accomplishments it's doing its best to squander. Eliot's clearly worried about what he saw as the growing selfishness that was taking over the money-obsessed modern world.

Also, whatever giving we might do in our lives "is not to be found in our obituaries / Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider" (407-408). Here Eliot's once again calling on his buddy John Webster's The White Devil to help him make some meaning. He's referring to lines in the play which say, "…they'll remarry / Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider / Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs." Once again, we have some imagery of death and decay.

But the real gist here is that we shouldn't give in order to be recognized as awesome people. We should give for the sake of giving.

And we shouldn't wait until we're dead to give things away in our wills, "under seals broken by the leans solicitor / In our empty rooms" (409). If we wait until we're dead to give things away, the only person to take them will be our lawyers, since everyone else will have already abandoned us.

 

Lines 411-417

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumors

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

At this point, you hear the thunder for a second time, and this time you hear it as the word Dayadhvam, which means "to have compassion."

Eliot's notes tell us that he's alluding, once again, to a line from Dante's Inferno, in which the speaker tells us that he heard a horrible tower being locked up…while he was in it.

In the waste land, though, our speaker hears the sound of a key turning. In fact, we all hear this symbolic key, "each in his prison" (414).

Eliot's notes also allude to the essay "Appearance and Reality" by FH Bradley. The essay suggest that thoughts, feelings, and external sensations are a private matter, because each person experiences the world differently—from a different perspective, one that's inaccessible to anyone else.

Based on the previous lines, we're thinking the prison he's talking about here is our own egotistical selfishness, our own, singular way of looking at the world.

Modern people like us only tend to think about ourselves, and even when we do think of others, we do it just to think more highly of ourselves as "good" people.

Alert: another allusion's afoot. The mention of Shakespeare's Coriolanus further develops this idea of selfishness, since Big Willy's Coriolanus was, in the play, a great solider who acted out of pride instead of duty.

In the modern world, it's tough to say if we actually know what real compassion is, because we can never get past our own concerns (we're all too busy thinking about our own prisons and keys). It's possible that we couldn't be compassionate even if we wanted to, since we lack the spiritual knowledge to do so. No wonder Eliot would refer to the ego as a prison.

 

 

Lines 418-423

DA

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

 

The thunder rumbles for the third time, and this time you hear it as Damyata, which means to have self-control.

If you're asking Eliot (and we are), one of the biggest problems with the modern world, apart from our selfishness, is the fact that we don't really resist temptation anymore. If we want something, we just go out and buy it, then move on to the next thing.

The lines that follow seem pretty happy, though, describing the speaker at sail on a calm sea and a heart responding "Gaily" to an invitation.

It seems to Shmoop that the most important word in these lines is "obedient," because Eliot is telling you to be obedient to something greater than yourself, some higher ideal or higher power. Whatever it is, just don't go around assuming that your happiness is the most important thing in the world, because then you'll have ignored what the thunder said.

Lines 424-426

  I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

The speaker returns from sailing to "upon the shore / Fishing" (424-425), which refers back to lines 189-192 when the speaker was fishing on the dirty canal.

The "arid plain behind [him]" still suggests that there hasn't been any sort of rebirth in the land, even after we've heard the thunder's message. But hey, the speaker thinks it's about time he set things right ("set my lands in order"). Still, it's one thing to know what's right; it's another thing to go out and do it.

There's another, less optimistic way to read these lines. When you set your affairs in order, after all, you're getting everything ready for your death. So in these lines, Eliot might be trying to make you think about dying, because this might be the only way to get you to stop thinking so selfishly. It's easier to do the right thing when you realize that you're just like everyone else, and that there's no point in trying to have more possessions or more fame than others, because everyone dies anyway. It might not be what you want to hear, but when has Eliot ever said something someone wanted to hear?

Ah, but Shmoop can't stop there. What is perhaps most important about these lines is the introduction of one of the central figures of the poem: the Fisher King. Who's that you ask? Well, allow Shmoop:

The Fisher King was a common figure in grail legends and Arthurian romances. Legends have it that when the knight Perceval (or Parsifal, if you're gonna get French on us, like Verlaine, to whom Eliot alluded in line 202) was on his Grail quest, he stopped by a castle with a wounded King—the Fisher King. The Fisher King is almost always wounded somewhere in the general area of the groin (infertility, much?). When he suffers, well, so does his kingdom, with matching infertility (hence, the waste land, or "arid plain"). It's a great honor to be the knight who finally heals this guy, and that honor went to Perceval, who also happened to be the knight who was innocent, pure, and plainly good enough to find the Holy Grail.

What does all this have to do with "The Waste Land"? Think of it as an allegory of sorts. The Fisher King's lands, which really, really need to be set in order, what with their being barren and all, are representative of modern society, which could also use some serious help. If only the modern world had some sort of Perceval, who was able to heal the King's wounds, and to, by extension, heal the land.

It's pretty interesting to note that in this case, it's the Fisher King who appears to be the one who's able to set his lands in order and get things growing again.

But will he?

Lines 427-430

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s'acose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

 

At this point, the poem sends out its final cry and throws out a nutty series of references to things from all kinds of different times and cultures.

It all starts with "London Bridge is falling down" (427), which is part of a familiar nursery rhyme, but just plain creepy when inserted into "The Waste Land."

In this case, it's a useful symbol with which Eliot can depict the collapse of Western culture.

Line 428 comes again from Dante's Inferno, and it talks about a poet who's burning in Hell. It translates to "he hid himself in the fire which refines them."

Although the line brings up the image of hellfire, it might actually be hopeful, because fire in this instance can be a purifying or "refining" thing as much as a destructive thing. Maybe Western culture is going through the burning it needs in order to rise again to greatness?

Line 429 brings you back to the myth of Philomela, and translates to "When shall I be as the swallow?" This might refer to Eliot's own desire to transform into a bird like Philomela so he can fly away from the brutal modern world and go off to sing his songs somewhere else.

Line 430-431

Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Line 430 is in French, and translates as "The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower."

This image continues Eliot's use of crumbling towers as symbols of crumbling civilization (remember that allusion to Inferno in line 412?). The line comes from a sonnet called "El Desdichado" by a French poet named Gérard de Nerval.

Line 431 might actually be the most important line in the entire poem, because it basically sums up everything Eliot is trying to do by writing "The Waste Land."

What do we mean by that? Well, he has taken broken fragments from a culture that was once whole, and is just piecing them together in order to "shore up" his ruins.

In other words, he sees himself standing in the middle of a waste land that's littered with pieces from a glorious, high-cultured past, and in writing this poem, he has collected these broken pieces and piled them together in a sort of testimony, which he feels is the most he can do now that Western culture is broken.

 

 

Line 432

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.

This line is taken from a play called The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. The subtitle to this play is "Hieronymo's Mad Againe," and the line "Ile fit you," comes from the main character, who's asked to write a play for the royal court and replies something along the lines of "Oh I'll give you a play all right!"

He ends up writing a play that leads to the deaths of the people who've murdered his son. In this case, Eliot might be sending out a message of rage to Western culture, saying, "You want a poem? Here's a poem!"

Lines 433-434

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih Shanith Shantih

 

The poem closes with the repetition of the three words the thunder said, which again mean: "Give, show compassion, and control yourself." These are Eliot's final words of advice to his audience, and it's advice he wants us to follow if we're going to have any hope of moving forward.

What's fascinating about this is that Eliot has spent all this time talking about the collapse of Western culture, and now he seeks the rebirth of our civilization by turning to the Eastern culture of Hinduism (or even Buddhism in "The Fire Sermon").

With that said, Eliot concludes the poem by repeating the word "Shantih" three times. Shantih is a sacred word from the Hindu faith (it ends each Upanishad, and it translates into English as "The peace which passeth all understanding."

The final repetition of this word might be Eliot's way of saying he's gone as far as his words can take him. In the end, there might actually be a mystical peace that's out there, but it's probably something that exists beyond all human understanding.

For such a depressing poem, "The Waste Land" actually ends on a slight note of hope, pointing us toward non-Western religions as a way to restore our faith and to start acting like decent, unselfish human beings again. Well, at least that's something. Maybe we're not so doomed after all.

Maybe.

 

 

 

 

ANALYSIS: WHAT'S UP WITH THE EPIGRAPH?

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi

in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβυλλα

τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω."

For Ezra Pound

il miglior fabbro.

Um, what?

 

That's right folks. Eliot starts this poem off with an epigraph that might as well be Ancient Greek to Shmoop. Oh wait, it is.

Actually, it's in Greek and Latin, and it refers to a very famous, very old text—Petronius' "Satyricon." The poem refers to an Ancient Greek oracle, Cumaean Sibyl, who was granted immortality by Apollo, for whom she was a prophetess. Eventually, she really really really regretted this wish (immortality is almost never as awesome as it sounds), because she just grows older and older and never dies. So in this quote from the poem, the speaker asks Cumaean Sibyl what she wants most, and she says that she wants to die.

Yikes. Now there's a hint of what's to come, right? In a poem that's all about the spiritual and cultural death of the Western world, it only makes sense that we would begin with the life of an oracle that is utterly without meaning. And the classical allusion reminds us that we're about to read a library's worth of references to the greatest hits of Western literature. The epigraph's telling us to buckle up.

And that last part, about il miglior fabbro? That's a dedication to the poet and critic Ezra Pound, who help Eliot edit this poem within an inch of its life, until it became the masterpiece that you're reading today.

Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay Water Imagery

WATER IMAGERY

For a poem about the desert, "The Waste Land" sure has a lot of water flowing through it. And what we're supposed to make of all that water is not always clear. Yes, the waste land is dying from lack of water, but the drowned sailor has also died because of too much water. Water becomes most important in the later stages of the poem, when Eliot focuses more and more on the barrenness of the land, where there "is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road" (331-332). It's here that water becomes a symbol of the fertility that the waste land no longer has, and without this fertility, there can be no hope for anything new or beautiful to grow.

Line 4: The "spring rain" comes to bring new life to the landscape; but all it manages to do is "sti[r] / Dull roots," suggesting that nothing new will grow out of the symbolic waste land.

Line 24: This line draws the first connection between the dryness of the land, the lack of water, and the spiritual infertility of the modern world.

Line 47: "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" appears in the tarot cards that the fortune-teller, Madame Sosostris, is dishing your way. He relates to the English myth of the Fisher King, whose wound causes the land to stop producing new life. The drowned sailor in this case might represent the terrible curse that has fallen over Europe as a whole in the 20th century.

Line 55: The warning to "Fear death by water" would suggest at first that you need to avoid dying like the drowned sailor; but fortune-tellers are always full of tricks, and you need to remember that there is a second way to "die by water"—that's if you don't have enough of it. So this warning could also refer to the spiritual drought that has fallen over the waste land.

Line 125: This line comes to us from Shakespeare's The Tempest, and it refers to a guy who drowned and has been underwater for so long, his eyes have turned into pearls. Remember the warning to avoid death by water? Well the turning of eyes to pearls also might symbolize how modern souls have become hard and lifeless. Everything's got a modern parallel in this poem.

Lines 312-321: The entire "Death by Water" section of the poem deals with the figure of Phlebas the Phoenician sailor, whom you were warned about by the Tarot pack. Here water appears to us in the form of a whirlpool (318), sucking Phlebas down into the darkness. At this point, the poem asks us young folks to be a little more humble, since Phlebas was once young and proud, too, and that seems to be what brought him to a watery grave.

Lines 331-359: Eliot gives us what is maybe his most sustained description of the metaphorical waste land of this poem. The most recognizable characteristic of this place is the lack of water. Eliot constantly uses the lack of water in connection with infertility, which conveys to us the sense that the modern world cannot produce anything new or beautiful. Lines like "Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water" (331-332) drive home this point. When the narrator fantasizes about a better world, he also does so by thinking "If there were rock / And also water / And water / A spring" (347-351), the shortened pattern of the lines almost makes it seem like he's getting delirious with the thought of water, which would bring symbolic health and rejuvenation.

Lines 395-397: The lack of rain has made the river low, and the "limp leaves / wai[t] for rain" the same way that modern people (whether they know it or not) wait for something to give them new spiritual life.

 

FIRE IMAGERY

For most of this poem, Eliot uses fire to describe the hellish experience of having to live in the modern world, a.k.a. the waste land. You can see this in lines 308-311, where the speaker starts screaming about the "Burning burning burning burning" and begs for the Lord to just let him die ("Thou pluckest me out"). Later in the poem, though, there is a slight hint that fire might actually be a redeeming or purifying thing. This hint comes mostly from another reference to Dante in line 428, which is written in Italian and means, "he hid himself in the fire which refines them." The possibility that fire can be "refining" gives us some hope that all of the cultural catastrophes we've suffered might lead to something new and good. But it's a vague hope at best.

Lines 82-84: At this point in the poem, we get our first direct image of fire. But the image hasn't yet taken on the significance that it will have in "The Fire Sermon" and onward. This is because early in the poem, Eliot's images are much grayer, with little life in them. He holds off on making us think of Hellfire. The "flames of the sevenbranched candelabra" (82) in this instance serve to show the glitter of the jewels in a lavish, classically beautiful room, which Eliot explores to show how the beauty of the past has been ruined in the 20th century.

Lines 108-110: The meaning of these lines is really ambiguous, since it is unclear whether the image of the woman spreading her hair out in "fiery points" is a good thing or bad thing. The next line (110) suggests that a certain beauty in this woman's fiery hair "Glowed into words, then would be savagely still," which might mean that the fire of her hair is beautiful, but when we try to put it in words, the meaning leaps up for only a second, before dying like a flickering flame. This could represent Eliot's view of classic beauty in the modern era. In other words, Eliot could be arguing that even if classic beauty were able to exist today, it would only appear for a second before getting snuffed out.

The Fire Sermon: Surprise surprise, the fire imagery takes center stage in "The Fire Sermon." This name is a reference to a sermon that the spiritual leader Buddha used to teach people to resist their worldly appetites for sex, power, and material possessions. In this case, fire represents the hunger in modern people that can't be satisfied. All we do is consume, consume, consume without ever really thinking about any larger issues surrounding all our consumption.

Lines 308-311: Out of nowhere, you suddenly read "Burning burning burning burning / O Lord thou pluckest me out" (308-309). Yowza. In these images, you get a sense that the speaker of the poem wants to be pulled out of the world of filthy desires. He doesn't want to chase after sex and material possessions anymore, but wants to be "plucked out" from the world by a higher power like God. It's a very intense way to end a section of the poem, but then again, Eliot's pretty intense when it comes to living a more peaceful life.

Line 322: The "torchlight red on sweaty faces" is the image Eliot uses to open the final section of the poem. The waste land is clearly hot place with no water, but the mention of torches also has Biblical connections to the period following the crucifixion of Jesus Christ: a terrible death, but also a symbol of rebirth.

Line 428: After using fire as a symbol of lust and spiritual damnation, Eliot actually uses it in a potentially positive way in the final lines of the poem. Quoting from Dante, he writes a line in Italian which translates as "he hid himself in the fire which refines them" (428). This line suggests that fire might have the power to refine or clean something instead of destroying it. Maybe for Eliot, rebirth can happen only after something like—let's just say society—has been completely destroyed or "burned up."

 

ZOMBIE CROWDS

To be fair, Eliot never actually uses the term "zombie" in this poem, but his descriptions of modern people going about their daily routines definitely feel zombie-ish. This might be because he usually describes these people by drawing from the Inferno and Purgatorio by Dante, two poems that describe the inner workings of hell and purgatory. You catch a glimpse of this type of crowd when the speaker observes in lines 61-63: "Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many." Like it or not, Eliot's basically slamming anyone who's content to go about his or her daily routine without thinking all that much about their lives. This sort of undead life represents the spiritual poverty of modern people, who "are now dying / With a little patience" (329-330).

 

Line 56: The fortune-teller Madame Sosostris tells you that she "see[s] crowds of people, walking round in a ring." This ring no doubt refers to the rings or "circles" of hell, which Dante describes as being filled with people who know they've got no hope of ever getting out. Can you guess whom Eliot is comparing these people to? You got it: pretty much everyone living in the modern world.

Lines 62-68: Here, Eliot really sinks his teeth into the zombie crowd image, describing the crowd of people that "flowed over London bridge, so many" (62). Again, he's referring to Dante's vision of hell. You can get a real sense of the despair Eliot sees in modern people, especially in the "Sighs, short and infrequent" that come out of them, who "fi[x] [their] eyes before [their] feet" (64-65). This idea of keeping your eyes on the ground in front of your feet is supposed to make you think about how you're always just worrying about the next thing to do. Modern folks never tend to lift their eyes to think about life (or even the world) as a whole. This is something Eliot would love for us to fix, but he's not all that optimistic about our chances.

 THE THAMES RIVER

For Eliot, the Thames River is a place that's been immortalized by English poetry for centuries. But in the modern world, the Thames is just a filthy, polluted waterway whose banks are filled with litter and slimy rats (175-188). How pleasant.

Pollution's an image that comes up in other places in this poem, too, like with the "brown fog" that covers London in physical and spiritual dirt (208). Overall, the pollution represents the destruction of things that were once great. All of the objects that pollute the banks of the Thames are also disposable things that were brought in by modern culture, like sandwich papers, bottles, or cigarette butts. These items all leave traces of people who are drinking and smoking—rather than frolicking and marrying and poeting, like in ye olden times.

Lines 173-186: Eliot opens "The Fire Sermon" by painting a pretty dismal picture of London's Thames River. In line 176, he quotes the great English poet Edmund Spenser, a man who once wrote love songs about how beautiful and inspiring the "Sweet Thames" was. In modern days, though, Eliot only finds "empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends."

Yeah, we know—he actually says that "the river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers" (emphasis ours). But our man T.S. is getting his sarcasm on. His Thames river is way filthier than Spenser's. Did your mom ever walk into your bedroom and say "Wow. Sure is spotless in here. You definitely shouldn't clean anything up"? Then you know exactly the tone that Eliot is adopting.

The polluting of a once-inspiring river is connected to the moral pollution that has affected a once-inspiring civilization. Maybe the most depressing image of this lost magic comes in Eliot's line, "The nymphs are departed." This line suggests not only that the Thames has lost its former beauty, but that the river has lost a sense of mythological awesomeness that it can never get back.

Lines 266-269: When these lines talk about how "The river sweats / Oil and tar," the description comes right on the heels of a beautiful images of "Ionian white and gold" (265). So basically Eliot's giving you a sense of how beautiful the world could be, then slapping you in the face with an image of how ugly it actually is. He also talks about the pollution of the river by slipping into the form of a popular song, drawing even more of a comparison between environmental filth and the moral pollution of pop culture.

KEYS AND PRISONS

These images show up mainly in lines 412-415, but they're pretty key (pardon the pun) to understanding the huge beef that Eliot has with modern people. Basically, what most of his anger boils down to is people's selfishness. In this sense, people live inside the private prisons of their own self-interest and ego. With nothing to live for outside themselves, these people spend their entire lives trying to fill the hole created by their lack of spirit or compassion, and they often do so by buying a bunch of stuff or taking advantage of other people, young man carbuncular-style. In either case, Eliot thinks people need to change the way they behave; but they won't be able to do this until they change the ways they think and feel about the world.

 

Lines 413-417: When he writes that "We think of the key, each in his prison" (414), Eliot means that each of us is trapped—either willingly or unwillingly—in the prison of our own selfishness and self-interest. He refers to this as a prison because he really believes that deep down, people's selfishness makes them wish for deeper connections with other people. Modern people have forgotten how to make these sorts of connections, though, because there's no unifying culture to bring us all together. So we all just continue doing our own thing and feeling lonely, assuming there's nothing we can do about it. Oh well.

 THUNDER

Thunder pops up mostly in the fifth and final section of the poem, aptly titled "What the Thunder Said." It takes its meaning from the fact that thunder usually symbolizes the coming of rain, but is also draws on Hinduism. The three thunder claps that sound in lines 400-423 basically retell the story of how thunder, the father of gods, men, and demons, told them that in order to live well, they'd have to practice the three DA-s (which apparently is what thunder sounds like). These words are Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata, which mean giving, compassion, and self-control. Eliot feels that if we can learn these three things, we'll at least be much better off than we've been for the last while. It's while talking about "What the Thunder Said" that Eliot most directly tells us to get over ourselves and start thinking about others.

"What the Thunder Said": Yep, the final section of the poem has thunder in its title, so you now it's gonna be big. Going back to the image of water, we can think of thunder as something that promises that rain will soon come. But we can also think of thunder as something that's about to bring destruction. It's the perfect image to show how Eliot's not really sure if society is going to get better or keep getting worse.

Line 327: Eliot connects thunder to the season of spring, which might mean that Eliot's connecting thunder to the possibility of cultural rebirth. But then again, we need to remember that Eliot starts "The Waste Land" by talking about what an awful season spring is; so the image might not be so promising.

Lines 341-342: At this point in the poem, Eliot is trying to undercut any potentially redeeming things about "The Waste Land." On the one hand, he says it's barren, but not so barren that it's silent and peaceful. No, there's always thunder booming to ruin your sense of calm. But does the thunder bring rain? Naw, it's totally this special kind of thunder that just keeps making noise: "dry sterile thunder without rain" (342). Sheesh, Eliot, we get it already. Ain't nothin' good comin' down the pike.

Lines 400-423: This closing section of the poem brings out even more meaning in Eliot's thunder image, which he connects deeply to a story from the Hindu religion. According to this story, thunder makes the sound "DA," which we're supposed to hear as three different da- words in Sanskrit: Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata. These words mean to give, to have compassion, and to have self-control. For Eliot, these are the three things we should think of when we hear thunder, because it is if we follow these commands that the thunder will give us the spiritual "rainwater" we need to rejuvenate our world.

POPULAR MUSIC

As much as we might all love pop music, Eliot uses it as an example of how crummy Western culture has gotten. Pop music symbolizes how mass culture tends to take objects of very important social value and utterly ruin them (like Dan Brown using the great works of Leonardo da Vinci to write a bestselling thriller—Eliot would not be down with that). Eliot is really, really not cool with art that's simply popular, because he believes that great art can sometimes be over people's heads, and that the majority of people don't have the good sense to appreciate it. So they just run back to their iTunes Top 10 and download whatever's catchy.

 

Lines 128-130: In these lines, Eliot quotes lines from a popular song (from his time) called "The Shakespearean Rag." The lines "It's so elegant / So intelligent" are said with total sarcasm, since stupid people have basically taken something that's actually intelligent (Shakespeare) and turned it into a song that drunk people like to sing. The word "rag" is especially suitable for this type of criticism, since it refers both to a popular form of song and also a cloth that wipes up filth.

Lines 199-201: In his notes, Eliot admits to lifting these lines from a ballad song he heard from Sydney, Australia. In reality, this version of the song is actually one of the cleaner versions that Australian troops sang during World War I. Again, popular music tends to insert itself in Eliot's poem as an interruption, a type of modern noise that's always drowning out meaningful thought with nonsense.

Lines 266-291: Eliot takes a song he would have respected—from a Wagner opera—and fills it with his own lyrics to show how the great accomplishments of the past are pulled down into the mud and filth of the modern world, which is defined mostly by unthinking mediocrity. Everything is so horrifically average in this modern world, and the forms of popular music convey this sad fact better than anything else.

 

TAROT CARDS

These fortune-telling cards date back to the 1400's, and Eliot seems convinced that they contain some valuable images for making sense of all that's wrong with the modern world. They're also connected to the theme of prophecy that Eliot brings up several times in the poem, also through the figure of Tiresias, the blind prophet. The tarot pack is associated in this poem mostly with Madame Sosostris, who might actually be a fraud. Nonetheless, Eliot feels that the images contained in her cards, like the falling tower or the drowned sailor, are helpful for illustrating the decline of Western society.

 

Lines 46-54: The cards make their first appearance early in the poem when the speaker appears to sit down with a "famous clairvoyante" named Madame Sosostris. The woman draws six tarot cards in total, which are: the drowned sailor, the Belladona, the man with three staves, the Wheel, the one-eyed merchant, and finally a card that shows a man carrying some unknown object behind his back (the meanings of the images are unpacked in the "Summary" section of this module, so head on over there for the scoop). Frankly, the speaker of the poem doesn't seem all that impressed with Madame Sosostris, suggesting that she should know how to avoid getting a cold if she knows the future so well. But on the other hand, the imagery of the tarot pack goes back to medieval England, so there's little doubt that Eliot finds something very meaningful in its cards. In fact, he thinks highly enough to use many of these images throughout his own masterpiece.

Line 55: At first, it might seem good that Madame Sosostris does not pull the "Hanged Man" card, but it turns out that the hanged man is actually a person who needs to be sacrificed before fertility and life can come back to the land; so the absence of this card is actually bad news for anyone waiting for culture to revive itself.

Lines 209-210: It's easy to miss, but the arrival of a "Symrna merchant" in this poem confirms the appearance of a "one-eyed" or immoral merchant in Madame Sosostris' prophecies. This character comes into the poem to symbolize greed and corruption.

Lines 312-321: The entire fourth section of the poem, "Death by Water," talks about the drowned Phoenician sailor, who was earlier pulled from the Tarot pack by Madame Sosostris. This figure of the sailor suggests that even when water is present in the poem, it only has the power to kill. Also, the seawater that drowns the sailor is not the same as the freshwater that promises to bring life back to the waste land. You could interpret the drowning of the sailor either as an symbol of total doom, or as a hint of hope for rebirth in the future, depending on whether or not you're a glass half full kind of person.

Lines 427-430: In the closing lines of the poem, you have both the image of London bridge falling down and that of "The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower," both of which call to mind the tower struck by lightning, which is displayed on one of the cards in a tarot pack. The image represents the fall of a great figure of some kind (either individual person or civilization), and it does not offer very good news for people who want to find hope in the ending of "The Waste Land."

ANALYSIS: FORM AND METER

Dramatic Monologue, Refrains, Mixed Meters

We've got a speaker reflecting on memories and current experiences in a personal, often philosophical way, which means that for much of "The Waste Land," we're reading a dramatic monologue. What makes "The Waste Land" different from a normal dramatic monologue (like Eliot's earlier poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") is that the speaker is constantly shifting between different personalities, cultures, and historical moments. This gives Eliot's poem a panoramic quality while also making it very fragmented. It's hard to keep track of who's saying what, but there's no doubt that for much of the poem, they're talking to us.

Every now and then, you'll find a rhyme or a consistent meter; but these moments are always fleeting. It's fitting, though. What good would perfect rhyme and meter do in a poem about the chaos and decay of the modern world? We get the sense that maybe the speakers trying to put together the pieces of a big, cultural puzzle, but we never quite see the overall picture that the pieces are supposed to create. And hey, maybe that picture doesn't exist anymore.

Messing with Meter: The Specifics

The second part of the poem starts off with a healthy and refreshing dash of blank verse (a classic English meter): "The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / […] / Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines" (77-79). These lines convey a proper sense of the classic beauty they're describing. But this beauty and meter quickly fall apart, eventually leading to the conversation between the two women in the pub, which seems to be just too "low class" to fit any poetic form (139-172).

In other parts of the poem, Eliot inserts popular songs from his time, but usually as examples of how low culture has overtaken the glorious rhythms of classic meters. The overall effect seems to be a poem that is constantly trying to regain a structured, refined style, but keeps getting sucked back into low culture. Kind of like how you try really hard to watch an episode of News Hour with Jim Lehrer, but you always wind up watching Nancy Grace instead.

In addition to his form and meter, Eliot pulls out almost every poetic technique in the book in order to convey his ideas about modernity in this poem. Overall, he wants to give us a sense of what it feels like to live in the 20th century, and he believes that the main feeling of this time is a sense of meaninglessness and despair, combined with a lack of closure.

How does he create that sense? By using a little thing called enjambment. That keeps every line feeling like it's unfinished. Remember the first two lines? "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, stirring" (1-2) leaves us hanging on each line, with those participles dragging out the sentence. Eliot also loves to use the ol' ellipsis to convey this same feeling, as is the case in line 182, where the speaker "sat down and wept…."

But he doesn't stop there. Another brutal element of modern existence is the terrible sameness that seems to determine every day of people lives. You know, that awful feeling that life isn't going anywhere in particular? Eliot conveys this most in his description of woman chatting in the pub in lines 139-172. And he especially conveys it through his use of the refrain of "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME." Every time you read this, you are reminded of the fact that this chatty Cathy has probably heard this phrase thousands of times, which means that she's probably spent a big chunk of her life wasting away the hours at the bottom of a bottle of sherry, rather than working toward any sort of goal.

 

With Eliot, you also get constant reminders that beauty that might still exist in the world, but unfortunately, these beautiful refrains fall on deaf ears. Remember that onomatopoeic refrain of "Jug jug jug"? That tells us that Philomela (who represents classic beauty) cannot be understood by modern people, because modern people lack the education or the good sense to recognize what they're hearing.

At its heart, this poem is a form unto itself. It's fragments, stories, allusions, and images. All these things get tossed into a poetic melting pot to invent a new form—one that Eliot finds suitable for the mess that is the modern world. The reason Eliot draws on all these poetic forms, traditions, and devices is that his poem is designed to be like a Wikipedia of sorts for Western culture (though he would've hated Wikipedia). He's hoping the diversity within the poem might help reinvigorate the lost respect for high culture that pervades modernity. That's a tall order, though, and it's your call whether or not Eliot makes this happen.

ANALYSIS: SPEAKER

What we've got here, is a failure to communicate.

Yep, the speakers are one of the major things that make this poem so difficult to read, since they're constantly shifting without any sort of signal to the reader.

In the opening stanza, we seem to hear from a woman named Marie who is looking back with nostalgia on her childhood memories. Later, we hear from someone sitting on the bank of the Thames River and complaining about all the litter, and later still we get a woman chatting inside a bar. The one speaker who seems capable of inhabiting all these speakers, though, is the blind prophet Tiresias, whom Eliot called "the most important personage in the poem." Since he is a prophet or "seer," Tiresias is able to guide us through any scene that is happening at any point in history, anywhere in the world.

Eliot probably puts so much importance on Tiresias because this character allows Eliot to jump all over the place, giving us a cross-section view of modern Western culture and how it stacks up (not so well) against the greatness of the past. Also, Tiresias' visions come to him in little spurts, which allow Eliot to make his entire poem seem fragmented and disconnected. It's up to you, the reader, to try to put all the pieces together, because our modern world no longer references the classic parables or clear moral standards to make sense of everything in terms of a larger whole.

Ultimately, the reason Eliot makes his speaker so fragmented and difficult to follow is because he believes that fragmentation is basically a perfect metaphor for what it feels like to live in the modern world. In former times, the world was held together by a belief in the greatness of high culture and a religious certainty that everything on earth fit into some sort of divine plan. Even while a guy like Dante might have written about terrible places like hell and purgatory, at least these places made perfect sense when you were reading about them.

The structure (or maybe anti-structure) of fragmentation was really popular with modern authors in general, who seemed convinced as a group that after the earth-shattering devastation of World War I, art was going to have to do something to convey the sense of shattered-ness that had affected the minds of everyone in Europe. Some writers would go on to embrace this sense of fragmentation as a good thing, since it opened the door to new ways of thinking about the world. Others like Eliot, though, chose to mourn for the past and to memorialize it as well as they could. And here, the fragmentation of the speaker is the perfect way for Eliot to mourn and embody the fragmentation of the past.

 ANALYSIS: SETTING

Where It All Goes Down

It might not seem like it at first, but the title of this poem is dead-on. This poem is set in "The Waste Land." But even a quick glance at the poem can tell us that this isn't literally true. The setting actually seems to fly all over the place, from a fancy chalet in the Swiss countryside to a pub in London, from the banks of the Thames River to some unnamed, desert-like place. But the setting of this poem is not just a physical place, but a mental and spiritual landscape that is dry, infertile, and generally awful.

 

Wrapping your head around this idea of a "physical place inside your head" is really important to understanding this poem. When you try to picture the setting of this poem, it's best to think about the "arid plain" (425) that Eliot describes in "What the Thunder Said," a rocky, sandy place where nothing will grow. The waste land is also a place filled with litter, and not just the sandwich papers and cigarette butts of lines 175-180, but the broken fragments of classic (mostly Greek, Italian, and Roman) culture. In this setting, you can picture the blind prophet Tiresias groping his way around the barren desert and picking up the fragments of classic culture, while he keeps being assaulted by gross "visions" like the catty woman chatting in the bar or the young man carbuncular having loveless sex with the typist.

So how do we make sense of all the other literal places this poem seems to be set in, as with the woman in the pub, or the young typist's apartment? Yes, these are also part of the poem's setting, and they tend to take place in London; but overall, they form part of a larger spiritual landscape, which Eliot sees as being all of Western civilization in the 20th century.

In terms of cultural setting, you can't deny that World War I is very, very present throughout this poem, even though Eliot's references to it are usually indirect. This might actually reflect the way that people suffering from shellshock often have trouble remembering a battle zone because their minds have blocked out the horror of what happened. The overall tone of despair in this poem, combined with the description of the waste land as a barren, dirty place, would have been recognized by most readers in Eliot's time as the battlefields of World War I, which completely destroyed just about everything in certain parts of Europe, burning massive meadows and forests and leaving behind only an endless landscape of mud, dirt, and corpses.

 

The destruction of World War I had an enormous influence not only on Eliot, but also all of modernism. After all, how could Western civilization continue to believe that it was progressing when all of its so-called progress led to the deaths of over ten million people? World War I left not only a physical, but spiritual vacuum throughout Europe, turning it into what Eliot's waste land.

 

ANALYSIS: SOUND CHECK

All in all, this poem sounds like what it is: a sophisticated meditation on modern society written by a very, very educated man. If you read the beginning aloud, you can tell right away that nothing gets resolved in this poem. One thought always leads to another because there is always a final word that keeps each line from being finished: "April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring" (1-3).

 

As you go on, you get a sense of the historical and cultural ground this poem is trying to cover, since it suddenly throws in lines like "Frisch weht der Wind" (German) (31), "Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!" (French) (202). Overall, the sound of the different languages has a "Tower of Babel" effect on the poem, constantly reminding you of the fractured and disconnected nature of modern society.

ANALYSIS: WHAT'S UP WITH THE TITLE?

Well, the first thing you'll want to remember about the title is that it's "The Waste Land," and not "The Wasteland." A silly distinction, maybe, but it's not an exaggeration to say that more than half of students usually get this title wrong on tests or essays, since computer autocorrect will try to make it one word. Stinkin' autocorrect.

On a symbolic level, "The Waste Land" refers to the spiritual and intellectual decay of the modern world. Throughout the poem, the image of a waste land shows us that, according to Eliot, 20th-century culture is just a barren, desert-like world with no real redeeming qualities, like, at all. Most importantly, the waste land is infertile, and therefore incapable of letting anything grow. This infertility symbolizes the spiritual and intellectual death that has happened in modern society, where it is impossible for any new hope of faith to grow—or any good art either.

This symbolic landscape pops up at several early points in the poem, but it is mostly represented by the "arid plain" of "What the Thunder Said." In this section, you really get a sense of the "mountains of rock without water" (334) that Eliot has been talking about since as early as line 24: "And the dry stone no sound of water." This landscape is sometimes substituted with other unpleasant places, like where the speaker sits beside the Thames River and watches a rat "Dragging its slimy belly on the bank" (189). But for the most part, "The Waste Land" usually refers to a dry, barren place that is swept by harsh wind and constantly shaken by "dry sterile thunder without rain" (342). No water, no good art, no nothing.

 

The speaker sees himself as a lone figured wandering across this waste land, picking up and sifting through the broken fragments of a culture that was once awesome and is now like Las Vegas on a Sunday morning. Throughout his travels, he picks up bits of Greek myth, Shakespeare, Dante, Wagner, and medieval English legend in order to try and make sense of his predicament. But none of these fragments are enough. He continues to thirst for spiritual renewal in a land that seems destined to remain dry.

 

ANALYSIS: CALLING CARD

Allusions Abound

You'll probably never find a poem more packed with references to art, culture, and history than this one. The thing is practically made up of lines from other literary works (see the "Allusions" section and the "Summary" to get a sense of just how crazy-extensive these references are). On top of that, you've also got Eliot's trademark dreariness, which he somehow manages to convey with some of the most beautifully written poetry you'll ever read.

Eliot is especially on his game when he's writing about dust, bones, and wind, a trio of images that he'd nearly perfect two years after "The Waste Land," when he wrote "The Hollow Men." Only Eliot could write something like, "But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear" (185-186), or "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" (30).

ANALYSIS: TOUGH-O-METER

(10) Mount Everest

There's just no getting around it; Eliot's "The Waste Land" is probably one of the toughest (if not the toughest) piece of literature you'll ever encounter (unless you try Finnegan's Wake). The range of Eliot's references, combined with Eliot's stubborn refusal to explain anything to you in clear terms, mean that you have to put in a ton of study time (with helpful study notes, wink wink) before this poem is going to start meaning something—anything—to you.

 

But rest assured, this poem is not difficult by accident, and it's not difficult just to be, well, difficult. Eliot wants it to be difficult because he is so sick of how the modern world tries to make everything in life so easy. iPods, microwaves, Google—as far as Eliot's concerned, these are all just things that make our brains weaker and weaker, even though we might think we're becoming more efficient.

 

In short, Eliot wants you not to understand this poem, at least not at first. He wants to frustrate you so much that you'll visit your local library and try to figure out what this poem means, and learn a bunch of rewarding stuff in the process. And if you snap this poem shut and say, "It's too hard; Eliot's a jerk," well then Eliot's more than happy to lose you as a reader. Make no mistake—dude's a huge snob. But he's only a snob because he still believes in the power of the human brain, and he has no time for people who waste that power on mindless entertainment and easy reading.

ANALYSIS: TRIVIA

Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge

Getting tired of all those red pen marks your teacher makes on your essays? Well T.S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, got nearly half of his masterpiece slashed away by his friend, Ezra Pound. It doesn't matter how great a writer you are, folks; you'll always have to deal with editors. (Source.)

 

Apparently, Ezra Pound gave Eliot the nickname "Old Possum," and Eliot actually used this name in a book of children's poems about cats, called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. We're wondering if Pound was referencing T.S.'s looks or nightowlish tendencies. (Source.)

Also, Eliot's book of nonsense verse about cats, believe it or not, was the inspiration for Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's classic musical, Cats. (Source.)

In 1986, Eliot's face was put on a 22 cent American stamp. But sheesh, they should've found a better picture of the guy. Maybe that's where the nickname comes from. (Source.)

 

ANALYSIS: ALLUSIONS

When poets refer to other great works, people, and events, it’s usually not accidental. Put on your super-sleuth hat and figure out why.

Literary and Philosophical References

The Bible: Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Psalms (20, 23, 25, 182, 354, 426)

Throughout the text, Eliot alludes to the books of Ezekiel (20), Ecclesiastes (23, 354), Isaiah (25, 426), and Psalms (182). For Eliot, the Bible is an incredible tool for holding together and making sense of our day-to-day lives, but as with any other great spiritual tool, the Bible is underused in contemporary society (according to Eliot).

Richard Wagner (31-34, 42, 266-291)

Wagner was a great composer from the 19th century, whose operas and music are still spread throughout movies and pop culture today. In "The Burial of the Dead," Eliot quotes four lines from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde (31-34, 42). In "The Fire Sermon," Eliot uses the song of the "Rhine-Daughters" from Wagner's Götterdämmerung opera, and replaces the original words with his own, leaving the original "Weialalal leia" (266-291).

Madame Sosostris (Sesostris) (43-59)

This fortune-teller is actually a character from Aldous Huxley's satirical novel Crome Yellow, which was published in 1921 to good reviews, one year prior to "The Waste Land." In Crome Yellow, Madame Sesostris is basically a fraud who dresses up as a gypsy and visits country fairs to tell people's fortunes for money.

Charles Baudelaire (60, 76)

Charles Baudelaire was a 19th-century French poet who was infamous for bringing immoral material into "high" poetry. Eliot quotes from Baudelaire's collection Fleurs du Mal, in lines 60 and 76 of "The Burial of the Dead."

Dante Alighieri (62-65, 293-295, 412-415)

Dante Alighieri was a poet from Italy who wrote in the 13th and 14th centuries. He is most famous for his trio of epic poems, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Eliot refers to the Inferno (62-65) and the Purgatorio (293-295, 412-415) throughout "The Waste Land" in order to give the reader a sense of the hellish, purgatorial existence of modern life.

John Webster (75, 118)

John Webster was a playwright who wrote around the time of Shakespeare (1600) and is best known for his tragedies, particularly The White Devil. Eliot alludes to this play in line 75 of "The Burial of the Dead." In line 118, Eliot alludes to another of Webster's plays, called The Devil's Law Case. Man, this Webster guy sounds like he really loved to write about the devil.

Thomas Middleton (137)

Thomas Middleton was also a playwright who wrote at the beginning of the 1600's, and the second section of "The Waste Land," no doubt refers in general to Middleton's plays A Game at Chess and Women Beware Women. In the second of these plays, the game of chess represents the moves made in the seduction of a woman.

 

William Shakespeare (48, 77, 172, 191, 257, 417)

Eliot references William Shakespeare many times in this poem because, well, Shakespeare's the man, isn't he? More specifically, Eliot alludes to the plays The Tempest (48, 191, 257), Antony and Cleopatra (77), Hamlet (172), and Coriolanus (417).

John Milton (98)

What's a waste land littered with fragments of great English literature without a little bit of John Milton's classic poem, Paradise Lost? Eliot alludes to this in line 98.

Ovid's Metamorphoses (99-104, 203-206, 218, 245, 429)

For anyone who wanted an education in the classics of Western literature in Eliot's time, knowing the Roman poet Ovid was an absolute must. Ovid wrote around the time of Christ (43 B.C.E. to 17-18 C.E.), and is most famous for his collection of mythology in poetic verse, The Metamorphoses. Eliot refers specifically to the myth of the "Rape of Philomel," which you can get the goods on in the "Summary" section. Tiresias, the blind prophet, is also a character from Ovid.

Edmund Spenser (176-184)

As he continues to work his way through the list of English Lit. heavyweights, Eliot makes sure to include Edmund Spenser in his references. More specifically, Eliot quotes Spenser's "Prothalamion" in order to show how the Thames of 1600 was definitely a lot nicer than the Thames of 1922.

 

Andrew Marvell (185, 196)

Another big name (for people who know English Lit. as well as Eliot). Andrew Marvell was a poet who wrote around 1660, and Eliot mentions him mostly to refer to his greatest hit, "To His Coy Mistress."

John Day, The Parliament of Bees, 1608-1616 (198)

This poem was written by English dramatist John Day sometime between 1608 and 1616, and Eliot references it in line 198.

Anonymous. Brihadaranyaka—Upanishad, 5.1-5.3 (401-423)

The Upanishads, the holy texts of Hindu belief, gave Eliot a ton of spiritual inspiration.

Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance, 1920 (425)

Eliot was extremely interested in Weston's history of ancient fertility myths, called From Ritual to Romance, especially her chapter on the British myth of the "Fisher King," whose sacrificial death was supposed to bring new life to a barren land. For the symbolic world of "The Waste Land," there has definitely been a death in Western culture; but for Eliot, it's not so clear if this death will bring new life or simply lead to the end of civilization.

 

Paul Verlaine, Parsifal, 1886 (202)

Eliot alludes to Verlaine's famous take on the Arthurian knight Perceval in his poem "Parsifal."

Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766 (254-256)

The Vicar of Wakefieldis Irish playwright Oliver Goldsmith's masterpiece.

Saint Augustine, Confessions, 398 C.E. (307, 309)

When Eliot talks of a trip to Carthage, he's referring to Saint Augustine's Confessions—a classic of Christian theology.

Herman Hesse, A Glimpse Into Chaos, 1920 (367)

Famous German writer Herman Hesse (who also wrote Siddhartha) wrote a collection of essays called A Glimpse into Chaos, which Eliot draws on here.

 

Historical References

Battle of Mylae (70)

Eliot refers to this battle from 260 B.C.E. when it would probably be more appropriate (in 1922) to refer to World War I (1914-1918). But in referring to this much earlier war, which was fought for financial gain, Eliot takes the combined greed and stupidity of human history and mashes it all together in "The Waste Land."

The Fire Sermon (308)

According to most accounts, the Fire Sermon was preached by the spiritual teacher known as Buddha. It was intended to encourage people to give up the "fire" of lust for sex and worldly possessions. Although looking at the world today, you have to wonder how well it worked.

 

Pop Culture References

Tarot Cards (46-55, 312-321, 430)

After they're introduced to the poem by Madame Sosostris, the tarot cards become a major way for Eliot to mix prophecy with criticism in his tone, since he both believes in the symbolic significance of the tarot pack (which is centuries old) and at the same time doesn't buy into fortune-tellers or psychic mediums. The tarot pack is still very much a part of pop culture today, and its wide appeal has made it just as popular in the 21st century as it was in the 16th.

The Shakespearean Rag (128-130)

"The Mysterious Rag" was very popular in the United States around 1912, and Eliot no doubt would have heard it quite often. He probably cringed at the thing the way people now cringe when they hear Nickelback. Sorry, but you know it's true.

Cannon Street Hotel and Metropole (213-214)

The Cannon Street Hotel and Hotel Metropole were two luxurious hotels of Eliot's time, although both had reputations for being places of questionable sexual activities. Check out our "Summary" section for more information.

Moorgate (296)

A subway station in London.

"London Bridge is Falling Down" (427)

This famous nursery rhyme was prevalent in Eliot's time, and still well-known in many places today.

 

THEMES

THE WASTE LAND THEME OF RELIGION

For Eliot, one of the single greatest causes of Western civilization becoming "The Waste Land" is the fact that religion doesn't really have the influence it once did. In the old days, people didn't have to worry so much about questions like "Why am I here?" or "What's the meaning of life," because religion already had answers for these questions. In the modern world though, Eliot has seen a decline in the power of religion, and one of the side effects of this decline is that more and more people are feeling like they're in a funk or suffering from a full-blown spiritual crisis.

THE WASTE LAND THEME OF MEMORY AND THE PAST

There's just no getting away from the past in "The Waste Land," but Eliot's biggest criticism of modern society is that it has gotten too far away from the past. Throughout this poem, you encounter a lot of personal memories; but for Eliot, these aren't nearly as important as the "cultural memory" he's trying to preserve in this poem.

Many critics have criticized Eliot for being "nostalgic," meaning that he tends to fantasize about a glorious past that probably never existed. Sure, if all you read are the great classics of literature, then it's going to seem that everyone living in Rome was killing tigers with his bare hands and drinking wine with the gods. For Eliot, though, there's just no question that modern society has developed a depressing sort of cultural amnesia, and the decline of this society is directly connected to the fact that people don't have a good enough understanding of their cultural history. So you make the call: is he right on or way off?

THE WASTE LAND THEME OF ISOLATION

Question: "Hey Eliot, what's so wrong with the modern world?"

Eliot's answer: "Everyone is way too selfish."

Question: "So what?"

Eliot's answer: "Well, haven't you ever wondered why you're so lonely? That's why."

In "The Waste Land," the great despair of modern existence doesn't just come from a sense of meaninglessness, but from a very deep loneliness. This loneliness, in turn, is something Eliot thinks we create for ourselves by constantly pursuing our own selfish interests. It's pretty simple: you can't spend your whole life trying to beat the people around you, then turn around and complain about being lonely. Modern existence, with its emphasis on individualism, is a breeding ground for isolation and loneliness, and the major problem with modern people is that they don't seem to realize that they're responsible for the isolation that's always eating at their souls.

THE WASTE LAND THEME OF APPEARANCES

Simply put, there are some pretty unattractive characters walking around "The Waste Land." The worst of all might be the two-thousand-year-old Tiresias, with his "wrinkled dugs" (228); but the pimply-faced "young man carbuncular" (231) might give the prophet a run for his money in the Ugliest Eliot Character pageant. Eliot might talk a lot about sympathy and compassion, but he's more than willing to draw a direct relationship between moral and physical ugliness when it comes to stuff he doesn't like. Eliot focuses on people's appearances constantly throughout this poem, and always does so to convey his larger ideas about spiritual beauty and ugliness.

THE WASTE LAND THEME OF SEX

In "The Waste Land," the status of sex is pretty much a measuring stick for how morally demolished society is. On several occasions, when it comes time for Eliot to show how truly low we've all fallen, he points toward sex—and not just sex, but the separation of sex from love. There's no getting around it; pop culture is totally obsessed with sex, and it tries to throw sex in our faces as much as it can. For Eliot, sex once had the potential to be a beautiful thing. But in modern times, this beauty (as with all forms of beauty) has been completely stripped of its significance, mostly because the act of sex no longer has anything to do with love. Call Eliot a little old-fashioned, but the guy's observations on sex pretty much still hold true for much of pop culture today.