TS Eliot (6) - The Waste Land

Early approaches to The Waste Land do not seem to augur well. The title derives from the Arthurian Grail legends. A mysterious transgression (possibly a sexual transgression which involved the breaking of a Grail Knight’s vow of chastity) led to the wounding of a Grail King. The wounding may have been a punishment. The wound he suffers is in the area of his thigh. Most scholars (and sensible people!) see this as a euphemism for a wound to the male organ of generation. This leaves him fit only for fishing and hence his appellation - ‘The Fisher King.’ Unable to father children this impotence extends itself to blighting all fertility in his lands which, therefore, have lapsed into the condition of ‘Wastelands.’ The renewal of life itself and of the seasons has ceased. Knowing Eliot as we do we expect such a metaphor to extend from the merely biological to ideas of spiritual renewal and resurrection from death. Moving on from the title we next encounter the epigraph which is taken from Petronius and presents the Cumean Sybil trapped in a cage or a glass jar wishing that she could die. Further existence is pain. This perhaps, extends the sense of spiritual death as a Sybil is a kind of oracle. From here the title of the first section of the poem – The Burial of the Dead does not take us by surprise and reinforces impressions already gathered. Having been thus prepared we read the opening lines. It is as if dead bodies or, perhaps, planted bulbs are addressing us from a graveyard, a garden, a field or a ‘Land’. Schopenhauer suggested that sexual desire was a version of what he called ‘will.’ This is something implanted in us without our permission. We cannot will whether this is the case or not. The urge to life itself is a given. In these opening lines we sense that the rising of the sap is unwelcome and heralds nothing but pain. This does tally with a Schopenhauerean vision as he too saw desire as a bondage and an exposure to the wheel of suffering in a distinctly Buddhist way. Eliot’s bulbs would have preferred the soft forgetfulness of winter snow. They are to be forced back into life. As I suggested, the ouverture of The Waste Land is not propitious.

Other impressions break in across these impressions but themes emerge in the first section of the poem. Positive youthful memories of freedom and expansion are evoked. Then we are back in a barren garden. Hope rises in a quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as a ship scuds over the waves only to be countered by another quotation describing a bleak and featureless sea from the same opera. Hyacinths, symbols of resurrection are mentioned as an enclosed memory. Attempts to read the runes of all of this in the Tarot pack come to very little as another figure of resurrection, ‘The Hanged Man’ is absent from the pack while the ‘Man with Three Staves’ (who Eliot identified as the Fisher King) is present, and meaning and interpretation themselves seem elusive. The section ends with a crowd of Dantesque lost souls equated with early morning London commuters chimed to work by a dead sound. We return to the idea of a buried corpse. This image might give hope as buried seeds, in Christian tradition, die and are reborn to life. However, Eliot’s buried souls may well be dug up by a marauding dog which will, thus, thwart the impulse to new life. Thus the scene is set in terms of symbolism.

Section II – A Game of Chess 

This section returns to a theme already treated in Eliot’s first two collections – the nature of and relation with women. In the wider context of a wasted infertile land it should be mentioned that women might be expected to be seen as figures representing fertility and completion for a male poet. We are presented with a reiteration of the Cleopatra story (one of the world’s great love stories) as it appeared in Anthony and Cleopatra conflated with descriptions of feasts from Virgil (Aeneid), Keats (Lamia, The Eve of St Agnes), Marlow (Hero and Leander), Apuleius (The Golden Ass), Baudelaire (Une Martyre) and Cymbeline. These descriptions of splendour and luxury, at first convincing, are slowly subverted as we note that the female figure’s perfumes are synthetic and, instead of delighting or enlivening the senses, those senses are troubled, confused or, indeed, even drowned by them, associating them with death. The woman here might seem duplicitous and dangerous tempting a male who is depicting her onto the rocks. The positive is further subverted by the painting over the mantelpiece. It is a painting not of love but of rape and its consequences. In Sweeney among the Nightingales I noted the double entendre of nightingales being both mythic creatures and prostitutes. Here it reminds of suffering occasioned by sex and the betrayal of women in the form of Philomel and Procne. Once again the forces of life and health are undermined. The description degenerates further from the Shakespearean apex on which it began to a kind of middle class drawing room inhabited by a neurasthenic woman and a, perhaps, male interlocutor resembling the one in Portrait of a Lady. Chess is resorted to as a way to kill time and evade an awareness of futility. The interlocutor is under no illusion regarding the dire nature of their reality.

The scene shifts from the middle class chess players to a Saloon Bar frequented by the working class elsewhere in town perhaps. The relations between man and woman are reduced to the utmost bathos (after the elevated beginning to the section) as false teeth, infidelity and abortion are discussed. The final departure of the Cockney ‘ladies’ evokes a higher social order in using Ophelia’s words but also a disastrous breakdown in the relations between male and female. In addition to this it puts even the Cockney ladies in an eternal dimension.

Section III – The Fire Sermon

This section is book-ended by references to fire. A fire in 1633 destroyed forty houses on London Bridge but spared the nearby church of Magnus Martyr. As a result a series of thanksgiving ‘Fire Sermons’ were commissioned. However, the title of the section also refers to the most famous sermon given by the Buddha in which he enjoined his followers to avoid the ‘fire’ of desire and the passions. He suggested an asceticism similar to that enjoined by Schopenhauer with his emphasis on not being bound by the will (the will to live and the will to reproduce) which simply binds one to the wheel of suffering. Schopenhauer was notable for his embrace of such Eastern religion and its tenets.

At the other end of the section the early reference to the fire of the passions is elided with fire as sexual sin as presented in St Augustine’s words describing his arrival in Carthage as a young man. He saw himself as burning and waiting to be plucked from the fire of sin by God. The closing lines see that wish evoked but, literally, the last word is given to the burning which might be seen to triumph.

In a similar way there are references in this section to wholesome tropes and tropes of redemption and resolution. Spenser’s Prothalamion figures with its wholesome celebration of marriage. The final line of Verlaine’s poem Parsifal features suggesting the celebration of the healing of the maimed Fisher King at Easter time. The ecclesiastical colours of white and gold, signifying Easter are mentioned regarding the columns in the church of Magnus Martyr. Counterpointed against these signs of hope and, it could be said, defeating or overwhelming them, are narratives of seduction, the ruining of women and the debasement of male-female relations. The eternal nature of such debasements is reinforced by the presence of Tiresias who has, literally, seen it all before. The section is centred on the Thames which provides the backdrop for sordid seductions and death, rats and bones feature prominently. The Parsifal story is subverted by Mr Eugenides, the corrupt and venal merchant from Smyrna, who is a bathetic re-imagining of the Syrian merchants who once brought the Grail Legends to Europe. The glory of Wagner’s Rhine-maidens is also bathetically evoked in the Thames maidens who describe one of the seductions. Royal Greenwich, where Elizabeth I lived for a while, faces the Isle of Dogs but the poor and squalid, East End, Isle of Dogs seems to win on a river memorably described by Conrad in Heart of Darkness.

The biographical

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.                                                                                                                                   

This section inserts two explicit references to Eliot’s biographical experience into the text which the reader can only understand by reference to that experience. Eliot experienced a ‘nervous breakdown’ while working at Lloyd’s Bank and was given three months to convalesce. During this time he stayed in Lausanne (by Lake Geneva otherwise known as Lake Léman) and in Margate. In both locations he wrote or edited the poem.

Section IV – Death by Water

This section centres around a drowned Phoenician sailor afloat at sea. This figure has already made an appearance in Madame Sosostris’s tarot pack where he has traditionally been connected with a fertility rite whereby he is cast into the sea at the end of summer in the belief that, because of this act, fertility will return to the land in spring. In this sense the drowning contains the potential for renewal and resurrection. It also connects with the sea-change undergone by ship-wrecked characters in The Tempest. However, Eliot undermines this potential by linking this particular exemplar of the rite with the story of Ulysses mad career beyond the known world in Inferno and Tennyson’s Ulysses. In these tales the sailors, in return for their hubristic presumption, are sucked down into a whirlpool never to return. Again, the potential for resurrection, dangled before the reader as a hope, is linked with disappointment and frustration.

Section V – What the Thunder Said

The title of this section refers simultaneously to the voice of God in the Bible and to the Fable of the Thunder in the Hindu Upanishads. The section opens by describing the time on Good Friday after the death of Christ and before his resurrection on the morning of Easter Sunday. This may be the time when Amfortas, the Fisher King, was healed of his dreadful wound by Parsifal. The Wasteland, in this interim period, is still languishing without the revitalising water it needs. The anticipated water is strongly suggested by the song of the Hermit Thrush. Then, suddenly, the presence of the risen Christ on the Road to Emmaus is evoked. Following this there is a nightmare sequence which includes Asiatic hordes invading Europe and the fall of civilised cities. The nightmare intensifies with images of bats and vampires, a haunted chapel (The Chapel Perilous), graves and bones. This is mercifully countered all of a sudden by a cock, dispeller of the evil of the night, crowing from the chapel roof which heralds a breaking storm. There is a reference to the sacred, dry Ganges river awaiting the descent of water from the Himalayas which links with the many references to dry bones from Ezekiel throughout the poem.

At this point the chant from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad begins the framing of the end of the poem. There is an oscillation between the chanted and, presumably, redeeming and restoring words and the disasters that they redeem. The redeeming words are Datta, Daydhvam, Damyata. They are each spoken once and then spoken together before the words Shantih  shantih  shantih at the end. The placing of these words as, literally, the last word suggest the victory of redemption. After Datta is the disaster of mortal follies committed to in the world of action. After Daydhvam is the loneliness and imprisonment of each mortal being. After Damyata the oscillation between redemption and disaster increases in frequency. At first there is a sailing image of freedom and joy which recalls the previously undermined Frisch weht der Wind. Then we have a hint of the restoration of the Fisher King and of the Waste Land. Evocations of crumbling cities, souls being redeemed and refined, tongueless Philomel with Procne finding release as birds in spring, the death of a poetic tradition, the attempt to reverse the ravages of decline and decadence, and madness are intercalated as the poem accelerates breathlessly to its end. That end is bracketed and enclosed by the words of redemption. One has to conclude that the end of The Waste Land is optimistic but only just. The disaster has been necessary in order that the redemption take place or the rescue can only take place once the possibility of disaster is achieved.