THE WASTE LAND – T. S. ELIOT

THE WASTE LAND – T. S. ELIOT

v  T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a landmark in the history of English poetry. Though the poem has only about four hundred and forty lines, it is regarded as the epic of our age. The poem has five parts 1) the Burial of the Dead 2) A Game of Chess 3) The Fire Sermon 4) Death by Water 5) What the Thunder Said.

v  The poem has a very austere and dull atmosphere. There are several reason for this bleakness. Eliot wrote this poem at a time when his private life was passing through a predicament. The mental derangement and finally the death of his wife in a mental hospital, the breakdown of his own health and his slow, painful recovery in Lausenne, Switzerland, the nerve- shattering impact of World War I – all these factors combined together contributed to the gloomy feeling expressed in The Waste Land.

v  The poem was first published in serial form in The Criteron in October and November, 1922.

v  Before publishing the poem, Eliot sent the rough draft to Ezra Pound who suggested radical modifications. Pound asked Eliot to remove the quotation from Conrad which originally formed the Epigraph to the poem.

v  This makes the poem incoherent.

v  When the poem was published, it was severely attacked. Many critics condemned its incoherence and called it a pastiche.

v  The title The Waste Land is derived from the work of Miss Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance.

v  The epigraph of the poem come from the Satyrican a satire of the poet Petronius.

v  The poem narrates the story of the Sibyl of Cumae. The Sibyl of Cumae, the beloved of Apollo, was granted immortality by him, but without eternal youth. The result was that she grew old and withered but could not die. She longed for death. Like the Sibyl, the moderns also wish to die. So Eliot uses the Sibyl’s statement expressing her death-wish as the epigraph of his poem.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

v  The first part of the poem is entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead’. The title refers to i) the burial of the dead, fertility-god and ii) the burial service for the dead performed by the Christian church. In both cases, death is believed to be followed by rebirth. But the moderns have no faith in rebirth.

v  April, a month characterized by regeneration of plants and trees, is most unwelcome to the moderns, for it reminds them of their unpreparedness for spiritual regeneration.

v  The protagonist of this part of the poem is Tiresias and German princess called Marie.

v  Marie’s life represents the roothlessness of the people of our time. She keeps touring different parts of the world in the company of her uncle, an arch-duke, with whom she seems to have sex relations. Her activities have no unifying purpose- reading much in the night and going south in the winter are two disconnected activities of hers mentioned in the poem. Spirituality, symbolized by rain, is shunned by her – she is surprised by the shower of rain and runs away from it.

v  Tiresias looks around himself and sees only waste and barrenness. The stones, dead trees, dry stones without any sound of water, the hot sun- all these things symbolize the spiritual desolation of our time. Nothing spiritual can grow in this waste land. People have only broken images, that is wrecked hopes and ideals, to comfort them. Even ‘a handful of dust’ frightens them. The shadow which symbolizes death is another thing constantly terrifying them in youth; the shadow (thought of death) is behind them. In old age, the shadow is ahead of them – they feel that death is before them, ready to meet them. Tiresias invites the moderns to take shelter under ‘the red rock’. The red rock symbolizes Christianity. Eliot thus maintains that only Christianity can solve our problems.

v  The next section of the poem exposes the degeneration of our times. Madam Sosostris is famous clairvoyante, equipped with a pack of cards. This is reminiscent of the Terrot pack used in ancient times in Egypt to foretell the rise and fall of the river Nile. The Nile was the source of fertility. But Madame Sosostris seems to be involved in shady affairs.

v  The figures on her cards reappear in some of the later sections of the poem: The Drowned Phoenician sailor, symbolizes the fertility God whose image was thrown into the sea every year to symbolize the end of summer. Drowning is a process of transformation and so his eyes have been transformed into pearls.

v  Belladohna Lady of the Rocks: she is an expert in handling sex intrigues. She stands for the sexy society women of the modern waste land. She reappears in the section entitled A Game of Chess.

v  The man with three staves is the King Fisher himself. He symbolizes degenerate humanity, requiring threefold remedy – to give, sympathize and to control.

v  The wheel stands for the efforts of degenerate humanity to guide and control itself without caring for divine guidance. It may also stand for the flux of life and the cycle of seasons.

v  The one-eyed merchant is the Smyrna merchant who in the past brought both religion and sexuality to Europe. Now he has only one eye, that is , he has only sexuality and has lost religious function. The card which is blank represents the hollowness of religion in our time.

v  The Hanged man is either Christ crucified or the dead fertility god. He is ‘hooded’ and the fortune teller cannot recognize him, that is, Christ’s values are neglected in our time.

v  “The crowds of people, walking in a ring” are the London crowds going through their daily round of existence – dull, boring, monotonousng through their daily round of existence – dull, boring, monotonous.

v  Tiresias, the protagonist surveys the unreal city, London, and the crowd moving over the London Bridge. These people on their routine work without worrying about any spirituality. They start their work at nine, which was also the hour of Christ’s crucifixion. But the hour means nothing to people. The stroke of nine does not remind them of Christ’s agony. These people are spiritually dead. The “brown for” of London reminds us of a similarly enveloped city in Bandelaire. Thus Eliot implies that all European cities, including London, are unreal. The crowds flowing over the bridge remind us of similar crowds in Dante’s Inferno.

v  Tiresias now stops one Stetson, an acquaintance of his whom he had first met at Mylea, an important naval battle. As Matthiessan points out, in the Punic Wars between Greece and Carthage. Cleanth Brooks says that Eliot, by having Tiresias address a man from the Punic wars and not from the world war; implies ‘all wars are one war; all experience one experience”. The ‘corpse’ and ‘the dog’ of this section have been interpreted in various ways. Cleanth Brooks takes the dog to mean ‘humanitarianism, rationalism and scientific mentality’ which in their concern for man, extirpate the supernatural – dig up the corpse of the buried fertility god and thus prevents the rebirth of life.

v  The French quotation at the end of the section, meaning “You hypocritical reader, my fellow-man, my brother” completes the universalisation of Stetson. Stetson represents Everyman, including the reader and Eliot himself.

A GAME OF CHESS

v  In this section, Eliot pictures the sexual perversion prevalent among both the upper and lower classes. The first part of this section shows the adulterous relationship between a rich neurotic lady and her adulterous lover. The mention of Philomel who after being raped, was changed into a nightingale throws into bold relief the degeneracy of our time. Philomel, in ancient times was transformed through suffering. But no such transformation is possible for the modern lady. The modern lady is the victim of dread and neurosis. The only remedy that her lover can think of for her neurotic dread is taking bath in hot water and going out in a closed car. The lives of these rich adulterous are shallow and artificial.

v  The later half of the section is about the going-on of the demobilized soldier Albert and his wife Lil. He is expected to be back home soon. Having been away from his wife for four years, he is thirsting for sexual satisfaction. Unfortunately his wife, having taken pills to abort herself, has become emaciated and lost all her good looks. She has lost her teeth. Lil’s friend tells her that if she fails to give sexual pleasure to her husband he will go on to other women. Lil’s friend is talking about these matters in a pub. Since it is closing time, the keeper asks these women to hurry up. The injunction also symbolizes a warning to these women to reform themselves in time.

THE FIRE SERMON

v  The title of this section is taken from the famous sermon of Lord Buddha in which the word is shown burning with lust and passion. It also reminds one of the Confessions of St. Augustine who described the world as ‘a cauldron of unholy leaves’.

v  The section opens with Tiresias surveying the Thames scene in the autumn. The leaves have fallen and the wind moves noiselessly. The Thames is deserted. In summer, the place was thronged by rich men and flirtatious women. All of them have now left, leaving behind empty bottles, cigarette cases, handkerchiefs and other signs of their revelry. The water is a source of purification and regeneration but the degenerate moderns do not realize this. They defile the river. As a result the river ‘sweats oil and tar’. The pollution of the river symbolizes spiritual degeneration. The river scene puts us in mind of a similar scene in Spencer’s Prothalamion.

v  The protagonist mourns the pollution of the river water. As he sits on its banks fishing in the dull canal near the gas house, a cold wind blows. It brings to him the sound of the senseless laughter of London crowds who move about rattling like dried bones. Memories crowd in upon him and he is reminded of Bonnivard in the Prison of Chillon in Byron’s famous poem. Lamenting his loss of freedom on the banks of Lake Leman; or the captive jews in the bible weeping by the river Babylon.

v  The protagonist is also reminded of the Fisher King, fishing for the regeneration of his brother, and of Ferdinand mourning the death of his father, the king of Naples. Water and fishing were symbols of transformation in the past but now they have lost their significance. The protagonist sees only dry bones about him rattled by rats. Further the protagonist sees Mrs. Porter and her daughter washing their feet with soda water and thus making themselves attractive enough o the customers visiting their brother. Reference to ‘sound of horns and hunting’ in Marvel’s To His Coy Mistress puts us in mind of Actaeon being brought face to face with Diana, the goddess of chastity. However in this passage the horns are the horns of the cars bringing such coarse customers as Sweeney to the brothel-keeper Mrs. Porter. The lust and sexual perversion of the modern man is further emphasized by the French song ‘O these children voices singing in the choir’ from Verlain’s Parsifal. In this poem Sir Parsifal reaches the Chapel perilous in search of the Holy Grail. But there is no purity in his heart and his sex instincts are aroused by the children’s voices singing. The modern man’s perverted sex with children is hinted at here.

v  Similarly the song of the nightingale evokes, not remorseful feelings, but only coarse sexual feelings in the minds of the moderns.

v  The homosexuality rife in our time is hinted at in the next passage. Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, formerly brought both merchandise and fertility cults to Europe. But now he spreads only homosexuality. He invites the protagonist Tiresias to hotels known to be hotbeds of homosexuality.

v  The relationship not only between men but between men and women is also perverted. A typist, tired after the day’s work, is approached by a coarse man. He has sex with her,without minding her indifference and lack of active participation.

v  The women does not feel guilty at all. After the man leaves, the women merely puts a record on the gramophone and listens to the music.

v  Tiresias next visits the quarters inhabited by the poor. The protagonist hears the chatter of fishermen and sailors in the rivers. These poor men are also not free from sexual perversion and sin as brought out by the songs of the three Thames’ daughters, i.e. three poor girls living on the banks of the river.

v  First the three daughters of Thames sing together. They sing of dirty modern commerce. Pleasure boats drift on the river, splashing water and spar on the logs of wood floating down from Greenwich. This is described as a voyage undertaken in the past by Queen Elizabeth with her favourite Leicester in her richly decorated pleasure boat. Her pleasure boat is far superior to the drab merchant ships of our time. But Elizabeth’s sex relationship with Leicester was as sterile as that of the daughters of Thames. Queen Elizabeth dominated her lover. This is unlike the humiliation suffered by the daughters of the Thames at the hands of their heartless men.

v  The Three daughters of the Thames sing separately about their sins. The first girl hates the dirty atmosphere of Highbury. She confesses that she was violated in Richmond and Kew. She lost her virginity in a boat.

DEATH BY WATER

v  Water is the traditional symbol of purification and regeneration, but in the modern land of desolation it has lost its functions and has become a source of destruction. This is so because man has become beastly, given to the pursuit of wealth, and sensuous pleasures. Phelbas, the Phoenician sailor, was young and tall and handsome but he was drowned because he was obsessed with profit and loss.

v  He was caught in a whirlpool and passed the various stages of his age youth. The reference is to the ritual immersion of the effigy of the vegetation god, Osiris, who was supposed to pass the various stages of life in the reverse order. He is old when he is immersed in water but becomes young and then a boy and is finally reborn. But there is no re-birth for the Phoenician sailor, because of his sordid commercialism.

v  The moderns are guided by mercenary forces only and not by moral and spiritual principles. At present, the moderns turn the wheel of life themselves, i.e. a life uncontrolled by spiritual considerations. Complete secularization is the root cause of the contemporary decay and degeneration.

v  The second daughter had quite a moving experience. Her lover wept after the event and promised to reform. The girl did not show any concern. For, she knew that the man’s remorse was only a passing feeling.

v  The third girl was undone on ‘Margate sands’, a sea-side pleasure spot in London. She feels the  insignificance and nothingness of her life. Her people are helpless humble people, like dumb-driven cattle.

WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

v  The Upanishads tell us of God speaking to His devotees in thunder and pointing out to them the way of salvation in the final section of The Waste Land. Eliot points out the way of salvation to the moderns and so the section is fittingly entitled as ‘What the Thunder Said’. The way of salvation suggested by Eliot is based on the hoary wisdom of India. In the first passage of this section, the poet describes Christ’s arrest and His suffering at the hands of His enemies. Christ was surrounded by dirty, sweating crowds, with burning torches in their hands. There was silence and terror everywhere after his arrest. The use of the word ‘garden’ suggests the death of the fertility of god in vegetation ceremonies. Christ spent a painful period in the palace of the Roman governor Pilate, where he was interrogated and put in prison (Stony Paces). Then it was rumoured that Christ was going to be released. This led to angry demonstration in front of the prison. At last Christ was crucified. Though Christ physically died. Yet he lived on in the minds of his disciples and followers. The twentieth century has totally forgotten Christ. In this sense, Christ is now dead, we have forgotten Christ. We are slowly dying spiritually.

v  In the passage beginning, ‘Here is no water, but only rock’, the reference is to the journey of Sir Percival or Parsifal, searching for the Holy Grail. Parsifal and his followers reach the mountain on the top of which is the Chapel Perilous in which is kept the lost Grail. There have been no rains for a long time and so there is universal ruin. As the searcher approaches the Chapel, he has hallucinations. Red ghostly figures seem to look out at the quester from mud cracked houses and mock at him. There is no water not even the sound of water. There is only the endless jarring noise made by insects.

v  The next passage narrates a hallucination experienced by the disciples of Christ during their journey to Emmaus, an evil land described in the Bible. One of the disciples sees a hooded figure, wrapped in a brown mantle, walking on the other side of his companion. The disciple does not know who the person is.

v  The journey to the Chapel Perilous and the journey to Emmaus had a definite purpose. But the modern humanity wanders about without any definite purpose. This is described in the passage beginning ‘what is that sound’. The hooded hordes symbolize the modern humanity. The murmur of maternal lamentation may be the lamentation of Europe over its plight. Towers are falling, that is, values are collapsing. Eastern Europe is represented as a mad woman, fiddling music on her own hair. The bats in this passage symbolize decay and the ‘towers upside down’ symbolize the perversion of the functions of the church. Church bells are still tolled and people still attend the church. But people have no genuine faith in Christianity, people are spiritually dead. This is symbolized by ‘empty cisterns and exhausted wells’.

v  Unlike the fruitless questers of our time, the Knight (Parsifal) ultimately reaches the goal. He reaches the Chapel Perilous on top of the mountain, only to find it in ruins. Still there is some hope. A cock crows, standing on a roof. This symbolizes the end of the hopeless condition and the birth of a hopeful state. Also, there is a damp wind, indicating the arrival of rain and fertility. The maimed King Fisher is likely to return to health.

v  Once India did not have rains for a long period. There was universal ruin in India as there is around the Chapel Perilous now. God spoke to the distressed people in thunder, suggesting a three fold way of attaining salvation – Datta, Dayadhvam and Damyata.

v  ‘Datta’ means to give. We must give ourselves over to some noble cause, without being swayed by prudential considerations even though such a sacrifice will not be recorded in obituaries or richly rewarded in the wills of rich men.

v  ‘Dayadhvam’ means ‘to sympathize’. Modern man is self-centred like Coriolanus. He should come out of the prison of his self and achieve oneness with others.

v  ‘Damyata’ means ‘self-control’. If we are spiritually disciplined our life will be easy and smooth, like the easy movement of a boat under expert guidance.

v  In the last passage, the poet strikes a personal note and tells the spiritually dead humanity how he hopes to achieve spiritual salvation. The falling of the ‘London Bridge’ symbolizes spiritual and social disintegration of the waste land. The poet turns his back on the dead land and sits fishing on the shore of the river, i.e. he makes efforts for his spiritual re-generation. He remembers some lines from Dante’s Purgatoria and some from another Latin poem, Pervigilium Veneris, which teach him that suffering results in self-purification and beauty is born when the heart is purified. He has also learnt that absolute detachment is necessary for spiritual salvation. These are the principles he has collected and he hopes to save himself by following them in life. Just as the mad Hiernimo in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy is ready to fit the actors with a suitable play, so Eliot has also fitted or provided humanity with the necessary advice and guidance. In the end, he reminds humanity of the teachings of the Upanishads. It is in this way alone that absolute peace – ‘the peace which passeth understanding’ – can be achieved. Thus the poem ends with a message of hope. The poet suggests a way to attain salvation.