The Waste Land
By: T.S. Eliot
However, both waste and land should be stressed: wasteness is an attribute of the land that is modern western civilisation in the aftermath of the First World War, the disaster whose shadow fell over much of the twentieth century. This land has been laid waste: unlike a natural desert, it is sterile because it has suffered devastation inflicted by human hands.
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere
. . .", translates "For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked the Sibyl, 'what do you want?' she answered 'I want to die'."
For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.
Ezra Pound was in a very real sense il miglior fabbro for under his brutal and brilliant editorship, The Waste Land was transformed, as Eliot himself recognised, "from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem".
I. The Burial of the Dead
The title of the Anglican Burial service.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Spring/Rebirth
In the beginning of "The Burial of the Dead" we hear a "voice of propriety" that wishes to halt all new movement, change, or development. This sterile propriety wishes to remain in the darkness, the twilight consciousness of winter, to avoid the suffering and oncoming rending pains of approaching new birth.
Winter/constant darkness; no change
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
Starnbergersee, a German water resort
Hofgarten café
Countess Marie Larisch
This vignette of modern leisured life in a European city, touched with regret for the lost excitement of youth in what is now a lost empire, then gives way to a stark confrontation with physical and spiritual drought which embodies a sense of menace
Countess Marie Larisch. Death by drowning is evoked (l. 8), which symbolizes the ancient narratives of sacrificial death, always necessary before renewal.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? 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 dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Ezekiel
a stark confrontation with physical and spiritual drought which embodies a sense of menace – "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
Such montage-imagism, a "heap of broken images" represents the incoherence of modernist social structures, and the mind it creates in its citizens. Spring, traditionally a seasonal process of rebirth and sexual and spiritual potency, is now perceived as painful.
The desert nourishes no roots; the spirit of vegetation, meaning love, cannot survive
Frish weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl."
-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.
Love
a quotation from Tristan und Isolde, Richard Wagners' opera about fateful and tragic passion, the poem leads on to a young woman's poignant lament over lost love
The lost love and desire of Tristan in lines 30-34, followed by the similar but more subjective and direct failure in the hyacinth garden, ending in "Waste and empty is the sea", suggests here that such a renewal will not occur in the modern Waste Land.
Madame
Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Another dramatic change ensues as the twentieth-century sibyl, the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, trots out the platitudes of her trade while mentioning cards with haunting names. She also issues the injunction "Fear death by water", words with a peculiar resonance in The Waste Land.
Avoiding such a death of self is to avoid renewal and remain in a living death. Myth in the hands of Sosostris becomes empty superstition, devoid of any personal self-sacrifice. There are intimations of redemption, and this may be symptomatic of Eliot’s reservations about overtly romantic optimism, blind hope, or easy, painless solutions.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!"
bring the poem to London, The modern metropolis, the "Unreal city", is a near-constant presence in The Waste Land, With one exception, it is the grim habitat of purposeless and alienated people: "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many." The aimless can still suffer, though: allusions to Dante's Inferno, John Webster's The White Devil, and Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal spread the chance meeting on London Bridge across a context seething with horror and grief.
Clock-time, and perpetual twilight of "brown fog" have overtaken seasonal changes of light and dark. It seems that man and woman have entered into a wasteland of twilight and are now unable to return to either darkness or light. Society has found itself to be "neither living nor dead".
