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.

 

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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

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