TS Eliot (6a) – Reflections on The Waste Land

My song is love unknown,
  My Savior’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
  That they might lovely be.
    O who am I,
    That for my sake
    My Lord should take
    Frail flesh, and die?

Samuel Crossman

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
  That saved a wretch; like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
  Was blind, but now I see.

John Newton

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back 

                              Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack 

                             From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

                             If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

                             Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,

                             I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

                             Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame

                             Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

                             My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

                             So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert

    These lyrics demonstrate that it is perfectly possible, in lyric form, to communicate the emotion associated with the experience of Christian salvation. In the final section of The Waste Land, after four previous sections in which signs of hope and rebirth have been undercut, redemption is signalled with the thunder and the breaking of the storm. The vedic mantra Datta, Daydhvam, Damyata is uttered, at first interspersed with memories of past disaster and current and future hopes and then as a whole and, finally, underscored with Shantih  shantih  shantih, words from a culture alien to most of the readers in the same culture as that of Eliot himself. It is notable that the second word, Daydhvam, which means 'Be compassionate', chimes with the fact that the Fisher King can only be healed by a 'compassionate fool' who comes, eventually, in the shape of Parsifal. Eliot's notes inform us that the vedic mantra he employs is the equivalent to the The Peace which Passeth all Understanding in the Christian tradition. We might, then, imagine what the final lines would have looked like had this western mantra been used instead, in the same way. It would, perhaps, have been cut up into The Peace followed by which Passeth, and, finally, all Understanding before being re-assembled at the end and followed by Peace  peace  peace.
In the main body of the poem Eliot was successful in communicating desolation but the news of salvation (whether in Sanskrit or English) is not felt by the reader as it is, for example, in the lyrics quoted above. It feels like a report of salvation which happened to someone else. It reminds one of the epigraph to Portrait of a Lady:

…………………but that was in another country,

     And besides, the wench is dead.

The news is suddenly and baldly placed before us to take it on trust that we are witnessing the achievement of salvation. It seems, though, like the idea of salvation, as though plucked from another tradition or the tradition of an earlier age, but not the reality. It seems like a quotation about salvation. This is surprising as Eliot had chosen to include in the poem references to biographical events regarding his convalescence from a nervous breakdown in Margate and Lausanne that had personalised the poem. It is interesting that, after completing it and, apparently, experiencing a form of redemption, Eliot’s next excursion into verse, The Hollow Men, returned to themes of despair to the extent that he referred to this later poem as a form of blasphemy in a letter to his cousin, Henry. This being the case one wonders what he was writing about in the final section of the longer poem which preceded it. Ultimately this makes The Waste Land, which shows all of the masterly qualities that great poetry should exhibit, unsatisfying in its overall import.