the waste land
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For I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die.”
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The quotation is from the Satyricon of Petronius and retells Ovid’s myth of the Cumaean Sibyl—a prophetess who was granted immortality by Apollo but forgot to ask for eternal youth and so, over the centuries, disintegrated until all that was left was her voice and a heap of dust that was kept in a jar and begged visitors for death. But again, it would be a mistake to read too much into the literary source. Title, date and epitaph together merely associate the idea of a world in ruins with the feeling of being weary unto death.
The poem itself begins with The Burial of the Dead and the sad, hesternal musings of a desiccated European aristocrat. It is plausible that the “dead” here are the living—including the first speaker, Marie, whose loathing of life finds expression in her preference for hibernal numbness over vernal vitality declaring, counterintuitively, that, “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” etc. while “winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with tried tubers.” But that speaker is soon interrupted by another—a prophetic voice that asks, “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 then laments that there is no shelter, relief or water.
Even at this early point in the poem, it is already clear that the choreographer of these fragments is overwhelmed with existential miseries to which he has sought, and failed, to find relief. The surmise is corroborated by a third voice that remembers a night on which she was being courted and succumbed to a sudden access of mystical dread,
The poem itself begins with The Burial of the Dead and the sad, hesternal musings of a desiccated European aristocrat. It is plausible that the “dead” here are the living—including the first speaker, Marie, whose loathing of life finds expression in her preference for hibernal numbness over vernal vitality declaring, counterintuitively, that, “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” etc. while “winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with tried tubers.” But that speaker is soon interrupted by another—a prophetic voice that asks, “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 then laments that there is no shelter, relief or water.
Even at this early point in the poem, it is already clear that the choreographer of these fragments is overwhelmed with existential miseries to which he has sought, and failed, to find relief. The surmise is corroborated by a third voice that remembers a night on which she was being courted and succumbed to a sudden access of mystical dread,
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. Od’ und leer das Meer. [2] |
And vexingly, mockingly, this accumulated plea for enlightenment is answered in the very next verse by “Madame Sosostris”—a prankster in drag who pretends to be a clairvoyant and blames a bad cold for “her” deep voice before offering a Tarot reading that answers nothing—and then Part I concludes with a scene suggestive of An Evening on the Karl Johann by Edvard Munch: A crowd of people, ashen eyed and empty, shuffling over London Bridge. Thus, in Part I, we have a human consciousness lost in an arid landscape where its thirst for fulfilment is not answered or is answered mockingly… and the poet insinuates that he is not alone in his plight.
A Game of Chess, the second part of the poem, opens with the description of a boudoir so ornate and luxurious that it seems to carry a promise of almost otherworldly matrimonial delights—but that scene is soon interrupted by a nervous, recriminatory exchange between two voices that belong, presumably, to a pair of misyoked spouses at the bitter end of a failed marriage.
A Game of Chess, the second part of the poem, opens with the description of a boudoir so ornate and luxurious that it seems to carry a promise of almost otherworldly matrimonial delights—but that scene is soon interrupted by a nervous, recriminatory exchange between two voices that belong, presumably, to a pair of misyoked spouses at the bitter end of a failed marriage.
‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. ‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? ‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’ |
With weariness and resignation, they decide to play a game of chess—which here means nothing more than a dreary, dilatory occupation for people who have nothing left to say to each other. And then Part II concludes with a conversation between two working class women in a public house at closing time. The first, Lil, is denigrated for her frigidity and for taking the abortion pills that have ruined her appearance (“She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.”) The other, unnamed, cruelly insinuates that she is going to seduce Lil’s husband.
What we have here, in other words, is a suggestion that the poet has already sought human fulfilment in romantic love and found only conflict, betrayal and bitterness.
Part III, The Fire Sermon, takes its title from Buddha’s Fire Sermon Discourse in which Buddha teaches that our consciousness and five senses are burning with the fire of passion. Liberation from suffering, says Buddha, is to be achieved by a detachment from passion. But for the voice that now speaks, detachment from passion has produced, not enlightenment, but a state of desolation—an aura of death, departure and human absence that is communicated by images of trash, bones and corpses. And thus burdened with an intolerably acute consciousness of his own mortality and loneliness, the speaker has no way to resist the siren song of lust that is represented by,
What we have here, in other words, is a suggestion that the poet has already sought human fulfilment in romantic love and found only conflict, betrayal and bitterness.
Part III, The Fire Sermon, takes its title from Buddha’s Fire Sermon Discourse in which Buddha teaches that our consciousness and five senses are burning with the fire of passion. Liberation from suffering, says Buddha, is to be achieved by a detachment from passion. But for the voice that now speaks, detachment from passion has produced, not enlightenment, but a state of desolation—an aura of death, departure and human absence that is communicated by images of trash, bones and corpses. And thus burdened with an intolerably acute consciousness of his own mortality and loneliness, the speaker has no way to resist the siren song of lust that is represented by,
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeny to Mrs Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water. [3] |
Accordingly, we move from scenes of death and desolation to scenes of Gomorran frenzy: The offer of a sodomitic assignation from one Mr. Eugenides; an acned clerk’s perfunctory defloration of a young typist; and then a woman who is raped on the floor of a canoe—this last event, preceded by the description of a lavish royal barge, repeats the bitter contrast between ideal and reality, just as the matrimonial despair in A Game of Chess was preceded by the description of a lavish bridal chamber. Only the hermaphroditic seer Tiresias (“throbbing between two lives, old man with wrinkled female breasts”) has the detachment and objectivity to see the futility of it all.
It would seem, then, that for Eliot both detaching from the passions and indulging in them leads to the profoundest discontent and bitterness. “I can connect nothing with nothing,” rues the speaker near the end of The Fire Sermon. And while the line, “To Carthage then I came,” is an allusion to St. Augustine who, in his Confessions, wrote, “To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears,” this is clearly not a place the speaker voluntarily seeks so much as a maelstrom into which he is involuntarily drawn—and for this reason Part IV of The Waste Land closes with the following cri de cœur,
It would seem, then, that for Eliot both detaching from the passions and indulging in them leads to the profoundest discontent and bitterness. “I can connect nothing with nothing,” rues the speaker near the end of The Fire Sermon. And while the line, “To Carthage then I came,” is an allusion to St. Augustine who, in his Confessions, wrote, “To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears,” this is clearly not a place the speaker voluntarily seeks so much as a maelstrom into which he is involuntarily drawn—and for this reason Part IV of The Waste Land closes with the following cri de cœur,
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest burning. |
After the brief memento mori of Death by Water, we come to the fifth and last section of the poem, What the Thunder Said: First, a rhythmic elaboration of the opening theme—a human consciousness lost in an arid waste where there is no water to quench its thirst and bring relief but only rock and a sandy road and “dry sterile thunder without rain,” then a series of apocalyptic images (swarming hordes, falling towers, shattered glass and toppling masonry) until, at the climax of the poem, the atmosphere brightens slightly when a cock crows in a flash of lightning and there is, “a damp gust bringing rain.”
There follow three thunderclaps--Da!—which, in the mind of the speaker, at least, sound like three Sanskrit words from the Upanishads: Datta, Dayadhvam and Damyatta; that is, give, sympathise and control. At the poem’s close, the last voice identifies itself with the spiritually crippled Fisher King of Arthurian legend (clearly, then, it has not achieved final redemption) and discharges a flurry of anguished literary allusions. But the apocalyptic culmination of all things, and the nearness of the Absolute, seems to have finally delivered the relief that has been sought by the multitude of voices in the poem, for the last, thrice-repeated word of The Waste Land is Shantih; meaning, approximately, “the peace that passeth understanding.”
So concluded Eliot’s masterwork and so began a great deal of guesswork by perplexed critics. Among them was E. M. Forster who wrote, “Let me go straight to the heart of the matter and say what I think The Waste Land is about. It is about the fertilising waters that arrived too late. It is a poem of horror.” Forster then speculated that, “the horror is so intense that the poet has an inhibition and is unable to state it openly,” before concluding that Eliot, “is difficult because he has seen something terrible, and (underestimating, I think, the general decency of his audience) has declined to say so plainly.” Forster’s amusing attempt to blame his incomprehension on Eliot reminds one of Coleridge’s admonition to readers. “Before you presume to understand a writer’s ignorance,” he said, “presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.” But more importantly, Forster’s thesis is undoubtably incorrect. A poem whose subject is inarticulable horror has no business concluding with, “a peace which passeth understanding.”
I began by saying that The Waste Land is a lamentation on the decay of Western Civilisation. In order to understand this, it is important to remember that Western Civilisation was built on the philosophical, moral and spiritual foundation of Christianity. In this sense “Western Civilisation” is synonymous with “Christian Civilisation” and it is, plausibly, agony over the loss of this heritage that is the overall subject of The Waste Land: the loss of an ultimate meaning and purpose to life; the breakdown of the family and of moral guidelines for relationships; the loss of a means to comfortably confront human mortality and finitude. And it is surely significant that, only at the end of the poem when the Transcendent draws near—albeit in a subtle, syncretic guise—there is an intimation of complete human fulfilment.
A Second Pass: An Affirmation of the Orthodox View of Human Nature. The second way in which the poem can be interpreted leaves the first intact and merely adds to it a level of philosophical depth. For how tidily all this matches to Lewis’ Argument from Desire. Man, Lewis notes, has a haunting desire for the Transcendent that nothing on Earth can satisfy; he is, as a Thomist would put it, ordered towards the Transcendent. Even a cursory study of the history of human civilisation suffices to prove the point: It is obvious, perhaps more obvious than anything else, that man is a religious animal who desires spiritual transcendence and immortality.
On the assumption that there is a God such desires should not surprise us: It is not plausible that God would create beings for a relationship with Himself and fail to endow them with the faculty and motivation to seek it; nor is it plausible that physically embodied beings made in the image of an Eternal Spirit should manifest no awareness of or propensity for eternal and spiritual things. Nor should it surprise us that the frustration of such desires produces feelings of pessimism, futility and despair. “Thou hast made us for Thyself,” writes Augustine in his Confessions, “and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.” Primordial and universal desires, meanwhile, always exist in response to some object of desire that exists in reality. And so, Lewis concludes, God must exist.
The relevant point here is that, in the language of natural law, atheism is a perversion of man’s rational faculty, the ultimate purpose of which is the knowledge of God. To flatly deny the objects of our natural desire for the Transcendent is to frustrate the ends which, given our nature, define what it is for us to flourish as the kinds of things we are; it is to become a being at odds with itself and with its Ultimate Reality; to transform one’s existence into a performative contradiction. If he is to disavow God with Sartre and Camus, Eliot must follow them to the conclusion that nausea and absurdity are the essence of the human experience. It is tragic but understandable that a man who entertains defying his own telos in this way should be moved to say, with the Cumaean Sibyl, “I want to die.”
In this sense The Waste Land does not repudiate but affirms an orthodox view of human nature; not, of course, by means of a didactic exposition but by example—in the form of a poetical lamentation on the decay of Christianity and the devastating effects of this on human consciousness.
A Third Pass: The Prevenient Activity of God in the Consciousness of the Poet. The third and final way in which The Waste Land can be interpreted leaves the first and second intact but adds to them a level of spiritual depth. Consider that the poem’s first existential cry of distress is directed at, “the Son of man,” that there is an Augustinian cri de cœur to the Lord at the end of The Fire Sermon; and that there is an obvious invocation of the Passion of Christ throughout What the Thunder Said: in “the frosty silence in the garden,” which recalls the Lord’s agony in Gethsemane; in the “agony in stony places,” which recalls His crucifixion; in the cock crow, which recalls Peter’s betrayal; and, more saliently, in the lines,
There follow three thunderclaps--Da!—which, in the mind of the speaker, at least, sound like three Sanskrit words from the Upanishads: Datta, Dayadhvam and Damyatta; that is, give, sympathise and control. At the poem’s close, the last voice identifies itself with the spiritually crippled Fisher King of Arthurian legend (clearly, then, it has not achieved final redemption) and discharges a flurry of anguished literary allusions. But the apocalyptic culmination of all things, and the nearness of the Absolute, seems to have finally delivered the relief that has been sought by the multitude of voices in the poem, for the last, thrice-repeated word of The Waste Land is Shantih; meaning, approximately, “the peace that passeth understanding.”
So concluded Eliot’s masterwork and so began a great deal of guesswork by perplexed critics. Among them was E. M. Forster who wrote, “Let me go straight to the heart of the matter and say what I think The Waste Land is about. It is about the fertilising waters that arrived too late. It is a poem of horror.” Forster then speculated that, “the horror is so intense that the poet has an inhibition and is unable to state it openly,” before concluding that Eliot, “is difficult because he has seen something terrible, and (underestimating, I think, the general decency of his audience) has declined to say so plainly.” Forster’s amusing attempt to blame his incomprehension on Eliot reminds one of Coleridge’s admonition to readers. “Before you presume to understand a writer’s ignorance,” he said, “presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.” But more importantly, Forster’s thesis is undoubtably incorrect. A poem whose subject is inarticulable horror has no business concluding with, “a peace which passeth understanding.”
I began by saying that The Waste Land is a lamentation on the decay of Western Civilisation. In order to understand this, it is important to remember that Western Civilisation was built on the philosophical, moral and spiritual foundation of Christianity. In this sense “Western Civilisation” is synonymous with “Christian Civilisation” and it is, plausibly, agony over the loss of this heritage that is the overall subject of The Waste Land: the loss of an ultimate meaning and purpose to life; the breakdown of the family and of moral guidelines for relationships; the loss of a means to comfortably confront human mortality and finitude. And it is surely significant that, only at the end of the poem when the Transcendent draws near—albeit in a subtle, syncretic guise—there is an intimation of complete human fulfilment.
A Second Pass: An Affirmation of the Orthodox View of Human Nature. The second way in which the poem can be interpreted leaves the first intact and merely adds to it a level of philosophical depth. For how tidily all this matches to Lewis’ Argument from Desire. Man, Lewis notes, has a haunting desire for the Transcendent that nothing on Earth can satisfy; he is, as a Thomist would put it, ordered towards the Transcendent. Even a cursory study of the history of human civilisation suffices to prove the point: It is obvious, perhaps more obvious than anything else, that man is a religious animal who desires spiritual transcendence and immortality.
On the assumption that there is a God such desires should not surprise us: It is not plausible that God would create beings for a relationship with Himself and fail to endow them with the faculty and motivation to seek it; nor is it plausible that physically embodied beings made in the image of an Eternal Spirit should manifest no awareness of or propensity for eternal and spiritual things. Nor should it surprise us that the frustration of such desires produces feelings of pessimism, futility and despair. “Thou hast made us for Thyself,” writes Augustine in his Confessions, “and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.” Primordial and universal desires, meanwhile, always exist in response to some object of desire that exists in reality. And so, Lewis concludes, God must exist.
The relevant point here is that, in the language of natural law, atheism is a perversion of man’s rational faculty, the ultimate purpose of which is the knowledge of God. To flatly deny the objects of our natural desire for the Transcendent is to frustrate the ends which, given our nature, define what it is for us to flourish as the kinds of things we are; it is to become a being at odds with itself and with its Ultimate Reality; to transform one’s existence into a performative contradiction. If he is to disavow God with Sartre and Camus, Eliot must follow them to the conclusion that nausea and absurdity are the essence of the human experience. It is tragic but understandable that a man who entertains defying his own telos in this way should be moved to say, with the Cumaean Sibyl, “I want to die.”
In this sense The Waste Land does not repudiate but affirms an orthodox view of human nature; not, of course, by means of a didactic exposition but by example—in the form of a poetical lamentation on the decay of Christianity and the devastating effects of this on human consciousness.
A Third Pass: The Prevenient Activity of God in the Consciousness of the Poet. The third and final way in which The Waste Land can be interpreted leaves the first and second intact but adds to them a level of spiritual depth. Consider that the poem’s first existential cry of distress is directed at, “the Son of man,” that there is an Augustinian cri de cœur to the Lord at the end of The Fire Sermon; and that there is an obvious invocation of the Passion of Christ throughout What the Thunder Said: in “the frosty silence in the garden,” which recalls the Lord’s agony in Gethsemane; in the “agony in stony places,” which recalls His crucifixion; in the cock crow, which recalls Peter’s betrayal; and, more saliently, in the lines,
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which recalls the Lord’s death and the despair of his followers. Interestingly, however, Eliot’s footnotes ignore the most significant religious allusion of all; for following these obvious Gospel allusions (and in the middle of a description of human misery in a desert landscape) we read,
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded, I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you? |
This parallels the famous encounter between Jesus and two disciples on the Road to Emmaus recorded in Luke—one of the earliest appearances of Jesus after His crucifixion and burial, for which reason the disciples, like the narrator of What the Thunder Said, found themselves walking in despair along a desert road; and again like our narrator, were soon joined by a mysterious third whom they did not, at first, recognise.
The Resurrection of Jesus is the moment at which God makes a decisive reply to all the horror, helplessness and despair of the Passion—as well as all the horror, helplessness and despair of human life that are the subject of The Waste Land. It is therefore very strange that in his note to these lines Eliot makes no mention of the Road to Emmaus. Instead, he claims that they were inspired by reports that, on their ill-fated Antarctic expedition, Shackleton’s men, “had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.” The omission is made stranger still by the fact that Eliot, in an earlier note, does identify “the journey to Emmaus” as one of the themes of Part V and even says—for no obvious reason—that the hooded figure is associated in his mind with the Hanged Man on one of the Tarot Cards of Madame Sosostris; in other words, that the mysterious third figure encountered on the desert road is a victim of execution.
It is almost as though, as Eliot gave heartfelt expression to the problem of life five years before his conversion, God was already whispering the solution. To the desperate voices crying out for water that open The Waste Land and multiply at its climax, the answer is John 4:13 in which Jesus says, “whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” And even Eliot’s premature Shantih seems to prefigure Philippians 4:6-7,
The Resurrection of Jesus is the moment at which God makes a decisive reply to all the horror, helplessness and despair of the Passion—as well as all the horror, helplessness and despair of human life that are the subject of The Waste Land. It is therefore very strange that in his note to these lines Eliot makes no mention of the Road to Emmaus. Instead, he claims that they were inspired by reports that, on their ill-fated Antarctic expedition, Shackleton’s men, “had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.” The omission is made stranger still by the fact that Eliot, in an earlier note, does identify “the journey to Emmaus” as one of the themes of Part V and even says—for no obvious reason—that the hooded figure is associated in his mind with the Hanged Man on one of the Tarot Cards of Madame Sosostris; in other words, that the mysterious third figure encountered on the desert road is a victim of execution.
It is almost as though, as Eliot gave heartfelt expression to the problem of life five years before his conversion, God was already whispering the solution. To the desperate voices crying out for water that open The Waste Land and multiply at its climax, the answer is John 4:13 in which Jesus says, “whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” And even Eliot’s premature Shantih seems to prefigure Philippians 4:6-7,
Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
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Here a skeptic might conclude that these details merely show an incipient interest in Christianity at the time Eliot wrote The Waste Land. That is reasonable. But it is also reasonable to wonder if they show something else: The subtle, prevenient work of God in the consciousness of the poet which the poet himself hardly noticed.
[1] Moreland has suggested that one test for the truth of a worldview is whether it can be consistently lived out. Remembering that fourteen years later, Virginia Woolf would drown herself in the river Ouse, it is hard to view her scorn for religion with anything but sad puzzlement. So Reid (considering the course of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hume) suggests that a traveler who finds himself in a coal pit must realise that he has taken a wrong turn.
[2] “Bitter and desolate is the sea.” One of two lines from the libretto to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
[3] Sweeny is a satyrish rogue in Sweeny Agonistes, an earlier poem by T. S. Eliot; and the lines about Mrs. Porter are adapted from a vulgar wartime song about a prostitutes. In the original, it is not their feet that mother and daughter wash in soda water.
[2] “Bitter and desolate is the sea.” One of two lines from the libretto to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
[3] Sweeny is a satyrish rogue in Sweeny Agonistes, an earlier poem by T. S. Eliot; and the lines about Mrs. Porter are adapted from a vulgar wartime song about a prostitutes. In the original, it is not their feet that mother and daughter wash in soda water.