T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land

The initial declaration of The Waste Land—“April is the cruellest month”—is clear enough in meaning, even if it defies readers’ expectations. The opening is a subversion of the first lines of the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer paints April as a month of restorative power, when spring rain brings nature back to life: 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour; 

It’s an image repeated to the point of cliché in subsequent centuries. But in the waste land of T.S. Eliot’s modern world, amid the ruins of World War I, the Chaucerian image of a fertile and resurrective April becomes suffused with cruelty. It is, ironically, winter that “kept us warm.” Soon after entering The Waste Land, we find ourselves unbalanced, at a disadvantage. “Summer surprised us” surprises us. A shift in tone has taken place. Could the same mouth that uttered the melancholic bitterness of “April is the cruellest month” turn so quickly to the social banality of “Summer surprised us”? This is followed by the matter-of-fact narration of a series of events: “we stopped in the colonnade, / And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, / And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.” The diction suddenly lacks mythic anxiety. Compare the images of consumption: “And drank coffee” is prosaic in both its unassuming delivery and ordinary meaning when set next to the festering “feeding / A little life with dried tubers.” This shift in tone—without even a stanza break to flag it—is emblematic of both the disjointed style and piecemeal structure of The Waste Land. 

But who is the “us” that winter kept warm and whom summer surprised? And, more important, who is the speaker (or speakers?) of these opening lines? By the time we reach the end of the first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” we have encountered many disparate voices. Who are all these people? Where is this waste land they inhabit? What is this chaos of impressions we are privy to? Wherefore such madness?

To borrow a phrase from Polonius in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t–,” a method that Eliot delineated in a piece he wrote for The Dial on James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Joyce’s use of Homer’s Odyssey as the novel’s foundation had, for Eliot, “the importance of a scientific discovery”:

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. […] Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.

The poet formulated these thoughts on Ulysses and its “mythical method” as he was writing The Waste Land. We can see in his command for others to pursue this method a personal mandate to carry out “his own, independent, further investigations,” which The Waste Land represents.

In his poem, Eliot replaced the Homeric parallel of Ulysses with a correspondence to the Arthurian Grail quest of medieval legend, particularly through Jessie Watson’s From Ritual to Romance. Eliot’s approach is not purely imitative though—he pushes Joyce’s structural innovation into new territory by atomizing its method. Though he focused on praising the connection to The Odyssey in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” it seems likely that Eliot picked up on the multi-mythic quality of Joyce’s text. Yes, Bloom is Odysseus, but he is not Odysseus alone; he is also at various points associated with such figures as Jesus Christ and the ghost of Hamlet’s father. What Joyce noticed is that Homer’s epic and Shakespeare’s tragedy were, in the words of Hugh Kenner, “homeomorphs, one concentrating on the father, one on the son, but comparable in their structure of incidents.” Thus, the allusive tapestry of Ulysses is woven through with countless threads of myth and tradition in conversation with the more dominant Homeric parallel. Through homeomorphic plots and contorting personas, the mythical method was always about more than the overlay of a contemporary story on the structure of a single earlier narrative. Rather, it is interested in the ways the contemporary story can rhyme with an excess of antecedents.

Eliot’s “heap of broken images” is, on some level, an elaborate series of heists—a charge Eliot himself admitted to. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” he wrote in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919, having already proven with his early poems to be a thief ransacking the temple of literary tradition. The cultural contraband Eliot hoards offers readers access to a collective consciousness through canonical reverberations, keying us into an emotional wavelength. This embodies Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative, “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Because a borrowed image, according to Eliot, is “only vigorous in relation to the feelings out of which it issues,” no image of his is merely decorative; each is enmeshed in the gossamer of history, myth, sensation. 

His version of the mythical method is not only more atomized than Joyce’s but also less rooted in his writerly present. Even though Ulysses evokes ancient images and emotions, Joyce kept the narrative grounded in a roughly contemporaneous time and place; the setting is Dublin on June 16, 1904. But the “heap of broken images” that is The Waste Land refuses such rooting; yes, at times we are in modern London, but we seem to drift through time and space, unmoored.

Fragmentation is not only a feature of the setting, plot, and theme of The Waste Land but also, crucially, its defining formal feature. We are accustomed to thinking of poems as lyrical utterances from a single speaker, but, as suggested by Eliot’s working title for the poem, “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” Eliot’s poem employs a multivocal approach that may set unsuspecting readers back on their heels. But is the poem merely a cacophony of voices or is there some guiding consciousness curating—or potentially enacting—these personages? Extrapoetically, the consciousness is Eliot himself, the poet arranging this collage of impressions. “The poet’s mind,” according to Eliot, “is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” But within the poem, what unites these particles?

How you read The Waste Land will determine your answers to that question. It is possible to read the poem as drama (in which the characters ostensibly exist without an overriding consciousness, speaking for themselves, interacting as if on a stage), as narrative (in which a single consciousness controls the proceedings but as a sort of narrator, giving voice to various characters), or as lyric (in which the entire poem becomes a sort of soliloquy of a single consciousness, and this central character dons the personas of these innumerable others, a “he” who “does the police in different voices”—from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend).

In the first stanza of the first section, we meet Marie (apparently Countess Marie Larisch, who played a pivotal role in the Mayerling Incident that set the stage for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and, thus, World War I). Her voice is unadorned with the trimmings of poesy, at least in comparison to the voice of the opening lines, but she is not entirely devoid of grief, nostalgia, and restlessness. There is childish longing: “In the mountains, there you feel free.” Her memories are presented as precious, but their maudlin bankruptcy is not hard to detect.

As we wander further into the vignettes of the first section, we meet more characters, including the hyacinth girl (whom Hugh Kenner described as speaking “with urgent hurt simplicity, like the mad Ophelia”) and Madame Sosostris (who is reminiscent of Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, the moniker Mr. Scogan uses when he masquerades as a fortune-teller at a fair in Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow). The cross-dressing gender play of Madame Sosostris foreshadows the sexual ambiguity of the Tiresias figure, who appears later in the poem and whom some scholars take as its central consciousness. Madame Sosostris’s clairvoyance, even if she is merely a charlatan seer, further solidifies her connection to Tiresias and to the Cumaean Sibyl in the poem’s epigraph (taken from Petronius’s Satyricon).

The final piece of the first section is set in a nightmarish “Unreal City,” modern London, and contains the landmarks of the city’s financial district where Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank. The phrase “Unreal City” is borrowed from Charles Baudelaire’s “The Seven Old Men”: “Unreal city, city full of dreams, / Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passers-by.” Eliot’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, and Dante’s Inferno merge into a hellish tableau—the inferno of modern life.

The second section, “A Game of Chess,” juxtaposes two scenes, on opposite ends of the class spectrum, like opposing sets of chess pieces—or, perhaps, like the divergence within the set of chess pieces between the pawns and the pieces of higher orders. The first episode involves a wealthy woman surrounded by her accumulation of expensive things (furniture, art, jewels, etc.). These may be fragments shored against her ruins, though Eliot doesn’t use that famous phrase just yet. As in chess, this queen is the focus; the king, the weakest piece in the game but around whose welfare the whole enterprise depends, is largely absent from this section. Her impressions become more fragmented and more erratic as the scene plays out. Amid the whorl of her tidal thoughts, we find a reference to the song “That Shakespearean Rag,” a minor hit in 1912:

But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— 
It’s so elegant 
So intelligent

The cultural degeneration from Shakespeare to popular music is emblematic of the decline and debasement seen throughout The Waste Land. Eliot interestingly affixed an “O O O O” to the beginning of the song, which is reminiscent of the final lines of Hamlet: “The rest is silence. / O, o, o, o.” The woman suggests a game of chess, the image that gives the section its title, and betrays a sense of listlessness, indolence, and anticipation.

Cut to a London bar at closing time, the working class patrons periodically reminded by the bartender to “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” Two women discuss a third woman; their conversation covers topics germane to the poem’s thematic interests, such as abortion, adultery, false teeth, army discharge, and male sexual insatiability. This second scene ends with a seemingly innocuous picking from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The words are spoken by Ophelia; they are her farewell: “And so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.” Ophelia is yet another character evoked by Eliot whose death arrives in the form of water, and there is also a connection to the poem’s “hyacinth girl” through their mutual association with flowers.

Elsewhere in Hamlet, a gentleman describes Ophelia’s incoherent words: 

Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection. They aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily. 

Hearers moved to collection, fitting the words to their own thoughts, could very well be a gentleman’s description of Eliot’s poem too.

The direct reference to Hamlet is curious because in an essay published just a few years before the poem, Eliot called the play “an artistic failure.” He claimed, “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” In his view, Hamlet’s emotional response to the incidents of the plot do not match the particulars of the situation. Something is rotten in the state of Eliot’s remark; as Harold Bloom explained, “who can believe Eliot, when he exposes his own Hamlet Complex by declaring the play to be an aesthetic failure?” Is it possible to see The Waste Land as Eliot’s attempt to tackle the problem that he thought proved too much for Shakespeare? Did it also prove too much for him? According to Nancy K. Gish, 

The Waste Land is Eliot’s Hamlet. It is endlessly puzzling and endlessly fascinating; and by Eliot’s own criterion it lacks an objective correlative. It is filled with a sense of horror and loathing which seems, on the face of it, out of proportion to the situation presented. Especially if that situation is primarily a myth of regeneration.

Like Hamlet, The Waste Land could be called “a stratification, [and] it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors.” If, according to Eliot, Hamlet is unsuccessful because Shakespeare imposed his own personality on the play, is Eliot able to escape that trap?

The third section, “The Fire Sermon,” on the banks of the “Sweet Thames,” begins with a speaker lamenting the departed nymphs of folklore. But before long, we are introduced to Tiresias. In Greek mythology, Tiresias is a blind seer from Thebes. In addition to his gift of prophecy, he is known for his sexual transformation from man to woman, a punishment from Hera, the queen of the Greek gods. In his endnotes, Eliot explained:

Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character,’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.

Most poems do not come with their own author-provided endnotes, but Eliot does offer some guidance by including them. That said, readers needn’t feel obligated to chain themselves to his signposts. The interpretational mileage one gets from shoehorning everything in the poem into a single consciousness, whether it is that of Tiresias or not, varies from critic to critic, but it would be difficult to understand The Waste Land without wrestling with “What Tiresias sees.” Thinking through some of the essential narratives that include Tiresias (especially Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex) can offer connections to many of the major motifs of The Waste Land, including blindness, gender ambiguity, withheld knowledge, cryptic prophecy, dangerous sexual power, stagnant relationships, plagued land, and death by water. Hugh Kenner called Tiresias 

he who has lost the sense of other people as inviolably other, and who is capable neither of pity nor terror but only of a fascination spuriously related to compassion, which is merely the twentieth century’s special mutation of indifference.

So what does this “Old man with wrinkled female breasts” see? Tiresias witnesses a typist at teatime whose lover arrives and has his way with her. He leaves triumphant; she is merely “glad it’s over.” (We are not, however, because this typist segment is one of the great aesthetic achievements of Eliot’s poem.) 

Now, the river song begins. We hear the voices of three “Thames-daughters,” each describing a loss of sexual purity. One laments, “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” Her speech, one might say, mirroring the gentleman’s description of Ophelia’s words, is nothing. Could this be a response to E. M. Forster who wrote in his novel Howard’s End a decade prior “Only connect”? If so, is it a negation of Forster’s famous injunction or an extension of it? Eliot’s line can mean “I can’t connect anything” or “I can’t connect anything with the nothingness” or “I can connect the nothingness with the nothingness,” all of which yield different interpretations to the closing lines of this section. The fact that this happens “On Margate Sands,” one place where Eliot physically stayed during the writing of the poem, connects the maiden’s voice with Eliot’s personal voice as well. Connection and disconnection are integral to the poem. Here it might be beneficial to turn to Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Poets”: 

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking: in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. 

Because this scene deals with betrayed maidens and their lost chastity, there is also the possibility that Eliot here is cognizant of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing pun. In that play, there is a triple entendre at work. The most obvious part of the pun is the connection between nothing and noting (or writing), but the less-discussed third aspect of the pun is “an O-thing” (or “no thing”), which was Elizabethan slang for vagina. The section ends with interlaced lines from St. Augustine’s Confessions and the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Eliot explained in his endnotes, “The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western ascetism [sic], as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.”

The fourth section of the poem, “Death by Water,” is by far the shortest, thanks to the extensive editorial cuts made in correspondence with Ezra Pound. After his friend’s edits, Eliot questioned whether he should keep Phlebas the Phoenician at all, but Pound was adamant he remain. Phlebas is connected not only to the tarot cards of Madame Sosostris but also to Ferdinand from The Tempest and the Smyrna merchant Mr. Eugenides. Phlebas, who has drowned, remains imprisoned at the bottom of the sea, laid waste by tidal currents and the creatures of the deep. We are asked to consider this sea-ravaged corpse, “who was once handsome and tall” as us.

In “What the Thunder Said,” the fifth and final section of the poem, we get an apocalyptic vision of a parched land: “There is no water.” The thunder brings no rain—is “dry sterile.” There are imagined “drip drop”s of irrigation, “[b]ut there is no water.” The poem telescopes into a scene in which two men are accompanied by a third (or by the specter or imagined image of a third). In his endnotes, Eliot pointed to Ernest Shackleton’s account of one of his Antarctic expeditions, in which the explorers maintained the delusion that there was an extra member present, but it also clearly conjures up a biblical story from Luke 24 of travelers on the road to Emmaus, in which two disciples encounter a third presence on their journey, who is revealed to be a post-resurrection Jesus. Moving back out to a wider lens, Eliot shows us “Falling towers” before naming a succession of cities—“Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London”—that could represent a clipped history of the trajectory of Western civilization from classical antiquity to modern day: empires achieving great heights yet eternally collapsing. 

Ultimately, a “damp gust” brings rain—and we find ourselves in India at the Ganges. The thunder is no longer sterile; it speaks: “DA.” In the Upanishads, a collection of Hindu scriptures, “DA” is the voice of thunder. Hugh Kenner explained it: “If the race’s most permanent wisdom is its oldest, then DA, the voice of the thunder and of the Hindu sages, is the cosmic voice not yet dissociated into echoes.” It is the root of “Datta” (“Give”), “Dayadhvam” (“Sympathize”), and “Damyata” (“Control”), each of which appears in this final section of the poem.

In the last stanza, the arid plain is behind the speaker, who brings to mind the Fisher King from Grail legend. He questions, “Shall I set my lands in order?”—something people usually do as they prepare for death. This is followed by more cultural detritus, lines from a traditional English nursery rhyme, Dante’s Purgatorio, the Pervigilium Veneris (of unknown authorship), and Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet “El Desdichado,” respectively, each appearing in its original language untranslated. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” the speaker says. The fragmentation is both external (“these fragments”) and internal (“my ruins”), but the one buttresses the other.

Hamlet is evoked again through reference to Thomas Kyd: Hieronimo’s Mad Againe is the subtitle of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (which Eliot noted was a source for Hamlet in his essay on Shakespeare’s play). The words “Why then Ile fit you” appear in Kyd’s play when Hieronymo says them to one of the murderers of his son when the killer asks him to write a play for the king’s entertainment. With that line, Hieronymo means both “I’ll oblige your wishes” and “I’ll give you what you have coming.” He uses the play as a means for revenge; wielding a real dagger as a prop, he murders the men on stage.

Eliot, too, obliges our wishes and gives us what we have coming: “Shantih shantih shantih.” A Sanskrit word for peace that is prayed at the close of an Upanishad, Eliot explained in his endnotes that “The peace which passeth understanding” is “a feeble translation of the content of the word.” The peace which passeth understanding itself, then, passeth understanding. 

Cleanth Brooks knew: “The poem would undoubtedly be ‘clearer’ if every symbol had a single, unequivocal meaning; but the poem would be thinner, and less honest.” Some things, in poetry as in life, must passeth understanding. Remember Eliot’s line about Hamlet: “We should have to understand things that Shakespeare did not understand himself.” Compare this to what he wrote to I.A. Richards: “I am rather inclined to believe, for myself, that my best poems are possibly those which evoke the greatest number and variety of interpretations surprising to myself.” “Shantih shantih shantih” The beyond-language-ness of this final prayer again returns us to those final lines of Shakespeare’s play: “The rest is silence. / O, o, o, o.”

Much of this guide concentrates on the poem’s Hamlet connections. The focus could just as easily have been on the references to The Tempest or to Dante or to the Fisher King—each of which are more numerous than the references to Hamlet—or to any number of other metatextual associations. The focus on Hamlet here was not because that particular set of allusions is a skeleton key that unlocks all doors and gives us complete access to the poem. As Eliot writes, “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.” Hamlet merely offers an interesting point of view. If anything, each allusion, each image, each feeling is more keyhole than key. Peer through whichever keyhole you like. What you see, in fact, is the substance of the poem.