Introduction to The Waste Land

Introduction

Structure

Unity

Technique

Introduction

     The Waste Land is the most famous poem of the 20th century. When it appeared at the beginning of the 1920's it exerted an immediate and powerful impact on the consciousness of the post-World War I generation. It was received, like Joyce's Ulysses and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises were to be a few years later, as both the expression of the doubts and uncertainties of an age and the revelation of a new technique in writing.

     The excitement over the poem was well justified¢wthe brilliant, original technique was there for all to see and for some to imitate. Yet few readers found themselves capable of giving a clear account of the meaning of the poem. One early admirer recalls that he saw himself in the same situation as St. Augustine in the Confessions:"If no one questions me, I know; if I have to explain, I don't know." Eliot himself was no help. He wrote:

Various critics have done me the honor to inter pret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumblings.

There is some truth in the statement. The Waste Land was written at a time of great strain in Eliot's life when he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown from overwork, marital problems, and lack of funds. Yet, the publication in 1971, fifty years after the poem first appeared, of a facsimile of the first draft of The Waste Land shows the great care Eliot took in writing and correcting it, a face that suggests he thought it was something more than mere grumblings.

     In any case, the greater number of Eliot's contemporaries saw in The Waste Land a metaphor for spiritual aridity, boredom, and death wish¢wall characteristics of modern man. Others interpreted it as a quest for the meaning of life amid the absurdity of modern living, or as a mirror of the state of the human soul after the death of God, or as an expression of the contrast between man's desire for a full intensity of existence and the actual drabness of daily living. The most recent interpretation of The Waste Land sees it as a Buddhist poem on the horror of reincarnation on the wheel of life.

     After half a century of scholarly analysis the poem is still enigmatic. To the best minds it remains a challenge, to students an ordeal, and to common readers a sphinx's riddle. This is perhaps, as in the case of Hamlet, the reason for its fascination. The undefinable meaning is its truth. Conrad Aiken, a close friend of Eliot and an early commentator of the poem, perhaps summed it up best when he wrote that the incoherence of the poem was a virtue because the subject is incoherence.

     The editors of this Study Guide do not wish to add to the confusion of interpretations. Their aim is simply to help undergraduate students of literature to achieve some insights by offering one interpretation, which seems consistent and acceptable.

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Structure

     The Waste Land can be read as a sequence of poems, each with a different speaker, setting, diction, and rhythm. The individual poems are of various length and grouped under five headings¢wThe Burial of the Dead; A Game of Chess; The fire Sermon; Death by Water; and What the Thunder Said. The first heading contains four poems: lines 1-18, 19-42, 43-59, and 60-76; the second, two: lines 77-138, 139-172; the third, four: lines 173-206, 207-214, 215-265, and 266-311; the fourth, one: lines 312-321; the fifth whose imagery gave The Waste Land its title, is made up of a poem extending from line 322 to line 423 and a conclusion to the whole sequence: lines 424-434.

     None of the poems in the sequence is entirely independent from the others. In a note to line 218 Eliot himself says that the various individual speakers in the whole sequence, both men and women, all melt into one speaker, Tiresias, who appears for the first time in his own guise in line 218. Furthermore, the heading under which each poem falls links it by tone and subject matter to the others in that group. The headings themselves are related to one another through cross references throughout the whole of The Waste Land. For instance, the downed Phoenician Sailor in the Sosostris passage of The Burial of the Dead is the main subject of section IV, Death by Water.

     Each of the poems in the sequence is composed of a scene or setting followed by either a dialogue or a dramatic monologue:

Part	Passage	Setting or Scene	Lines	Speech	Lines
I	Marie	Spring time	1-7	dramatic monologue by Marie	8-18
	Desert and Garden	Desert Sea and Garden	9-24 31-42	dramatic monologue dialogue between girl & male speaker	25-30 31-42
	Sosostris	Fortune teller's stall or home	43-46	dramatic monologue	46-59
	Unreal City	City district of London	60-69	dramatic monologue	69-75

The quotation from Baudelaire (line 76) is a comment on the whole of Part I

II	Neurotic Lady Lil	Her bedroom pub in London	76-110 139-172	dialogue dramatic monologue	111-138 139-172
III	River	Thames in autumn	173-181	dramatic monologue	182-206
	Eugenides	Foreign businessmen in hotel	207-211	invitation in indirect speech	212-214
	The typist	Typist's room and actions	215-256	inner monologue	257-265
	The Thames daughters	The river	266-291	triple dramatic monologue	292-305

Lines 306-311 comment on the whole of Part III in the form of an inner monologue made of memories of readings in asceticism.

IV	Phlebas	Sea	312-318	rhetorical speech	319-321
V	Walk in the Desert	Death of God, desert, Chapel Thunder, Ganges.	322-400	dramatic monologue	401-423
	Finale	Quester in the Waste Land	424-425	inner monologue	426-434

     Each poem is highly dramatic and constitutes what T.S. Eliot has called an "objective correlative." By this term he meant a scene or series of scenes so organized by the poet as to contain the complex of thoughts, feelings, and emotions the poet means to convey. This way, instead of being an outpouring of subjective sentiment, the poem becomes an objective equivalent of the poet's state of mind. The reader has the responsibility of finding out what thoughts, feelings, and emotions are contained in the "objective correlative." A great deal of disagreement on the meaning of a modern poem comes from the use of this method by poets after Eliot¡Ðthe poets no longer express their thoughts and feelings in abstract words, they only present an object, as painters do, in which the thoughts and the feelings are present. The poem is a symbol. Reading comprehension, then, is no longer a question of understanding the meaning of words; it requires a new habit of mind capable of grasping the symbolic meaning of thins and scenes. A Nietzsche wrote: "Was not nature given to man so that he could find objects with which to communicate with another soul?"

     Each of the five headings of The Waste Land groups poems which are related by thought and feeling. "The Burial of the Dead," an expression taken from the burial service of the Anglican Church, collects poems dealing with the feeling of death-in-life, the feeling of the absence of true life in one's existence. The title of "A Game of Chess" derives from a scene in Thomas Middleton's play, Women Beware Women, in which a game of chess is described in terms of a game of sex played by an Italian duke in the act of seducing a young lady. This part brings together two vignettes of modern life: one representing a couple of the upper class and the other a couple of the lower class, both couple lacking the harmony of matrimony, both suffering equally from the battle of the sexes, the association of man and woman being a source of conflict. "The Fire Sermon" refers immediately to the Buddha's Fire Sermon against all forms of sensuality and groups poems which all deal with promiscuity and prostitution. "Death by Water" is a single poem on death as purification. "What the Thunder Said" refers directly to the voice of God in the Upanishads and indirectly to the voice of god on Mount Sinai. This section is made up of a series of vignettes progressing from scenes of the death of God in the soul of modern man t6o the rediscovery, or at least the memory, of primitive revelation. It also contains a finale to The Waste Land, which recapitulates the main themes and shows the speaker trying to achieve, in the midst of a conflict of hope and doubt, some kind of peace of mind in sight of the pathetic spectacle of life that The Waste Land describes.

     Parts I, II, and III present characters in the modern waste land. Parts IV and V present the enveloping action¡Ðthe death of a culture at the end of its normal course ("And we too are dying with a little patience"). Memory recalls the death of preceding civilizations: Phoenicia, Alexandria, Athens, and now London. It goes as far back as the beginning of Indo-European civilization in Hinduism.

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Unity

     In spite of their disjointedness, the poems that constitute The Waste Land all show a remarkable unity of tone and feeling. We have no trouble in accepting all these poems as the expression of one sensibility undergoing a period of moral crisis. The Waste Land is the objective correlative of that particular state of mind groping to achieve some kind of inner peace. In his note on line 218 Eliot says that what Tiresias, the central figure of The Waste Land sees, is the substance of the poem. Tiresias being blind, what he sees is really what he remembers, experiences, and hopes. All through The Waste Land we hear only one voice, the persona of Tiresias who assumes the various characters in the poem.

     The arrangement of the sequence shows some kind of organic progression from the despair of "I want to die" in the epigraph to the final "Shantih," the peace which passeth understanding. There is also a progress in debt of experience from the voice of Madame Sosostris, the fortuneteller with a bad cold, to the voice of God in the thunder. Though Sosostris speaks in the present and the voice of God is something remembered, yet, in this poem, things remembered and thins perceived are all equally present in Tiresias' consciousness.

     The groupings of the poems also follow a sort of progression from 1) a description of the spectacle of present life ( the first three headings) to 2) a drowning in materialism (Death by Water) and 3) a search for spiritual renewal (What the Thunder Said).

     The Waste Land ends with a serenity of sorts¡Ðthe speaker knows what he has lost of real life in the world he lives in, at this particular moment of history, and hopes and doubts at the same time that renewal is possible. His serenity comes from the realization that his task is to make the best of a bad job¡Ðto try to fit the fragments of his broken world together and be satisfied with the trying.

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Technique

     One characteristic of The Waste Land is the impersonality of the main speaker. As Eliot notes, he is not a character, we don't see him, and we only hear him. He is only a voice, a language trying to communicate a state of mind, to give communicable form and shape to complex, subtle, fluid, almost ungraspable feelings which he himself hardly understands. His language is a tool or exploring the region of his deepest feelings. The difficulty we experience in understanding The Waste Land is the same difficulty the speaker experiences in understanding his own state of mind. In another poem, Eliot will say: "We had the experience but missed the meaning," a remark that applies well to the experience of reading The Waste Land. Tiresias is not a definite character with definite views on life, but an anonymous carrier of a state of mind. The individual poems, vignettes, scenes are arranged to express that state of mind; they are studies in contrasts between images taken from actual living and images, references, allusions and hints of passionate intensity of existence:

Part	Intensity of life	Actual living	Comments
I Marie1-18	Indirect allusion to the Canterbury Tales:"Wham that Aprille with his shoures stoe¡K."which stresses the joy of life rooted in nature and supernature	Sleeplessness (I read much of the night), uselessness (go south in the winter), rootlessness (Bin gar keine Russin¡K)	Marie, of the international aristocratic set, recalls only one moment in her childhood, which gave her a hint of what life could be.
Desert & Garden 19-42	Possibility of love and life in the Hyacinth Garden, freshness (water in garden) vision and light (heart of light in garden).	aloneness and death in desert dryness and unbearable heat in desert, intense glare and shadow in desert (your shadow¡K striding behind you¡Krising to meet you)	This key scene contains innumerable allusions to the Bible, literature and mythology. Scholars find new ones every now and then.
Sosostris 43-59	Allusions through the Tarot cards to the Egyptian religious ritual, which used such figures to determine the rise of the life-giving Nile.	The cards have degenerated into a tool for fortune-teller's tricks.	The passage is the most compact and clearest comment on the decay of life from the sacred to the secular.
Unreal City 60-76	Allusion to King William, mention of St. Mary Woolnoth Church, loss of sacredness ("that corpse you planted in your garden "alludes to the burial of the fertility god in ancient rituals).	Life in London described in terms of Dante's Inferno (death-in life), full of boredom (the quotation from Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil alludes to the main statement of Baudelaire that the basic sickness of man is boredom, whether he admits it or not).	Death-in life is the condition of modern man.
II Neurotic lady 77-137 Lil 139-172	Allusions to Shakespeare's Cleopatra, Pope's Belinda in The Rape of the Lock, Philomena, Milton's Satan (line 98 especially) Main allusion to Hamlet's Ophelia (good night ladies, good night, sweet ladies¡K) in the last scene before her death (III, i, 163).	Dialogue between the neurotic lady and her male companion. Images of decay, corruption, abortion, sex as good time.	Disharmony in the association of man and woman.
III River 173-205	Quotation of Spenser's Prothalamium (Sweet Thames run softly¡K¡K) a poetic conception of the Thames where the weddingfeast takes place. Wagner's Parsifal who had his feet washed before entering the castle of the Grail. Verlaine's Parsifal (O ces voix d'enfants,¡K) Marvel's "At my back I hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near."	Physical and moral pollution on the river (empty bottles¡Kslimy rats, Sweeney coming to Mrs. Porter.) Mrs. Porter and her daughter wash their feet (a cuphemism for sexual organs in the original song quoted) Images of impurity Sound of horns and motors
Smyrna merchant 207-214	Allusions to the mystery religion that Smyrna merchants spread around the Mediterranean coast in ancient times.	Secretive meeting with prostitutes
Typist 215-265	Images of life based on rhythm of nature (At the violet hour¡K(1. 220 f.) Sex as part of the rhythm and mystery of nature (the violet hour that brings the sailor home from sea) (1. 220-221), Magnus Martyr holds inexplicable spendor¡K (1. 264-265)	Mechanical life (human engine, like a taxi, food in tins, record on gramophone, etc.) Sex as a dirty meaningless bodily activity, an escape from boredom.	The decay of sexual relationship from a mystical experience to a bodily relief.
Thames daughters 266-305	Poetic river of Elizabethan time (1. 279-291) Rhine daughters weeping over the loss of a treasure. Implied poetic conception of the Rhine in Wagner's opera.	Modern polluted river (1. 266-278). Thames daughters indifferent to loss of virginity. Loss of virginity amid pollution of the river and bodies.
Carthage 306-311	St. Augustine and Buddha both exhorting to sexual control	Implied desire to be delivered from a life of sensual subjection into spiritual freedom.
IV Phoenician 312-321			"Death by Water" compares the Phoenician culture that has grown to greatness and then decayed in materialism and death to the present Judeo-Christian culture of Europe (Gentile and Jew, 1. 319) which is also decaying the same way.
V Death of God 322-366	What the death of Christ meant to the disciples from Emmaus (Luke 24: 13-35)	Implied comparison with what the death of God means to modern man.
Death of Cultures 367-385		The state of modern Europe, symbolized by London, is compared to the destruction of previous civilizations (Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna), which all disappeared in violence. Imagery of nightmare and despaire.
Quest for Permanence & Meaning 386-423	Implied comparison with quest for the Holy Grail (1. 386-391) Implied comparison with the resurrection (1. 392-395) The origin of Indo European civilization in the Hindu revelation. (The voice of God in Himavant) (1. 396-423)	Chapel, symbol of the sacred, abandoned by the modern world. The cock singing and signs of rain (fertility) Modern man needs this revelation to survive.Failure of the quest for the meaning of existence.
Finale 424-434	The quotations in various languages, suggesting the confusion of tongues of the Tower of Babel, the end of an era, imply man's desire for a glorious culture (London before the falling down), for a sense of purification in suffering (foco che gli affina), for spiritual transformation (quando fiam uti chelidon), for traditional values (Le Prince d'Aquitaine), for order (I'll fit you¡K Shall I at least set my lands in order), for peace of mind (Shantih).	The modern quester in the sterile modern world waiting for life to come back, and trying to save what he can from destruction. The quester can achieve peace of mind by accepting to live in a time of confusion of values and sterility (both physical and spiritual), knowing it is part of the normal course of nature (Shantih). What is there to do is to try and fit the broken pieces together. (These fragments I have shored against my ruins.) The suffering from this confusion is a purification (nel foco che gli affina).	This finale to the whole poem is made up of bits and pieces from past literary works implying the fragmentary (Tower of Babel) conception of the world at the present time.

     In spite of its length, the above schema is only a superficial presentation of the most obvious contrasts, in the poem, between images of the ideal intensity of life and images of the spiritual poverty of actual living. Every new reading of The Waste Land brings out more subtle and complex relations between the dreams of passionate existence that much of the literature of the past expresses and the reality of every day life that modern literature, especially the literature since the First World War, limits itself to. It would be an over implication to see the poem as a study in contrasts between past and present values; it is more a contrast between the kind of existence man's soul aspires to and the reality that is offered him.

     Another influenced innovation in The Waste Land that greatly influence later poetry in Europe is its variety of diction, style and rhythm. The most remarkable, even to the superficial reader, is the break within each poem of the sequence between the style, rhythm, and diction of the passages describing the setting and the passages containing the dialogue or monologue:

Setting	Lines	Monologue or dialogue	Lines
April is the cruelest month¡K	1-7	My cousin's, he took me out on a sled¡K	13 69-71
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street to where St. Mary Woolnoth kept the hours¡K	66-68	Stetson, that corpse you planted last year in your garden
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne¡K	77 ff.	O O O that Shakespeherian Rag The whole of the pub scene	128 141-172
The river's tent is broken, the last fingers of leaf¡K	173-176	The moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter and her daughter¡K	199-201
The violet hour that brings the sailor home from the sea. These fragments I have shored against my ruin.	220-221 431	Lays out food in tins... On the divan are piled Stockings slippers, camisoles, and staysWhy then Ile fit you	227ff. 432

     These, again, are only a few more obvious examples. The"Death by Water"and "What the Thunder Said"sections are remarkable for unity of diction and style as compared with the three earlier sections. In The Waste Land, as in Eliot's poetry in general, the complex of thought, feeling, and emotion is not forced into a pre-established verse form; on the contrary, the exterior form espouses the inner experience that strives to express itself as fully as possible. This technique has become one of the characteristics of modern poetry and art.

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