Welcome back to the Pens and Poison The Waste Land analysis series! Today, we’ll be looking at “The Fire Sermon,” the third part of this monumental 20th century poem about the futility of human intimacy.
You may access the full poem here.
Check out my previous The Waste Land analysis posts:
“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.”