20 T. S. Eliot: The Wasteland

Dr. Sanchitha J

epgp books

 

 

Introduction

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was an eminent poet, literary critic and dramatist of the twentieth century. Eliot was one of the representative writers of the Modern age in English literature, roughly the period between 1890 and 1950.Other famous modernist authors include James Joyce, D. H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound. In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

 

Major influences in Eliot’s poetic career:

  • Metaphysical poetry
  • Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature
  • Ezra Pound, the American poet and critic who shaped Eliot’s evolution as a poet.

Common features of his poems:

  • realistic, though depressing portrayal of contemporary society
  • intellectual and rational verses
  • tones of bitterness, pessimism, irony, satire and paradox
  • reveal the poet’s disappointment with modern life in general

Important works:

  •  Poems-The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock (1915),The Waste Land (1922),Four Quartets (1945)
  • Criticism- Tradition and Individual Talent (1919), The Function of Criticism ((1923)
  • Play- Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

Learning Outcome

  • To gain a general awareness of early twentieth century society
  • To identify different modernist poetry techniques
  • To appreciate the use of myths to convey meanings effectively
  • To evaluate the language, form and content of the poem aesthetically
  • To analyse the universal relevance of the poem today

Characteristic features of modernist literature.

  • breaking away from conventional rules of narration and rhyme,
  • application of techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration and free verse.
  • common literary topics – alienation, despair, meaninglessness of life
  • strong reactions against current religio-socio-political issues
  • focus on spiritual and moral degradation of man.

The Waste Land

 

The Waste Land is considered a masterpiece in Modernist English Literature. Eliot depended on a variety of sources while composing this poem.

Sources

 

Eliot was influenced mainly by the following two books, which narrate legends of many lands, from ancient Egypt to the England of King Arthur.

  • Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance
  • Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough

Other main sources include The Bible, The Hindu Upanishads and Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Eliot also quotes profusely from authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Aldous Huxley, Andrew Marvell, Walt Whitman and even Baudelaire, Ovid and Homer.

  •  Read on the internet about the important myths/legendsusedin The WasteLand
  1.  Legend of the Fisher King: The impotent Fisher King made his kingdom an infertile “waste land”. Weston and Fraziernarrate ancient stories of healing the Fisher King to make the land fertile again. Eliot brilliantly adapts the legend of the Fisher King’s wasteland to illustrate the deteriorating condition of modern society.
  2.  Grail Legend: The Holy Grail is believed to be the cup in which the blood of Jesus Christ was collected, and has healing powers.The young knight Percival was one of King Arthur’s legendary Knights of the Round Table.During his quest of the Holy Grail, he stays in the castle of the Fisher King.
  3. Legend of Oedipus: The King of Thebes, Oedipus, unknowingly killed his father and married his mother invoking the wrath of the gods. When he knew the truth he became blind and the land became infertile.
  4. Legend of Tiresias: The legendary soothsayer of Thebes, Tiresias was gifted with prophecy and immortality. According to legends Tiresias was punished by Goddess Hera who changed him into a woman. He wasalso struck blind by Goddess Athena because he saw her bathing naked. Eliot uses Tiresias as a narrator because he has enjoyed both manhood and womanhood.
  5. Emmaus: The wasteland referred to in The Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes. God commands the prophet Ezekiel to warn the people to stop engaging in evil activities.

Narrative style

  • modernist technique of fragmentary narration
  • verses which seem to lack continuity.
  • disconnected episodes
  • mostly monologues, but it also has many narrators.
  • excellent use of ‘cinematic technique’ –jumping from one scene to the other, juxtaposing image upon image in rapid succession.
  • inter textual references
  • use of many languages including Latin, Greek, German and Sanskrit.

Eliot’s narrative style has a great impact on the readers who understand the poem by successfully connecting the disconnected verses.

The Waste Landis dedicated to Ezra Pound, ilmigliorfabbro which means ‘the better craftsman’, as a mark of gratitude to Pound’s efforts. Published in 1922, four years after the I World War the poem begins on a pessimistic note with an epigraph in Latin and Greek, taken from Satyricon by Petronius Arbiter:

For I saw with mine own eyes,

celebrated Sibyl of Cumae, hanging in a

jar And when the boys called out to her:

‘What do you want?’

She replied:

‘I wish to die’.

According to mythology Sibyl was granted immortality by Apollo, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth. Hence her body withered away till only her voice was left and she was eventually kept in a jar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumaean_Sibyl). The epigraph points out that, like Sibyl, men and women living in the modern waste land fear life and are haunted by the wish to die. This pessimism is reflected throughout the poem, which consistsof five sections.

  • The Burial of the Dead
  • A Game of Chess
  • The Fire Sermon
  • Death by Water
  • What the Thunder Said

Now let us take a look at each section in detail.

The Burial of the Dead

 

This section deals with the theme of the glorious past contrasted with the gloomy present.Title is an extract from the Anglican funeral service. Poem begins on a harsh note with ‘April is the cruellest month’. Theopening line echoes Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Why do you thinkSpringis described as an unhappy season? The bright and joyful Spring breathes life into the dead earth which is buried during winter. But images used ‘dead land’ and ‘dull roots’ signifyunwillingness to be revived and reborn. Modern people strangely prefer the gloomy Winter thatcovers Earth ‘in forgetful snow’, itsbitter cold and numbness enable people to stop thinking about the fertile past.

 

The four narrators narrate different episodes. First episode moves to and fro, between Marie’s past and present. Her nostalgic childhood recollections and fun times with cousins playing on the snow are juxtaposed with the present sombre images of having coffee in the park with friends.Marie who claims to be a pure German and not a Russian, is supposed to beCountess Marie Larisch who wrote her autobiography ‘My Past’(1916). Marie’s memories end in a meditative mode, ‘I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter’ signifying her current unproductive existence.

 

Second episode is narrated in a frightening prophetic voice against the background of barren images. Certain linesare taken fromThe Bible,where prophets like Ezekiel, Isaiah and Jeremiah warn Israelites to reject their evil ways. The prophet-narrator persuades man to take shelter ‘under the shadow of this red rock’. Here red rock symbolises the church (Rosenthal 1960). References denote the spiritual degradation in post-war society. Prophet warns nonbelievers, ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’. The scene suddenly shifts to image of a sailor waiting for the ‘hyacinth girl’. Hyacinth is a symbol of fertility in ancient Greece. Eliot introduces a happy quote from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, based on a medieval love tragedy. Asin the story, section ends on a tragic note, indicating the lack of love and meaningful relationships in the modern age.

Third  episode   shows  an  imaginative  Tarot  card  reading  session.   Madame  Sosostris,   a character inspired by Huxley’s Crome Yellow, is a dishonest fortune teller ‘with a wicked pack of cards’. She selects the narrator’s card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor and cautions him to ‘Fear death by water’. Other cards show Belladonna (Madonna in Christianity), man with three staves, the Wheel of Fortune, the one-eyed merchant and The Hanged Man. All these  images  have  various  symbolic  significances. She  talks  of her  vision of ‘crowds   of people, walking around in a ring’. This is probably an allusion to circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno. The imaginary session ends with amentionof the horoscope of another imaginary client, Mrs Equitone.

 

Final episode is a dreamlike walk through London. It is the modern waste land and described as the ‘Unreal City’ (Baudelaire’s Paris) and ‘the brown fog of a winter’s dawn’ (Dickens’ London).An aimless wandering crowd is portrayed, each man walking ‘fixed his eyes before his feet’ and exhaling ‘short and infrequent’ sighs. The poet-narrator meets a former acquaintance, Stetson with whom he had fought in the battle of Mylae. He asks Stetson weird questions, whether the corpse ‘planted’ in the garden has survived the frost and sprouted and bloomed. He advises to keep away the Dog from digging it up (adapted from Webster’s The White Devil), so that what is buried would eventually sprout and bloom, symbolising spiritual/moral rebirth. Section ends with a quote from Baudelaire. The reader is addressed as a hypocrite and also a brother, to sustain the miserable mood of the poem.

A Game of Chess

 

The suitable title is taken from a Jacobean play, Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton. In this play a young wife is seduced by a Duke, while her naive mother-in-law is playing a game of chess. Title alludes to the depressing state of sexual relationships in the modern waste land. Two episodes in this section expose contrasting images of women belonging to high and low classes in society.

 

First episode opens with a graphic description of the home of a rich woman. With jewels ‘from satin cases poured in rich profusion’ and ‘strange synthetic perfumes’ she awaits her lover amidst luxurious surroundings. Eliot parodies lines from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to show that Cleopatra and the rich woman are similar in their passion. But the modern woman lacks emotional intensity. She is also compared to Dido, Queen of Carthage who gives a grand banquet to her unfaithful lover Aeneas. To highlight the predicament of the rich woman, Eliot also compares her to Philomel, acharacter from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Philomel was raped by her brother-in-law, ‘the barbarous king’ Tereus. He cut off her tongue to prevent her from telling her sister. But Philomel manages to tell her sister who takes revenge by killing her son and feeding him to the king. The gods transform the sisters into birds to save them from Tereus. Philomel becomes a nightingale and symbolises violence against women, still widespread in modern society. Problems are still faced by women in modern waste land as represented in line,‘And still she cried, and still the world pursues’.

Episode ends with a conversation between a man and the rich woman who has brushed her hair ‘spread out in fiery points’. The man suddenly starts to sing ‘O OOO that Shakespeherian Rag’, a popular jazz song of 1912. The ironical verses ‘It’s so elegant / So intelligent’ indicate  how even  classic  songs  are cheapened in  the  modern   age. Woman’s words reveal her insecurity and anxietyin spite of leading a comfortable life. She requests the man to talk to her and share his thoughts as she longs for a more meaningful and loving bond.

 

Broken dialogues indicate an obviouslack of communication. Eliot liberally quotes from Webster, Lawrence and Shakespeare to emphasise how society’s moral and spiritual decadencedestroyshuman relationships. The reference to the game of chess signifies that modern life is a game people play to win with cunning and manipulative moves.

 

In the second episode, scene abruptly shifts to a bar in London. We listen to a conversation amongpeople from working class section of society. Two women, Lou and May discuss their friend Lil, with a man named Bill. They criticise Lil for not being ashamed and making herself ‘smart’ enough to receive her husband Albert who is in the army. Albert who is returning home after four years naturally ‘wants a good time’ with his wife. The women feel obliged to advise thirty-one year old Lil not to ‘look so antique’ otherwise ‘if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling’. Their talk reveals that relationships in lower class society are also meaningless and mechanical. Meanwhile in the background the bar keeper keeps shouting ‘HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME’. Eliot uses this refrain again and again to show that it is time people started changing their attitudes to life in order to be saved. Section ends with the narrator wishing ‘Goodnight’ reminding us of Ophelia bidding farewell in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is relevant that like Cleopatra and Dido who committed suicides, Ophelia undergoes ‘death by water’. Lil is compared with the rich lady, interestingly both women face similar problems in spite of their class differences and contrasting lifestyles.

The Fire Sermon

 

Eliot presents his important and subtle observations of the modern waste land, in this longest and most complex section. Title alludes to Buddha’s Fire Sermon which urges men to give up their attachment to worldly desires symbolised by fire. Title also echoes Saint Augustine’s words, thus representing a synthesis of both Eastern and Western philosophy. The opening stanzas known as the ‘river song’ paint a murky picture of the River Thames during autumn season. Having lost its sheltering canopy of leaves the ‘river’s tent is broken’ and resembles a waste land. The reference to the departed nymphs signifies that ‘Sweet Thames’ has lost its splendour. The famous refrain from Spenser’s Prothalamion highlights the sad condition of the Thames abandoned by everyone including ‘the loitering heirs of City directors’. Lines have also been adapted from the Bible and Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ to lament the death of spirituality. The narrator fishing in the once-glorious river, now reduced to a ‘dull canal’, represents the Fisher King. The sight of a slimy-bellied rat symbolises the rapid decay prevalent in modern society. The Fisher King’s castle becomes a mere ‘gashouse’ in the waste land.

 

Eliot also alludes to incidents from Shakespeare’s The Tempest where Prospero magically causes a shipwreck to take revenge on his brother. The ‘sound of horns and motors’ is combined with an allusion to John Day’s Parliament of Bees. In this play the sounds of horns and hunting bring Actaeon to where Diana is bathing. Similarly Sweeney, the modern-day Actaeon is brought to Mrs. Porter, the present-day Diana. The reference to ‘wash their feet in soda water’ alludes to the healing ritual of the Fisher King. The ritual to lift the curse of sterility is accompanied by children singing. The lines in French are translated as ‘Oh those children’s voices singing in the dome’. The constant reference to ‘bones’ in this section signify modern man’s dark obsession with death.

 

The allusion to Philomel is repeated before the scene moves on to the ‘Unreal City under the brown fog of winter’. Eliot presents Mr. Eugenides of Smyrna, who is probably the one-eyed merchant mentioned by Madame Sosostris in The Burial of the Dead. According to Weston’s book, Smyrna merchants were the main carriers of the Grail legend. Mr. Eugenides invites the narrator to join him for lunch at Cannon Street Hotel and a weekend at the Metropole. Both places were notorious during Eliot’s time as secret meeting places for homosexuals. Mr Eugenides thus represents the new cult of sterility overshadowing the modern waste land.

 

The typist episode provides the perfect setting to introduce the main protagonist of the waste land, Tiresias. Although he is a blind prophet, Eliot affirms that what Tiresias sees is the substance of the poem. Cursed by Goddess Hera to be a woman, he throbs ‘between two lives’. Pictured as an ‘old man with wrinkled female breasts’, Tiresias is the representative of the decadent culture of the modern age. Tiresias narrates the affair of a young typist with ‘the young man carbuncular’. The ‘bored and tired’ typist lives alone in an untidy apartment and dines on ‘food in tins’. She does her domestic chores mechanically as she awaits the ‘expected guest’. Her lover, also insignificant like her, is a ‘small house agent’s clerk’. His ‘one bold stare’ reveals his bold intention, which is to ‘assault’ the young woman. Athough she doesn’t desire him, she does not resist his advances and submits indifferently. Tiresias laments that there is no room for love in a modern relationship; it is purely physical in nature. Eliot quotes from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, ‘when lovely woman stoops to folly’ to show the disintegration of traditional values.The typist hardly notices her ‘departed lover’. She is glad when the sexual act is over and casually puts a record on the gramaphone.

 

Tiresias walks along the Strand and Queen Victoria’s street with the sound of music ringing in his ears. He sometimes hears the ‘pleasant whining of a mandoline’ beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street. It comes from the Magnus Martyr, a church, an ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’. Significantly it is the place where the fishermen lounge at noon. The ‘clatter and a chatter from within’ the walls of this splendid church indicate how simple and uneducated fishermen lead meaningful lives. Two songs are included here. The first depicts the sad state of the modern Thames which ‘sweats oil and tar’ symbolising moral pollution. This description is a continuation of the opening stanzas of The Fire Sermon. The lines parody a song from Wagner’s opera Ring Cycle which describe women singing glories of the river Rhine. The chorus ‘Weialalaleia’ reflects the beauty of the Rhine.

 

The next song brings back Elizabethan images of the lovely Thames portrayed in Prothalamion. It picturises Queen Elizabeth I and Earl of Leicester rowing on the Thames, discussing marriage plans. Their relationship is contrasted with the affair of the typist and the clerk. Both may be considered similar as they did not have a happy ending. Eliot tries to point out that modern affairs deliberately exhibit an absolute lack of emotion unlike traditional relationships. The scene shifts to the speaker lying ‘supine on the floor of a narrow canoe’. There is a description of a gloomy tour through London. The lines ‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart under my feet’ may be a reference to Elizabeth. The queen decides not to marry Leicester for the sake of her kingdom. Though it made Leicester weep and promise a ‘new start’, she had no choice.

The concluding stanza is narrated on Margate Sands (mouth of river Thames). The word ‘nothing’ is repeated signifying the emptiness of modern life. The line ‘To Carthage then I came’ refers to St. Augustine’s Confessions which narrate the saint’s transformation from a man of the world to a man of God. Images of ‘burning’ allude to Buddha’s Fire Sermon which encourages burning all kinds of worldly pleasures. Eliot stated that he had brought together representatives of eastern and western asceticism deliberately in this section.

Death by Water

 

The  shortest  section  of  this  poem  describes  the  death  of  Phlebas  the  Phoenician.  He is mentioned by Madame Sosostris in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ as the drowned Phoenician sailor. This section reminds us of her warning, ‘Fear death by water’. Her prophecy comes true. The literal meaning of this section refers to the physical death of Phlebas, from where there is no return to life. His body has decayed and the sea current has ‘picked his bones’.  He cannot be brought back to life again. From a religious perspective, death by water indicates baptism and spiritual rebirth.

The phrase ‘you who turn the wheel and look to windward’ refers to people inhabiting the waste land. Modern people live selfish and meaningless lives on their own terms, with no concern for others. They are indifferent to and devoid of any good emotion. Eliot’s advises them to repent and be spiritually reborn. Otherwise they will be doomed to the same fate as Phlebas, irrespective of whether they are ‘Gentile or Jew’.

What the Thunder Said

 

This  final  and  most  complex  section  begins  with  violent  images  alluding  to  Christ’s crucifixion.  Poet  gives  brief  glimpses  of  events  before  His  resurrection.  The  garden  of Gethsemane where Christ was arrested, trial before Pilate, ‘the agony in stony places’; all end with ‘He who was living is now dead’. The images of spiritual death are continued in ‘mountains of rock without water’, ‘feet are in the sand’ and ‘dry sterile thunder without rain’. The nightmare is worsened by the song of the hermit-thrush ‘drip drop … but there is no water’.

 

The scene moves on to the Legend of Emmaus. Christ appears to two men from Emmaus, but they fail to recognise him. To them, as to the rest of the world, He is just ‘the third’ person ‘gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded’. The next scene presents horrifying images of ‘murmur of maternal lamentation’ and ‘hooded hordes swarming over endless plains’. They symbolise a decaying and dying Europe in the grip of communism, pointing out the fate of modern waste land. Falling towers refer to powerful and ‘Unreal’ cities like Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London which are destroyed. More nightmarish images of decaying civilizations come up – ‘bats with baby faces in violet light’, ‘blackened wall’, ‘empty cisterns and exhausted wells’, ‘decayed hole’ and so on. Cleanth Brooks say that violet colour symbolises repentance. The empty chapel among the tumbled graves refers to the Chapel Perilous in the Grail legend. It is purposely filled with horrors to prevent the Holy Grail from being stolen. The image of the cock on the rooftop is significant. Its ‘Co corico co corico’ has the power to chase away evil forces. After the cock crows, there is a flash of lightning and ‘a damp gust bringing rain’.

The scene again shifts all the way to the ‘sunken’ Ganga. Weston remarks that fertility rites are mentioned in early Sanskrit legends. When devas, asuras and men asked Prajapathi how to live well, he answered Da (the sound of thunder). Prajapathi then asked them to interpret Da. Men replied Datta – ‘give’; asuras replied Dayadhvam – ‘sympathise’ and devas replied Damyata– ‘control’. Eliot wanted to connect the Upanishads with these human qualities (Aiken, 1968). Tiresias asks humanity to give and surrender as it is more important than preserving memories and honouring obituaries. Instead of being compassionate, each one is in his selfish egoistic prison, suffering from loneliness like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Tiresias finally remarks that man lacks self-control which leads to chaos and unhappiness. The image of the Fisher King collecting fragments from ruins with hopes to rebuild reappears in the end. The reference to mad Heironymo reveals the anger and frustration of the poet at the collapse of Western culture. However the poet concludes optimistically chanting Shantih shantih shantih.

Conclusion

 

The Waste Land can be seen as a mosaic of images depicting man’s journeys from birth – from past to present to future – culminating in his death. The images produce a totality of effect in the end leading to a better understanding of the poem. According to I.A. Richards “The Waste Land is a music of ideas, the ideas like the musicians phrases are not arranged that they may tell us something, but that their effects in us combine into a coherent whole of feelings and attitudes” (Principles of Literary Criticism).

you can view video on T. S. Eliot: The Wasteland

Reference

  • Aiken,Conrad. ‘An Anatomy of Melacholy’ in Dyson ed. T.S.Eliot: The Waste Land (Case Book).
  • London: Macmillan, 1968.
  • Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and Tradition. New York: OUP, 1939. Coote, S. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. London: Penguin, 1985.
  • Craig, D. ‘The Defeatism of The Waste Land’ in C. B Cox and A. P. Hinchliffe (eds) T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land. London: Macmillan Press, 1968.
  • Dwivedi, A.N. T.S.Eliot: A Critical Study. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1949.
  • —. The Waste Land. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972.
  • Miller, James. E. T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons. USA: Pennsylvania Univ Press, 1977.
  • Richards, I.A. Principle of Literary Criticism (first pub. 1924). London: Routledge, 2002.
  • Rosenthal, M.L. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. USA: OUP, 1960.