To venture to write anything further on The Waste Land, particularly after the work of F. R. Leavis and F. O. Matthiessen, may call for some explanation and even apology. I am obviously indebted to both critics. The justification for such a commentary as this must be made primarily in terms of a difference of intention. Leavis is interested predominantly in Eliot’s method of organization. One or two passages in the poem are treated in detail and are highly valuable for a knowledge of the “meaning” of the poem, but the bulk of the poem does not receive this kind of examination. Moreover, I believe, Leavis makes some positive errors. Matthiessen examines more of the poem in detail, and, as far as it goes, his account is excellent. But the plan of his Achievement of T. S. Eliot does not allow for a consecutive examination either. He puts his finger on the basic theme, death-in-life, but I do not think that he has given it all the salience which it deserves.
I prefer not to raise here the question of how important it is for the reader of the poem to have an explicit intellectual account of the var- ious symbols, and a logical account of their relationships. It may well be that such rationalization is no more than a scaffolding to be got out of the way before we contemplate the poem itself as a poem. But many readers (including myself) find the erection of such a scaffolding valuable—if not absolutely necessary—and if some readers will be tempted to lay more stress on the scaffolding than they properly should, there are perhaps still more readers who will be prevented from getting at the poem at all without the help of such a scaffolding. Furthermore, an interest attaches to Mr. Eliot’s own mental processes, and whereas Mr. Matthiessen has quite properly warned us that Eliot's poetry cannot be read as autobiography, many of the symbols and ideas which occur in The Waste Land are ideas which are definitely central to Eliot's general intellectual position.
The basic symbol used, that of the waste land, is taken, of course, from Miss Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. In the legends which she treats there, the land has been blighted by a curse. The crops do not grow, and the animals cannot reproduce. The plight of the land is summed up by, and connected with, the plight of the lord of the land, the Fisher King, who has been rendered impotent by maiming or sickness. The curse can only be removed by the appearance of a knight who will ask the meanings of the various symbols which are displayed to him in the castle. The shift in meaning from physical to spiritual sterility is easily made, and was, as a matter of fact, made in certain of the legends. A knowledge of this symbolism is, as Eliot has already pointed out, essential for an understanding of the poem.
Of hardly less importance to the reader, however, is a knowledge of Eliot's basic method. The Waste Land is built on a major contrast—a device which is a favorite of Eliot's and to be found in many of his poems, particularly his later poems. The contrast is between two kinds of life and two kinds of death. Life devoid of meaning is death; sacrifice, even the sacrificial death, may be life-giving, an awaking to life. The poem occupies itself to a great extent with this paradox, and with a number of variations on it.
Eliot has stated the matter quite explicitly himself in one of his essays. In his “Baudelaire” he says: “One aphorism which has been especially noticed is the following: la volupte unique et supreme de l'amour git dans la certitude de faire le mal. This means, I think, that Baudelaire has perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil (of moral Good and Evil which are not natural Good and Bad or puritan Right and Wrong). Having an imperfect, vague romantic conception of Good, he was at least able to understand that the sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural, ‘life-giving’ cheery automatism of the modern world so far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist [italics mine].” The last statement is highly important for an understanding of The Waste Land. The fact that men have lost the knowledge of good and evil, keeps them from being alive, and is the justification for viewing the modern waste land as a realm in which people do not even exist.
This theme is stated in the quotation which prefaces the poem. The Sybil says: “I wish to die.” Her statement has several possible interpretations. For one thing, she is saying what the people who inhabit the waste land are saying. But she also may be saying what the speaker says in “The Journey of the Magi,” “this Birth was / Hard and hitter agony for us, like Death, our death /. . . I should be glad of another death.”
The first section of “The Burial of the Dead” develops the theme of the attractiveness of death, or of the difficulty in rousing oneself from the death in life in which the people of the waste land live. Men are afraid to live in reality. April, the month of rebirth, is not the most joyful season but the cruelest. Winter at least kept us warm in forgetful snow. The idea is one which Eliot has stressed elsewhere. Earlier in “Gerontion” he had written
In the juvenescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
……………………………………………..
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
More lately, in Murder in the Cathedral, he has the chorus say
We do not wish anything to happen.
Seven years we have lived quietly,
Succeeded in avoiding notice,
Living and partly living.
And in another passage: “Now I fear disturbance of the quiet seasons.” Men dislike to be aroused from their death-in-life.
The first part of “The Burial of the Dead” introduces this theme through a sort of reverie on the part of the protagonist—a reverie in which speculation on life glides off into memory of an actual conversation in the Hofgarten and back into speculation again. The function of the conversation is to establish to some extent the class and character of the protagonist. The reverie is resumed with line 19.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?
The protagonist answers for himself:
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
In this passage there are references to Ezekiel and to Ecclesiastes, and these references indicate what it is that men no longer know: the passage referred to in Ezekiel, II, pictures a world thoroughly secularized:
1. And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee. 2. And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me. 3. And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me, even unto this very day.
The following passage from Ecclesiastes, XII, is not only referred to in this passage; a reference to it also is evidently made in the nightmare vision of Section V of the poem:
1. Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; 2. while the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not: darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: 3. In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they arc few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, 4. And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low; 5. Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail [italics mine]: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets; 6. Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. 7. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. 8. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.
The next section which begins with the scrap of song quoted from Wagner (perhaps another item in the reverie of the protagonist), states the opposite half of the paradox which underlies the poem: namely, that life at its highest moments of meaning and intensity resembles death. The song from Act I of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, “Frisch weht der Wind,” is sung in the opera by a young sailor aboard the ship which is bringing Isolde to Cornwall. The “Irish kind” of the song does not properly apply to Isolde at all. The song is merely one of happy and naive love. It brings to the mind of the protagonist an experience of love—the vision of the hyacinth girl as she came back from the hyacinth garden. The poet says
………… my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
The line which immediately follows this passage, “Oed' und leer das Meer,” seems at first to be simply an extension of the last figure: that is, "Empty and wide the sea [of silence]. “The line, however, as a matter of fact, makes an ironic contrast; for the line, as it occurs in Act III of the opera, is the reply of the watcher who reports to the wounded Tristan that Isolde's ship is nowhere in sight; the sea is empty. And, though the “Irisch kind” of the first quotation is not Isolde, the reader familiar with the opera will apply it to Isolde when he comes to the line “Oed' und leer das Meer.” For the question in the song is in essence Tristan's question in Act III: My Irish child, where dwellest thou? The two quotations from the opera which frame the ecstasy-of-Iove passage thus take on a new meaning in the altered context. In the first, love is happy; the boat rushes on with a fair wind behind it. In the second, love is absent; the sea is wide and empty. And the last quotation reminds us that even love cannot exist in the waste land.
The next passage, that in which Madame Sosostris figures, calls for further reference to Miss Weston's book. As Miss Weston has shown, the Tarot cards were originally used to determine the event of the highest importance to the people, the rising of the waters. Madame Sosostris has fallen a long way from the high function of her predecessors. She is engaged merely in vulgar fortune-telling—is merely one item in a generally vulgar civilization. But the symbols of the Tarot pack are still unchanged. The various characters are still inscribed on the cards, and she is reading in reality, though she does not know it, the fortune of the protagonist. She finds that his card is that of the drowned Phoenician Sailor, and so she warns him against death by water, not realizing any more than do the other inhabitants of the modern waste land that the way into life may be by death itself. The drowned Phoenician Sailor is a type of the fertility god whose image was thrown into the sea annually as a symbol of the death of summer. As for the other figures in the paek: Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, is woman in the waste land. The man with three staves, Eliot says he associates rather arbitrarily with the Fisher King. The term arbitrarily indicates that we are not to attempt to find a logical connection here. (It may be interesting to point out, however, that Eliot seems to have given in a later poem his reason for making the association. In “The Hollow Men” he writes, speaking as one of the Hollow Men:
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves.
Behaving as the wind behaves.
The figure is that of a scarecrow, fit symbol of the man who possesses no reality, and fit type of the Fisher King, the maimed, impotent king who ruled over the waste land of the legend. The man with three staves in the deck of cards may thus have appealed to the poet as an appropriate figure to which to assign the function of the Fisher King, although the process of identification was too difficult to expect the reader to follow and although knowledge of the process was not necessary to an understanding of the poem.)
The Hanged Man, who represents the hanged god of Frazer (including the Christ), Eliot states in a note, is associated with the hooded figure who appears in “What the Thunder Said.” That he is hooded accounts for Madame Sosostris’ inability to see him; or rather, here again the palaver of the modern fortune-teller is turned to new and important account by the poet's shifting the matter into a new and serious context. The Wheel and the one-eyed merchant will be discussed later.
After the Madame Sosostris passage, Eliot proceeds to complicate his symbols for the sterility and unreality of the modern waste land by associating it with Baudelaire's “fourmillante cite” and with Dante’s Limbo. The passages already quoted from Eliot's essay on Baudelaire will indicate one of the reasons why Baudelaire's lines are evoked here. In Baudelaire’s city, dream and reality seem to mix, and it is interesting that Eliot in "The Hollow Men" refers to this same realm of death-in- life as “death’s dream kingdom” in contradistinction to “death’s other kingdom.”
The references to Dante are most important. The line, “ I had not thought death had undone so many,” is taken from the Third Canto of the Inferno; the line, “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,” from the Fourth Canto. Mr. Matthiessen has already pointed out that the Third Canto deals with Dante's Limbo which is occupied by those who on earth had “lived without praise or blame.” They share this abode with the angels, “Who were not rebels, nor were faithful to God, but were for themselves.” They exemplify almost perfectly the secular attitude which dominates the modern world. Their grief, according to Dante, arises from the fact that they “have no hope of death; and their blind life is so debased, that they are envious of every other lot.” But though they may not hope for death, Dante calls them “these wretches who never were alive.” The people who are treated in the Fourth Canto arc those who lived virtuously but who died before the proclamation of the Gospel—they are the unbaptized. This completes the categories of people who inhabit the modem waste land: those who are secularized and those who have no knowledge of the faith. Without a faith their life is in reality a death. To repeat the sentence from Eliot previously quoted: “So far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.”
The Dante and Baudelaire references, then, come to the same thing as the allusion to the waste land of the medieval legends; and these various allusions drawn from widely differing sources enrich the comment on the modern city so that it becomes “unreal” on a number of levels: as seen through “the brown fog of a winter dawn”; as the medieval waste land and Dante’s Limbo and Baudelaire’s Paris arc unreal.
The reference to Stetson stresses again the connection between the modern London of the poem and Dante’s hell. After the statement, “I could never have believed death had undone so many,” follow the words “Meter I had distinguished some among them, I saw and knew the shade of him who made, through cowardice, the great refusal.” The protagonist, like Dante, sees among the inhabitants of the contemporary waste land one whom he recognizes. (The name ‘Stetson’ I take to have no ulterior significance. It is merely an ordinary name such as might be borne by the friend one might see in a crowd in a great city.) Mylae, as Mr. Matthiessen has pointed out to us, is the name of a battle between the Romans and the Carthaginians in the Punic War. The Punic War was a trade war-might be considered a rather close parallel to our late war. At any rate, it is plain that Eliot in having the protagonist address the friend in a London street as one who was with him in the Punic War rather than as one who was with him in the World War is making the point that all the wars are one war; all experience, one experience. As Eliot put the idea in Murder in the Cathedral:
We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
I am not sure that Leavis and Matthiessen are correct in inferring that the line, “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,” refers to the attempt to bury a memory. But whether or not this is true, the line certainly refers also to the buried god of the old fertility rites. It also is to be linked with the earlier passage—“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow,” etc. This allusion to the buried god will account for the ironical, almost taunting tone of the passage. The burial of the dead is now a sterile planting-without hope. But the advice to “keep the Dog far hence,” in spite of the tone, is, I believe, well taken and serious. The passage in Webster goes as follows
O keep the wolf far hence, that's foe to men,
Or with his nails he'll dig it up again.
Why does Eliot turn the wolf into a dog? And why does he reverse the point of importance from the animal’s normal hostility to men to its friendliness? If, as some critics have suggested, he is merely interested in making a reference to Webster’s darkest play, why alter the line? I am inclined to take the Dog (the capital letter is Eliot’s) as Humanitarianism and the related philosophies which in their concern for man extirpate the supernatural dig up the corpse of the buried god and thus prevent the rebirth of life. For the general idea, see Eliot’s essay, “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt.”
The last line of “The Burial of the Dead”- “You! hypocrite lecteur! —mon semblable,—mon frere!”—the quotation from Baudelaire, completes the universalization of Stetson begun by the reference to Mylae. Stetson is every maIl including the reader and Mr. Eliot himself.
II
If “The Burial of the Dead” gives the general abstract statement of the situation, the second part of The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,” gives a more concrete illustration. The easiest contrast in this section -and one which may easily blind the casual reader to a continued emphasis on the contrast between the two kinds of life, or the two kinds of death, a heady commented on is the contrast between life in a rich and magnificent setting, and life in the low and vulgar setting of a London pub. But both scenes, however antithetical they may appear superficially, arc scenes taken from the contemporary waste land, In both of them life has lost its meaning.
I am particularly indebted to Mr. Allen Tate’s brilliant comment on the first part of this section. To quote from him, “the woman is, I believe, the symbol of man at the present time. He is surrounded by the grandeurs of the past, but he does not participate in them; they don’t sustain him.”And to quote from another section of his commentary: “The rich experience of the great tradition depicted in the room receives a violent shock in contrast with a game that symbolizes the inhuman abstraction of the modern mind.” Life has no meaning; history has no meaning; there is no answer to the question: “what shall we ever do?” The only thing that has meaning is the abstract game which they are to play, a game in which the meaning is assigned and arbitrary, meaning by convention only-in short, a game of chess.
This interpretation will account in part for the pointed reference to Cleopatra in the first lines of the section. But there is, I believe, a further reason for the poet’s having compared the lady to Cleopatra. The queen in Shakespeare’s drama “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety” is perhaps the extreme exponent of love for love’s sake the feminine member of the pair of lovers who threw away an empire for love. But the infinite variety of the life of the woman in “A Game of Chess” has been staled. There is indeed no variety at all, and love simply docs not exist. The function of the sudden change in the description of the carvings and paintings in the room from the heroic and magnificent to the characterization of the rest of them as “other withered stumps of time” is obvious. But the reference to Philomela is particularly important, for Philomela, it seems to me, is one of the major symbols of the poem.
Miss Weston points out (in The Quest of the Holy Grail) that a section of one of the Grail manuscripts, which is apparently intended as a gloss of the Grail story, tells how the court of the rich Fisher King was withdrawn from the knowledge of men when certain of the maidens who frequented the shrine were raped and had their golden cups taken from them. The curse on the land of Hows from this act. Miss Weston conjectures that this may be a statement, in the form of parable, of the violation of the older mysteries which were probably once celebrated openly, but were later forced underground into secrecy. Whether or not Mr. Eliot noticed this passage or intends a reference, the violation of a woman makes a very good symbol of the process of secularization. John Crowe Ransom makes the point very neatly for us in his God Without Thunder. Love is the aesthetic of sex; lust is the science. Love implies a deferring of the satisfaction of the desire; it implies even a certain asceticism and a ritual. Lust drives forward urgently and scientifically to the immediate extirpation of the desire. Our contemporary waste land is in a large part the result of our scientific attitude-of our complete secularization. Needless to say, lust defeats its own ends. The portrayal of “The change of Philomela, by the barbarous king” is a fitting commentary on the scene which it ornaments. The waste land of the legend came in this way-the modern waste land has come in this way.
That this view is not mere fine-spun ingenuity is borne out somewhat by the change of tense which Eliot employs here and which Mr. Edmund Wilson has commented upon: “And still she cried, and still the world pursues.” Apparently the “world” partakes in the barbarous king’s action, and still partakes in that action.
To “dirty ears” the nightingale’s song is not that which filled all the desert with inviolable voice-it is “jug, jug.” Edmund Wilson has pointed out that the rendition of the bird's song here represents not merely the Elizabethans’ neutral notation of the bird's song, but carries associations of the ugly and coarse. The passage is one therefore of many instances of Eliot’s device of using something which in one context is innocent but in another context becomes loaded with a special meaning.
The Philomela passage has another importance, however. If it is a commentary on how the waste land became waste, it also repeats the theme of the death which is the door to life—the theme of the dying god. The raped woman becomes transformed through suffering into the nightingale; through the violation comes the “inviolable voice.” The thesis that suffering is action, and that out of suffering comes poetry is a favorite one of Eliot’s. For example, “Shakespeare, too, was occupied with the struggle—which alone constitutes life for a poet—to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.” Consider also his statement with reference to Baudelaire: “Indeed, in his way of suffering is already a kind of presence of the supernatural and of the superhuman. He rejects always the purely natural and the purely human; in other words, he is neither ‘naturalist’ nor ‘humanist.’” The theme of the life which is death is stated specifically in the conversation between the man and the woman. She asks the question “Are you alive, or not?” and this time we arc sufficiently prepared by the Dante references in “The Burial of the Dead” for the statement here to bear a special meaning. (She also asks “Is there nothing in your head?” He is one of the Hollow Men—“headpiece stuffed with straw.”) These people, as people in the waste land, know nothing, see nothing, do not even live.
But the protagonist, after this reflection that in the waste land of modern life even death is sterile—“I think we arc in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones”—remembers a death which was not sterile, remembers a death that was transformed into something rich and strange, the death described in the song from The Tempest—“Those arc pearls that were his eyes.”
The reference to this section of The Tempest is, like the Philomela reference, one of Eliot’s major symbols. We are to meet it twice more, in later sections of the poem. Some more general comment on it is therefore appropriate here. The song, one remembers, was sung by Ariel in luring Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, on to meet Miranda, and thus to find love, and through this love, to effect the regeneration and deliverance of all the people on the island. Ferdinand says of the song:
The ditty doth remember my drowned father.
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes…
The allusion is an extremely interesting example of the device of Eliot’s already commented upon, that of taking an item from one context and shifting it into another in which it assumes a new and powerful mean- ing. This description of a death which is a portal into a realm of the rich and strange—a death which becomes a sort of birth—assumes in the mind of the protagonist an association with that of the drowned god whose effigy was thrown into the water as a symbol of the death of the fruitful powers of nature but which was taken out of the water as a symbol of the revivified god. (See From Ritual to Romance.) The passage therefore represents the perfect antithesis to the passage in “The Burial of the Dead”: "That corpse you planted last year in your garden,”etc. It also, as we have already pointed out, finds its antithesis in the sterile and unfruitful death “in rats’ alley” just commented upon. (Wc shall find that this contrast between the death in rats' alley and the death in The Tempest is made again in “The Fire Sermon.”)
We have yet to treat the relation of the title of the section, “A Game of Chess,” to Middleton’s play, Women beware Women, from which the game of chess is taken. In the play, the game is used as a device to keep the widow occupied while her daughter-in-law is being seduced. The seduction amounts almost to a rape, and in a double entendre, the rape is actually described in terms of the game. We have one more connection with the Philomela symbol therefore. The abstract game is being used in the contemporary waste land, as in the play, to cover up a rape and is a description of the rape itself.
In the second part of “A Game of Chess” we are given a picture of spiritual emptiness, but this time, at the other end of the social scale, as reflected in the talk between two cockney women in a London pub. The account here is straightforward enough and the only matter which calls for comment is the line spoken by Ophelia in Hamlet which ends the passage. Ophelia, too, was very much concerned about love, the theme of conversation of the two ladies. As a matter of fact, she was in very much the same position as that of the woman who has been the topic of conversation between the two good ladies we have just heard. She had remarked too once that
Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t;
By cock, they are to blame.
And her poetry (including the line quoted from her here), like Philomela's, had come out of suffering. I think that we are probably to look for the relevance of the allusion to her in some such matter as this rather than in an easy satiric contrast between Elizabethan glories and modern sordidness. After all (in spite of the Marxists) Eliot's objection to the present world is not merely the sentimental one that this happens to be the twentieth century after Christ and not the seventeenth.
III
"The Fire Sermon" makes much use of several of the symbols already developed. The fire is the sterile burning of lust, and the section is a sermon, although a sermon by example only. This section of the poem also contains some of the most easily apprehended uses of literary allusion. The poem opens on a vision of the modern river. In Spenser’s “Prothalamion” the scene described is also a river scene at London, and it is dominated by nymphs and their paramours, and the nymphs are preparing for a bridal. The contrast between Spenser’s scene and its twentieth century equivalent is jarring. The paramours are now “the loitering heirs of city directors,” and, as for the bridals of Spenser’s Elizabethan maidens, in the stanzas which follow we learn a great deal about those. At the end of the section the speech of the third of the Thames-nymphs summarizes the whole matter for us.
The waters of the flames are also associated with those of Leman—the poet in the contemporary waste land is in a sort of Babylonian Captivity.
The castle of the Fisher King was always located on the banks of a river or on the sea shore. The title “Fisher King,” Miss Weston shows, originates from the use of the fish as a fertility or life symbol. This meaning, however, was often forgotten, and so the title in many of the later Grail romances is accounted for by describing the king as fishing. Eliot uses the reference to fishing for reverse effect. The reference to fishing is part of the realistic detail of the scene-“While I was fishing in the dull canal.” But to the reader who knows the Weston references, the reference is to that of the Fisher King of the Grail legends. The protagonist is the maimed and impotent king of the legends.
Eliot proceeds now to tie the waste-land symbol to that of The Tempest, by quoting one of the lines spoken by Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, which occurs just before Ariel's song, “Full Fathom Five,” is heard. But he alters The Tempest passage somewhat, writing not, “Weeping again the king my father's wreck,” but
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
It is possible that the alteration has been made to bring the account taken from The Tempest into accord with the situation in the Percival stories. In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, for instance, Trevrezent, the hermit, is the brother of the Fisher King, Anfortas. He tells Parzival, “His name all men know as Anfortas, and I weep for him evermore.” Their father, Frimutel, is of course dead.
The protagonist in the poem, then, imagines himself not only in the situation of Ferdinand in The Tempest but also in that of one of the characters in the Grail legend; and the wreck, to be applied literally in the first instance, applies metaphorically in the second.
After the lines from The Tempest, appears again the image of a sterile death from which no life comes, the bones, “rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.” (The collocation of this figure with the vision of the death by water in Ariel’s song has already been commented on. The lines quoted from The Tempest come just before the song.)
The allusion to Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” is of course one of the easiest allusions in the poem. Instead of “Time's winged chariot” the poet hears “the sound of horns and motors” of contemporary London. But the passage has been further complicated. The reference has been combined with an allusion to Day's “Parliament of Bees.” “Time’s winged chariot” of Marvell has not only been changed to the modern automobile; Day’s “sound of horns and hunting” has changed to the horns of the motors. And Actaeon will not be brought face to face with Diana, goddess of chastity; Sweeney, type of the vulgar bourgeois, is to be brought to Mrs. Porter, hardly a type of chastity. The reference in the ballad to the feet “washed in soda water” reminds the poet ironically of another sort of foot-washing, the sound of the children singing in the dome heard at the ceremony of the foot-washing which precedes the restoration of the wounded Anfortas (the Fisher King) by Parzival and the taking away of the curse from the waste land. The quotation thus completes tile allusion to the Fisher King commenced in line 189—“While I was fishing in the dull canal.”
The pure song of the children also reminds the poet of the song of the nightingale which we have heard in “The Game of Chess.” The recapitulation of symbols is continued with a repetition of “Unreal city”” and with the reference to the one-eyed merchant.
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, is the one-eyed merchant mentioned by Madame Sosostris. The fact that the merchant is one-eyed apparently means in Madame Sosostris’ speech no more than that the merchant’s face on the card is shown in profile. But Eliot applies the term to Mr. Eugenides for a totally different effect. The defect corresponds somewhat to Madame Sosostris’ bad cold. The Syrian merchants, we learn from Miss Weston’s book, were, with slaves and soldiers, the principal carriers of the mysteries which lie at the core of the Grail legends. But in the modern world we find both the representatives of the Tarot divining and the mystery cults in decay. What he carries on his back and what the fortune-teller was forbidden to see is evidently the knowledge of the mysteries (although Mr. Eugenides himself is hardly likely to be more aware of it than Madame Sosostris is aware of the importance of her function). Mr. Eugenides, in terms of his former function ought to be inviting the protagonist to an initiation into the esoteric cult which holds the secret of life, but on the realistic surface of the poem, in his invitation to “a week end at the Metropole” he is really inviting him to a homosexual debauch. The homosexuality is ‘secret’ and now a ‘cult’ but a very different cult from that which Mr. Eugenides ought to represent. The end of the new cult is not life but, ironically, sterility.
In the modern waste land, however, even the relation between man and woman is also sterile. The incident between the typist and the carbuncular young man is a picture of ‘love’ so exclusively and practically pursued that it is not love at all. The scene, as Allen Tate puts it, is one of our most terrible insights into Western civilization. The tragic chorus to the scene is Tiresias, into whom perhaps Mr. Eugenides may be said to modulate, Tiresias, the historical ‘expert’ on the relation between the sexes.
The allusions to Sappho’s lines and to Goldsmith’s made in this passage need little comment. The hour of evening, which in Sappho's poem brings rest to all and brings the sailor home, brings the typist to her travesty of home—“On the divan ... at night her bed”—and brings the carbuncular young man, the meeting with whom ends not in peace but in sterile burning.
The reminiscence of the lines from Goldsmith’s song in the description of the young woman’s actions after the departure of her lover gives concretely and ironically the utter break~down of traditional standards.
It is the music after gramophone which the protagonist hears “creep by” him “on the waters.” Far from the music which Ferdinand heard bringing him to Miranda and love, it is, one is tempted to think, the music of “OOOO that Shakespearian Rag” of “A Game of Chess.”
But the protagonist says that he can sometimes hear “The pleasant whining of a mandolin.” Significantly enough, it is the music of the fish men (the fish again as a life symbol) and it comes from beside a church (though-if this is not to rely too much on Eliot's note—the church has been marked for destruction). Life on Lower Thames Street, if not on the Strand, still has meaning as it cannot have meaning for either the typist or the rich woman of “A Game of Chess.”
The song of the Thames-daughters brings us back to the opening section of “The Fire Sermon” again, and once more we have to do with the river and the river-nymphs. Indeed, the typist incident is framed by the two river-nymph scenes.
The connection of the river-nymphs with the Rhine-daughters of Wagner’s Gotterdamerung is easily made. In the passage in Wagner’s opera to which Eliot refers in his note, the opening of Act III, the Rhine-daughters bewail the loss of the beauty of the Rhine occasioned by the theft of the gold and then beg Siegfried to give them back the Ring made from this gold, finally threatening him with death if he does not give it up. Like the Thames-daughters they too have been violated; and like the maidens mentioned in the Grail legend, the violation has brought a curse on gods and men. The first of the songs depicts the modern river, soiled with oil and tar. (Compare also with the description of the river in the first part of “The Fire Sermon.”) The second song depicts the Elizabethan river, also evoked in the first part of “The Fire Sermon.” (Leicester and Elizabeth ride upon it in a barge of state. Incidentally, Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’ from which quotation is made in the first part of “The Fire Sermon” mentions Leicester as having formerly lived in the house which forms the setting of the poem.)
In this second song there is also a definite allusion to the passage in Antony and Cleopatra already referred to in the opening line of “A Game of Chess.”
Beating oars
The stern was formed
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
And if we still have any doubt of the allusion, Eliot’s note On the passage with its reference to the barge and poop should settle the matter. We have already commented on the earlier allusion to Cleopatra as the prime example of love for love’s sake. The symbol bears something of the same meaning here, and the note which Eliot supplies does some- thing to reinforce the ‘Cleopatra’ aspect of Elizabeth. Elizabeth in the presence of the Spaniard De Quadra, though negotiations were going on for a Spanish marriage, “went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I [De Quadra was a bishop] was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be married if the queen pleased.” The passage has a sort of double function. It reinforces the general contrast between Elizabethan magnificence and modern sordidness: in the Elizabethan age love for love’s sake has some meaning and therefore some magnificence. But the passage gives something of an opposed effect too: the same sterile love, emptiness of love, obtained in this period too: Elizabeth and the typist are alike as well as different. (One of the reasons for the frequent allusion to: Elizabethan poetry in this and the preceding section of the poem may be the fact that with the English Renaissance the old set of supernatural sanctions had begun to break up. See Eliot’s various essays on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists. )
The third Thames-daughter’s song depicts another sordid ‘love’ affair, and unites the themes of the first two songs. It begins “Trams and dusty trees.” With it we are definitely in the waste land again. Pia, whose words she echoes in saying “Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew /Undid me” was in Purgatory and had hope. The woman speaking here has no hope-she too is in the Inferno: “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” She has just completed, floating down the river in the canoe, what Eliot has described in Murder in the Cathedral as
. . . the effortless journey, to the empty land
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Where the soul is no longer deceived, for there are no objects, no tones,
Where those who were men can no longer turn the mind
To distraction, delusion, escape into dream, pretense,
No colors, no forms to distract, to divert the soul
From seeing itself, foully united forever, nothing with nothing,
To distraction, delusion, escape into dream, pretense,
No colors, no forms to distract, to divert the soul
From seeing itself, foully united forever, nothing with nothing,
Not what we call death, but what beyond death is not death. . .
Now, “on Margate sands,” like the Hollow Men, she stands “on this beach of the tumid river.”
The songs of the three Thames-daughters, as a matter of fact, epitomize this whole section of the poem, With reference to the quotations from St. Augustine and Buddha at the end of “The Fire Sermon” Eliot states that “The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.”
It is certainly not an accident. The moral of all the incidents which we have been witnessing is that there must be an asceticism-some- thing to check the drive of desire. The wisdom of the East and the West comes to the same thing on this point. Moreover, the imagery which both St. Augustine and Buddha use for lust is fire. What we have witnessed in the various scenes of “The Fire Sermon” is the sterile burning of lust. Modern man, freed from all restraints, in his cultivation of experience for experience’s sake burns, but not with a “hard and gemlike flame.” One ought not to pound the point borne in this fashion, but to see that the imagery of this section of the poem furnishes illustrations leading up to the Fire Sermon is the necessary requirement for feeling the force of the brief allusions here at the end to Buddha and St. Augustine.
IV
Whatever the specific meaning of the symbols, the general function of the section, “Death by Water,” is readily apparent. The section forms a contrast with “The Fire Sermon” which precedes it—a contrast between the symbolism of fire and that of water. Also readily apparent is its force as symbol of surrender and relief through surrender.
Some specific connections can be made, however. The drowned Phoenician Sailor recalls the drowned god of the fertility cults. Miss Weston tells that each year at Alexandria an effigy of the head of the god was thrown into the water as a symbol of the death of the powers of nature, and that this head was carried by the current to Byblos where it was taken out of the water and exhibited as a symbol of the reborn god.
Moreover, the Phoenician Sailor is a merchant—“Forgot . . . the profit and loss.” The vision of the drowned sailor gives a statement of the message which the Syrian merchants originally brought to Britain and which the Smyrna merchant, unconsciously and by ironical negatives, has brought. One of Eliot’s notes states that the “merchant . . . melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples.” The death by water would seem to be equated with the death described in Ariel’s song in The Tempest. There is a definite difference in the tone of the description of this death—“A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers,” as compared with the ‘other’ death—“bones cast in a little low dry garret / Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.”
Farther than this it would not be safe to go, but one may point out that whirling (the whirlpool here, the Wheel of Madame Sosostris’ palaver) is one of Eliot’s symbols frequently used in other poems (Ash Wednesday, “Gerontion,” Murder in the Cathedral, and “Burnt Norton”) to denote the temporal world. And one may point out, supplying the italics oneself, the following passage from Ash Wednesday:
Although I do not hope to turn again
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wavering between the profit and the lossIn this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
At least, with a kind of hindsight, one may suggest that “Section IV” gives an instance of the conquest of death and time, the “perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,” the “world of spring and autumn, birth and dying” through death itself.
v
The reference to the “torchlight red on sweaty faces” and to the “frosty silence in the gardens” obviously associates, as we have already pointed out, Christ in Gethsemane with the other hanged gods. The god has now died, and in referring to this, the basic theme finds another strong restatement:
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
The poet does not say “We who are living.” It is “We who were living.” It is the death-in-life of Dante’s Limbo. Life in the full sense has been lost.
The passage on the sterility of the waste land and the lack of water which follows, provides for the introduction later of two highly important passages:
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain—
lines which look forward to the introduction later of “what the thunder said” when the thunder, no longer sterile, but bringing rain speaks.
The second of these passages is, “There is not even solitude in the mountains,” which looks forward to the reference to the Journey to Emmaus theme a few lines later: “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” The god has returned, has risen, but the travelers cannot tell whether it is really he, or mere illusion induced by their delirium.
The parallelism between the “hooded figure” who “walks always beside you,” and the “hooded hordes” is another instance of the sort of parallelism that is really a contrast, one of the type of which Eliot is fond. In the first case, the figure is indistinct because spiritual; in the second, the hooded hordes are indistinct because completely unspiritual—they are the people of the waste land—
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion—
to take two lines from “The Hollow Men,” where the people of the waste land once more appear. Or to take another line from the same poem, perhaps their hoods are the “deliberate disguises” which the Hollow Men, the people of the waste land, wear.
Eliot, as his notes tell us, has particularly connected the description here with the “decay of eastern Europe.” The hordes represent then the general waste land of the modern world with a special application to the breakup of Eastern Europe, the region with which the fertility cults were especially connected and in which today the traditional values are thoroughly discredited. The cities, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, like the London of the first section of the poem are “unreal,” and for the same reason.
The passage which immediately follows develops the unreality into nightmare, but it is a nightmare vision which is not only an extension of the passage beginning, “What is the city over the mountains”—in it appear other figures from earlier in the poem: the lady of “A Game of Chess” who, surrounded by the glory of history and art sees no meaning in either and threatens to rush out into the street “With my hair down, so,” has here let down her hair and fiddles “whisper music on those strings.” One remembers in “A Game of Chess” that it was the woman’s hair that spoke:
. . . her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
The hair has been immemorially a symbol of fertility, and Miss Weston and Frazer mention sacrifices of hair in order to aid the fertility god.
As we have pointed out earlier in dealing with “The Burial of the Dead,” this whole passage is to be connected with the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes. The doors “of mud cracked houses,” and the cisterns in this passage arc to be found in Ecclesiastes, and the woman fiddling music from her hair is one of “he daughters of music” brought low. The towers and bells from the Elizabeth and Leicester passage of “The Fire Sermon” also appear here, but the towers arc upside down, and the bells, far from pealing for an actual occasion or ringing the hours, are ‘reminiscent.” The civilization is breaking up.
The “violet light” also deserves comment. In “The Fire Sermon” it IS twice mentioned as the “violet hour,” and there it has little more than a physical meaning. It is a description of the hour of twilight. Here it indicates the twilight of the civilization, but it is perhaps something more. Violet is one of the liturgical colors of the Church. It symbolizes repentance and it is the color of baptism. The visit to the Perilous Chapel, according to Miss Weston, was an initiation—that is, a baptism. In the nightmare vision, the bats wear baby faces.
The horror built up in this passage is a proper preparation for the passage on the Perilous Chapel which follows it. The journey has not been merely an agonized walk in the desert, though it is that, or merely the journey after the god has died and hope has been lost; it is also the journey to the Perilous Chapel of the Grail story. In Miss Weston's account, the Chapel was part of the ritual, and was filled with horrors to test the candidate’s courage. In some stories the perilous cemetery is also mentioned. Eliot has used both: “Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel.” In many of the Grail stories the Chapel was haunted by demons.
The cock in the folk-lore of many peoples is regarded as the bird whose voice chases away the powers of evil. It is significant that it is after his crow that the flash of lightning comes and the “damp gust / Bringing rain.” It is just possible that the cock has a connection also with The Tempest symbols. The first song which Ariel sings to Ferdinand as he sits “Weeping again the king my father’s wreck” ends
The strain of strutting chanticleer,
Cry, cock-a-doodle-doo.
'The next stanza is the “Full Fathom Five” song which Eliot has used as a vision of life gained through death. If this relation holds, here we have an extreme instance of an allusion, in itself innocent, forced into serious meaning through transference to a new context.
As Miss Weston has shown, the fertility cults go back to a very early period and are recorded in Sanscrit legends. Eliot has been continually in the poem linking up the Christian doctrine with the beliefs of as many peoples as he can. Here he goes back to the very beginnings of Aryan culture, and tells the rest of the story of the rain's coming, not in terms of the setting already developed but in its earliest form. The passage is thus a perfect parallel in method to the passage in “The Burial of the Dead”:
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!That corpse you planted last year in your garden . . .
The use of Sanscrit in what the thunder says is thus accounted for. In addition, there is of course a more obvious reason for casting what the thunder said into Sanscrit here: onomatopoeia.
The comments on the three statements of the thunder imply an acceptance of them. The protagonist answers the first question, “what have we given?” with the statement:
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed.
Here the larger meaning is stated in terms which imply the sexual meaning. Man cannot be absolutely self-regarding. Even the propagation of the race—even mere ‘existence’— can for such a surrender. Living calls for—see the passage already quoted from Eliot's essay on Baudelaire—belief in something more than ‘life.’
The comment on dayadhvam (sympathize) is obviously connected with the foregoing passage. The surrender to something outside the self is an attempt (whether on the sexual level or some other) to transcend one's essential isolation. The passage gathers up the symbols previously developed in the poem just as the foregoing passage reflects, though with a different implication, the numerous references to sex made earlier in the poem. For example, the woman in the first part of “A Game of Chess” has also heard the key turn in the door, and confirms her prison by thinking of the key:
Speak to me. 'Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? what thinking? What?
I never know what you arc thinking. Think.
The third statement made by the thunder, damyata (control) follows the logical condition for control, sympathy. The figure of the boat catches up the figure of control already given in “Death by Water”—“O you who turn the wheel and look to windward”—and from “The Burial of the Dead” the figure of happy love in which the ship rushes on with a fair wind behind it: “Frisch weht der wind . .”
I cannot accept Mr. Leavis’ interpretation of the passage, “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me,” as meaning that the poem “exhibits no progression.” The comment upon what the thunder says would indicate, if other passages did not, that the poem does “not end where it began.” It is true that the protagonist does not witness a revival of the waste land; but there are two important relationships involved in his case: a personal one as well as a general one. If secularization has destroyed, or is likely to destroy, modern civilization, the protagonist still has a private obligation to fulfill. Even if the civilization is breaking up—“London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down”—there remains the personal obligation: “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” Consider in this connection the last sentences of Eliot's “Thoughts After Lambeth”: “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.”
The bundle of quotations with which the poem ends has a very definite relation to the general theme of the poem and to several of the major symbols use it in the poem. Before Arnaut leaps back into the refining fire of Purgatory with joy he says: “I am Arnaut who weep and go singing; contrite I see my past folly, and joyful I see before me the day I hope for. Now I pray by that virtue which guides you to the summit of the stair, at times be mindful of my pain.” This note is carried forward by the quotation from Pervigilium Veneris: “When shall I be like the swallow.” The allusion also connects with the Philomela symbol. (Eliot’s note on the passage indicates this clearly.) The sister of Philomela was changed into a swallow as Philomela was changed into a nightingale. The protagonist is asking therefore when shall the spring, the time of love return, but also when will he be reborn out of his sufferings, and with the special meaning which the symbol takes on from the preceding Dante quotation and from the earlier contexts already discussed—he is asking what is asked at the end of one of the minor poems: “When will Time flow away.”
The quotation from ‘EI Desdichado,’ as Edmund Wilson has pointed out, indicates that the protagonist of the poem has been disinherited, robbed of his tradition. The ruined tower is perhaps also the Perilous Chapel, “only the wind's home,” and it is also the whole tradition in decay. The protagonist resolves to claim his tradition and rehabilitate it.
The quotation from The Spanish Tragedy—“Why then lie fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe”—is perhaps the most puzzling of all these quotations. It means, I believe, this: the protagonist’s acceptance of what is in reality the deepest truth will seem to the present world mere madness. (“And still she cried, and still the world pursues / ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.”) Hieronymo in the play, like Hamlet, was ‘mad’ for a purpose. The protagonist is conscious of the interpretation which will be placed on the words which follow—words which will seem to many apparently meaningless babble, but which contain the oldest and most permanent truth of the race:
Dalta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
After this statement comes the benediction:
Shantih Shantih Shantih.
The foregoing account of The Waste Land is, of course, not to be substituted for the poem itself. Moreover, it certainly is not to be considered as representing the method by which the poem was composed. Much which the prose expositor must represent as though it had been consciously contrived obviously was arrived at unconsciously and concretely.
The account given above is a statement merely of the “prose meaning,” and bears the same relation to the poem as does the “prose meaning” of any other poem. But one need not perhaps apologize for setting forth such a statement explicitly, for The Waste Land has been almost consistently misinterpreted since its first publication. Even a critic so acute as Edmund Wilson has seen the poem as essentially a statement of despair and disillusionment, and this account sums up the stock interpretation of the poem. Indeed, the phrase, “the poetry of drouth,” has he come a cliche of left-wing criticism. It is such a misrepresentation of The Waste Land as this which allows Edmund Walton to entitle an essay on contemporary poetry, “Death in the Desert;” or which causes Waldo Frank to misconceive of Eliot’s whole position and personality. But more than the meaning of one poem is at stake. If The Waste Land is not a world weary cry of despair or a sighing after the vanished glories of the past, then not only the popular interpretation of the poem will have to be altered but also the general interpretations of post War poetry which begin with such a misinterpretation as a premise.
Such misinterpretations involve also misconceptions of Eliot’s technique. Eliot’s basic method may be said to have passed relatively unnoticed. The popular view of the method used in The Waste Land may be described as follows: Eliot makes use of ironic contrasts between the glorious past and the sordid present the crashing irony of
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
But this is to take the irony of the poem at the most superficial level, and to neglect the other dimensions in which it operates. And it is to neglect what are essentially more important aspects of his method. Moreover, it is to overemphasize the difference between the method employed by Eliot in this poem and that employed by him in later poems.
The basic method used in The Waste Land may be described as the application of the principle of complexity. The poet works in terms of surface parallelisms which in reality make ironical contrasts, and in terms of surface contrasts which in reality constitute parallelisms. (The second group set up effects which may be described as the obverse of irony.) The two aspects taken together give the effect of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole though the realistic surface of experience is faithfully retained. The complexity of the experience is not violated by the apparent forcing upon it of a predetermined scheme.
The fortune-telling of “The Burial of the Dead” will illustrate the general method very satisfactorily. On the surface of the poem the poet reproduces the patter of the charlatan, Madame Sosostris, and there is the surface irony: the contrast between the original use of the Tarot cards and the use made here. But each of the details (justified realistically in the palaver of the fortune-teller) assumes a new meaning in the general context of the poem. 'There is then in addition to the surface irony something of a Sophoclean irony too, and the “fortune-telling” which is taken ironically by a twentieth-century audience becomes true as the poem develops—true in a sense in which Madame Sosostris herself does not think it true. The surface irony is thus reversed and becomes an irony on a deeper level. The items of her speech have only one reference in terms of the context of her speech: the “man with three staves,” the "one-eyed merchant," the "crowds of people, walking round in a ring," etc. But transferred to other contexts they become loaded with special meanings. To sum up, all the central symbols of the poem head up here, but here, in the only section in which they arc explicitly bound together, the binding is slight and accidental. The deeper lines of association only emerge in terms of the total context as the poem develops—and this is, of course, exactly the effect which the poet intends.
This transference of items from an ‘innocent’ context into a context in which they become charged and transformed in meaning will account for many of the literary allusions in the poem. For example, the “change of Philomel” is merely one of the items in the decorative detail in the room in the opening of “A Game of Chess.” But the violent change of tense “And still she cried, and still the world pursues” makes it a comment upon, and a symbol of, the modern world. And further allusions to it through the course of the poem gradually equate it with the general theme of the poem. The allusions to The Tempest display the same method. The parallelism between Dante’s Hell and the waste land of the Grail legends is fairly close; even the equation of Baudelaire’s Paris to the waste land is fairly obvious. But the parallelism between the death by drowning in The Tempest and the death of the fertility god is, on the surface, merely accidental, and the first allusion to Ariel’s song is merely an irrelevant and random association of the stream of consciousness:
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
And on its second appearance in “A Game of Chess” it is still only an item in the protagonist’s abstracted reverie. Even the association of The Tempest symbol with the Grail legends in the lines
While I was fishing in the dull canal
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
and in the passage which follows, is ironical merely. But the associations have been established, even though they may seem to be made in ironic mockery, and when we come to the passage, “Death by Water,” with its change of tone, they assert themselves positively. We have a sense of revelation out of material apparently accidentally thrown together. I have called the effect the obverse of irony, for the method, like that of irony, is indirect, though the effect is positive rather than negative.
The ‘melting’ of the characters into each other is, of course, an aspect of this general process. Elizabeth and the girl born at Highbury both ride on the Thames, one in the barge of state, the other supine in a narrow canoe, and they are both Thames-nymphs, who are violated and thus are like the Rhine-nymphs who have also been violated, etc. With the characters as with the other symbols, the surface relationships may be accidental and apparently trivial and they may be made either ironically or through random association or in hallucination, but in the total context of the poem the deeper relationships are revealed. The effect is a sense of the oneness of experience, and of the unity of all periods, and with this, a sense that the general theme of the poem is true. But the theme has not been imposed, it has been revealed.
This complication of parallelisms and contrasts makes, of course, for ambiguity, but the ambiguity, in part, resides in the poet’s fidelity to the complexity of experience. The symbols resist complete equation with a simple meaning. To take an example, ‘rock’ throughout the poem seems to be one of the ‘desert’ symbols. For example, the ‘dry stone’ gives “no sound of water;” woman in the waste land is “the Lady of the Rocks,” and most pointed of all, there is the long delirium passage in “what the Thunder Said:” “Here is no water but only rock,” etc. So much for its general meaning, but in “The Burial of the Dead” occur the lines
Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock).
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock).
Rock here is a place of refuge. (Moreover, there may also be a reference to the Grail symbolism. In Parzival, the Grail is a stone: “And this stone all men call the grail . . . As, children the Grail doth call them, 'neath its shadow they wax and grow.”) The paradox, life through death, penetrates the symbol itself.
To take an even clearer case of this paradoxical me of symbol, consider the lines which occur in the hyacinth girl passage. The vision gives obviously a sense of the richness and beauty of life. It is a moment of ecstasy (the basic imagery is obviously sexual); but the moment in its intensity is like death. The protagonist looks in that moment into the “heart of light, the silence,” and so looks into—not richness—but blankness: he is neither “living nor dead.” The symbol of life stands also for a kind of death. This duality of function may, of course, extend to a whole passage. For example, consider:
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.
Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.
The function of the passage is to indicate the poverty into which religion has fallen: the splendid church now surrounded by the poorer districts. But the passage has an opposed effect also: the fish men in the “public bar in Lower Thames Street” next to the church have a meaningful life which has been largely lost to the secularized upper and middle classes.
The poem would undoubtedly be “clearer” if every symbol had one, unequivocal meaning; but the poem would be thinner, and less honest. For the poet has not been content to develop a didactic allegory in which the symbols are two-dimensional items adding up directly to the sum of the general scheme. They represent dramatized instances of the theme, embodying in their own nature the fundamental paradox of the theme.
We shall better understand why the form of the poem is right and inevitable if we compare Eliot's theme to Dante's and to Spenser’s. Eliot’s theme is not the statement of a faith held and agreed upon (Dante’s Divine Comedy) nor is it the projection of a ‘new’ system of beliefs (Spenser’s Faerie Queene). Eliot’s theme is the rehabilitation of a system of beliefs, known but now discredited. Dante did not have to ‘prove’ his statement; he could assume it and move within it about a poet’s business. Eliot does not care, like Spenser, to force the didacticism. He prefers to stick to the poet’s business. But, unlike Dante, he can not assume acceptance of the statement. A direct approach is calculated to elicit powerful “stock responses” which will prevent the poem’s being read at all. Consequently, the only method is to work by indirection. The “Christian” material is at the center, but the poet never deals with it directly. The theme of resurrection is made on the surface in terms of the fertility rites; the words which the thunder speaks are Sanscrit words.
We have been speaking as if the poet were a strategist trying to win acceptance from a hostile audience. But of course this is true only in a sense. The poet himself is audience as well as speaker; we state the problem more exactly if we state it in terms of the poet’s integrity rather than in terms of his strategy. He is so much a mall of his own age that he can indicate his attitude toward the Christian tradition without falsity only in terms of the difficulties of a rehabilitation; and he is so much a poet and so little a propagandist that he can be sincere only as he presents his theme concretely and dramatically.
To put the matter in still other terms: the Christian terminology is for the poet here a mass of cliches. However ‘true’ he may feel the terms to be, he is still sensitive to the fact that they operate superficially as cliches, and his method of necessity must be a process of bringing them to life again. The method adopted in The Waste Land is thus violent and radical, but thoroughly necessary. For the renewing and vitalizing of symbols which have been crusted over with a distorting familiarity demands the type of organization which we have already commented on in discussing particular passages: the statement of surface similarities which are ironically revealed to be dissimilarities, and the association of apparently obvious dissimilarities which culminates in a later realization that the dissimilarities are only superficial—that the chains of likeness are in reality fundamental. In this way the statement of beliefs emerges through confusion and cynicism—not in spite of them.
By: CLEANTH BROOKS, JR
