T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

A Pens and Poison Poetry Analysis

This article previously appeared in serialized form on Pens and Poison from July to November 2024. I have decided to compile it into one post for all of those who missed the first several installments.

---

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.