Nostos—the Greek concept of homecoming—has appeared in countless retellings of the Odysseus myth, from Joyce’s Ulysses in prose fiction to the Cohen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou in film. I recently stumbled upon a lesser-known retelling of The Odyssey in Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Odysseus to Telemachus” and wanted to write a bit about why this poem moved me. It’s been a while since I did a poetry analysis post, anyhow, and it’s time to jump back in with a lesser-known poem.

In “Odysseus to Telemachus,” Joseph Brodsky, a Russian expat and Nobel Prize-winning poet, reimagines Odysseus through the lens of his own exile from the Soviet Union, lending a unique perspective to Homer’s timeless tale.

Let’s read the poem below. I have pulled up the translation from poets.org.

My dear Telemachus,
                   The Trojan War 
is over now; I don’t recall who won it. 
The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave
so many dead so far from their own homeland. 
But still, my homeward way has proved too long. 
While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon, 
it almost seems, stretched and extended space.

I don’t know where I am or what this place 
can be. It would appear some filthy island, 
with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs. 
A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other. 
Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son! 
To a wanderer the faces of all islands 
resemble one another. And the mind 
trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons, 
run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears. 
I can’t remember how the war came out; 
even how old you are—I can’t remember.

Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong. 
Only the gods know if we’ll see each other 
again. You’ve long since ceased to be that babe 
before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks. 
Had it not been for Palamedes’ trick 
we two would still be living in one household. 
But maybe he was right; away from me 
you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions, 
and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.

As I am fortunate enough to have access to the original Russian text (which you can access here), I will quote from the original in several places throughout my analysis (with translations, of course). As an aside, I am very excited to be bringing Russian poetry to you all—a lot of us are familiar with the Russian novelist beasts, but I find that Russian poetry is less widely disseminated. I aim to amend that through this post (and hopefully through future posts as well).

With that said, let’s turn to the poem.

“Odysseus to Telemachus” is written from the perspective of the seafarer Odysseus, who embarks on a protracted journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Brodsky’s poem is a vision of a letter written from a father to an abandoned son. The poem begins with a jaded observation about the war, and as we progress through the text, we witness Odysseus becoming increasingly indifferent to the destruction around him, losing sensitivity to anything that does not directly affect his son—including the flux of the world and the passage of time.

As Odysseus heads home from the Trojan War, the diction with which he describes his surroundings creates a picture of destruction and corruption, which eventually become synonymous with change. One of the first memories that he recalls is the desolation of the Trojan War itself: “столько мертвецов/вне дома бросить могут только греки” (The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave/so many dead so far from their own homeland). Odysseus blames the Greeks for the war and observes a destructive force in his people as he notes both their disregard for the homeland of the Trojans and their unadulterated thirst for victory. Odysseus seems to grow more pessimistic, noting the duration of his journey and the distractions that he encounters along the way. He tells Telemachus about his encounter with Calypso and some of the other islands he visits:

Какой-то грязный остров,
кусты, постройки, хрюканье свиней,
заросший сад, какая-то царица,
трава да камни. (11-14)

It would appear some filthy island,
with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs.
A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other.

Here, Odysseus describes a dirty island and paints a scene that is almost urban in nature, reminiscent of the filth of industrialization with its buildings, bushes, and pigs. The pigs are an allusion to the power of the enchantress Circe, who transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs and further delays their return to Ithaca. We can read the transformed pigs as emblems of the futility of homecoming; Odysseus, therefore, equates transformation with corruption and destruction—in this case, it is a destruction of his plans to return home. In the following line, he elaborates on his surroundings and alludes to Hamlet’s first important soliloquy, in which the Danish prince laments the change that his mother has undergone following King Hamlet’s death. “’Tis an unweeded garden,” Hamlet declares of his surrounding world, “That grows to seed” (see Hamlet 1.2.135-36). Recall that, at this stage in the play, Hamlet is faced with a stark change in his mother as she quickly abandons the memory of old King Hamlet and marries his brother Claudius. Hamlet remarks on and is disgusted by her supposed promiscuity, and as he contemplates Gertrude’s ability to move on from her husband so quickly after his death, he adopts a misogynistic worldview that, for him, represents the corruption of the world. You might remember that his soliloquy culminates in one of the most famous Shakespeare lines of all time: “Frailty, thy name is woman!” Similarly, Brodsky’s Odysseus draws a parallel between the fickle woman and the corruption of the world as represented by an unweeded garden. In alluding to Hamlet’s garden, therefore, Brodsky paints an Odysseus who becomes unable to accept the changing world around him; he is unsettled by the constant turbulence of his travels and concludes that the world must be corrupt. In the same line, after all, comes an off-handed mention “of some queen or other,” pointing, perhaps, to Odysseus’s own misogyny as he scorns the women around him—most notably Circe and Calypso—who have detained him in his journey.

Yet Odysseus does not cast his scorn or hatred exclusively on women—he is in, fact, wholly indifferent to the world around him. His description of the grass and rocks is especially poignant in the Russian, which reads “трава да камни.” The insertion of the particle “да” in the place of something more conventional such as “and” or “or” generates a sense of stark passivity; whatever Odysseus observes around him amounts to the same old story. “Все острова,” he continues, “похожи друг на друга” (all of the islands look like one another). He no longer cares to distinguish between the places he visits and longs only to return home. At the end of the long stanza, he reiterates his indifference about the war and then begins to look forward to his reunion with his son: “Не помню я, чем кончилась война,/ и сколько лет тебе сейчас, не помню” (I can’t remember how the war came out; /even how old you are—I can’t remember). He doesn’t remember how the war ended and perhaps doesn’t care. At this point in his journey, he only thinks about his son, his weariness reflected in the chilling announcement that he cannot even remember how old Telemachus is. Interestingly enough, the construction of these two lines is reminiscent of the Ancient Greek convention of chiasmus, where two grammatical structures are reversed over two phrases. In the Greek and Roman tradition, chiasmus typically connoted a reversal of sentiment or rhetorical antithesis—in our case, Brodsky first places subject and verb—“не помню”—at the beginning of first clause, and then at the end of the second clause. We can conjecture, then, that where Odysseus’s first thought is rife with indifference, his second thought demonstrates the exact opposite sentiment: Odysseus cares deeply for his son.

The epithets with which Odysseus addresses Telemachus, in fact, constitute the only example of tender diction that we receive in the entire poem. The first line sets the stage for the thought to which Odysseus continually returns: “Мой Tелемак” (My Telemachus). This compassionate address resurfaces at the beginning of the second stanza in line 22 and in the very last line of the poem. The remaining instance of Telemachus’s name is also accompanied by a tender description: “Милый Телемак” (Dear Telemachus). We can observe how Odysseus’s tone thus alters whenever he directly addresses his son, shifting from indifference to paternal love.

Indeed, Odysseus’s care for his son incites him to protect Telemachus from destruction at all costs. Just as all else around Odysseus, Telemachus must change with the passage of time; because Odysseus has seen so much change throughout his journey—change that he associates with ruin—he becomes increasingly protective of Telemachus, wishing to deflect any ruin that may come his way. Odysseus recognizes that Telemachus is no longer a child and reminiscences on how he used to protect him from potential danger as he reigned in oxen. In a sinister shift in tone, Odysseus realizes that he will no longer be able to keep his son from harm. At last, however, the dreadful thought is upon him—Odysseus might himself bring destruction to his son by coming home. “Без меня,” he thinks, “ты от страстей Эдиповых избавлен,/ и сны твои, мой Телемак, безгрешны” (away from me/ you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions,/and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless). Wearied by his travels, Odysseus’s primary preoccupation is homecoming, yet, as he approaches Ithaca and considers the most important thing he left behind—his son—it dawns on him that his homecoming might be a corrupting force in itself: Telemachus has grown up fatherless and has thus remained in innocence, free of the desire to murder his father, as in the famous Oedipus myth. Odysseus’s final realization—“Но может быть и прав он” (But maybe he was right)—thus casts a bleak and tragic shadow over the poem, for, in his great desire to protect his son from destruction, he realizes that his own nostos may be impossible.

In retelling the Odysseus myth, Brodsky thus offers us a more ominous portrait of Homer’s famous tale: as Odysseus’s love of Telemachus grows deeper, his final wish becomes to protect his son from corruption—even at the expense of his own paternal love.

And we can only ever guess how much of Odysseus’s pain in the poem is Brodsky’s own.

It’s hard to be a woman. One day you’re too strange, the next day you’re too bland; one day you’re too wild, the next day, you’re too tame.

Anne Sexton knew this all too well.

Despite enjoying great acclaim during her short lifespan, Sexton struggled with depression after childbirth and used poetry as a way to cope between her fraught therapy sessions. In her haunting poem “Her Kind,” she explores much of her inner turmoil by inviting us into the minds of a variety of different women, all of whom embody an “Every Woman” figure we can recognize within our own psyches. Rivaled only by the great Sylvia Plath, Sexton presents us with an integral work that establishes her as a key player in the confessional poetry tradition. “Her Kind,” lending itself to several captivating interpretations and presenting an apt commentary on the female mind, offers a unique window into 20th-century womanhood.

Let’s first give the poem a read.

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch, 
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light: 
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. 
A woman like that is not a woman, quite. 
I have been her kind. 

I have found the warm caves in the woods, 
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: 
whining, rearranging the misaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my  nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. 
A woman like that is not ashamed to die. 
I have been her kind.

From its opening lines, you might imagine “Her Kind” as a Halloween poem, with possessed witches haunting the air as they wreak havoc on its unsuspecting inhabitants. Yet Sexton’s poem references a different sort of witch—the witches of the Salem Witch Trials, one of history’s most salient examples of the oppression of women, where women were painted as mystical viragos and later sentenced to death. Sexton’s poem suggests that not much has changed in the 20th century—and that, in fact, many women are still wrongfully accused of ills to which they have no direct relation. In the first stanza, Sexton imagines herself as such a witch, reclaiming this negative image of women to comment on the multifaceted nature of a woman’s inner turmoil.

At its core, the poem cycles through three stages of what we might consider “traditionally feminine” struggles, and its opening stanza addresses women who, like the women in the witch trials accused of madness, are driven out of their minds. Interestingly enough, each of the poem’s three stanzas starts off with a traditional ABAB rhyme scheme and then diverges from it entirely, as if progressively undermining traditional norms through verse. Because of fraught societal standards, Sexton explains, many women gravitate towards darkness, feeling “braver at night” when not scrutinized under the light of day. The poem’s first stanza thus comments on the dangerous consequences of loneliness and despair—and the way that these common female struggles can make a woman seem “possessed.” Sexton’s own experience with postpartum depression likely informs her take on the madness of women as she pushes back on the common portrayal of women as hysterical.

In the poem’s second stanza, Sexton takes on another traditional female stereotype—that of the woman in the house—and refutes the societal perception of women as maternal, warm, and hospitable. She describes an assortment of kitchen utensils as she challenges the woman-as-housewife motif, depicting the men around her who do not adequately appreciate women as “worms” and “elves.” A traditional woman, she claims, is misunderstood by these creatures because, though seemingly restoring order to the world through her work, such a woman cannot adequately express her inner turmoil and becomes increasingly unstable on the inside as a result.

In the final stanza, Sexton puts herself into the shoes of a wild woman, playing into the stereotype that women are hysterical. She states that she, too, has experienced the mindset of a woman burned and tormented to death, calling our attention back to the image of the Salem Witch Trials in the opening lines as she imagines herself barbarically immolated. Yet in fighting against this sort of subjugation, she establishes herself as a woman who is both strong and unafraid, staring death in the eye as she announces that if women are subjected to such demeaning treatment, she is unabashedly ready to take on the challenge of womanhood—even if it ends in death.

While we might speculate that Sexton sees herself in the sort of women she describes in the poem, we can also read this deeply confessional poem as a plea for women to consider their historical position in society and realize that they are not alone.

“Her Kind” is a unique poem in the feminist tradition that encapsulates the complicated feelings that come with womanhood in elegant verse. When we consider our own feelings of confusion and shame, we will forever recall the words of Anne Sexton as we realize that, yes, we have all been “her kind.”

Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” a sober yet startlingly familiar meditation on mortality, is perhaps the twentieth century’s most famous poem about that most universal of universal human themes—death. Larkin’s last major work is at once stark and introspective, painting a vivid scene of one man’s rumination on the inevitability of leaving our world behind. What can we learn from this singular take on ephemerality? Let’s read “Aubade” to find out.

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Aubade by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   
Till then I see what’s really always there:   
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   
Making all thought impossible but how   
And where and when I shall myself die.   
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   
—The good not done, the love not given, time   
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   
That slows each impulse down to indecision.   
Most things may never happen: this one will,   
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without   
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave   
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The first thing you might notice is that the poem is simplistic and straightforward. We have none of T.S. Eliot’s abstruse literary allusions or Sylvia Plath’s complex metaphors for womanhood. Instead, the poet tells us directly how he spends his days: “I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.” The first line of the poem introduces its main theme—the human attempt to avoid the inevitability of death—and, as we progress, the poem oscillates between such quotidian experiences and the narrator’s inner turmoil. In the middle of the night, for instance, Larkin, neither working nor drunk, is forced to confront his own mortality as anxiety becomes personified as a being of its own.

Larkin then asks himself what to make of his new companion—and whether we should fear death or accept it as an inevitable part of life. In the following stanza, the poet frets about how little time he has to interact with other people and wonders whether a given individual can truly have an impact on the collective good. He describes death as “the sure extinction that we travel to,” emphasizing its inevitability in plain terms to provide a sobering contrast to the typical poetic discussion on the topic—it does not do us well, Larkin assures us, to couch death in poetic language to attempt to mitigate its haunting reality.

As the poem progresses to the third stanza, Larkin considers the role of religion as a sort of analgesic against death and concludes that not even devout religious belief can allay the terror of knowing that everything must pass. Here, we enjoy the poem’s first elaborate metaphor, with religion portrayed as a more noble contrast to the poet’s previous earthly musings. Religion, however, though a “musical” brocade, becomes moth-eaten—a futile endeavor that has eroded over time and a decorative accessory that has lost its value. Larkin then goes so far as to argue that staunch religious belief only exacerbates the fear of death, for it misguides us into thinking that it is not possible to fear something that we cannot experience—a notion that the poet rejects as false. In so doing, Larkin equates death with nothingness and claims that it is precisely this nothingness that human beings fear the most. If life is a sensory experience—filled not only with sight and sound but also with conscience—then death, with its absence of all sensation, is its prime antithesis.

Is there an antidote, then, to the fear of death? Larkin devotes the next stanza to this question yet does not come up with a satisfying answer. He personifies death as “a small unfocused blur,” emphasizing the ambiguity of an event that every living being is privy to yet never will consciously experience. The way we typically quell anxiety, Larkin suggests, is by assuring ourselves that the outcome is highly unlikely—yet here, the method is faulty, for death is sure to happen. We can, perhaps, distract ourselves from the thought of death by surrounding ourselves with other people or indulging in food or drink, but for a moment, Larkin invites us to stare death in the face and imagine a world without these sweet distractions. Courage, he claims, will not save us. There is not much we can do aside from acknowledge the reality of death—at the end of the day, neither fear nor bravery will make a difference.

Yet despite the darkness that permeates the poem, Larkin leaves us with a layer of optimism as we progress into the final stanza. Night gives way to day as light spills into the room, transforming the hazy shadows of the unknown into the tangible, recognizable wardrobe of the morning. Death becomes personified as a quotidian fixture of life, ushering in the telephones and offices of the work day and other such familiar distractions. The notion of death is still ominous—with the offices locked-up and the world uncaring—yet in the daytime, it becomes more ordinary and comprehensible. Dreariness gives way to a subtle optimism that negates the anxiety the narrator previously experienced. The sky is white as clay, the sun is gone, yet life goes on—if only for a moment.

“Aubade” is far from a cheerful ballad, yet in contrasting the daytime and the beauty of life with the grim imagery of the night, Larkin highlights life’s intrinsic value and suggests that while we must all come to term with death, we must also embrace the ordinary joys of life and make the most of the short time we have on our planet.

Perhaps, then, we have an optimistic poem after all.

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Impression du Matin

The Thames nocturne of blue and gold
    Changed to a Harmony in grey:
    A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold
The yellow fog came creeping down
    The bridges, till the houses’ walls
    Seemed changed to shadows, and S. Paul’s
Loomed like a bubble o’er the town.
Then suddenly arose the clang
    Of waking life; the streets were stirred
    With country waggons: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.
But one pale woman all alone,
    The daylight kissing her wan hair,
    Loitered beneath the gas lamps’ flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.

The poem’s French title—“Morning Impression”—is perhaps intentionally misleading, leading us to expect a scene drawn from the streets or the salons of Paris; what we receive instead is a portrait of the River Thames, placing us immediately in Wilde’s London. Wilde’s diction evokes both a musicality and an artistic temperament, with words such as “nocturne” and “harmony” evoking the piano pieces of Debussy, and descriptive colors—“blue,” “gold,” and “grey”—channeling the canvases of Monet. The river is at once a painting and a musical composition, creating a synesthetic experience for Wilde’s readers as sound is blended with sight. The reader receives two distinct impressions of the River Thames in the first stanza, the first majestic in its blue and gold, the second more gloomy in its grey, representative of two opposing facets of London.

If such a movement as poetic impressionism exists, Wilde is perhaps its paragon. With its consistent iambic tetrameter, the poem feels like a set of notes or brushstrokes hastily yet playfully composed, close enough to iambic pentameter to be in dialogue with the English poetic tradition yet not rigid enough to wholly embody it—one might recall the experience of regarding a Monet alongside a Raphael. Iambic tetrameter appears in many lines throughout Coleridge’s “Christabel,” a deceptively simple nursery rhyme that soon turns nightmarish.

“Impression du Matin” is thus at once evocative and rudimentary. Its rhyme scheme is consistent throughout, adhering to a standard ABBA pattern in all four stanzas. But Wilde’s use of enjambment—sentences that spill from one line to the next—reinforce the sense of impressionistic immediacy. The first stanza flows directly into the next; at this stage of the poem, he describes a “chill” and “cold” yellow fog, creating a sort of sensual experience.

We can compare the second stanza of “Impression du Matin” to a stanza from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses’ walls
Seemed changed to shadows and S. Paul’s
Loomed like a bubble o’er the town.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

It is possible that Eliot draws on Wilde’s description of London in his own rendition of the city as it appears in Prufrock’s imagination (I presume here that Prufrock inhabits London). The parallel diction and tone are indeed stunning, with both poets presenting the “yellow fog” as a personified entity that ominously roams the city. The fog seems to examine the enigmatic infrastructure that exemplifies modern urban life and creates a sense of alienation in both poems. Wilde’s London—just as Eliot’s will be some decades later—is at once familiar and alienating.

In the third stanza, the poem moves away from its more materialistic descriptions as it tackles “waking life.” The emerging bird sets the stage for the final stanza, which introduces a human figure in the form of a “pale woman.” The woman stands “alone” and thereby augments the feeling of alienation that we receive throughout this picture of urban London. Given the manner in which this woman appears, she seems to almost blend in with the description of the city and become one with its inanimate elements. Her “lips of flame” recall the “glistening roofs” in the previous stanza, and the final words of the poem inform us that she has a “heart of stone.” Thus she becomes virtually indistinguishable from her insentient surroundings, which highlights the mechanical nature of urban life and the insignificance of man in the face of that which he has artificially created.

Is Wilde’s poem thus merely a morose picture of city life? Certainly it dwells on the loneliness of London, but perhaps its arch rhymes and consistent rhyme scheme suggest that there is wonder still to be found in such a world—if only one is perceptive enough to find it.

Lullaby - W.B. Yeats

Beloved, may your sleep be sound
That have found it where you fed.
What were all the world's alarms
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen's arms?

Sleep, beloved, such a sleep
As did that wild Tristram know
When, the potion's work being done,
Roe could run or doe could leap
Under oak and beechen bough,
Roe could leap or doe could run;

Such a sleep and sound as fell
Upon Eurotas' grassy bank
When the holy bird, that there
Accomplished his predestined will,
From the limbs of Leda sank
But not from her protecting care.

Let us begin in Ancient Rome. Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the infamous tale of Arachne—the young girl who challenges the goddess Minerva to a tapestry weaving contest—in Book 6, yet perhaps slightly lesser known is the story of Jupiter (the Roman name for the Greek God Zeus) and Leda, which appears woven in Arachne’s tapestry. Arachne recalls Jupiter’s rape of a woman named Leda, who is subsequently transformed into a swan—one of many metamorphoses we find in Ovid’s collection. Taking up this same story in his poem Lullaby, William Butler Yeats invites us to consider sexual desire as benign and innocent rather than as destructive and violent. In Lullaby, Yeats turns several violent mythological tales on their heads as he presents his own interpretation—or, perhaps, presents an ironic commentary on the violence of love.

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Yeats first draws a parallel between lover and child before placing a peaceful bedroom scene against the backdrop of a violent war. In the first stanza of the poem, he paints a portrait of erotic bliss between the mythological Paris and Helen—two figures from Homer’s Iliad—and blurs the boundaries between a parent-child and a lover-lover relationship, thereby ascribing a childlike playfulness to erotic desire. Rather than presenting the standard condemnatory picture of desire gone awry—the classic take on Paris, whose lust for Helen is violent enough to provoke the Trojan War—Yeats depicts an alternate paradigm in which Paris’s desire for Helen is gentle and innocent, absolving erotic desire of its negative qualities. 

As the poem’s title suggests, our first stanza begins with a parent (let us assume a mother, for simplicity’s sake) who addresses a child about to go to sleep. She calls her child “beloved,” an address typical of one lover to another (perhaps of Paris to Helen), and tells her child that he has found “sleep” where he “fed,” highlighting two of the most fundamental human needs and portraying a child’s most basic desires. Just as a child desires a “sound” sleep, so does Paris long for peace through sleep in Helen’s arms. Yeats’ language is simplistic, and the rhyme here occurs in the word “found,” which Yeats uses to describe the acquisition of sleep in both the child and Paris. The diction, therefore, ties the feeling of desire to a primal sense of discovery that recalls childlike wonder. We thus discern a parallel between the child and Paris in their mutual desire for sleep, a symbol for peace and stability, and in the innocence that defines this sort of sleep. Paris, furthermore, seeks refuge in “Helen’s arms,” a description that equates Helen with a maternal figure and further strengthens the parallel between the child and Paris. Thus desire, in its association with a sleeping child, becomes an emblem of innocence rather than a force of destruction. 

According to Yeats, such desire is powerful enough to stave off the chaos that ensues in the following lines. We might assume from a preliminary reading that the “world’s alarms” (most likely the onset of the Trojan War), should disrupt Paris’ peace, yet Paris slumbers on regardless, and this rest becomes his ultimate source of satisfaction; the continual enjambment from the third to the sixth lines, for instance, highlights his urgency to reach repose in Helen’s arms. The Trojan War no longer matters to Paris—his desire for Helen allows him to block out the surrounding disaster. Paris’s world thus becomes dreamlike and blissful: although Yeats may be giving Paris a literal golden bed to lie upon to symbolize luxury, we may interpret the golden bed metaphorically as the epitome of desire and happiness. In contrast to the destruction of the war outside, Paris and Helen enjoy a stable love. Even just a moment of desire, the “first dawn,” is enough for Paris to disregard the world around him. He concentrates solely on the bliss of his experience: sleep in Helen’s arms. 

Sleep then becomes the ultimate source of satisfaction for Paris, and because the first two lines of the poem set up sleep in relation to a child, we can imagine Paris as an innocent child when he is with Helen rather than a character who has violated the peace both of the woman he seizes and the world around him. We find, therefore, that Yeats represents Paris’s sexual desire as stable and peaceful rather than as destructive and violent. 

As we transition to the second stanza, this theme of peaceful sleep reemerges in a similar mythological tale—the tale of Tristram. This is, of course, the story of Tristan and Isolde—the same medieval legend that Richard Wagner adapts in his opera Tristan und Isolde. In the myth, the knight Tristan, after having slain Isode’s betrothed, King Mark, captures Isolde and carries her off with him. In this way, the Tristan story parallels the story of Paris and Helen: both men carry off their lovers against their wills. Along the way, however, Tristan and Isolde both take a love potion and fall for each other (if you’re interested in learning more about their unnatural love, you can check out my analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land here—a poem that quotes from Wagner’s opera and uses the backdrop of the Tristan myth to establish a deeper layer of meaning). 

But Yeats, in the ensuing imagery, turns this love from unnatural to natural. We have roes and does and oaks and boughs; the repetition and rhymes here resemble that of a nursery rhyme, once again recalling our sleeping child from the poem’s opening stanza. In crafting this stanza, Yeats seems to be suggesting that Tristan’s conquest of Isolde is natural indeed. 

Finally, sleep reaches Leda, who finds peace as a swan on the bank of the river Eurotas—once again, Yeats invokes naturalistic imagery to emphasize the serenity and ease with which these lovers find peace. The holy bird (Jupiter) having accomplished his “predestined will” (which we may assume to be the rape of Leda), sinks from Leda’s body but not from her care, returning us to the image of the mother and the tranquility that comes from a mother’s love. Leda, as a swan and mother, seems at peace, sleeping soundly.

Does Yeats, then, suggest that love restores peace, lulling lovers off to sleep? Without the mythological backdrop, that would seem to be the most accurate conclusion of this poem. If I had not told you that the three myths mentioned here—Paris and Helen, Tristan and Isolde, and Jupiter and Leda—were all myths of rape, perhaps we could then read Yeats’ poem as such. Yet it is no accident that Yeats singles out three mythological stories that concern the mistreatment of women. Does Yeats, then, consciously turn these tales on their head to present a peaceful alternative to sexual violence, or does he intend to leave us with an ironic commentary on the injustices that these women have been subjected to as the rest of the world turns a blind eye to their suffering—as the men in this poem go off to sleep peacefully amidst their suffering? A grimmer read might suggest the latter, but I’d like to stay optimistic—in pointing out these misdemeanors, Yeats, perhaps, suggests that we might move towards a more peaceful future in which male love might turn more gentle. 

Background and Intro

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is perhaps one of my favorite poems of all time. Certainly, it’s the most abstruse poem out of my array of favorites—it’s also the poem I analyzed extensively for my MA thesis several years ago. 

The Waste Land is widely considered to be one of the 20th century’s greatest and most profound poems, and rightly so. Over the next several months, we’ll be tackling The Waste Land through a five-part series of articles and videos. 

You can check out my video intro to the Waste Land here and read the full poem here. 

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I first came across the Waste Land in the 7th grade when I was just 12 years old. That afternoon, my 7th grade English teacher introduced our class to Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man” through the unorthodox method of having us all stand around outside for an hour on the frigid January morning so that we could become, in his words, literal snowmen. As we rushed back into the classroom to revel in the power of modern heat technology, my teacher began to lecture us about the poem’s bleak yet hopeful underpinnings and likened its conclusion to Eliot’s The Waste Land—both poems find recourse in the meditative aspect of Eastern philosophy. Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued, especially after my teacher left us with the thought that The Waste Land is probably one of the world’s most difficult poems to comprehend. Twelve-year-old Liza was up for the challenge. 

Of course, at twelve, slogging through the poem and missing 90% of its literary, philosophical and musical references, I came away from the poem more baffled than satisfied yet resolved to revisit the work as I grew older.  

By the age of eighteen, picking up the poem once again, I was absolutely hooked. 

The Waste Land is a poem about the futility of human desire. Published in 1922, the poem originally ran a whopping 19 pages long and would have likely retained its epic length had it not been edited by Eliot’s friend and fellow modernist poet Ezra Pound. Eliot later dedicated the poem to Pound, whom he called il miglior fabbro—“the better craftsman.” 

The Waste Land is divided into five sections, each of which mirrors an act of a Shakespearean drama. Eliot was a staunch proponent of tradition, arguing, in his famous essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, that one must first understand the history of the literary tradition before leaving a mark upon it. Eliot’s homage to Shakespeare is a nod towards literary dialogue and a key component to understanding the development of his poem. 

Throughout much of his work, Eliot aims to spark conversation with the figures of the literary past. In the notes to The Waste Land, for instance, he cites a book called from Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston as his primary inspiration. “Not only the title,” writes Eliot, “but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend.” We might presume that Eliot’s fascination for antiquity led him to select Arthurian romance as the backdrop for his poem.

As its title suggests, The Waste Land tackles the issue of societal decay through a reinterpretation of Arthurian legend. Just as James Joyce’s Ulysses is a loose retelling of Odysseus' homecoming in Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Eliot’s The Waste Land broadly follows the story of the Fisher King from the famous Perceval myth. In Perceval (the same myth that gives us the legend of the Holy Grail), we learn that the Fisher King once presided over a thriving kingdom, yet a wound on his leg has rendered him barren, leaving his kingdom to fester and decay. Though Arthurian myths—in the vein of the Greek epic tradition—may have been disseminated orally, artists throughout literary history have attempted to capture the story of the Fisher King in verse and prose alike: Chrétien de Troyes in his verse romance Perceval, Wolfram von Eschenbach in his chivalric romance Parzival, and Thomas Malory in his Arthurian behemoth Le Morte d'Arthur, to name a few. Yet Eliot’s Fisher King is perhaps best known as King Amfortas from Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, and indeed, it is no accident that Eliot, a great admirer of Wagner, quotes from several of his operas throughout the poem, borrowing motifs from the composer to bring his story to life. 

Understanding The Waste Land’s Wagnerian parallel is crucial to tapping into the poem’s deeper meaning: Wagner’s persistent commentary on the unnatural and even sickly nature of many human relationships strikes an important chord with the overall message of The Waste Land, and characters from Wagner’s operas and Eliot’s Waste Land alike evince a vehement urge to attain genuine connections in the face of desolation and despair. Eliot thus uses the Wagnerian trope of unattainable and unnatural desire to stress the perils to which modern society has subjected itself. But though Fisher King might stand for infertility, in Eliot’s retelling of the myth, he becomes a vehicle for bringing life back from the dead and imbuing meaning into an absurd and senseless world. Just like the Perceval myth, The Waste Land becomes a quest story—a story of recovery, fertility, and coherence. 

In looking to Wagner, Eliot offers a potential solution to societal decay through the revitalization and transformation of human relationships—a topic we’ll further explore in our next analysis of The Waste Land.

Part 1

In the intro and backdrop to The Waste Land, we learned about how the poem is a reinterpretation of the Fisher King myth. Today, we’ll discuss how this mythical figure plays into the first part of the poem and what this might tell us about desire in The Burial of the Dead. 

Let’s start with the epigraph. A poem’s epigraph is typically a short quotation that provides a lead-in to a poem’s overall theme or message. Eliot chooses a rather abstruse epigraph for his poem—in keeping with the poem’s overall abstruse nature, of course—and gives us a quote partially in Latin and partially in Ancient Greek. It’s an excerpt from an early Latin satirical piece by Gaius Petronius called—quite aptly—The Satyricon. 

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεîν θέλω.’

There are several different translations to the excerpt above, but here’s my own translation based on my limited working knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek:

“For I saw the Cumean Sybil hanging in a jar with my own eyes, and the boys asked her, ‘Sybil, what do you want?’; she responded, ‘I want to die.’ ” 

The myth of the Cumean Sybil follows the story of a woman who was granted a wish from the Greek god Apollo. Her wish is simple: to live for as many years as there were grains of sand on the beaches of the Earth. In making her wish, however, she forgets to ask Apollo for eternal youth and now must live out her immortal days rotting from old age, suspended in a jar to survive. In a somewhat morbid turn of events, Sybil can only then think of death. 

Eliot could not have chosen a more suitable: at once, he presents us with the poem’s main themes: death, futility, desire. 

From there, we have a dedication to Eliot’s friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound, who helped edit to the poem down to the form we know it in today: 

     For Ezra Pound

       il miglior fabbro.

We’re already reading in four languages before the poem even begins. Talk about modernist pretensions! In his dedication, Eliot communicates his gratitude to Pound, whom he calls “the better craftsman.” The Italian in the dedication might at once be an homage to Eliot’s favorite poet Dante Alighieri and an allusion to Pound’s admiration for the Italian language and culture, which famously and somewhat unfortunately culminated in Pound’s support for the Italian fascist party under Mussolini. 

Yet despite Pound’s less-than-perfect politics, his skills as an editor are unparalleled. Pound was responsible, for instance, for the poem’s current title, The Waste Land, which, at his instigation, Eliot changed from his original title He Do the Police in Different Voices, a reference to Charles Dickens’ Victorian novel Our Mutual Friend. Eliot’s original title was meant to capture the many overlapping voices we see throughout the poem, but the title The Waste Land more succinctly represents the poem’s essence. 

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The Waste Land famously opens with an allusion to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a medieval collection of stories that center around a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Chaucer’s work opens with a plea to springtime—“Whan that April with his showres soote”—and through its opening lines sets up the theme of hope through the rebirth of life in spring. The Waste Land’s opening line—“April is the cruellest month”—takes Chaucer’s idea of spring as rebirth and turns it on its head—spring is no longer about hope; in Eliot, rather, spring becomes the emblem of futility and cruelty. The season no longer embodies the blanket of safety that it does in Chaucer—in Eliot, in fact, it is now “winter that kept us warm.” The narrator of the opening stanza of The Waste Land—perhaps the figure Marie—experiences a fear that can only be released by the act of sledding downward. When Marie feels frightened, her cousin negates her fear and isolation by taking her sledding in the mountains, replacing her fear with a sense of freedom. In one respect, Eliot seems to be saying, freedom assuages fear. Yet freedom from what? Desire, perhaps? That certainly seems to be the landscape that Eliot presents us with at the outset of the poem.

The second stanza of the poem—widely known as “The Sermon Stanza”—presents an alternate take on fear through allusions to the Book of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. At this stage in the narrative, Ezekiel establishes a prophetic authority within the poem that grants both the prophet and the reader the feelings that were earlier denied them in the Marie episode. While Marie sleds downwards and releases fear, the prophetic stanza explores the act of rising—almost a direct juxtaposition to Marie’s release of anxiety whilst sledding. Here, fear culminates in “a handful of dust,” a reference to the famous “all is vanity” from Ecclesiastes, which highlights the futility of old age and argues that all human experience must end in the same way. 

Intimacy in The Waste Land therefore becomes intrinsically bound up with the human experience of fear. If you recall our earlier analysis of the Fisher King, you’ll remember that one of the most famous representations of the Fisher King lies in Wagner’s opera Parsifal. It is no accident, then, that the end of the sermon stanza Eliot quotes directly from Wagner: 

       Frisch weht der Wind

                      Der Heimat zu

                      Mein Irisch Kind,

                      Wo weilest du?

My translation of these lines runs thus:

Fresh blows the wind 

To the homeland 

My Irish child, 

Why are you weeping? 

These lines appear twice in the opera, and with the exception of four preceding lines that establish the nautical setting of the first act, these words open the initial act of Tristan und Isolde and introduce a new motif within the opera that we do not find in the prelude; later on, sung by the same young seaman, they also open the second scene of the opera. 

Tristan und Isolde? But isn’t The Waste Land based on Parsifal? 

My theory is that Eliot quotes from Tristan rather than Parsifal because the former opera more accurately captures the theme of the futility of desire and the unnaturalness of intimacy—the main ideas of The Waste Land. 

The sailor’s song in Tristan establishes a powerful sense of erotic longing for an unattainable beloved; 

taken by itself, the sailor’s song has no obvious mal-intent: the seaman sings “of his separation from his own Irish sweetheart,” a lover we never see onstage and who is removed from the storyline entirely; the moody Isolde, however, overhears the sailor’s song and immediately takes his lament as an invitation to rage against Tristan in the memory of her own betrothed, the Irish knight Morold, whom Tristan has slain. As she overhears the sailor’s song, Isolde, starts up auffahrend, the German irritable. Her next reaction—sie blickt verstört um sich (she looks around in bewilderment)—suggests a sense of confusion and mental distress that anticipates the ignorance of Eliot’s Hyacinth Girl (whom we will meet in just a moment). 

When we hear the text of the sailor’s song for a second time in the following scene, we find that Isolde has undergone a change of heart: the description that Wagner gives of Isolde runs thus: deren Blick sogleich Tristan fand und starr auf ihn geheftet blieb, dumpf für sich. Her gaze lands immediately on Tristan and remains fixed; she sings hollowly to herself. The sailor’s song thus represents both “bereavement” and “passion” for Isolde, and her initial two lines in response to seeing Tristan—“Mir erkoren/Mir verloren” (both lost to me and destined for me)—reemphasize this dualistic dimension of love and suffering. Wagner borrows the thematic material of Mir erkoren/Mir verloren from his prelude and then reuses the same bars in the famous Liebestod in the final act of his opera. Wagner’s powerful leitmotif of desire and longing thus associates itself with the innocent sailor’s song and consequently begins to muddle innocence with sexual experience. 

Which brings us swimmingly to Eliot’s Hyacinth Garden.

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Eliot is quite famous for his use of flowers and gardens as metaphors—you see his “rose garden” later in The Four Quartets’ opening poem, “Burnt Norton.” Gardens in literature have long been symbols for paradise, innocence and beauty, and they are often used metaphorically to represent societal decay—think of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, which Eliot was almost certainly intimately familiar with. In Eliot’s Hyacinth Garden, the love between the Hyacinth Girl and her lover possesses a sort of artificiality—one that is closely reminiscent of the love that develops between Tristan and Isolde, who only fall in love after they both drink a love potion. 

At the tail end of the “Hyacinth Girl" episode comes another quotation from Tristan und Isolde, this one taken from the opera’s third and final act: Oed’ und leer das Meer (Desolate and empty is the sea). The “Hyacinth Garden” passage is thus framed by these two passages taken from Tristan und Isolde, highlighting the opera's importance to the work—or, at least, to these few stanzas. Curiously enough, this line is sung by a tenor in the role of a shepherd who usually doubles in the opera as the young sailor; in performance, therefore, the roles become reminiscent of one another. 

At this point in the opera, Kurwenal, Tristan’s companion and vassal, and the shepherd are in the castle garden (there’s our garden again), looking out at sea to anticipate the coming of the ship that is to carry Isolde, the only Ärztin, or nurse, who will be able to heal the wounded Tristan—again, we revisit the theme of decay and healing and are reminded of the Fisher King. Kurwenal asks the shepherd to “pipe his merriest tune” should he apprehend the coming of Isolde’s ship, but the shepherd instead replies, after an extended pause that lasts five bars, that the sea is desolate and empty—our quote in the poem. 

The crucial thing to note here is that Isolde is not only separated from Tristan as a lover from a lover but also as a nurse from a patient; Tristan’s wound thus becomes associated with sexual guilt—for he has been wounded by the sword of Melot, a knight who serves King Marke, the man Isolde was supposed to marry upon the ship’s arrival to Cornwall. When Tristan and Isolde are discovered making love in the garden in the previous act, Tristan succumbs to Melot’s sword because of the guilt he feels at having been with Isolde. What is even most significant for our purposes is the explicit link that Tristan’s wound creates between himself and Parsifal’s Amfortas—Eliot’s Fisher King. 

In both cases, the wound is one of “sexual guilt” and thus sets up the motifs we find in the Hyacinth Garden episode and elsewhere in the poem. The difference, however, between Eliot’s barren world and that of Tristan und Isolde is that in the latter, hope arrives in the form of Isolde the healer and temptress, albeit too late, and leads to a more optimistic “transfiguration” through the singing of her Liebestod, Isolde’s eventual love-death. In Tristan, death is the necessary prerequisite to the fulfillment of an otherwise unattainable desire, the bypath to change and transfiguration and, ultimately, a better future. 

Death allows Tristan and Isolde to reveal their true feelings for one another and escape the artificial and substitutive world which they have been previously subjected to. With the resolution of the opera’s opening Tristan chord in the Liebestod, Isolde’s emotions, stifled unnaturally for over three hours by Wagner’s initial rejection of the standard dictates of harmonic chord progression, become not only possible but also genuine. She experiences an intense emotional episode and comes to terms with the reality of her love for Tristan: she can love him only in the wake of her own death. 

In Eliot, the Hyacinth Girl’s failure with lover mirrors Tristan and Isolde’s own failed relationship in terms of a common sense of unfulfilled longing: the moment that the Hyacinth Girl apprehends the abortive nature of her relationship with her unspecified lover, “she cannot speak” and virtually loses all conscience of her surroundings. She exists in a paralyzed limbo much like Isolde, yet unlike Isolde, there is no hope for her of transformation or redemption, for we leave her in the wake of silence, desolation, emptiness. Unlike Tristan and Isolde, therefore, who attain meaning in their lives through their mutual destruction, Eliot’s lovers cannot consummate their love through any sort of transformation and thus find themselves facing an utter loss of meaning in their relationship—“I knew nothing.” Yet after a continued strain of bleakness in tone and imagery, the male figure in the garden looks into the “heart of light.” Perhaps a shred of hope? Yet as if oblivious to the failure of his sexual relationship, his hope is fleeting: he blindly convinces himself that there is hope for himself and the Hyacinth Girl, resurrecting their love in a most unnatural fashion. The phrase itself—“the heart of light”—recalls Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, from which Eliot notably intended to extract the phrase “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” for The Waste Land’s epigraph before it became the epigraph for The Hollow Men instead. 

The alteration of the phrase—from heart of darkness to heart of light—suggests a false hope for a better future and an artificial method through which this hope can be attained. The tragedy of the world of the Hyacinth Girl is thus that these lovers, and, indeed, lovers in general, can no longer recognize the beauty of genuine human connection and opt instead to content themselves with an empty erotic experience that culminates in silence.

Later in the poem, there will be hope for redemption—through the themes of drowning and water that we are introduced to at this stage of the poem.

Here we come to Madame Sosostris, the famous clairvoyante with a bad cold, who, through her Tarot cards, brings us the idea of drowning as a symbolic transformation. During a Tarot reading, she draws the card of the Phoneician Sailor, exclaiming “fear death by water.” 

Eliot likes sailors.

At this stage, in fact, we have even more of them. Eliot invites us to recall Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest—a play about drowning and shipwreck—through the lines “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” an allusion to the drowning of Ferdinand’s father. Yet as many things in The Waste Land, the motif of drowning will soon become inverted and perhaps become a positive. Don’t forget to pay attention to the nautical imagery throughout—it will come back in later sections of the poem. 

Finally, we come to the famous closing stanza of “The Burial of the Dead”: Eliot’s famous “Unreal City,” which he himself claimed was a reinterpretation of Baudelaire's Fourmillante Cité—“swarming city.” We have yet another reference (Eliot likes those) to Dante’s Inferno in the line “I had not thought that death had undone so many,” wherein Dante visits Hell and witnesses many dying souls as he progresses through each of the nine circles of Hell. The narrator of Eliot’s poem roams through a similar Hell—yet here, Hell is conceptualized in the form of the London city streets. We revisit the theme of death and old age in conjunction with the garden: 

‘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?

Does Eliot thus suggest that we can attain growth from death—rebirth from death? Morbid, yet very much in keeping with the parallel to Tristan und Isolde. 

Finally, the closing line to The Burial of the Death (in yet another language): 

‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

One more Baudelaire reference, this one bringing us back to the poem’s opening line through the idea of repetition and the digging up of memories. Talk about rebirth. 

So is this a poem about death and the futility of desire? Absolutely. Through the poem’s many allusions, Eliot takes us through the decay of human relationships and the human experience. At this stage in the poem, there is no hope for redemption, yet as we'll see later, Eliot will invite us to consider what we must do to resurrect human relationships and find meaning in decay. 

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Part 2

We left off our analysis of Part 1 with a rather bleak portrait of London city life—images of corpses pervade the final stanza of “The Burial of the Dead,” and we see an inversion of the concept of new beginnings as new life sprouts from the dead. In Part 2 of the poem, however, we are in a different sort of scene: a room that represents high French aestheticism. The title of this particular section is taken from the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Middleton, whose play “A Game at Chess” satirizes the heightened tensions between England and Spain in the early 17th century. The play uses chess as a metaphor for political maneuvers and failed relationships, and in Eliot, we see the idea of chess repurposed as a metaphor for sexual maneuvering. 

In the first line, we get a Shakespearean allusion (Eliot likes those) to Antony and Cleopatra, immediately introducing the theme of female sexuality that will be present throughout this section of the poem. The line taken from Antony and Cleopatra runs thus: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Burned on the water...” The encounter here, as described by Antony’s friend Enorbarbus, is the first between Anthony and Cleopatra and accentuates Cleopatra’s beauty, who “o’erpictures Venus” in appearance. In Eliot, the barge is swapped out for a chair, which is reflected in the marble that adorns the room. Notice that Eliot replaces water with marble—if water will later become symbolic of redemption, then at this stage in the poem, we are still operating within an irredeemable sphere. The ensuing description of the room is at once opulent and grotesque, featuring blind Cupids, jewels, and synthetic perfumes (again highlighting the unnatural environment). 

The narrator then zones in on a picture above the mantelpiece of the transformation of Philomela, an allusion to the story in Ovid’s Metamorphosis of the rape of Philomela that highlights an unnatural change following a forced sexual encounter. In the myth, Tereus, the king of Thrace, rapes Philomela, the sister of his wife Procne, and cuts out her tongue when she threatens to tell everyone what he has done. Philomela then alerts her sister of the rape through a tapestry she weaves and is later transformed into a nightingale, whose mournful cry is explained by Tereus’ actions. Procne, similarly, is turned into a swallow, a detail that will be important to us as we enter our analysis of the next section of the poem. Eliot denotes the nightingale’s cry through the onomatopoeic “Jug Jug,” an outburst that is sung to “dirty ears,” thereby emphasizing the perversion of forced sexual encounters that pervade the world of The Waste Land. Eliot seems to suggest that in the absence of a meaningful, loving relationship, women become sterile and purposeless, unable to share their inner thoughts as they are reduced to primitive sounds heard only by men with malicious intent. 

We leave the room in this sort of unrest and transition then to a marriage scene, now exiting the lavishness of the throne room and becoming privy to the vignettes of a infertile marriages. Though we stil find some of Eliot’s characteristic literary allusions in this section of the poem, the second half of “A Game of Chess” is largely devoid of complex references to literary history and instead turns to the British vernacular to paint a portrait of English city life. We witness a dialogue that betrays the lack of deep connection between two lovers—“I never know what you are thinking”—and segue back into a rats’ alley that resuscitates the final city scene in “The Burial of the Dead.” Yet throughout this barren, smoggy scene, vestiges of hope creep up through the line “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” which we saw in the poem’s previous section in reference to the Phonecian sailor. In recalling Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest once again, Eliot invites us to consider the transformation of decay into something more positive, yet only for a moment, for the following line recalls another sort of emptiness: “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” Here, we have the emptiness of emotion between two lovers much like we saw in the Hyacinth Garden scene in the previous section. 

At this stage, Eliot invokes a ragtime song that betrays a sense of irony: “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag–/ It’s so elegant/ So intelligent.” In the motif of the popular song lies the death of high art, though the song itself, which references Shakespeare and its own intelligence, seems to believe otherwise. Eliot ascribes a negative morality to this sort of world devoid of true artistic pursuit and once again brings our attention back to these troubled lovers, who, in a manner reminiscent of Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, seem panicked about quotidian, quasi-meaningless decisions—the woman wonders whether she should rush out with her hair down and what she might do the following day. She settles finally on playing a game of chess, highlighting the absence of profound emotional experience in her relationship as she presses her “lidless eyes” together and waits for a knock on the door: her eyes never close, symbolizing a constant alertness, and a lack of peace, as she waits for death. 

We shift then to a parallel infertility scene in a more lower-class setting and meet several gregarious women in a pub, who discuss their friend Lil. Throughout this section, we are met with the repetitive cry of the barman: “Hurry up please its time,” which, taken at its surface, suggests the closing of the pub yet might also symbolize the ominous approach of death. The women gossip about Lil and her husband Albert, who has just come home from the war and will be disappointed to find that Lil has gotten an abortion with the money that he left her. In this scene, sexuality and fertility become weapons of manipulation; in the absence of a meaningful relationship, suggests Eliot, women will be bitter about their sexuality and ability to bear children. They are left, instead, as barren and meaningless, just as in the barren world of the Fisher King. 

The most telling lines of “A Game of Chess” come towards the section’s conclusion in an allusion to Hamlet. (Eliot isn’t going to go very long without dropping an allusion on us.) Here, we find an excerpt from Ophelia’s famous mad songs that lead up to her suicide. Ophelia bids the women around her good night, just as the women in Eliot’s pub bid each other good night. Ophelia’s portentous words accentuate her decay into madness and reemphasize the danger of failed relationships, but why does Ophelia go mad? There is no single interpretation for her descent into lunacy, but based on the previous discussion of abortion and fertility in the poem, we can assume that Eliot is alluding to the popular theory that Ophelia is pregnant with Hamlet’s child and kills herself because does not wish to bear without having secured Hamlet’s love for her (recall that Hamlet turns bitter towards Ophelia halfway through the play). Eliot thus suggests that in the absence of meaning in human relationships, women must necessarily become futile and barren, leaving the world in a state of decay—leaving behind a waste land. 

“A Game of Chess” is thus an exploration of the lack of regeneration in a world that has brushed aside meaning in favor of trivial experiences. Yet while Eliot leaves off this section with a bleak picture of fertility and regeneration, we will start to see hope in “The Fire Sermon,” which might offer this sort of barren world a chance at redemption. 

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Part 3

“The Fire Sermon” is the longest section of The Waste Land. The title of this particular section is taken from a Buddhist sermon that describes the burning away of lust and the liberation from suffering. In this particular sermon, the Buddha envisions all worldly things as consuming fires and must free himself from them by achieving total detachment from the earthly world. In this way, Eliot’s “The Fire Sermon” becomes a turning point of sorts, in which we begin to free ourselves from lust and desire through a turn away from Western mores towards Eastern principles. Much of “The Fire Sermon,” however, still takes us through feelings of isolation and sexual futility, and it is not until the final section of the poem that we see direct hope for redemption.

As we might expect from Eliot, the opening stanza of “The Fire Sermon” is rife with literary references. We find ourselves now departed from the streets of London, where we left our pub women in the previous section, and instead immersed in a naturalistic world. We’ve seen a great deal of natural imagery throughout the poem already—especially in the famous sermon stanza in the first section of the poem, in the “fear in a handful of dust” line. Notice that then, too, we were in the midst of a sermon, though now we enter a different sort of sermon, stepping away from the traditional Judeo-Christian sermon into a Buddhist sermon. Yet even the Buddhist sermon, at this stage in the poem, is not enough to restore the dying Waste Land to health: the tent on Eliot’s river is “broken,” the land “brown.” The third line of this section re-emphasizes the desolation that we have seen thus far throughout The Waste Land through a reference to Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion” (a type of poem that eulogizes an upcoming wedding). Spencer’s poem, set along the River Thames, describes a warm marriage scene through colorful and jubilant diction. It follows a set of nymphs as they prepare to celebrate the wedding day. In The Waste Land, however, the “nymphs are departed,” creating a sense of despair of any sort of fulfilling marriage bond. The line Eliot quotes from Spenser—“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song”—is the refrain at the end of each stanza in “Prothalamion” that signals a calm equilibrium at the consummation of the marriage in question. Eliot compares Spenser’s river with that of the modern Thames: in Spenser’s time, there were no vestiges of human waste through empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends, and—arguably—contraceptives (“testimony of summer nights”). Eliot argues that in the modern era of decay, in the absence of marriage structures, we are left only with the replacement of the nymphs by ruthless bureaucrats (“city directors”) who leave no trace of themselves. Without the stability of marriage, there is no method of preservation—no way through which to erect a lasting tradition or timeless order.

Eliot then takes us to another Biblical allusion—this one taken from Psalm 137. The line in The Waste Land—“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept”—is a deliberate misquotation of the opening line of the Psalm: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” The psalm concerns the people of Israel’s despair in the wake of the Babylonian exile as they remember the foundational city of Jerusalem. In a rare self-referential moment, Eliot cites his own experiences at Leman—otherwise known as Lake Geneva—where he spent several weeks working on The Waste Land. Eliot reminds us, therefore, of his own despair over the bygone wonders of the ancient world. He then repeats Spenser’s line as if in prayer and alludes to another 17th century poem, “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. The poet here describes his love for a woman and urges her to seize the moment of their love rather than waiting for a time in the future in which it may decay. We know by now, of course, that decay is a central theme in The Waste Land, and in alluding to Marvell’s lines “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” Eliot introduces a sense of urgency to his poem—though, in the world of The Waste Land, it is already too late, as all that’s left is a skeletal chuckle and “the rattle of the bones.”

Decay does not leave us as we progress to the next stanza, whose opening image is a rat (the poem’s second instance of the animal). The diction here creates a scene of corruption, impurity, and decay: the rat’s belly is “slimy,” the canal is “dull,” the ground is “damp.” The sullied rats seem to impinge upon the purity of water, and the image of “white bodies naked” renders this impurity more imminently sexual with the classic association of whiteness with purity. Eliot then inserts another Tempest reference through the lines “Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck/And on the king my father’s death before him.” These lines reference Ferdinand’s dismay at his father’s shipwreck—right before he hears Ariel’s more celestial song—and create a link to the “pearls that were his eyes” of the previous section, commenting on the prevalence of blindness—or, perhaps, the act of turning a blind eye to the world—that we will soon see with the arrival of the blind prophet Tiresias upon The Waste Land’s stage. The reference to a “king” in this section may perhaps also hint at the impurity of Parsifal’s King Amfortas—which we will see in just a moment as we transition to the stanza’s final line—a citation from the poet Paul Verlaine.

Eliot then pivots directly to his characters from quotidian London life, summoning his character Sweeney, who features in several other of his poems, including “Sweeney Erect” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales.” Sweeney is typically Eliot’s stand-in for—to borrow a term from my Norton edition of The Waste Land—the “urban lout.” Another of Eliot’s characters, Mrs. Porter, then proceeds to wash her daughter’s feet in soda water, further reinforcing the contamination evident throughout our modern waste land.

Then comes the Verlaine poem, where we revisit our friend Richard Wagner and his influence on the text of Eliot’s poem (more on the Wagnerian backdrop of The Waste Land here). Eliot’s second significant allusion to Wagnerian opera comes not from Wagner himself but from the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, whose sonnet “Parsifal” is based on Wagner’s opera of the same name. The line crowning the second stanza of “The Fire Sermon” runs thus:

Et, O ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole!

The line is a direct quotation of Verlaine’s poem, which chronicles Parsifal’s successful evasion of the sorceress Kundry’s sexual advances, as well as Amfortas’ wounds. Verlaine’s poem is at its core celebratory, and the final stanza of the poem in particular, with its majestic imagery, sets up an especially grandiose commemoration of Parsifal’s redemptive powers:

En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole,

Le vase pur où resplendit le Sang réel.

- Et, ô ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole!

Verlaine’s stanza combines regal imagery with virtue and purification, thereby connecting the image of the Holy Grail to the image of the Fisher King. The penultimate and antepenultimate lines taken together, in fact, may seem at first glance an apt conclusion to the poem, with the King finally reclaiming the Holy Grail.

What, then, might be the purpose of the final line, the line that Eliot excerpts? Although Verlaine might be commenting on the most positive conclusion of Wagner’s final opera, it is alternately possible that Verlaine includes this line to highlight the ultimate instability of the opera’s seemingly positive finale. Wagner’s score for Parsifal directs that these boys to whom the sonnet refers come in towards the end of the opera “heard but not seen,” reinforcing the parallel with the Hyacinth Girl (and in Bayreuth exclusively, these choir boys would be singing, as the sonnet suggests, from a hidden dome). The harmonies they sing are plain and thus suggest the “purity of the hymnal, a pre-sexual ecstasy.” Their voices, furthermore, evoke a wistful longing. Eliot thus creates a commentary on the greater message of the stanza: unattainable desire, represented by the hidden voices of the singing choir boys, becomes bound up with that which is unnatural or grotesque. This line from Parsifal reiterates the message Eliot extracts from Tristan und Isolde and casts it in a novel light, engaging a new set of poetic characters to demonstrate just how absurd and unfulfilling a meaningless romance can really be.

At the heart of this allusion is also the figure of Kundry, the mysterious seductress forced to roam the Earth to seek redemption for once scorning the image of Jesus Christ upon the Cross. Kundry becomes especially important when we consider her resemblance to the Cumean Sybil from Eliot’s epigraph: both women have been cursed with unending life. Kundry is the figure who has been sent by the sorcerer Klingsor to seduce Parsifal in an attempt to foil his quest for the Holy Grail; she therefore represents the meaninglessness of sexual experience and the very destabilizing force that the final line of Verlaine’s sonnet seems to evoke. Taken in conjunction with the imagery of this stanza from “The Fire Sermon,” we can conceptualize Kundry as a prostitute-like figure, who, in her advances towards Parsifal, becomes a symbol of sexual violation.

Kundry’s implication in the Verlaine allusion may perfectly explain Eliot’s strategic placement of the “Parsifal” quotation at this stage in the poem, for the stanza immediately following runs thus:

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

The excerpt hearkens back to the opening passage of “A Game of Chess,” which briefly chronicles the rape of Philomela by the Thracian King Tereus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Philomela is consequently transformed into a nightingale (while Tereus later becomes a hoopoe). Eliot thus uses onomatopoeic language to express the lament of Philomela, and we may surmise that “twit twit twit” represents the call of a hoopoe, who appears to be persistently chasing the nightingale who has been “so rudely forc’d.” The inclusion of this rape scene in The Waste Land accentuates the unnatural dimension of romantic attraction found throughout the poem and reminds us that rape is unnatural love taken to its extreme. Yet what is most notable here is that the rape of Philomela culminates in transformation as hope for redemption; although at this point in The Waste Land, the poem’s various characters are faced with desolation in the face of artificial romance, the poem will end with the hope for positive transformation and redemption.

Meanwhile, Eliot transports us back to the “Unreal City” from “The Burial of the Dead,” introducing yet more characters from urban life. We lapse back into a more quotidian dimension filled with “brown fog” (reminiscent of the yellow fog from Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), colloquial French, and several London hotels. In the following stanza, we are transported to corporate space through images of desks and taxis. Eliot’s comparison of the “human engine” to a “throbbing taxi” is probably my favorite simile of the poem, and this beautiful use of figurative language leads us into the next section of the poem, which we observe through the eyes of the blind prophet Tiresias who, in Greek mythology, lost his sight in a dispute with a god and was transformed into a woman—hence, he throbs between two lives just like the indecisive and mechanical “human engine.”

The Tiresias stanza has been subjected to many interpretations. I took three courses in college that covered The Waste Land and then wrote my master’s thesis on this poem, and every modernist scholar seems to have a different take on the Tiresias passage. One of my professors insisted that this was a famous example of queerness in modernist poetry (unlikely if you know anything about Eliot’s staunch Anglican beliefs, though we do have a Sappho reference in the seventh line of this stanza); another professor interpreted the stanza as a commentary on the film noir genre, which gained popularity right around the time of The Waste Land’s composition (there are several elements that connect the stanza to film noir, though we will never know if that was Eliot’s intention); and a third professor read the stanza as a commentary on the vapidity of the nouveau riche (perhaps the most likely of these three interpretations, at least given the “Bradford millionaire” line). Yet my reading of the stanza takes us to something far more fundamental and universal: the stanza paints a scene of sexual failure and the emptiness of the modern romantic experience.

Tiresias becomes an all-knowing figure in this stanza, looking into the minds and daily lives of a typist and her carbuncular lover, whose existence, like the throbbing taxi, has become lifeless and mechanical. The woman is “bored and tired” as she staves off the advances of the clerk before capitulating to him. The woman here seems to view sex as a chore rather than as an exalted pleasure, and she seems relieved just after it has ended. She is capable only of “half-formed thoughts” and exists in a mechanical world, emphasized by her “automatic hand” on the gramophone. At this stage, Eliot’s rhyme scheme also becomes, for the first time in the poem, fairly regular, reinforcing the idea that this sort of existence can only be dull and mechanical.

The theme of water returns in the following stanza, along with another reference to Ariel’s Song from  The Tempest. In this stanza, the subject matter is music, and we hear a mandolin echoing through a church, bringing the poem back to a more exalted tone, especially in the stanza’s final line, “Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.” Perhaps, at this stage, we begin to approach some form of redemption—or, at least, leave behind some of the bleakness we’ve encountered thus far in the poem’s world.

Yet then we revisit the soiled Thames, Eliot’s river worn out by the “oil and tar” of contemporary life. Eliot then hits us with another Wagner reference, this one to the Rhinemaidens from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. This specific gibberish-like wailing comes from the final opera in the cycle—Die Götterdämmerung or The Twilight of the Gods (yes, this is the opera from which Friedrich Nietzsche borrowed the title of his work The Twilight of the Idols). In Das Rheingold, the opera that opens the cycle, the Rhinemaidens lose the gold that they guard, and by the final opera, they lament the fact that the gold will never be recovered. Interestingly enough, they also sing a similar, more optimistic song in Das Rheingold—Wallala la la leia lalai!—but later, in Die Götterdämmerung,  resort to the lamentation that Eliot cites in his poem as they realize that they will not recover the gold. Eliot might be hinting here at a dynamic of irreparability in the world of The Waste Land, and, considering that he chooses maidens to voice this sort of cry, we might also interpret the Rhinemaidens’ cry as representing sexual irreparability, which has been a running theme throughout Eliot’s poem. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land connect this stanza to Dante’s Purgatorio, and as we are in a river, we may read this section as a sort of purgatorial cleansing that anticipates the redemption through water that will greet us in the poem’s concluding section.

The following stanza takes us through another scene from city life—another world filled with emptiness. Although the theme of this stanza may not be immediately apparent, it is reminiscent of the scene with Lil in “A Game of Chess” in that it likely concerns either a pregnancy or an abortion (“After the event/He wept”). Eliot reinforces the disconnectedness in such a relationship—and quite literally too (“I can connect/Nothing with nothing”). As the third section of the poem closes, we meet a reference to St. Augustine’s Confessions and the temptations of his youth, reinforcing the idea that the encounter we witness between the two lovers of this stanza both represents corruption and signals a possible hope for redemption (just as Augustine’s Confessions is a story of redemption and cleansing oneself of sin).

As we enter the final stanzas of the section, we see an excerpt from Eliot’s titular Fire Sermon that concerns burning sins away (just as in Confessions) and freeing oneself from worldly passions. We end with the image of burning fire, which will soon take us into the fourth section of the poem—our big turning point—as we swap the cleansing effect of fire for that of water, and begin to approach redemption.

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Part 4

“Death by Water” is the shortest section of The Waste Land. According to Ezra Pound, the poet who helped bring The Waste Land to the state we know it in today, “Death by Water” is an “integral” part of the poem that helps bridge the desolation we see in the first three sections and the redemption that we will attain in the fifth and final section. “Death by Water” might be the poem’s shortest section, but its inspiration is drawn from a longer piece of Eliot’s: the section is a close translation of the final stanza of Eliot’s 1918 French poem “Dans le Restaurant,” a poem that takes us through the sort of city scenes that we find in the first three sections of The Waste Land. In this particular poem, Eliot describes an encounter between a man at a restaurant and his waiter. Because “Dans le Restaurant” has never adequately been translated into English, little scholarship exists on it, and the scholars who have written on it seem to be either stumped by the Phlebas stanza at the end or convinced that Eliot meant the stanza to be an entirely separate poem. When taken in the context of The Waste Land, however, the meaning of Eliot’s “Dans le Restaurant” becomes clear, and we can use this poem to inform our reading of “Death by Water” in The Waste Land.

“Dans le Restaurant” opens with a scene of a waiter talking to a restaurant patron. Immediately, the waiter begins telling the story of his youth and sharing memories of his homeland. He then segues into a memory of a sexual encounter he had at the age of seven with a little girl (whom he describes as “toute mouillée,” a phrase that would have carried a sexual meaning even in Eliot’s time) before giving her primroses. He then mentions 38 stains on her waistcoat and says he caressed her and fell into delirium. The restaurant patron dubs the waiter a lecher before the waiter concludes his story by saying that he let the girl go halfway through the act, which he says is “a shame.”

“Dans le Restaurant” is an oddly sexual poem for Eliot. It was written several years before The Waste Land and nearly ten years before his conversion to Anglicanism. The restaurant scene, however, which culminates in the famous Phlebas stanza, is yet another instance of unnatural or stilted love—the sort we’ve seen throughout the first three sections of The Waste Land. Rather than interpreting the final stanza of “Dans le Restaurant” as a standalone poem, we can thus read it as a logical necessity at the end of such a fraught scene—a ritualistic cleansing of sorts through water.

In the remainder of The Waste Land, water will be a proxy for rebirth. “Death by Water” is a culmination of sorts that invites readers to reflect on their mortality, especially by referencing the act of drowning. In this section, Phlebas the Phonecian sailor loses his life to water (hence, “Death by Water”). We have seen several instances of drowning in the poem so far—most notably in the Madame Sosostris passage in “The Burial of the Dead”—and in the first three sections of the poem, drowning is presented as a negative. Madame Sosostris, for instance, describes a tarot card with a “drowned Phonecian Sailor” (whom we can now assume is Phlebas) and announces “Fear death by water.” The Madame Sosostris section also alludes to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which contains another unfortunate instance of drowning. Early on in the poem, therefore, drowning carries a negative connotation and is associated with the fear that dominates the early stanzas (recall “fear in a handful of dust”). By the time we reach “Death by Water,” on the other hand, the act of drowning takes on a more positive connotation—drowning seems to be intricately linked with rebirth through the acceptance of suffering.

At first glance, Phlebas’ death is nothing special: by placing Phlebas in the distant Phoenician past, Eliot seems to be suggesting that Phlebas might have little relevance to our present world. He is at once forgotten and forgets, a poignant reminder that there is no memory in death, either for the deceased or for those who forget him. Eliot then suggests that all people must go through death—that no matter what stature one reaches in life, all living beings reach the same grim conclusion. It is a short section with somewhat macabre diction that at first suggests nothing of hope or regeneration, but when we consider it against the sort of sexually impure moments that pervade both the world of The Waste Land and “Dans le Restaurant,” it becomes evident that this “death by water” indicates a ritualistic cleansing. It is no accident that Eliot places “Death by Water” at the tail end of the Buddhist ritual of cleansing through fire. This death might be ordinary—it might suggest nothing regenerative—but it is an invitation for us to consider our mortality. Eliot seems to be suggesting that the moment we come to terms with our mortality, we might find rebirth and regeneration in life—we might be cleansed of worldly sins and sexual impurities and find a deeper meaning in our rote existence. And indeed, as we progress to the final section of the poem, we will see that hypothesis realized as water becomes a powerful symbol of cleansing and regeneration.

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Part 5

“What the Thunder Said” is the fifth and final section of The Waste Land. Throughout our Waste Land journey, we have been presented with a rather grim portrait of human life, but in Part 5, Eliot somewhat unexpectedly offers us a chance of redemption.

At the start of “What the Thunder Said,” we find ourselves still in the bleak world of the poem’s previous sections. In his notes, Eliot describes the first stanza of Part 5 as a crucifixion scene; he adopts an appropriately frightful and despairing tone. Throughout this stanza, Eliot alludes to images from “The Burial of the Dead,” with a “frosty silence” in the gardens recalling the silence of the Hyacinth Girl scene, an “agony in stony places” recalling the “shadow of this red rock,” and “spring over distant mountains” recalling The Waste Land’s opening stanza with Marie out in the mountains. With this revitalization of “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot sets up a quasi-Nietzschean dynamic of eternal return and suggests that all life is cyclical. Following “The Fire Sermon” and “Death by Water,” the world of The Waste Land seems to have been reborn in another iteration, setting the stage for the redemption that will follow.

“What the Thunder Said” is replete with imagery of water—the ultimate redemptive force—yet in the second stanza, we cannot yet access it. Eliot’s scenery is arid, the rocks and mountains dry. If we are to imagine water as a palliative agent, then at this stage we await the coming of the rain. Given the Biblical imagery in these opening stanzas, we might picture a sort of pilgrimage through a barren desert. An unnamed traveler seems to implore the heavens for a source of water (“If there were water!”), yet he is met with only “dry thunder” that brings no rain.

We can read the following stanza as a prayer for water that underscores a desire to escape the dry oppression of the rock (“if there were no rock”)—presumably the same rock that in “The Burial of the Dead” symbolized fear and despair. “But there is no water,” our narrator tells us, following an onomatopoeic appeal to rain, and there is no spring—there is only desolation.

Progressing with their pilgrimage, the travelers notice a third person accompanying them. In his notes, Eliot draws a parallel between this hooded figure and the risen Christ from Luke 24, which describes two analogous travelers making their way to Emmaus who are kept from recognizing Christ as their companion. This section of “The Waste Land” thus alludes to a sort of prophetic redemption and suggests that the unrecognized prophet might be the blind prophet Tiresias from “The Fire Sermon,” with the narrator observing “I do not know whether [the hooded figure is] a man or woman.” Tiresias (as you might recall from the poem’s third section) lived life both as a man and as a woman.

Tiresias then beckons an apocalyptic vision, and Eliot himself notes that the following stanza is based on Herman Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos (In Sight of Chaos), a set of essays on Dostoyevsky’s novels The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. In particular, Eliot references a passage from Hesse’s essay on The Brothers Karamazov that runs thus:

Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligem Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Über diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen.

Half of Europe, at the very least half of Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos, cruising drunkenly in a state of holy delusion towards the abyss and singing a drunken hymn just like Dmitri Karamazov sang. The offended citizen laughs at these songs, and the saint and the seer listen to them in tears.¹

The “sound high in the air” that the narrator hears in the poem likely alludes to this “drunken hymn” from Hesse’s analysis of The Brothers Karamazov. Civilization, suggests Eliot, seems to be on the brink of collapse; over the mountains, where “you feel free” (see “The Burial of the Dead”), there is a crumbling city; the air is apocalyptically violet, and the towers begin to fall. Civilization seems to be dismantling itself, the edifice of order crumbling, leading us into the more contemporary London and Vienna, which seem unreal (another allusion to Eliot’s unreal city from “The Burial of the Dead”).

As the city dissipates, we are transported to a more bucolic scene: a woman plays a fiddle, and in the distance the towers toll, revealing another set of singing voices, jaded and exhausted. Then, as the imagery grows more natural, Eliot suggests that the questing knight, whom we have followed in the background throughout our poetic journey, has reached the Holy Grail, identifying a source of redemption for the ailing Fisher King—and, indeed, the world of The Waste Land. Suddenly, nature—for the first time in the poem—seems to be reinvigorated, with the grass singing just as the people sang previously. The dry bones, Eliot tells us, “can harm no one,” suggesting that at this stage, the questing knight has perhaps come to terms with his mortality—a theme that Eliot introduced earlier in the poem. On the rooftree stands a rooster, singing “co co rico” (the onomatopoeic rooster crow in French and Russian, signifying, perhaps, a cross-cultural unity) and beckoning a new morning—a fresh start. Then, at last, a damp gust brings the falling rain.

If Eliot has overturned the pillars of Western civilization—toppling the towers of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, London, and Vienna and making way for new beginnings—then what does he suggest is in store? Immediately following the alleged acquisition of the Holy Grail is a new sort of world, a world that opens up on the river Ganges. While previously we lounged on the banks of the Thames, witnessing the destruction of the Western world, we are now transported to the East—to India’s Ganges River, which arises from the Himalayas. Eliot thus brings us back to the world of the mountains, where, as we were earlier told, we can feel free. But the mountainside is now in the Eastern world, and though the Ganges has seen its own fair share of desolation with its limp leaves, this new world is graced with a rain-bearing thunderstorm. Eliot brings his poem out of the Christian tradition of the West—the quest for the Holy Grail having now been consummated—and into the Upanishads, a collection of ancient Hindu texts and a cornerstone of Eastern philosophy. In the section of the Upanishads to which Eliot alludes, the creator-god Prajapati addresses a group of disciples and teaches them the way of spiritual progress. Prajapati speaks the syllable “Da,” which prompts the students to consider three Sanskrit words—Damayata (self-control), Datta (giving), and Dayadhvam (compassion)—that become the pillars of spiritual progress. This powerful revelation in Eliot’s poem, transmitted through the thunder (which is personified as the Upanishads’ Prajapati), overturns the failure of romantic relationships exemplified by the Hyacinth Girl episode and inaugurates a new era of understanding. The thunder’s revelation, therefore, ushers in the possibility of inner strength and redemption for the sorts of lovers we have seen throughout the poem, presenting a pledge of intimacy that deviates from love’s grotesque failures. Eliot’s “awful daring of a moment’s surrender” introduces a more authentic and purposeful existence: self-control, giving, and compassion are the keys to understanding one another; the Western premise of supreme individuality must fall to the sidelines if we are to allow human relationships to flourish. The prison that Eliot then describes—which we might conceptualize as a prison of the mind—is the psychic condition that must be overcome to reach redemption and escape isolation—to revive, for instance, the “broken Coriolanus” who has been sentenced to a lifetime of alienation in Shakespeare’s famous play. Through Damayata, or self-control, the sea is calmed and the heart is made gay—this signifies the alleviation of all inner turmoil.

Eliot then brings back our friend the Fisher King, who now dawdles on the shore and asks whether he should “set [his] lands in order”—in other words, whether he should restore his kingdom to prosperity now that he has secured the Grail and identified the means of humanity’s redemption. The allusion here is also Biblical: Eliot quotes the Prophet Isaiah, who instructs King Hezekiah to set his house in order before he dies. This short stanza at the end of the poem again signifies cyclical rebirth. After the Fisher King expires, his kingdom will live on.

The final stanza of The Waste Land opens, quite aptly, with a famous nursery rhyme: “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.” Now that the cycle of regeneration is complete, we are propelled back into the world of childhood—a moment made especially significant when we consider that the vast majority of the scenes of abortive love that we witnessed throughout The Waste Land occurred not too far from London Bridge. The Italian that follows is a reference to Dante’s purgatory, signifying Dante’s spiritual redemption as he climbs the purgatorial mountain towards Earthly Paradise (note the reappearance of the mountain as a symbol of freedom). As the poem closes, we shift from Italian to Latin with the line “Quando fiam uti chelidon” (“When shall I be like the swallow?”), which is taken from an anonymously authored Latin poem that ends with a reference to the Philomela story that Eliot references throughout The Waste Land (for a full rundown of the Philomela story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, read my analysis of “A Game of Chess”). The swallow in question is Philomela’s sister Procne, whom the gods transform into a swallow for standing up to her husband Tereus after he rapes Philomela. Presumably, Eliot asks us all to embody Procne’s strength and stand up against the sort of unnatural love that he decries throughout his poem.

Another allusion follows, this one to Gerard de Nerval’s French poem “El Desdichado,” which describes love’s transformative power in the face of desolation. The narrator of the poem at first envisions himself as a ruined prince but then finds hope through love, which allows him to twice victoriously cross the Acheron—a river in the Greek mythological underworld—and become a sort of successful Orpheus.

As the poem draws to a close, we are hit with one of its most famous lines—“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” This seems not only to describe the progression of The Waste Land itself in its fragmented scenes but also to suggest a sort of unity in this collage-like quality: by bringing these fragments together, Eliot paints a portrait of the peace to which he builds up in the final words of the poem: “Shantih, shantih, shantih,” Sanskrit for “peace, peace, peace.” In this case, he suggests that we might find peace in other traditions, in a sort of unity that allows for mutual understanding in a fragmented world.

We might thus understand The Waste Land as a poem about sacrificing a component of individuality in order to better understand the people around us and find meaning in a collective unit. That is how the poem itself comes together, after all—in disparate fragments functioning as a cohesive work of art. In asking us to consider the wisdom of the Upanishads, Eliot reveals a path to redemption that might no longer be possible in our Western world. One hundred years later, we still have much to learn from the greatest poem of the twentieth century.

You may access the full poem here.

Check out my previous The Waste Land analysis posts:

Intro

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

“What the Thunder Said” is the fifth and final section of The Waste Land. Throughout our Waste Land journey, we have been presented with a rather grim portrait of human life, but in Part 5, Eliot somewhat unexpectedly offers us a chance of redemption.

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At the start of “What the Thunder Said,” we find ourselves still in the bleak world of the poem’s previous sections. In his notes, Eliot describes the first stanza of Part 5 as a crucifixion scene; he adopts an appropriately frightful and despairing tone. Throughout this stanza, Eliot alludes to images from “The Burial of the Dead,” with a “frosty silence” in the gardens recalling the silence of the Hyacinth Girl scene, an “agony in stony places” recalling the “shadow of this red rock,” and “spring over distant mountains” recalling The Waste Land’s opening stanza with Marie out in the mountains. With this revitalization of “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot sets up a quasi-Nietzschean dynamic of eternal return and suggests that all life is cyclical. Following “The Fire Sermon” and “Death by Water,” the world of The Waste Land seems to have been reborn in another iteration, setting the stage for the redemption that will follow.

“What the Thunder Said” is replete with imagery of water—the ultimate redemptive force—yet in the second stanza, we cannot yet access it. Eliot’s scenery is arid, the rocks and mountains dry. If we are to imagine water as a palliative agent, then at this stage we await the coming of the rain. Given the Biblical imagery in these opening stanzas, we might picture a sort of pilgrimage through a barren desert. An unnamed traveler seems to implore the heavens for a source of water (“If there were water!”), yet he is met with only “dry thunder” that brings no rain.

We can read the following stanza as a prayer for water that underscores a desire to escape the dry oppression of the rock (“if there were no rock”)—presumably the same rock that in “The Burial of the Dead” symbolized fear and despair. “But there is no water,” our narrator tells us, following an onomatopoeic appeal to rain, and there is no spring—there is only desolation.

Progressing with their pilgrimage, the travelers notice a third person accompanying them. In his notes, Eliot draws a parallel between this hooded figure and the risen Christ from Luke 24, which describes two analogous travelers making their way to Emmaus who are kept from recognizing Christ as their companion. This section of “The Waste Land” thus alludes to a sort of prophetic redemption and suggests that the unrecognized prophet might be the blind prophet Tiresias from “The Fire Sermon,” with the narrator observing “I do not know whether [the hooded figure is] a man or woman.” Tiresias (as you might recall from the poem’s third section) lived life both as a man and as a woman.

Tiresias then beckons an apocalyptic vision, and Eliot himself notes that the following stanza is based on Herman Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos (In Sight of Chaos), a set of essays on Dostoyevsky’s novels The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. In particular, Eliot references a passage from Hesse’s essay on The Brothers Karamazov that runs thus:

Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligem Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Über diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen.

Half of Europe, at the very least half of Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos, cruising drunkenly in a state of holy delusion towards the abyss and singing a drunken hymn just like Dmitri Karamazov sang. The offended citizen laughs at these songs, and the saint and the seer listen to them in tears.1

The “sound high in the air” that the narrator hears in the poem likely alludes to this “drunken hymn” from Hesse’s analysis of The Brothers Karamazov. Civilization, suggests Eliot, seems to be on the brink of collapse; over the mountains, where “you feel free” (see “The Burial of the Dead”), there is a crumbling city; the air is apocalyptically violet, and the towers begin to fall. Civilization seems to be dismantling itself, the edifice of order crumbling, leading us into the more contemporary London and Vienna, which seem unreal (another allusion to Eliot’s unreal city from “The Burial of the Dead”).

As the city dissipates, we are transported to a more bucolic scene: a woman plays a fiddle, and in the distance the towers toll, revealing another set of singing voices, jaded and exhausted. Then, as the imagery grows more natural, Eliot suggests that the questing knight, whom we have followed in the background throughout our poetic journey, has reached the Holy Grail, identifying a source of redemption for the ailing Fisher King—and, indeed, the world of The Waste Land. Suddenly, nature—for the first time in the poem—seems to be reinvigorated, with the grass singing just as the people sang previously. The dry bones, Eliot tells us, “can harm no one,” suggesting that at this stage, the questing knight has perhaps come to terms with his mortality—a theme that Eliot introduced earlier in the poem. On the rooftree stands a rooster, singing “co co rico” (the onomatopoeic rooster crow in French and Russian, signifying, perhaps, a cross-cultural unity) and beckoning a new morning—a fresh start. Then, at last, a damp gust brings the falling rain.

If Eliot has overturned the pillars of Western civilization—toppling the towers of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, London, and Vienna and making way for new beginnings—then what does he suggest is in store? Immediately following the alleged acquisition of the Holy Grail is a new sort of world, a world that opens up on the river Ganges. While previously we lounged on the banks of the Thames, witnessing the destruction of the Western world, we are now transported to the East—to India’s Ganges River, which arises from the Himalayas. Eliot thus brings us back to the world of the mountains, where, as we were earlier told, we can feel free. But the mountainside is now in the Eastern world, and though the Ganges has seen its own fair share of desolation with its limp leaves, this new world is graced with a rain-bearing thunderstorm. Eliot brings his poem out of the Christian tradition of the West—the quest for the Holy Grail having now been consummated—and into the Upanishads, a collection of ancient Hindu texts and a cornerstone of Eastern philosophy. In the section of the Upanishads to which Eliot alludes, the creator-god Prajapati addresses a group of disciples and teaches them the way of spiritual progress. Prajapati speaks the syllable “Da,” which prompts the students to consider three Sanskrit words—Damayata (self-control), Datta (giving), and Dayadhvam (compassion)—that become the pillars of spiritual progress. This powerful revelation in Eliot’s poem, transmitted through the thunder (which is personified as the Upanishads’ Prajapati), overturns the failure of romantic relationships exemplified by the Hyacinth Girl episode and inaugurates a new era of understanding. The thunder’s revelation, therefore, ushers in the possibility of inner strength and redemption for the sorts of lovers we have seen throughout the poem, presenting a pledge of intimacy that deviates from love’s grotesque failures. Eliot’s “awful daring of a moment’s surrender” introduces a more authentic and purposeful existence: self-control, giving, and compassion are the keys to understanding one another; the Western premise of supreme individuality must fall to the sidelines if we are to allow human relationships to flourish. The prison that Eliot then describes—which we might conceptualize as a prison of the mind—is the psychic condition that must be overcome to reach redemption and escape isolation—to revive, for instance, the “broken Coriolanus” who has been sentenced to a lifetime of alienation in Shakespeare’s famous play. Through Damayata, or self-control, the sea is calmed and the heart is made gay—this signifies the alleviation of all inner turmoil.

Eliot then brings back our friend the Fisher King, who now dawdles on the shore and asks whether he should “set [his] lands in order”—in other words, whether he should restore his kingdom to prosperity now that he has secured the Grail and identified the means of humanity’s redemption. The allusion here is also Biblical: Eliot quotes the Prophet Isaiah, who instructs King Hezekiah to set his house in order before he dies. This short stanza at the end of the poem again signifies cyclical rebirth. After the Fisher King expires, his kingdom will live on.

The final stanza of The Waste Land opens, quite aptly, with a famous nursery rhyme: “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.” Now that the cycle of regeneration is complete, we are propelled back into the world of childhood—a moment made especially significant when we consider that the vast majority of the scenes of abortive love that we witnessed throughout The Waste Land occurred not too far from London Bridge. The Italian that follows is a reference to Dante’s purgatory, signifying Dante’s spiritual redemption as he climbs the purgatorial mountain towards Earthly Paradise (note the reappearance of the mountain as a symbol of freedom). As the poem closes, we shift from Italian to Latin with the line “Quando fiam uti chelidon” (“When shall I be like the swallow?”), which is taken from an anonymously authored Latin poem that ends with a reference to the Philomela story that Eliot references throughout The Waste Land (for a full rundown of the Philomela story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, read my analysis of “A Game of Chess”). The swallow in question is Philomela’s sister Procne, whom the gods transform into a swallow for standing up to her husband Tereus after he rapes Philomela. Presumably, Eliot asks us all to embody Procne’s strength and stand up against the sort of unnatural love that he decries throughout his poem.

Another allusion follows, this one to Gerard de Nerval’s French poem “El Desdichado,” which describes love’s transformative power in the face of desolation. The narrator of the poem at first envisions himself as a ruined prince but then finds hope through love, which allows him to twice victoriously cross the Acheron—a river in the Greek mythological underworld—and become a sort of successful Orpheus.

As the poem draws to a close, we are hit with one of its most famous lines—“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” This seems not only to describe the progression of The Waste Land itself in its fragmented scenes but also to suggest a sort of unity in this collage-like quality: by bringing these fragments together, Eliot paints a portrait of the peace to which he builds up in the final words of the poem: “Shantih, shantih, shantih,” Sanskrit for “peace, peace, peace.” In this case, he suggests that we might find peace in other traditions, in a sort of unity that allows for mutual understanding in a fragmented world.

We might thus understand The Waste Land as a poem about sacrificing a component of individuality in order to better understand the people around us and find meaning in a collective unit. That is how the poem itself comes together, after all—in disparate fragments functioning as a cohesive work of art. In asking us to consider the wisdom of the Upanishads, Eliot reveals a path to redemption that might no longer be possible in our Western world. One hundred years later, we still have much to learn from the greatest poem of the twentieth century.

You may access the full poem here.

Check out my previous The Waste Land analysis posts:

Intro

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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“Death by Water” is the shortest section of The Waste Land. According to Ezra Pound, the poet who helped bring The Waste Land to the state we know it in today, “Death by Water” is an “integral” part of the poem that helps bridge the desolation we see in the first three sections and the redemption that we will attain in the fifth and final section. “Death by Water” might be the poem’s shortest section, but its inspiration is drawn from a longer piece of Eliot’s: the section is a close translation of the final stanza of Eliot’s 1918 French poem “Dans le Restaurant,” a poem that takes us through the sort of city scenes that we find in the first three sections of The Waste Land. In this particular poem, Eliot describes an encounter between a man at a restaurant and his waiter. Because “Dans le Restaurant” has never adequately been translated into English, little scholarship exists on it, and the scholars who have written on it seem to be either stumped by the Phlebas stanza at the end or convinced that Eliot meant the stanza to be an entirely separate poem. When taken in the context of The Waste Land, however, the meaning of Eliot’s “Dans le Restaurant” becomes clear, and we can use this poem to inform our reading of “Death by Water” in The Waste Land.

“Dans le Restaurant” opens with a scene of a waiter talking to a restaurant patron. Immediately, the waiter begins telling the story of his youth and sharing memories of his homeland. He then segues into a memory of a sexual encounter he had at the age of seven with a little girl (whom he describes as “toute mouillée,” a phrase that would have carried a sexual meaning even in Eliot’s time) before giving her primroses. He then mentions 38 stains on her waistcoat and says he caressed her and fell into delirium. The restaurant patron dubs the waiter a lecher before the waiter concludes his story by saying that he let the girl go halfway through the act, which he says is “a shame.”

“Dans le Restaurant” is an oddly sexual poem for Eliot. It was written several years before The Waste Land and nearly ten years before his conversion to Anglicanism. The restaurant scene, however, which culminates in the famous Phlebas stanza, is yet another instance of unnatural or stilted love—the sort we’ve seen throughout the first three sections of The Waste Land. Rather than interpreting the final stanza of “Dans le Restaurant” as a standalone poem, we can thus read it as a logical necessity at the end of such a fraught scene—a ritualistic cleansing of sorts through water.

In the remainder of The Waste Land, water will be a proxy for rebirth. “Death by Water” is a culmination of sorts that invites readers to reflect on their mortality, especially by referencing the act of drowning. In this section, Phlebas the Phonecian sailor loses his life to water (hence, “Death by Water”). We have seen several instances of drowning in the poem so far—most notably in the Madame Sosostris passage in “The Burial of the Dead”—and in the first three sections of the poem, drowning is presented as a negative. Madame Sosostris, for instance, describes a tarot card with a “drowned Phonecian Sailor” (whom we can now assume is Phlebas) and announces “Fear death by water.” The Madame Sosostris section also alludes to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which contains another unfortunate instance of drowning. Early on in the poem, therefore, drowning carries a negative connotation and is associated with the fear that dominates the early stanzas (recall “fear in a handful of dust”). By the time we reach “Death by Water,” on the other hand, the act of drowning takes on a more positive connotation—drowning seems to be intricately linked with rebirth through the acceptance of suffering.

At first glance, Phlebas’ death is nothing special: by placing Phlebas in the distant Phoenician past, Eliot seems to be suggesting that Phlebas might have little relevance to our present world. He is at once forgotten and forgets, a poignant reminder that there is no memory in death, either for the deceased or for those who forget him. Eliot then suggests that all people must go through death—that no matter what stature one reaches in life, all living beings reach the same grim conclusion. It is a short section with somewhat macabre diction that at first suggests nothing of hope or regeneration, but when we consider it against the sort of sexually impure moments that pervade both the world of The Waste Land and “Dans le Restaurant,” it becomes evident that this “death by water” indicates a ritualistic cleansing. It is no accident that Eliot places “Death by Water” at the tail end of the Buddhist ritual of cleansing through fire. This death might be ordinary—it might suggest nothing regenerative—but it is an invitation for us to consider our mortality. Eliot seems to be suggesting that the moment we come to terms with our mortality, we might find rebirth and regeneration in life—we might be cleansed of worldly sins and sexual impurities and find a deeper meaning in our rote existence. And indeed, as we progress to the final section of the poem, we will see that hypothesis realized as water becomes a powerful symbol of cleansing and regeneration.

Stay tuned for the final installment of my analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where we’ll trace the poem to its more optimistic conclusion in its fifth section—“What the Thunder Said.”

You may access the full poem here. 

Check out my previous The Waste Land analysis posts: 

• Intro

• Part 1

• Part 2

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“The Fire Sermon” is the longest section of The Waste Land. The title of this particular section is taken from a Buddhist sermon that describes the burning away of lust and the liberation from suffering. In this particular sermon, the Buddha envisions all worldly things as consuming fires and must free himself from them by achieving total detachment from the earthly world. In this way, Eliot’s “The Fire Sermon” becomes a turning point of sorts, in which we begin to free ourselves from lust and desire through a turn away from Western mores towards Eastern principles. Much of “The Fire Sermon,” however, still takes us through feelings of isolation and sexual futility, and it is not until the final section of the poem that we see direct hope for redemption.

As we might expect from Eliot, the opening stanza of “The Fire Sermon” is rife with literary references. We find ourselves now departed from the streets of London, where we left our pub women in the previous section, and instead immersed in a naturalistic world. We’ve seen a great deal of natural imagery throughout the poem already—especially in the famous sermon stanza in the first section of the poem, in the “fear in a handful of dust” line. Notice that then, too, we were in the midst of a sermon, though now we enter a different sort of sermon, stepping away from the traditional Judeo-Christian sermon into a Buddhist sermon. Yet even the Buddhist sermon, at this stage in the poem, is not enough to restore the dying Waste Land to health: the tent on Eliot’s river is “broken,” the land “brown.” The third line of this section re-emphasizes the desolation that we have seen thus far throughout The Waste Land through a reference to Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion” (a type of poem that eulogizes an upcoming wedding). Spencer’s poem, set along the River Thames, describes a warm marriage scene through colorful and jubilant diction. It follows a set of nymphs as they prepare to celebrate the wedding day. In The Waste Land, however, the “nymphs are departed,” creating a sense of despair of any sort of fulfilling marriage bond. The line Eliot quotes from Spenser—“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song”—is the refrain at the end of each stanza in “Prothalamion” that signals a calm equilibrium at the consummation of the marriage in question. Eliot compares Spenser’s river with that of the modern Thames: in Spenser’s time, there were no vestiges of human waste through empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends, and—arguably—contraceptives (“testimony of summer nights”). Eliot argues that in the modern era of decay, in the absence of marriage structures, we are left only with the replacement of the nymphs by ruthless bureaucrats (“city directors”) who leave no trace of themselves. Without the stability of marriage, there is no method of preservation—no way through which to erect a lasting tradition or timeless order.

Eliot then takes us to another Biblical allusion—this one taken from Psalm 137. The line in The Waste Land—“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept”—is a deliberate misquotation of the opening line of the Psalm: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” The psalm concerns the people of Israel’s despair in the wake of the Babylonian exile as they remember the foundational city of Jerusalem. In a rare self-referential moment, Eliot cites his own experiences at Leman—otherwise known as Lake Geneva—where he spent several weeks working on The Waste Land. Eliot reminds us, therefore, of his own despair over the bygone wonders of the ancient world. He then repeats Spenser’s line as if in prayer and alludes to another 17th century poem, “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. The poet here describes his love for a woman and urges her to seize the moment of their love rather than waiting for a time in the future in which it may decay. We know by now, of course, that decay is a central theme in The Waste Land, and in alluding to Marvell’s lines “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” Eliot introduces a sense of urgency to his poem—though, in the world of The Waste Land, it is already too late, as all that’s left is a skeletal chuckle and “the rattle of the bones.”

Decay does not leave us as we progress to the next stanza, whose opening image is a rat (the poem’s second instance of the animal). The diction here creates a scene of corruption, impurity, and decay: the rat’s belly is “slimy,” the canal is “dull,” the ground is “damp.” The sullied rats seem to impinge upon the purity of water, and the image of “white bodies naked” renders this impurity more imminently sexual with the classic association of whiteness with purity. Eliot then inserts another Tempest reference through the lines “Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck/And on the king my father’s death before him.” These lines reference Ferdinand’s dismay at his father’s shipwreck—right before he hears Ariel’s more celestial song—and create a link to the “pearls that were his eyes” of the previous section, commenting on the prevalence of blindness—or, perhaps, the act of turning a blind eye to the world—that we will soon see with the arrival of the blind prophet Tiresias upon The Waste Land’s stage. The reference to a “king” in this section may perhaps also hint at the impurity of Parsifal’s King Amfortas—which we will see in just a moment as we transition to the stanza’s final line—a citation from the poet Paul Verlaine.

Eliot then pivots directly to his characters from quotidian London life, summoning his character Sweeney, who features in several other of his poems, including “Sweeney Erect” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales.” Sweeney is typically Eliot’s stand-in for—to borrow a term from my Norton edition of The Waste Land—the “urban lout.” Another of Eliot’s characters, Mrs. Porter, then proceeds to wash her daughter’s feet in soda water, further reinforcing the contamination evident throughout our modern waste land.

Then comes the Verlaine poem, where we revisit our friend Richard Wagner and his influence on the text of Eliot’s poem (more on the Wagnerian backdrop of The Waste Land here). Eliot’s second significant allusion to Wagnerian opera comes not from Wagner himself but from the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, whose sonnet “Parsifal” is based on Wagner’s opera of the same name. The line crowning the second stanza of “The Fire Sermon” runs thus:

Et, O ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole!

The line is a direct quotation of Verlaine’s poem, which chronicles Parsifal’s successful evasion of the sorceress Kundry’s sexual advances, as well as Amfortas’ wounds. Verlaine’s poem is at its core celebratory, and the final stanza of the poem in particular, with its majestic imagery, sets up an especially grandiose commemoration of Parsifal’s redemptive powers:

En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole,

Le vase pur où resplendit le Sang réel.

- Et, ô ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole!

Verlaine’s stanza combines regal imagery with virtue and purification, thereby connecting the image of the Holy Grail to the image of the Fisher King. The penultimate and antepenultimate lines taken together, in fact, may seem at first glance an apt conclusion to the poem, with the King finally reclaiming the Holy Grail.

What, then, might be the purpose of the final line, the line that Eliot excerpts? Although Verlaine might be commenting on the most positive conclusion of Wagner’s final opera, it is alternately possible that Verlaine includes this line to highlight the ultimate instability of the opera’s seemingly positive finale. Wagner’s score for Parsifal directs that these boys to whom the sonnet refers come in towards the end of the opera “heard but not seen,” reinforcing the parallel with the Hyacinth Girl (and in Bayreuth exclusively, these choir boys would be singing, as the sonnet suggests, from a hidden dome). The harmonies they sing are plain and thus suggest the “purity of the hymnal, a pre-sexual ecstasy.” Their voices, furthermore, evoke a wistful longing. Eliot thus creates a commentary on the greater message of the stanza: unattainable desire, represented by the hidden voices of the singing choir boys, becomes bound up with that which is unnatural or grotesque. This line from Parsifal reiterates the message Eliot extracts from Tristan und Isolde and casts it in a novel light, engaging a new set of poetic characters to demonstrate just how absurd and unfulfilling a meaningless romance can really be.

At the heart of this allusion is also the figure of Kundry, the mysterious seductress forced to roam the Earth to seek redemption for once scorning the image of Jesus Christ upon the Cross. Kundry becomes especially important when we consider her resemblance to the Cumean Sybil from Eliot’s epigraph: both women have been cursed with unending life. Kundry is the figure who has been sent by the sorcerer Klingsor to seduce Parsifal in an attempt to foil his quest for the Holy Grail; she therefore represents the meaninglessness of sexual experience and the very destabilizing force that the final line of Verlaine’s sonnet seems to evoke. Taken in conjunction with the imagery of this stanza from “The Fire Sermon,” we can conceptualize Kundry as a prostitute-like figure, who, in her advances towards Parsifal, becomes a symbol of sexual violation.

Kundry’s implication in the Verlaine allusion may perfectly explain Eliot’s strategic placement of the “Parsifal” quotation at this stage in the poem, for the stanza immediately following runs thus:

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

The excerpt hearkens back to the opening passage of “A Game of Chess,” which briefly chronicles the rape of Philomela by the Thracian King Tereus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Philomela is consequently transformed into a nightingale (while Tereus later becomes a hoopoe). Eliot thus uses onomatopoeic language to express the lament of Philomela, and we may surmise that “twit twit twit” represents the call of a hoopoe, who appears to be persistently chasing the nightingale who has been “so rudely forc’d.” The inclusion of this rape scene in The Waste Land accentuates the unnatural dimension of romantic attraction found throughout the poem and reminds us that rape is unnatural love taken to its extreme. Yet what is most notable here is that the rape of Philomela culminates in transformation as hope for redemption; although at this point in The Waste Land, the poem’s various characters are faced with desolation in the face of artificial romance, the poem will end with the hope for positive transformation and redemption.

Meanwhile, Eliot transports us back to the “Unreal City” from “The Burial of the Dead,” introducing yet more characters from urban life. We lapse back into a more quotidian dimension filled with “brown fog” (reminiscent of the yellow fog from Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), colloquial French, and several London hotels. In the following stanza, we are transported to corporate space through images of desks and taxis. Eliot’s comparison of the “human engine” to a “throbbing taxi” is probably my favorite simile of the poem, and this beautiful use of figurative language leads us into the next section of the poem, which we observe through the eyes of the blind prophet Tiresias who, in Greek mythology, lost his sight in a dispute with a god and was transformed into a woman—hence, he throbs between two lives just like the indecisive and mechanical “human engine.”

The Tiresias stanza has been subjected to many interpretations. I took three courses in college that covered The Waste Land and then wrote my master’s thesis on this poem, and every modernist scholar seems to have a different take on the Tiresias passage. One of my professors insisted that this was a famous example of queerness in modernist poetry (unlikely if you know anything about Eliot’s staunch Anglican beliefs, though we do have a Sappho reference in the seventh line of this stanza); another professor interpreted the stanza as a commentary on the film noir genre, which gained popularity right around the time of The Waste Land’s composition (there are several elements that connect the stanza to film noir, though we will never know if that was Eliot’s intention); and a third professor read the stanza as a commentary on the vapidity of the nouveau riche (perhaps the most likely of these three interpretations, at least given the “Bradford millionaire” line). Yet my reading of the stanza takes us to something far more fundamental and universal: the stanza paints a scene of sexual failure and the emptiness of the modern romantic experience.

Tiresias becomes an all-knowing figure in this stanza, looking into the minds and daily lives of a typist and her carbuncular lover, whose existence, like the throbbing taxi, has become lifeless and mechanical. The woman is “bored and tired” as she staves off the advances of the clerk before capitulating to him. The woman here seems to view sex as a chore rather than as an exalted pleasure, and she seems relieved just after it has ended. She is capable only of “half-formed thoughts” and exists in a mechanical world, emphasized by her “automatic hand” on the gramophone. At this stage, Eliot’s rhyme scheme also becomes, for the first time in the poem, fairly regular, reinforcing the idea that this sort of existence can only be dull and mechanical.

The theme of water returns in the following stanza, along with another reference to Ariel’s Song from  The Tempest. In this stanza, the subject matter is music, and we hear a mandolin echoing through a church, bringing the poem back to a more exalted tone, especially in the stanza’s final line, “Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.” Perhaps, at this stage, we begin to approach some form of redemption—or, at least, leave behind some of the bleakness we’ve encountered thus far in the poem’s world.

Yet then we revisit the soiled Thames, Eliot’s river worn out by the “oil and tar” of contemporary life. Eliot then hits us with another Wagner reference, this one to the Rhinemaidens from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. This specific gibberish-like wailing comes from the final opera in the cycle—Die Götterdämmerung or The Twilight of the Gods (yes, this is the opera from which Friedrich Nietzsche borrowed the title of his work The Twilight of the Idols). In Das Rheingold, the opera that opens the cycle, the Rhinemaidens lose the gold that they guard, and by the final opera, they lament the fact that the gold will never be recovered. Interestingly enough, they also sing a similar, more optimistic song in Das Rheingold—Wallala la la leia lalai!—but later, in Die Götterdämmerung,  resort to the lamentation that Eliot cites in his poem as they realize that they will not recover the gold. Eliot might be hinting here at a dynamic of irreparability in the world of The Waste Land, and, considering that he chooses maidens to voice this sort of cry, we might also interpret the Rhinemaidens’ cry as representing sexual irreparability, which has been a running theme throughout Eliot’s poem. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land connect this stanza to Dante’s Purgatorio, and as we are in a river, we may read this section as a sort of purgatorial cleansing that anticipates the redemption through water that will greet us in the poem’s concluding section.

The following stanza takes us through another scene from city life—another world filled with emptiness. Although the theme of this stanza may not be immediately apparent, it is reminiscent of the scene with Lil in “A Game of Chess” in that it likely concerns either a pregnancy or an abortion (“After the event/He wept”). Eliot reinforces the disconnectedness in such a relationship—and quite literally too (“I can connect/Nothing with nothing”). As the third section of the poem closes, we meet a reference to St. Augustine’s Confessions and the temptations of his youth, reinforcing the idea that the encounter we witness between the two lovers of this stanza both represents corruption and signals a possible hope for redemption (just as Augustine’s Confessions is a story of redemption and cleansing oneself of sin).

As we enter the final stanzas of the section, we see an excerpt from Eliot’s titular Fire Sermon that concerns burning sins away (just as in Confessions) and freeing oneself from worldly passions. We end with the image of burning fire, which will soon take us into the fourth section of the poem—our big turning point—as we swap the cleansing effect of fire for that of water, and begin to approach redemption.

Stay tuned for the next installment of my analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where we’ll reach the poem’s turning point in its fourth section—“Death by Water.”

You can read my intro to The Waste Land here and catch up on Part 1 of this poem here. 

You can also watch my Part 2 analysis on YouTube here.

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We left off our analysis of Part 1 with a rather bleak portrait of London city life—images of corpses pervade the final stanza of “The Burial of the Dead,” and we see an inversion of the concept of new beginnings as new life sprouts from the dead. In Part 2 of the poem, however, we are in a different sort of scene: a room that represents high French aestheticism. The title of this particular section is taken from the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Middleton, whose play “A Game at Chess” satirizes the heightened tensions between England and Spain in the early 17th century. The play uses chess as a metaphor for political maneuvers and failed relationships, and in Eliot, we see the idea of chess repurposed as a metaphor for sexual maneuvering. 

In the first line, we get a Shakespearean allusion (Eliot likes those) to Antony and Cleopatra, immediately introducing the theme of female sexuality that will be present throughout this section of the poem. The line taken from Antony and Cleopatra runs thus: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Burned on the water...” The encounter here, as described by Antony’s friend Enorbarbus, is the first between Anthony and Cleopatra and accentuates Cleopatra’s beauty, who “o’erpictures Venus” in appearance. In Eliot, the barge is swapped out for a chair, which is reflected in the marble that adorns the room. Notice that Eliot replaces water with marble—if water will later become symbolic of redemption, then at this stage in the poem, we are still operating within an irredeemable sphere. The ensuing description of the room is at once opulent and grotesque, featuring blind Cupids, jewels, and synthetic perfumes (again highlighting the unnatural environment). 

The narrator then zones in on a picture above the mantelpiece of the transformation of Philomela, an allusion to the story in Ovid’s Metamorphosis of the rape of Philomela that highlights an unnatural change following a forced sexual encounter. In the myth, Tereus, the king of Thrace, rapes Philomela, the sister of his wife Procne, and cuts out her tongue when she threatens to tell everyone what he has done. Philomela then alerts her sister of the rape through a tapestry she weaves and is later transformed into a nightingale, whose mournful cry is explained by Tereus’ actions. Procne, similarly, is turned into a swallow, a detail that will be important to us as we enter our analysis of the next section of the poem. Eliot denotes the nightingale’s cry through the onomatopoeic “Jug Jug,” an outburst that is sung to “dirty ears,” thereby emphasizing the perversion of forced sexual encounters that pervade the world of The Waste Land. Eliot seems to suggest that in the absence of a meaningful, loving relationship, women become sterile and purposeless, unable to share their inner thoughts as they are reduced to primitive sounds heard only by men with malicious intent. 

We leave the room in this sort of unrest and transition then to a marriage scene, now exiting the lavishness of the throne room and becoming privy to the vignettes of a infertile marriages. Though we stil find some of Eliot’s characteristic literary allusions in this section of the poem, the second half of “A Game of Chess” is largely devoid of complex references to literary history and instead turns to the British vernacular to paint a portrait of English city life. We witness a dialogue that betrays the lack of deep connection between two lovers—“I never know what you are thinking”—and segue back into a rats’ alley that resuscitates the final city scene in “The Burial of the Dead.” Yet throughout this barren, smoggy scene, vestiges of hope creep up through the line “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” which we saw in the poem’s previous section in reference to the Phonecian sailor. In recalling Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest once again, Eliot invites us to consider the transformation of decay into something more positive, yet only for a moment, for the following line recalls another sort of emptiness: “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” Here, we have the emptiness of emotion between two lovers much like we saw in the Hyacinth Garden scene in the previous section. 

At this stage, Eliot invokes a ragtime song that betrays a sense of irony: “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag–/ It’s so elegant/ So intelligent.” In the motif of the popular song lies the death of high art, though the song itself, which references Shakespeare and its own intelligence, seems to believe otherwise. Eliot ascribes a negative morality to this sort of world devoid of true artistic pursuit and once again brings our attention back to these troubled lovers, who, in a manner reminiscent of Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, seem panicked about quotidian, quasi-meaningless decisions—the woman wonders whether she should rush out with her hair down and what she might do the following day. She settles finally on playing a game of chess, highlighting the absence of profound emotional experience in her relationship as she presses her “lidless eyes” together and waits for a knock on the door: her eyes never close, symbolizing a constant alertness, and a lack of peace, as she waits for death. 

We shift then to a parallel infertility scene in a more lower-class setting and meet several gregarious women in a pub, who discuss their friend Lil. Throughout this section, we are met with the repetitive cry of the barman: “Hurry up please its time,” which, taken at its surface, suggests the closing of the pub yet might also symbolize the ominous approach of death. The women gossip about Lil and her husband Albert, who has just come home from the war and will be disappointed to find that Lil has gotten an abortion with the money that he left her. In this scene, sexuality and fertility become weapons of manipulation; in the absence of a meaningful relationship, suggests Eliot, women will be bitter about their sexuality and ability to bear children. They are left, instead, as barren and meaningless, just as in the barren world of the Fisher King. 

The most telling lines of “A Game of Chess” come towards the section’s conclusion in an allusion to Hamlet. (Eliot isn’t going to go very long without dropping an allusion on us.) Here, we find an excerpt from Ophelia’s famous mad songs that lead up to her suicide. Ophelia bids the women around her good night, just as the women in Eliot’s pub bid each other good night. Ophelia’s portentous words accentuate her decay into madness and reemphasize the danger of failed relationships, but why does Ophelia go mad? There is no single interpretation for her descent into lunacy, but based on the previous discussion of abortion and fertility in the poem, we can assume that Eliot is alluding to the popular theory that Ophelia is pregnant with Hamlet’s child and kills herself because does not wish to bear without having secured Hamlet’s love for her (recall that Hamlet turns bitter towards Ophelia halfway through the play). Eliot thus suggests that in the absence of meaning in human relationships, women must necessarily become futile and barren, leaving the world in a state of decay—leaving behind a waste land. 

“A Game of Chess” is thus an exploration of the lack of regeneration in a world that has brushed aside meaning in favor of trivial experiences. Yet while Eliot leaves off this section with a bleak picture of fertility and regeneration, we will start to see hope in “The Fire Sermon,” which might offer this sort of barren world a chance at redemption. 

Stay tuned for my next installment of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land analysis, where we’ll dive further into The Waste Land’s exploration of regeneration in the third half of the poem—“The Fire Sermon.”

You can also watch my analysis of Part 1 of The Waste Land here. 

In the intro and backdrop to The Waste Land, we learned about how the poem is a reinterpretation of the Fisher King myth. Today, we’ll discuss how this mythical figure plays into the first part of the poem and what this might tell us about desire in The Burial of the Dead. 

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Let’s start with the epigraph. A poem’s epigraph is typically a short quotation that provides a lead-in to a poem’s overall theme or message. Eliot chooses a rather abstruse epigraph for his poem—in keeping with the poem’s overall abstruse nature, of course—and gives us a quote partially in Latin and partially in Ancient Greek. It’s an excerpt from an early Latin satirical piece by Gaius Petronius called—quite aptly—The Satyricon. 

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεîν θέλω.’

There are several different translations to the excerpt above, but here’s my own translation based on my limited working knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek:

“For I saw the Cumean Sybil hanging in a jar with my own eyes, and the boys asked her, ‘Sybil, what do you want?’; she responded, ‘I want to die.’ ” 

The myth of the Cumean Sybil follows the story of a woman who was granted a wish from the Greek god Apollo. Her wish is simple: to live for as many years as there were grains of sand on the beaches of the Earth. In making her wish, however, she forgets to ask Apollo for eternal youth and now must live out her immortal days rotting from old age, suspended in a jar to survive. In a somewhat morbid turn of events, Sybil can only then think of death. 

Eliot could not have chosen a more suitable: at once, he presents us with the poem’s main themes: death, futility, desire. 

From there, we have a dedication to Eliot’s friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound, who helped edit to the poem down to the form we know it in today: 

     For Ezra Pound

       il miglior fabbro.

We’re already reading in four languages before the poem even begins. Talk about modernist pretensions! In his dedication, Eliot communicates his gratitude to Pound, whom he calls “the better craftsman.” The Italian in the dedication might at once be an homage to Eliot’s favorite poet Dante Alighieri and an allusion to Pound’s admiration for the Italian language and culture, which famously and somewhat unfortunately culminated in Pound’s support for the Italian fascist party under Mussolini. 

Yet despite Pound’s less-than-perfect politics, his skills as an editor are unparalleled. Pound was responsible, for instance, for the poem’s current title, The Waste Land, which, at his instigation, Eliot changed from his original title He Do the Police in Different Voices, a reference to Charles Dickens’ Victorian novel Our Mutual Friend. Eliot’s original title was meant to capture the many overlapping voices we see throughout the poem, but the title The Waste Land more succinctly represents the poem’s essence. 

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The Waste Land famously opens with an allusion to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a medieval collection of stories that center around a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Chaucer’s work opens with a plea to springtime—“Whan that April with his showres soote”—and through its opening lines sets up the theme of hope through the rebirth of life in spring. The Waste Land’s opening line—“April is the cruellest month”—takes Chaucer’s idea of spring as rebirth and turns it on its head—spring is no longer about hope; in Eliot, rather, spring becomes the emblem of futility and cruelty. The season no longer embodies the blanket of safety that it does in Chaucer—in Eliot, in fact, it is now “winter that kept us warm.” The narrator of the opening stanza of The Waste Land—perhaps the figure Marie—experiences a fear that can only be released by the act of sledding downward. When Marie feels frightened, her cousin negates her fear and isolation by taking her sledding in the mountains, replacing her fear with a sense of freedom. In one respect, Eliot seems to be saying, freedom assuages fear. Yet freedom from what? Desire, perhaps? That certainly seems to be the landscape that Eliot presents us with at the outset of the poem.

The second stanza of the poem—widely known as “The Sermon Stanza”—presents an alternate take on fear through allusions to the Book of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. At this stage in the narrative, Ezekiel establishes a prophetic authority within the poem that grants both the prophet and the reader the feelings that were earlier denied them in the Marie episode. While Marie sleds downwards and releases fear, the prophetic stanza explores the act of rising—almost a direct juxtaposition to Marie’s release of anxiety whilst sledding. Here, fear culminates in “a handful of dust,” a reference to the famous “all is vanity” from Ecclesiastes, which highlights the futility of old age and argues that all human experience must end in the same way. 

Intimacy in The Waste Land therefore becomes intrinsically bound up with the human experience of fear. If you recall our earlier analysis of the Fisher King, you’ll remember that one of the most famous representations of the Fisher King lies in Wagner’s opera Parsifal. It is no accident, then, that the end of the sermon stanza Eliot quotes directly from Wagner: 

       Frisch weht der Wind

                      Der Heimat zu

                      Mein Irisch Kind,

                      Wo weilest du?

My translation of these lines runs thus:

Fresh blows the wind 

To the homeland 

My Irish child, 

Why are you weeping? 

These lines appear twice in the opera, and with the exception of four preceding lines that establish the nautical setting of the first act, these words open the initial act of Tristan und Isolde and introduce a new motif within the opera that we do not find in the prelude; later on, sung by the same young seaman, they also open the second scene of the opera. 

Tristan und Isolde? But isn’t The Waste Land based on Parsifal? 

My theory is that Eliot quotes from Tristan rather than Parsifal because the former opera more accurately captures the theme of the futility of desire and the unnaturalness of intimacy—the main ideas of The Waste Land. 

The sailor’s song in Tristan establishes a powerful sense of erotic longing for an unattainable beloved; 

taken by itself, the sailor’s song has no obvious mal-intent: the seaman sings “of his separation from his own Irish sweetheart,” a lover we never see onstage and who is removed from the storyline entirely; the moody Isolde, however, overhears the sailor’s song and immediately takes his lament as an invitation to rage against Tristan in the memory of her own betrothed, the Irish knight Morold, whom Tristan has slain. As she overhears the sailor’s song, Isolde, starts up auffahrend, the German irritable. Her next reaction—sie blickt verstört um sich (she looks around in bewilderment)—suggests a sense of confusion and mental distress that anticipates the ignorance of Eliot’s Hyacinth Girl (whom we will meet in just a moment). 

When we hear the text of the sailor’s song for a second time in the following scene, we find that Isolde has undergone a change of heart: the description that Wagner gives of Isolde runs thus: deren Blick sogleich Tristan fand und starr auf ihn geheftet blieb, dumpf für sich. Her gaze lands immediately on Tristan and remains fixed; she sings hollowly to herself. The sailor’s song thus represents both “bereavement” and “passion” for Isolde, and her initial two lines in response to seeing Tristan—“Mir erkoren/Mir verloren” (both lost to me and destined for me)—reemphasize this dualistic dimension of love and suffering. Wagner borrows the thematic material of Mir erkoren/Mir verloren from his prelude and then reuses the same bars in the famous Liebestod in the final act of his opera. Wagner’s powerful leitmotif of desire and longing thus associates itself with the innocent sailor’s song and consequently begins to muddle innocence with sexual experience. 

Which brings us swimmingly to Eliot’s Hyacinth Garden.

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Eliot is quite famous for his use of flowers and gardens as metaphors—you see his “rose garden” later in The Four Quartets’ opening poem, “Burnt Norton.” Gardens in literature have long been symbols for paradise, innocence and beauty, and they are often used metaphorically to represent societal decay—think of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, which Eliot was almost certainly intimately familiar with. In Eliot’s Hyacinth Garden, the love between the Hyacinth Girl and her lover possesses a sort of artificiality—one that is closely reminiscent of the love that develops between Tristan and Isolde, who only fall in love after they both drink a love potion. 

At the tail end of the “Hyacinth Girl" episode comes another quotation from Tristan und Isolde, this one taken from the opera’s third and final act: Oed’ und leer das Meer (Desolate and empty is the sea). The “Hyacinth Garden” passage is thus framed by these two passages taken from Tristan und Isolde, highlighting the opera's importance to the work—or, at least, to these few stanzas. Curiously enough, this line is sung by a tenor in the role of a shepherd who usually doubles in the opera as the young sailor; in performance, therefore, the roles become reminiscent of one another. 

At this point in the opera, Kurwenal, Tristan’s companion and vassal, and the shepherd are in the castle garden (there’s our garden again), looking out at sea to anticipate the coming of the ship that is to carry Isolde, the only Ärztin, or nurse, who will be able to heal the wounded Tristan—again, we revisit the theme of decay and healing and are reminded of the Fisher King. Kurwenal asks the shepherd to “pipe his merriest tune” should he apprehend the coming of Isolde’s ship, but the shepherd instead replies, after an extended pause that lasts five bars, that the sea is desolate and empty—our quote in the poem. 

The crucial thing to note here is that Isolde is not only separated from Tristan as a lover from a lover but also as a nurse from a patient; Tristan’s wound thus becomes associated with sexual guilt—for he has been wounded by the sword of Melot, a knight who serves King Marke, the man Isolde was supposed to marry upon the ship’s arrival to Cornwall. When Tristan and Isolde are discovered making love in the garden in the previous act, Tristan succumbs to Melot’s sword because of the guilt he feels at having been with Isolde. What is even most significant for our purposes is the explicit link that Tristan’s wound creates between himself and Parsifal’s Amfortas—Eliot’s Fisher King. 

In both cases, the wound is one of “sexual guilt” and thus sets up the motifs we find in the Hyacinth Garden episode and elsewhere in the poem. The difference, however, between Eliot’s barren world and that of Tristan und Isolde is that in the latter, hope arrives in the form of Isolde the healer and temptress, albeit too late, and leads to a more optimistic “transfiguration” through the singing of her Liebestod, Isolde’s eventual love-death. In Tristan, death is the necessary prerequisite to the fulfillment of an otherwise unattainable desire, the bypath to change and transfiguration and, ultimately, a better future. 

Death allows Tristan and Isolde to reveal their true feelings for one another and escape the artificial and substitutive world which they have been previously subjected to. With the resolution of the opera’s opening Tristan chord in the Liebestod, Isolde’s emotions, stifled unnaturally for over three hours by Wagner’s initial rejection of the standard dictates of harmonic chord progression, become not only possible but also genuine. She experiences an intense emotional episode and comes to terms with the reality of her love for Tristan: she can love him only in the wake of her own death. 

In Eliot, the Hyacinth Girl’s failure with lover mirrors Tristan and Isolde’s own failed relationship in terms of a common sense of unfulfilled longing: the moment that the Hyacinth Girl apprehends the abortive nature of her relationship with her unspecified lover, “she cannot speak” and virtually loses all conscience of her surroundings. She exists in a paralyzed limbo much like Isolde, yet unlike Isolde, there is no hope for her of transformation or redemption, for we leave her in the wake of silence, desolation, emptiness. Unlike Tristan and Isolde, therefore, who attain meaning in their lives through their mutual destruction, Eliot’s lovers cannot consummate their love through any sort of transformation and thus find themselves facing an utter loss of meaning in their relationship—“I knew nothing.” Yet after a continued strain of bleakness in tone and imagery, the male figure in the garden looks into the “heart of light.” Perhaps a shred of hope? Yet as if oblivious to the failure of his sexual relationship, his hope is fleeting: he blindly convinces himself that there is hope for himself and the Hyacinth Girl, resurrecting their love in a most unnatural fashion. The phrase itself—“the heart of light”—recalls Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, from which Eliot notably intended to extract the phrase “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” for The Waste Land’s epigraph before it became the epigraph for The Hollow Men instead. 

The alteration of the phrase—from heart of darkness to heart of light—suggests a false hope for a better future and an artificial method through which this hope can be attained. The tragedy of the world of the Hyacinth Girl is thus that these lovers, and, indeed, lovers in general, can no longer recognize the beauty of genuine human connection and opt instead to content themselves with an empty erotic experience that culminates in silence.

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Later in the poem, there will be hope for redemption—through the themes of drowning and water that we are introduced to at this stage of the poem.

Here we come to Madame Sosostris, the famous clairvoyante with a bad cold, who, through her Tarot cards, brings us the idea of drowning as a symbolic transformation. During a Tarot reading, she draws the card of the Phoneician Sailor, exclaiming “fear death by water.” 

Eliot likes sailors.

At this stage, in fact, we have even more of them. Eliot invites us to recall Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest—a play about drowning and shipwreck—through the lines “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” an allusion to the drowning of Ferdinand’s father. Yet as many things in The Waste Land, the motif of drowning will soon become inverted and perhaps become a positive. Don’t forget to pay attention to the nautical imagery throughout—it will come back in later sections of the poem. 

Finally, we come to the famous closing stanza of “The Burial of the Dead”: Eliot’s famous “Unreal City,” which he himself claimed was a reinterpretation of Baudelaire's Fourmillante Cité—“swarming city.” We have yet another reference (Eliot likes those) to Dante’s Inferno in the line “I had not thought that death had undone so many,” wherein Dante visits Hell and witnesses many dying souls as he progresses through each of the nine circles of Hell. The narrator of Eliot’s poem roams through a similar Hell—yet here, Hell is conceptualized in the form of the London city streets. We revisit the theme of death and old age in conjunction with the garden: 

‘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?

Does Eliot thus suggest that we can attain growth from death—rebirth from death? Morbid, yet very much in keeping with the parallel to Tristan und Isolde. 

Finally, the closing line to The Burial of the Death (in yet another language): 

‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

One more Baudelaire reference, this one bringing us back to the poem’s opening line through the idea of repetition and the digging up of memories. Talk about rebirth. 

So is this a poem about death and the futility of desire? Absolutely. Through the poem’s many allusions, Eliot takes us through the decay of human relationships and the human experience. At this stage in the poem, there is no hope for redemption, yet as we'll see later, Eliot will invite us to consider what we must do to resurrect human relationships and find meaning in decay. 

Stay tuned for my next installment of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land analysis, where we’ll dive further into The Waste Land’s exploration of decay in the second half of the poem—“The Game of Chess.”

The Waste Land is widely considered to be one of the 20th century’s greatest and most profound poems, and rightly so. Over the next several months, we’ll be tackling The Waste Land through a five-part series of articles and videos. 

You can check out my video intro to the Waste Land here and read the full poem here. 

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I first came across the Waste Land in the 7th grade when I was just 12 years old. That afternoon, my 7th grade English teacher introduced our class to Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man” through the unorthodox method of having us all stand around outside for an hour on the frigid January morning so that we could become, in his words, literal snowmen. As we rushed back into the classroom to revel in the power of modern heat technology, my teacher began to lecture us about the poem’s bleak yet hopeful underpinnings and likened its conclusion to Eliot’s The Waste Land—both poems find recourse in the meditative aspect of Eastern philosophy. Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued, especially after my teacher left us with the thought that The Waste Land is probably one of the world’s most difficult poems to comprehend. Twelve-year-old Liza was up for the challenge. 

Of course, at twelve, slogging through the poem and missing 90% of its literary, philosophical and musical references, I came away from the poem more baffled than satisfied yet resolved to revisit the work as I grew older.  

By the age of eighteen, picking up the poem once again, I was absolutely hooked. 

The Waste Land is a poem about the futility of human desire. Published in 1922, the poem originally ran a whopping 19 pages long and would have likely retained its epic length had it not been edited by Eliot’s friend and fellow modernist poet Ezra Pound. Eliot later dedicated the poem to Pound, whom he called il miglior fabbro—“the better craftsman.” 

The Waste Land is divided into five sections, each of which mirrors an act of a Shakespearean drama. Eliot was a staunch proponent of tradition, arguing, in his famous essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, that one must first understand the history of the literary tradition before leaving a mark upon it. Eliot’s homage to Shakespeare is a nod towards literary dialogue and a key component to understanding the development of his poem. 

Throughout much of his work, Eliot aims to spark conversation with the figures of the literary past. In the notes to The Waste Land, for instance, he cites a book called from Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston as his primary inspiration. “Not only the title,” writes Eliot, “but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend.” We might presume that Eliot’s fascination for antiquity led him to select Arthurian romance as the backdrop for his poem.

As its title suggests, The Waste Land tackles the issue of societal decay through a reinterpretation of Arthurian legend. Just as James Joyce’s Ulysses is a loose retelling of Odysseus' homecoming in Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Eliot’s The Waste Land broadly follows the story of the Fisher King from the famous Perceval myth. In Perceval (the same myth that gives us the legend of the Holy Grail), we learn that the Fisher King once presided over a thriving kingdom, yet a wound on his leg has rendered him barren, leaving his kingdom to fester and decay. Though Arthurian myths—in the vein of the Greek epic tradition—may have been disseminated orally, artists throughout literary history have attempted to capture the story of the Fisher King in verse and prose alike: Chrétien de Troyes in his verse romance Perceval, Wolfram von Eschenbach in his chivalric romance Parzival, and Thomas Malory in his Arthurian behemoth Le Morte d'Arthur, to name a few. Yet Eliot’s Fisher King is perhaps best known as King Amfortas from Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, and indeed, it is no accident that Eliot, a great admirer of Wagner, quotes from several of his operas throughout the poem, borrowing motifs from the composer to bring his story to life. 

Understanding The Waste Land’s Wagnerian parallel is crucial to tapping into the poem’s deeper meaning: Wagner’s persistent commentary on the unnatural and even sickly nature of many human relationships strikes an important chord with the overall message of The Waste Land, and characters from Wagner’s operas and Eliot’s Waste Land alike evince a vehement urge to attain genuine connections in the face of desolation and despair. Eliot thus uses the Wagnerian trope of unattainable and unnatural desire to stress the perils to which modern society has subjected itself. But though Fisher King might stand for infertility, in Eliot’s retelling of the myth, he becomes a vehicle for bringing life back from the dead and imbuing meaning into an absurd and senseless world. Just like the Perceval myth, The Waste Land becomes a quest story—a story of recovery, fertility, and coherence. 

In looking to Wagner, Eliot offers a potential solution to societal decay through the revitalization and transformation of human relationships—a topic we’ll further explore in our next analysis of The Waste Land.

Stay tuned for my next installment of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land analysis, where we’ll dive further into The Waste Land’s Wagnerian parallel, discussing human relationships in the first section of the poem—“The Burial of the Dead.”

You can access the poem here to follow along. You can also watch my analysis over on YouTube here.

Auden wrote “Musée des Beaux Arts” in 1938 on the cusp of World War II in a world of political unrest. You might imagine that the suffering of the war might have presented an apt backdrop to this poem, which covers the topic of human suffering, but the poem is too leisurely and light to be in reference to a war—it’s set in a museum, after all. 

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Auden was inspired by a particular painting hanging in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Belgium. It’s a painting by Breughel, one of the most significant Dutch painters of the Dutch Golden Age known for his landscapes scenes. 

The painting in question here is Breughel’s Icarus, whose composition is in keeping with what we might expect of Breughel’s dedication to the pastoral landscape. The painting appears in the second stanza of the poem and references one Icarus, the Greek mythological son of Daedalus. If you remember your Greek mythology, or if you’ve studied James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, whose main character is named after the mythological Daedalus, you’ll remember Daedalus as the creator of the labyrinth that held the half-bull half-human Minotaur. Later on, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Daedalus reappears with his son Icarus and is tasked with creating wings. Because the wings are made of bird’s feathers and beeswax, Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun. Icarus, of course, as any brash Greek hero, disobeys his father’s admonition and flies towards the sun. As we are left to contemplate his hubris, Icarus plummets to the ground, his wings melting under the sun’s heat, and drowns in the sea.

You might thus expect a flamboyant painting that depicts the heroic Icarus ascending towards the sun, perhaps replete with bright reds and yellows, but that’s not the painting we get at all. Instead, we have a verdant landscape with a plowman, feathery green trees, a shepherd with his dog, and ships off in the distance. In a modest corner, we see Icarus’ limbs poke out from the water. And no one seems to notice his descent. 

Auden’s poem alludes directly to Breughel’s painting through a literary device called ekphrasis, which allows a poet, through vivid imagery, to put art to words and create a vibrant scene. One of the earliest and maybe most famous examples of ekphrasis can be found in Book 18 of Homer’s epic The Iliad in a description of Achilles’ shield. Auden wrote several ekphrastic poems, and in fact, his other famous ekphrastic poem is his take on Achilles’ shield through the poem “The Shield of Achilles.” 

Yet in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” we don’t arrive at the ekphrasis until the latter half of the piece. Instead, we open with the lines “About suffering they were never wrong,” a sentiment that promptly reveals the poem’s subject matter: humanity’s indifference to suffering and its corresponding focus on quotidian life. The poem’s tone mirrors the feeling of Breughel’s painting: its diction creates a quasi-pastoral scene with shepherds and ordinary people going about their day rather than heroic figures falling to their death. 

Auden’s poem concerns ordinary human experience, as well as how suffering is a part of everyday life, yet Auden doesn’t negatively judge the rote pace of human life or the more ignorant people who are unaware of the profound suffering around them. He seems to be suggesting that suffering is a typical part of the human experience.  

You might notice that our opening line is a bit odd—it’s written in a sort of Yoda speak, with the predicate at the start of the sentence and the subject at the end: “About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters.” Auden liked to break literary conventions: he has many of these convoluted sentences throughout his work; he also loves adverbs: “walking dully along” or “reverently, passionately waiting.” I teach writing to teenagers, and the two rules of writing I always push—write sentences in the simplest, most straightforward way and use adverbs sparingly—are the very rules that Auden chooses to break, reflecting his belief that human beings don’t have to be relegated to a fixed standard. The effect in the poem is something playful or even ordinary—prose that is, perhaps, more innocent. 

Certainly, the poem concerns innocence. We witness children who are actively “skating,” ignorant of the more serious and devoted elderly people who are “waiting” for Jesus’ birth. If you note the rhymes, which come at irregular intervals and are somewhat cloaked within the text, you’ll see that the rhymes link ideas together. For instance, “waiting” and “skating” present a contrast between the experience of suffering and the ordinary world. The children don’t care about suffering, for how could they be privy to its existence? And what of the dogs? They go about their life—their “doggy life” (a fun one). The poem is full of enjambment as well—the literary device where one line spils over to the next. Here, the enjambment creates a sense of perpetual motion and reemphasizes Auden’s idea that life goes on—despite all the suffering that comes with it. 

In the second stanza, we encounter Breughel’s painting and Auden’s love of ekphrasis. Auden notes how the poem's actors turn leisurely (there’s your adverb again) away from the disaster of Icarus’ fall. The plowman goes about his life; the ships sail calmly on past Icarus drowning in the water. 

Does Auden excuse us for ignoring suffering in the world? That is certainly my reading of the poem—Auden seems to be arguing that while it might not be justified to turn a blind eye to suffering, it is certainly natural to go about life in ignorance of it. Auden thus captures a central facet of the human experience: it is ordinary, quotidian—a life without recourse to perils. And maybe, he suggests, that’s all right.