T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land - Part 5
A Pens and Poison Poetry Analysis
Welcome back to the Pens and Poison The Waste Land analysis series! Today, we’ll be looking at the fifth and final section of The Waste Land: “What the Thunder Said.”
You may access the full poem here.
Check out my previous The Waste Land analysis posts:
“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.
My translation.
These are excellent critical essays. They show an impressive and sensitive close reading of the poem.
"As the city dissipates, we are transported to a more bucolic scene ..."
I don't know if any critics have speculated that Eliot in this poem was influenced by cinema, and perhaps 1922 was too early for such an influence to be felt. But this sort of transition, which seems to occur repeatedly in the poem, seems to me very like the cinema technique of the "dissolve." Alfred Hitchcock said that the art of cinema consists of putting together pieces of film to tell a story, and that The Waste Land is a poem that puts together pieces of verse to tell a story also makes it seem, to me at least, cinematic, though as I say it may not be a question of direct influence.
"... then what does he suggest is in store?" I think later Eliot gave a rather pessimistic answer to this question in Christianity and Culture: "we can even anticipate a period when it will be possible to say that [society] will have no culture". I remember first reading that long ago and thinking that he surely must be overstating the case, but more recently I feel be may have been right.
Anyway, Eliot later claimed that the poem was a completely personal "grouse against life." But what did he know, he only wrote the thing.
Nice analysis. I would add that the poem is also a study in the pains of excessive self-consciousness and indecision, something Eliot felt acutely on a personal and generational level (the kind of spirit that led to the "Do I dare?" refrain in another of his works). To that end, the use of Purgatorio is particularly interesting - it is an indeterminate place, where people are not yet fully one thing nor the other.
In Canto 18, exactly at the midpoint of the Mountain of Purgatory, Dante is at the terrace of the slothful. Mostly he's trying to learn how to love correctly, and temper the emotions with a spirit of divine love guided by reason, but the slothful (who in a sense could not be bothered to be one thing nor another) run past him without stopping, so all he hears are fragments of what they are saying - a form paralleled in much of The Waste Land, which is full of fragmentary voices.
One could equally argue that the form is a literary attempt to convey the fragmented media world of the city (imagine what taking a trolley past advertisements while the radio played seemed like when it was new) that also influenced cubism and the experimental tone poems of the time. Jon Corelis mentions the effect of cinema on literature, which is similar - On the third page of The Great Gatsby, published just three years after this, Fitzgerald likens his emotional state to a flower opening up in sped-up film.
I like the Purgatory thing, though.
Also of note: What kind of barely known poet publishes notes to his poem, attempting to recapitulate what they say as most of world culture? He and Pound were so very apocalyptic.