18. T S ELIOT'S THE WASTE LAND- for APPSC TGPSC TREIRB JL/DL

18. T S ELIOT'S 

THE WASTE LAND (1922) 

for APPSC TGPSC TREIRB JL/DL

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Thomas Stearns Eliot  (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965)

Biography:

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. in 1888 to a Bostan Brahmin family. Eliot largely abandoned his Midwestern roots and chose to ally himself with both New and Old England throughout his life. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was a social worker

Modern Poet, playwright and Critic, Well versed with the knowledge of Latin, French, Greek, and German. He was the greatest poet of Modern Age. He is known as “Arnold of the 20^th century”. He shows the influence of the Hindu and the Buddhist.

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies included Ancient Greek, Latin, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was 14, under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in 1905.

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.

After working as a philosophy assistant and earned a master's degree at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, France. From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. studying in Paris and Germany. At the age of 25, He settled in England in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I,

Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate School in London, where he taught French and Latin. To earn extra money, he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses at University College London and Oxford. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London. In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds to become a director in the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer (later Faber & Faber)

He met Ezra Pound in 1914, whom he called as “il Miglior Fabbo” (=the better craftsman). As Ezra Pound has edited his poem drastically and helped Eliot to get recognition, he dedicated The Waste Land (1922) poem to Ezra Pound. 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

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".

Eliot served as literary editor of the Egoist, a feminist (in support of equality for women) magazine, from 1917 to 1919.  Eliot founded the quarterly Criterion in 1922, editing it until its end in 1939.

He was strongly influenced the school of New Criticism. In addition to writing poetry and editing it for various publications, he wrote philosophical reviews and a number of critical essays such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent," have become classics. Eliot made great use of Verse libre (Free verse) in his poetry. He defined poetry as “Poetry is not turning loose emotion, but an escape from emotion’

He converted to Anglicanism and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship. Eliot joined the Church of England in 1927 and his subsequent work reflects his Anglican attitudes. He proclaiming himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion". His wife Vivienne-Highwood, died in the year 1947. He was the recipient of a Noble Prize in 1948.

Eliot was unhappy for most of his life, but his second marriage proved fruitful. In 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher (his secretary at Faber & Faber), who was 30. He died in London, England in 1965.  Eliot had no children with either of his wives.

 

Poetry:

1.   Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)- poetry collection, a twelve-poem chapbook.

a.   Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917: first published in Poetry: A magazine of Verse in 1915. 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 “The Love Song of Har Dyal”. Used stream of Consciousness, described it as drama of ‘Literary Anguish’. Dramatic Monologue of on urban man’s feeling an isolated lamenting for spiritual progress and his failure as a lover. It is about a lady’s advances towards Prufrock (an urban man), who is shy, he escapes her. Contains a famous quotes:

                            i.        “I am not Prince Hamlet”

                           ii.        “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

                         iii.        I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

b.   Portrait of a Lady 1915- one of the two main Boston poems written by Eliot, the other being "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Frst published in “Others: A Magazine of the New Verse” in 1915. The title is from a novel by Henry James', by the same name. Epigraph of the poem is a famous quote from Marlowe's, The Jew of Malta: “Thou has committed Fornication: but that was in another country, And besides, the wench is dead." Story of a failed friendship in three episodes, occurring over a period of ten months and depicts the upper-class lady as soulless and empty, reveals himself as the one who is truly callous and unfeeling.

c.    Preludes: opening lines: “The winter evening settles down, With smell of steaks in passageways.”

2.   Poems (1920)- collection of poems

a.   Gerontion 1920- The title is Greek for "little old man," poem is an interior monologue relating which describes Europe after World War I through the eyes of an elderly man. opens with an epigraph (from Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure) which states: “Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both.”

b.   Whispers of Immortality 1920- parody of William Wordsworth's title of the poem, Intimations of Immortality.

3.   The Wasteland 1922: first published in “The Criterion” (in UK) and “The Dial” (in USA). It is a 434-line modernist poem (Too obscure and complex) 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 Wasteland is based on 2 anthropological works (i) From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L Weston and (ii) Golden Bough by Frazer. Eliot dedicated it to Il Miglior Fabbro (the better craftsman") refers to Ezra Pound. The Poem is often read as representation of the disillusionment of the postwar generation. The Wasteland is a touch-stone of Modern Literature. This poem is in 5 parts: (Code: B G F D T- Burial -Game -Fire- Death- Thunder)

i)    The burial of the dead: Title drawn from Anglican Burial Service. opening line ‘April is the cruelest month’.

This section is in Vignettes, each from a different Speaker: 

a) Auto biographical Snippet from the childhood of a German Aristocratic woman.

b) Prophetic invitation to a journey into a desert wasteland.

Speaker’s journey into a desert which threatens him “I will show you fear in a Hand full of Dust”. The threatening tone is mixed with childhood recollections of a hyacinth girl through quotes of Waganer's story “Tristram and Isolde”. Madam Sosostris, fortune teller, reads tarot cards and makes predictions.

Unreal city is a section in the last part, which denotes the corruption and materialism of the society. 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?”

ii)   A game of Chess: Title from Middleton’s play “Women Beware Women (1657)” (It has scene in which mother-in-law is distracted by Game of Chess, while her daughter-in-Law (Bianca) is seduced). This section is about the failure of love and sexuality in the modern world.

It is in 2 parts:

Part-I:  Description of a wealthy woman sitting in a beautiful chair (reference to Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare). The painting on the wall tells the story of Philomel, a maiden raped by Tereus and cuts her tongue, then they transformed into Nightingales doomed to sing the song “Jug Jug".

Part-II: Two women meet at London bar where they discuss with third "Lil" who complains about unhappy married life, taking pills, and childless. 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. title from a Sermon given by Budha (to give up earthly Passion seek spiritual regeneration). Opens with a river side song, the speaker surrounded by rats and garbage, who is fishing on the banks of the river Thames, musing on his brother’s and father's death: “Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song- Refrain from Spencer’s Prothalamion”.

The speaker is propositioned by Mr. Eugenides (one eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris’s tarot pack) Eugenides invites the speaker to a homosexual hotel. The speaker introduces himself as Tiresias, a hermaphrodite (one who is male and female- “Old man with wrinkled female breasts”) and is blind but can see into future. Tiresias watches a female typist having sex with a clerk (young man carbuncular) 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.

Fisherman’s daughter sings “Weilalaleila Waillala Leialala”- nonsense song. The section then comes to an abrupt end with a few lines from St. Augustine’s Confessions and a vague reference to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon.

iv) Death by water: shortest of the poem’s 5 sections.  Describes Phlebas, the Phoenician seafarer who has died by drowning.  Phlebas is apparently a merchant by the reference to the profit and loss. The narrator asks the readers to consider Phlebas, we humans all meet the Phlebas.

v)   What the Thunder said: “Hieronimo is mad again”- from Elizabethan drama, The Spanish Tragedy” by Thomas Kyd; The poem returns to the arid desert scene visited in Part I. Rain has not arrived, despite the promise from thunder and the approaching spring. Speaker is lamenting for water in desert. The scene shifts to Ganges River, which is sunken and longing for water. The thunder speaks in the single syllable “DA” which means the thunder “Datta (gives), 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 children’s rhyme “London bridge is falling down”- Nursery rhyme; and “Shantih Shantih Shantih”-final words.

In The Wasteland

Ø The Fisherking (Central Character) - refers to damaged sexuality

Ø Tiresias refers Confused & ambiguous sexuality

Ø Women's chattering refers out of control sexuality

Ø Rats in Wasteland. (Crabs in Prufrock.)

 

4.   The Hollow man 1925- poem- title from The Hollow Land by William Morris & "The Broken Men" by Rudyard Kipling.  The two epigraphs to the poem, "Mistah Kurtz – he dead" and "A penny for the Old Guy", are allusions to Conrad's character and to Guy Fawkes (Gun Powder Plot). In “The Hollow Men,” the speaker discusses the dead land, now filled with stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their upraised hands, stiffened from rigor mortis.

Final stanza of the poem is most quoted:

“This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang but a whimper.”

5.   Ariel Poems 1927-1931: -series of 38 pamphlets by several authors, T S Eliot contributed 5 poems.

a.   "Journey of the Magi 1927" is a 43-line poem. The Magi were 3 wise men from the East.  They brought gifts for infant Christ. ‘No longer at ease’ is the last line from this poem. It is significant because, He converted to Anglo-Catholicism in the same year. It is one of five poems that Eliot contributed for a series of 38 pamphlets by several authors collectively titled the Ariel Poems.

b.   A Song for Simeon- is a 37-line poem written in free verse.

6.   Ash-Wednesday 1930- 6 parts- Long poem on conversion issue, based on Dante’s Purgatario. (part3 of Divine Comedy). It is the day of fasting in Western Culture. It is persona of poet, who lacked faith by the past. It is parodied by Nobokov in Lolita (1955).

7.   Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) is a collection of whimsical light poems

8.   Four Quartets 1943: It brings in Hindu stories with a particular emphasis on the Bhagavad-Gita of the Mahabharata. It is connected to four places related to Eliot’s life: (code: B E D L)

a.   Burnt Norton 1936: (AIR)- related to Deseuted Estate, Glustershire - It is connected to Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral; he worked on the poem while the play was being produced during 1935.

b.   East Coker 1940:  (EARTH)- Village in Somerset (town) - It is a place that Eliot visited in 1937 with the St Michael's Church, where his ashes were later kept. Eliot offers a solution: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope." Famous line: Our beginning is our end, our end is our beginning.

c.   The Dry Salvages 1941: (WATER)- Cape on the coast The central image of The Dry Salvages is water and the sea.

d.   Little Gidding 1942:  (FIRE)- used terza rima rhyme in a manner similar to Dante

T.S. Eliot converted to "Angle Catholicism" his poetry can be compared to Dante’s Divine Comedy:

• Inferno - The Wasteland
• Purgatory- Ash Wednesday
• Paradise- Four Quartets

 

Criticism: (see criticism notes)

9.   Tradition and Individual Talent 1919– Essay- Theory of Impersonality in it. (see criticism)

10.    Hamlet and His Problems 1920: 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.

11.    The Sacred Wood (1920) – critical essays

12.    Metaphysical poets 1921 – essay- dissociation of sensibility concept (see criticism)

13.    The function of criticism (1923)

14.    What is a Classic? 1944 - Essay (see criticism)

15.    Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948):

16.  The Frontiers of Criticism (1956)

17.  To Criticize the Critic 1961

Magazine:

The Criterion- British literary magazine -published from October 1922 to January 1939. For most of its run, a quarterly journal, although for a period in 1927–28 it was published monthly. It was created by T. S. Eliot who served as its editor for its entire run.

 

The Revival of Poetic Drama:

He firmly established the conventions and traditions of poetic drama. He wrote 7 plays:

1.   Sweeney Agonistes (1926)- poetic drama in two scenes - published in two parts in the New Criterion, as “Fragment of a Prologue” (Oct,1926) & “Fragment of an Agon” (Jan,1927) and together in book form as Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama (1932). It comments on the meaninglessness of contemporary life and sinfulness of humanity.

2.   The Rock (1934)- subtitle is “a pageant play,”- Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (Restoration diarists) appears in it.

3.   Murder in the Cathedral 1935: modern miracle play on the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury in 1170. most striking feature is the use of a chorus in the Classical Greek manner. He was commissioned to write a play for Kent's annual Canterbury Festival, after his conversion to the Anglican Church.

4.   The Family Reunion 1939- 2 act drama mostly in blank verse- It incorporates the elements of ancient Greek drama and modern detective plays to portray the hero's journey from guilt to redemption. set in the fictional estate of Wishwood, where Amy Dowager "Lady" Monchensey is hosting her 60^th birthday party. Harry, the eldest son, returns home after an eight-year absence, deeply haunted by the mysterious death of his wife. Amy, despairing at Harry's renunciation of Wishwood, dies at the end.

5.   The Cocktail Party 1949- verse drama in three acts- most famous among his seven plays- based upon the Alcestis of Euripides. Edward Chamberlayne's wife Lavinia has left him, after five years of marriage, just as they are about to host a cocktail party at their London home. Unidentified Guest ("psychiatrist" Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly) offers to bring Lavinia back, and does so.

6.   The Confidential Clerk (1953)- Sir Claude Mulhammer, a wealthy entrepreneur, decides to appoint Colby (Claude’s illegitimate son), as his confidential clerk, hoping his eccentric wife, Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer, will take a liking to the boy and allow him to live as her adopted son.

7.   The Elder statesmen (1958)- final play- Lord Claverton, an eminent former cabinet minister and banker, is helped to confront his past by the love of his daughter, his Antigone.

 

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

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.

 

THE WASTE LAND (1922)

Background:

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 book on the Grail legend: Miss Jessie L. Weston’s “From Ritual to Romance .” 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.

Another influential book in writing The Waste Land is Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough

"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.

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.

At the time of the poem's composition, Eliot was ill, struggling to recover from his nervous breakdown and languishing through an unhappy marriage. Eliot's close friend and colleague, Ezra Pound, significantly revised the poem, suggesting major cuts and compressions. The two men seemed to have genuinely collaborated on molding the work. 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. 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.

Eliot’s original title for The Waste Land was “He do the Police in Different Voices.” The line, another quotation, comes from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) in which Betty Higden’s describes Sloppy’s skills as a reader of the newspaper —imitating the voices of the police in the crime reports.

The title, "The Waste Land", on a symbolic level 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.

Eliot's "The Waste Land" is probably one of the toughest piece of literature you'll ever encounter. 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.

Cleanth Brooks describes The Waste Land as a ‘highly condensed epic of the modern age’.

 

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 …..."

 

Structure:

Part	Summary & Characters
I. The Burial of the Dead (=Earth)	Introduces themes of death, rebirth, and spiritual barrenness through fragmented voices. Marie recalls pre-war Europe; the Hyacinth Girl symbolizes lost love; Madame Sosostris gives a cryptic tarot reading; Stetson in Unreal City hints at wartime trauma.
II. A Game of Chess (=Ether)	First part is set in richly decorated room (Rich woman’s hysterical monologue), Philomela’s rape and transformation into nightingale and song of Jug Jug); and second part shifts to a pub (Two woman’s (Lou and May) pub conversation & Bartender’s (Bill) interruption about Lil’s abortion and Albert’s infidelity)
III. The Fire Sermon (=Fire)	Journey through a degraded urban landscape and polluted Thames as modern Wasteland; themes of lust, spiritual emptiness, and decay. Ends with references to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Tiresias narrates a mechanical affair between the Typist and Young Man Carbuncular; Mr. Eugenides propositions the speaker; the Thames Daughters lament exploitation.
IV. Death by Water (=Water)	Shortest part, death of Phlebas the Phoenician, whose drowning symbolizes the inevitability of death and forgotten history.
V. What the Thunder Said (=Air)	Apocalyptic imagery blends drought, war, and fragmented myths. The Fisher King’s wound mirrors the land’s infertility; a mysterious third figure appears; the cock’s crow hints at possible redemption. Shift to Eastern spirituality as a hope of rebirth; The thunder speaks: “DA” —“Datta” (give), “Dayadhvam” (sympathize), “Damyata” (control). Ends with “Shantih shantih shantih”

Code to remember:

B G F D T- Burial -Game -Fire- Death-Thunder

 

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 or Sex

For Eliot, sex once had the potential to be a beautiful thing. But in modern times, this beauty has been completely stripped of its significance, mostly because the act of sex no longer has anything to do with love. 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 of Philomela. For Eliot, it 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. The world had been turned upside down and now, with the rapid changes.

Eliot argues that many things change, and many other 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.

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 modern world Eliot has seen a decline in the power of religion, and his shift to Eastern religion (Hinduism and Budhism) is only hope for him for spiritual rebirth.

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?

Isolation

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.

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.

 

Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay Water Imagery

WATER IMAGERY

The waste land is dying from lack of water, but the drowned sailor has also died because of too much water. 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". 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.

FIRE IMAGERY

Eliot uses fire to describe the hellish experience of having to live in the modern world, a.k.a. the waste land. 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."

ZOMBIE CROWDS

 Eliot never actually uses the term "zombie" in this poem, but his descriptions of modern people 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." 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.

THE THAMES RIVER

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. 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.

KEYS AND PRISONS

Modern 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. 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.

THUNDER

Thunder, symbolizes the coming of rain, pops up in the final section of the poem, was drawn from Hinduism. The three thunder claps that sound 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.

Going back to the image of water, we can think of thunder as something that promises that rain will soon come. Eliot connected thunder to the possibility of cultural rebirth.

POPULAR 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. Eliot quotes lines from a popular song called "The Shakespearean Rag.(Lines 128-130)"; from a ballad song he heard from Australian troops (Lines 199-201) sang during World War-I.; and from a Wagner opera (Lines 266-291) and fills it with his own lyrics.

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. The tarot pack is associated in this poem mostly with Madame Sosostris. 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. Madame Sosostris 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.

 

ANALYSIS: FORM AND METER

Dramatic Monologue, Refrains, Mixed Meters

The speaker reflects 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 is that the speaker is constantly shifting between different personalities, cultures, and historical moments. Every now and then, you'll find a rhyme or a consistent meter; but these moments are always fleeting.

The second part of the poem starts off with a healthy and refreshing dash of blank verse (a classic English meter) in a conversation between the two women in the pub.

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.

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 by using enjambment.

Eliot uses several refrains: "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. (by bar tenderer)"; "Jug jug jug (by Philomela)"; “Sweet Thames run slowly…. (Spencer’s song)

ANALYSIS: SPEAKER

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." Eliot made his entire poem seem fragmented and disconnected.

ANALYSIS: SETTING

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.

When you try to picture the setting of this poem, it's best to think about the "arid plain" 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,. In this setting, you can picture the blind prophet

In terms of cultural setting, you can't deny that World War I is very, very present throughout this poem. 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.

World War I left not only a physical, but spiritual vacuum throughout Europe, turning it into what Eliot's waste land.

 

Detailed Summary:

Section I: "The Burial of the Dead"

Eliot labled his first section “The Burial of the Dead,” a title pulled from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

"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.”

Sibyl is a mythological figure who asked Apollo “for as many years of life as there are grains in a handful of sand”. 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. She finds that what she most wants is death. Death alone offers escape; and therefore a new beginning.

 The quotation is followed by a dedication to Ezra Pound (added in a 1925 republication), Eliot’s  friend, who played a major role in shaping the final version of the poem. It reads "For Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro" ("the better craftsman")

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 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.”  

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 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: “Looking into the heart of light, the 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.” (Narrator is the drowned Phonecian Sailor). Sosostris also sees a vision of a London Bridge image, where mass of people “walking round in a ring.” They walk and walk, but go nowhere, like the inhabitants of modern London. 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, refers to area inside the gates of Hell); “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled” (from Canto 4, 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!” which reads: “Hypocrite reader! – my likeness, – my brother!”

Section II: "A Game of Chess"

“A Game of Chess” comes from Thomas Middleton’s seventeenth-century play A Game of Chess, an allegory to describe conflict between England and Spain.

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, simply any high class unnamed lady. 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. The splendid decorations of the room appear at times more menacing than beautiful.

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, 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.

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.”

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 I end 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 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)

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.” Here, 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.

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 “Old man with wrinkled female breasts.”) the blind prophet who has lived both as a man 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.

IV: “Death by Water”

“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.

Section V: “What the Thunder Said”

“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."

Line by Line Summary

THE EPIGRAPH

Eliot (1971) gives this translation:

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”

For Ezra Pound

il miglior fabbro.

Eliot originally intended use an epigraph from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) describing the death of the character Kurtza, but Ezra Pound suggested to use a very famous, very old text in Latin and Ancient Greek epigraph (without translation) from chapter 48 of the Gaius Petronius' Satyricon.

The poem refers to an Ancient Greek oracle, Cumaean Sibyl, who was granted immortality by Apollo, for whom she was a prophetess. She asked to live for as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust.  Apollo granted her long life, but not eternal youth. She lived for hundreds of years, each year becoming smaller and frailer, grows older and older and never dies. When the speaker asks Cumaean Sibyl what she wants most, and she says that she wants to die.

The last part is a dedication to his friend and editor Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro (=better craftsman), who helped Eliot to edit this poem.

 

SECTION-I ‘THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD’

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. But if you're lonely, seeing flowers blooming might make you even more depressed about your "Memory and desire". The spring rain might normally bring new life, but for you it only stirs "Dull roots".

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, to give a sense of stability in a poem.

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". 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.

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.

"[C]oming over the Starnbergersee" makes the location of the memory more specific, because Starnbergersee is the name of a lake in 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. They drank coffee and talked for an hour.

Then you have strange linea in German that says "I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German".

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. The speaker is the cousin of an archduke,. And they went out on a sled and told her not to be frightened. You find out at this point that the speaker's name is Marie. These lines close with Marie talking about how awesome and free you feel in the mountains.

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.

She ends on a weird note, though, telling you that she likes to read during the night and travels south in the winter.

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 talk about how your soul is like soil without water.

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". (Son of man 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", meaning that you live your life on a superficial level and don't bother to draw your thoughts together into any meaningful ideas.

You live in a world that is as hard on you as a beating sun, but your trees (ideas and 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". All you're going to get is a half-hearted comfort, like shadow under a "red rock".

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

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.

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".

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.

The speaker finally says: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust". The dust is so scary because we are all going to turn into dust some day.

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. At this point, the poem takes on a tone of mourning for a love that was once great, but is now broken.

Another reason for this tone of mourning is World War I (1914-18) which was awful, blood mess, and during the four years that it lasted, over nine million soldiers were killed. This sense of despair made artists to radically rethink about art.

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 speaker recalls 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 talking to herself.

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". 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."

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", 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.

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". The next line has Sosostris telling you that "Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!". 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.

The next card Sosostris pulls is "Belladona," meaning "Beautiful Lady" in Italian, but also referring to a type of poison called nightshade. Of course, the "Belladonna" is not actually a tarot card—it is an allusion to Leonardo's famous painting, Madonna of the Rocks or "the lady of situations". she can be either beautiful or dangerous, depending on what's going down.

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.

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.

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.

After this, Madame pulls "the one-eyed merchant" (another totally made up tarot card), and then finally 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 symbolizes spiritual rebirth. The lady tells you to fear death by water.

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.

Suddenly, Sosostris has a vision of people "walking around in a ring", which could go back to the wheel of fortune image. Or, they are trapped inside a circle or circling around it. It could also refer to the circles of hell that make up Dante's Inferno, a classic of 14th-century Italian literature.

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.

The Divine Comedy is a three-part epic poem, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise), written by Dante Alighieri in the 14th century each consisting of 33 cantos using terza rima.

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, to 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 Fluers du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, a 19th-century French poet.

The speaker remembers watching a crowd flowing over London Bridge like zombies, and says he "had not thought death had undone so many". Here, Eliot is talking about the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno, and is comparing modern life to living in hell where all the dead people are. The people in this scene are staring only at the ground in front of their feet. They seem pretty unsatisfied with their undead lives.

The speaker mentions King William 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".

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 speaker saw someone he knew from an ancient war – Battle of Mylae (actually refers to WW-I)- (named Stetson) in the flowing zombie-crowd and asked him if the "corpse [he] planted last year in [his] garden" has begun to sprout". The speaker claims planting a body in the ground is like planting a seed that's supposed to grow. The speaker then gives the Stetson, an advice about keeping the dog and the frost away from where the corpse is planted.

He is 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. Eliot calling out the reader "mon frère" or "my brother" in French, and finally as a lazy hypocrite.

 

SECTION-II ‘A GAME OF CHESS’

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" is a reference to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, which heightens the queen-like sense of the room.

The words/phrases marble (line 78), fruited vines(line 79),Cupidon (line 80) and sevenbranched candelabra (line 82) and ‘the glitter of her jewels’ fills out this description of luxury room as in an ancient Greek play.

Eliot opens this section of the poem with unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, which is a classic, common meter in English poetry.

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.)

Everything sounds a kind of fake and tawdry, too and the word "synthetic" especially seems to point to the unnaturalness.

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", which makes it burn green and orange.

The speaker finds that in the room's "sad light a carvèd dolphin swam". This line really shows how the room has taken the image of dolphin—and turned it into a dead carving.

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 myth of Philomela, is taken from Metamorphoses by Ovid, which 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. 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.

 We can still hear Philomela's voice in the songs of nightingales, but it sounds like “Jug Jug” to dirty ears.

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.

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."

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.

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", But then they're still 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.

She is not happy in this room. It seems that the lady is a neurotic crazy lady, as she is  frantically questions whomever she's speaking to. This kind of neurotic behavior is way more common in modern times than it was in the past.

Same as the structure of the poem experiences a breakdown, the character speaking too seems to have a mental breakdown.

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 where "the dead men lost their bones."

The rats' alley is probably a very unpleasant place, and it continues the rat motif that symbolizes modern decay throughout this poem.

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?"

The conversation (lines 117-120) shows how someone being really paranoid about he sound of wind coming through a doorway (allusion to John Webster’s The Devil's Law Case, which contains the line "Is the wind in that door still?").

The speaker of the poem insists that it is "nothing again nothing". The repetition of the word "nothing" might hint toward the overall nothingness of modern life.

The structure of the poem (placement of "Do" in the line) 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?"

The line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest about a drowned person's eyes turning into pearls.

This image of a hardened, dead soul leads back into the question of whether you (the reader) are alive or dead.

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, the poem launches into a popular Irving Berlin song "That Mysterious Rag," only the speaker refers to "that Shakespearean Rag," perhaps alluding to his mention of The Tempest two lines above.

The repetition of the questions "What shall I do?" or "What shall we do?" or “What shall we ever do?" gives us a strong sense that the people in this poem really don't know what to do, which again refers to the loss of religion and spirituality in modern life.

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.

In Modern life, the people wish to kill time in their lives, staying up all night and playing a game of chess etc., without spirituality is an allusion to the Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess and Women Beware of Women, in which chess moves are used in seduction of a woman.

The speaker is "pressing lidless eyes," which suggests a lack of sleep, and "waiting for a knock upon the door", which could mean that he's waiting for something or someone. In this sense, modern life just seems like a long wait for something that never seems to come.

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.

Scene shifts to a London Bar where the Bar Tenderer name Bill is interrupting the conversation of two woman, Lou and May, about third friend Lil. One woman criticizes Lil, to make herself look good because Lil’s husband, Albert, was coming back from the war after four years. The woman tells her friend to get all of her gross teeth pulled out and to buy herself a new set.

Eliot uses "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME" as a refrain to interrupt the woman's conversation. This adds 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.)

At this point, Lil 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".

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".

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

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 looking so old. She's been really messed up by the pills she took "to bring it off” (means aborting a baby).

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 calls Lil a fool. It seems Lil is not all interested in sex, but the first woman says "What you get married for if you don't want children?" It reflects the theme of infertility that comes up over and over again in this poem.

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. The subject of the women's conversation changes to visiting someone's house and having a really nice ham or "hot gammon". We finally learn who these folks in the bar are: Bill, Lou, and May.

This final repetition of "good night" is also a reference to Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

 

SECTION-III ‘THE FIRE SERMON’

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" referring to the river's tent's being broken.

The most significant part of these lines comes with the phrase, "The wind / Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed". 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 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.

The line "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song" is a line from Edmund Spenser’ Prothalamion that celebrates marriage along the Thames.

Eliot is suggesting to us, 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".

And along with the litter replacing the scenic riverbank, the nymphs have been replaced by these city directors, who is seeing how they make the river all polluted.

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…", 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. (allusion to Pslams 137.) He wrote part of The Waste Land in Lausanne, by Lac Léman (Lake Geneva), where he was being treated for his mental depression.

Line 185 is An allusion to Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” in which the poet tries to seduce his lady friend.(see 196)

The use of ellipsis (…) at the end of this line also contributes to the overall lack of closure that you get throughout.

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 slimy rat (image for the decay that's going on in society) crawls into the Thames while the speaker is fishing and thinking about "the king my brother's wreck".

It refers to an early scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which the magician Prospero summons an 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.

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" 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 (=a little attic )"

These bones are disturbed by "the rat's foot only, year to year". The Thames and London is no longer the awesome beautiful place that some poets have made it out to be.

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.

Line 196 is an allusion to "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." (see line 185)

Sweeney is a not-so-likeable character from an earlier Eliot poem called "Sweeney Among the Nightingales.” Lines 199-201 about Mrs. Porter is from a popular song by Australian troops during World War I.

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.

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

Through this refrain, Eliot remind us 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. (allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphosis)

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 "Unreal city," which is covered by a filthy "brown fog of a winter noon".

We hear a story about some 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.

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". These two places were notorious in Eliot's time for being secret meeting places where men would hook up with women.

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.

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 (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. The goddess Hera transformed him into a woman for seven years. 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, and gave Tiresias the power of prophecy.]

Eliot uses Tiresias as a sort 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. 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".  Perhaps the "throbbing" at the "violet hour" is also a reference to Tiresias.

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.

By a vision, Tiresias talks about a young woman being home from work at teatime and "Lay[ing] out her food in tins", while her laundry dries out the window. For one thing, she's alone. (her Stockings, slippers,  camisoles (=undergardments) are lying on the bed).

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.

Tiresias telling us that what's about to happen in this young woman's apartment. Strutting through the front door, "the young man carbuncular arrives". Carbuncular (self-assured as a millionaire, even though he's basically a secretary) is a fancy word for really pimply, which means this guy's probably not all that much to look at. He's got a "bold stare" and is way more self-assured than he's got reason to be.

Eliot is satirizing the scene as an example of "modern romance.”

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. He "Endeavours to engage her in caresses". The girl doesn't really want to have sex with him, but doesn't really put up a fight.

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", loving the fact that the girl doesn't care. 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.

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 …

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.

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", which may be an allusion to the Odyssey or the Dante’s Inferno.

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

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."

Now the girl "turns and looks a moment" in her mirror, "hardly aware of her departed lover". 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".

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.

The line “When lovely woman stoops to folly”, Eliot quotes from Oliver Goldsmith's novel The Vicar of Wakefield is from a song in which the main character sings of being seduced.

This 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).

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.

Tiresias quotes a line from Shakespeare's Tempest, which is from a scene of mourning. Tiresias goes on to talk about how he often hears music coming out of bars and "the pleasant whining of a mandolin", which comes with the "clatter and chatter from within" the bar.

Eliot goes on to talk about Magnus Martyr, which is a church with "Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold". 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 German song from  Rhine daughters from Götterdämmerung, the last opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle and replaced it with English ones. The song is about women by a Rhine river, 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", which is not so beautiful.

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 towers

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

These lines talk abour Queen Elizabeth I and her "lover," Lord Robert, the Earl of Leicester from James Anthony Froude’s book The Reign of Elizabeth. Whose love is a go-nowhere (They discuss a potentional but impossible marriage on Thames), just as the young typist's relationship with the pimply guy is going nowhere.

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 unidentified 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 de Tolemei, who describes where she's from and how she was killed (on the orders of her husband).

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—now she's at a modern subway station called Moorgate. Her heart is under her feet, indicating that it's underground or maybe in Hell.

She mentions some "event" that happened and made someone (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.

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).

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".

This speaker then takes a moment to say that he comes from humble people and expects nothing.

The line 307, which reads "To Carthage then I came," is taken from the Confessions of St. Augustine, In which 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).

In this line, Eliot talks about how the modern man, however humble, is tempted to an almost insane degree by the modern world.

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 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.

Eliot's bringing in Eastern tradition (Budhism), to illustrate the decline of Western civilization (Christianity) in the modern world.

 

SECTION-IV ‘DEATH BY WATER’

Lines 312-314

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

"Death by Water" is the shortest section of the poem. These lines tell us that some guy named "Phlebas the Phoenician" (perhaps drowned sailor from Madame Sosostris's tarot pack) is the one who's been killed by water. He's been dead for two weeks, or a "fortnight".

Lines 313-314 suggest that Phlebas, now dead, doesn't really worry about worldly things like making money anymore.

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.

Lines 315-316 might refer to the idea of "your whole life passing before your eyes" that usually associated with the moment right before you die.

For Eliot, the same might be true of modern people; it's only after they're on the brink of death that they finally think deeply.

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".

In this case, Phlebas becomes a cautionary figure for anyone who walks around thinking they're awesome.

 

SECTION-V ‘WHAT THE THUNDER SAID’

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

In the first part of Part V three themes pop up: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous, and the present decay of eastern Europe.

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, 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" after we've witnessed Christ's "agony in stony places". Christ is the one being spoken about in "He who was living is now dead".

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".

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". 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". 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 It'll always be uncomfortable. You don't even get the peacefulness of silence, since the waste land is filled with "dry sterile thunder without rain". 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". In this line, Eliot uses alliteration: "sullen faces sneer and snarl."

Lines 346-359

If there were water       

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

The speaker wonders to himself, "If there were water / And no rock" or even "If there were rock / And also water […]" (346-349). 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 seems like the hallucinations of someone who's been wandering in a spiritual desert.

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?

The story is about how the explorers (inspired by a story that came from one of the expeditions to Antarctica), 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.

So the speaker 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". 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", 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", which might refer to the hordes (=crowd) who pollute the modern world.

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". Eliot referes these places as "Unreal".

Line 367 is an allusion to an essay by German writer Herman Hesse’s essay ‘The Brothers Karamazov or The Downfall of Europe’, which appeared in his book Blick ins Chaos (Glimpse into Chaos, 1920). In the essay, Hesse decribes 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. (Hesse also wrote Siddhartha) 

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.

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.

Eliot’s ‘baby-faced bats’ might actually represent us, the modern folks. We've become monstrous in our superficial pleasures, and we just keep crawling down a wall head-first without even realizing that we're "upside-down in air".

All the while, we still hear that horrifying music of damnation, which comes from "voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells" . And once again, we're reminded that this world is waterless (cisterns and wells are empty).

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”. Here we find a the Chapel Perilous.

Unfortunately, this chapel (The Chapel Perilous appears in Arthurian legend, figured as the place where the Holy Grail) is totally empty, as "only the wind's home". There are no windows, "and the door swings", which suggests that the chapel of hope, kind of like Eliot's hope for humanity, is both literally and symbolically abandoned.

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".

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.

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.

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".

There are black clouds gathering in the distance, over the "Himavant"(Himalayas). 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" 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

[This final section of The Waste Land is inspired by a story from the Hindu faith (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad), Prajapati taught men, gods and demons. At the conclusion of the education before leaving the Guru they asked for a final guidance from the Guru. Prajapati said "DA," and asked them how they understood the sound. Each of the three groups interpreted this sound in a different way: The men thought it was the word Datta, which means to give/charity (danam); the gods heard it as Damyata, which means to have self-control (daman); and the demons thought it was Dayadhvam, which means to have compassion (dayam). Mankind has the qualities of both Asuras and Devas, and so mankind should follow all three instructions.]

In Line 401, the thunder rubles for the first time as "DA," and we hear it as: Datta, which means to give. It is only through charity and giving that humanity has managed to reach the cultural accomplishments. (Eliot is worried about the selfishness in the modern world.)

Whatever giving we might do in our lives "is not to be found in our obituaries / Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider". Here Eliot's once again recalling John Webster's The White Devil. That is we shouldn't give in order to get recognition. We should give for the sake of giving.

We shouldn't wait until we're dead to give: "under seals broken by the leans solicitor / In our empty rooms”. If we wait until we're dead to give things away, the only person to take them will be our lawyers.

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."

Alluding, once again, to a line from Dante's Inferno, in which the speaker tells us that he heard sound of a key turning (symbolic key), "each in his prison" (in Line 414).

Eliot's allude to the essay "Appearance and Reality" by FH Bradley. The essay suggest that thoughts, feelings, and external sensations are a private matter. We can understand that the prison here is our own egotistical selfishness, our own, singular way of looking at the world.

Allusion to Shakespeare's Coriolanus further develops this idea of selfishness, in the play, a great solider who acted out of pride instead of duty.

We can never get past our own concerns (we're all 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. Eliot refers: 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.

The next biggest problem of the modern world, apart from our selfishness, is the fact that we don't really resist temptation anymore. Eliot is advising to be “obedient” to something greater than us, some higher power.

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", 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. The speaker thinks it's time to "set my lands in order".

The most important about these lines is the introduction the central figures of the poem: the Fisher King, a common figure in grail legends and Arthurian romances. (Fisher King is allusion to Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance.)

The Fisher King's lands really need to be set in order, what with their being barren and all, are representative of modern society. If only the modern world had some sort of Perceval (or Parsifal, in French by Verlaine), who was able to heal the Fisher King's wounds, and to, by extension, heal the land. Fisher Kings’ sacrificial death was supposed to bring new life to a barren land.

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

It starts with "London Bridge is falling down", which is part of a familiar nursery rhyme refers to 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."vSpeaker is hopeful, because fire in this instance can be a purifying or "refining" thing.

Line 429 brings you back to Philomela (from Ovid’s Metamorphosis), 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." 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 say: ‘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.’

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. He ends up writing a play that leads to the deaths of the people who've murdered his son.

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 us:

Eliot concludes the poem by repeating the word "Shantih" three times. Shantih is a sacred word from the Hindu Upanishad which means: "The peace which passeth all understanding."

For such a depressing poem, "The Waste Land" actually ends on a slight note of hope, pointing us toward Eastern religions as a way to restore our faith.

 

 

 

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