Walk Through The Waste Land - A Conducted Tour
Author: 2020 April
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

WALK THROUGH THE WASTE LAND

A Synopsis of Critical Commentary

April, 2020

' You should never explain a poem, but it always helps, nevertheless' - William Carlos Williams 1 a prophetic voice out of the void, sombrely detached and disembodied, both universal and dislocated – it speaks with clarity and propriety and its object is the gaining or regaining of stasis
and order - a generalised choric weariness at the seeming eternal cycle of the seasons bringing no
inner renewal - redemptive showers are now a cruel memory - the final 'l' of April and cruel rein-
force the meaning of 'cruelest' - cruel not only for the crucifixion and death of Christ but on ac-
count of the frightful way in which nature creates life out of death, bringing endless circularity
and unavoidable paradox - flux, craving and suffering - the return of Spring the ‘memory’ of life
on the wheel, a cycle of desire from which the enlightened seek release - Spring’s life and colour
throws the individual’s depression into stark relief and forces painful memories to surface -

Spring is fearful to the corpse because growing flowers feed off the buried dead, and the body
becomes, once again, preyed upon - death here will be followed by fearsome transmogrification -
the wrenching of lines over the normal catalexis causes a heavy masculine caesura on ‘breeding’,
causing a halting, pensive, brooding sensation - the reflective voice assumes a tone that per-
fectly matches the sombre sense - the theme in the poem of frustrated natural impulse - that we
feel pain admits the potential for genuine spiritual rebirth (‘Christ the tiger’) - an ironic counter-
point to the positive view of April that opens the Canterbury Tales - and cf. Tennyson In Memor-
iam (CXVI) 'Is it, then, regret for buried time/That keenlier in sweet April wakes...', and in Maud

'why have they not buried me deep enough?' - April is the usual month of Easter - Spring marks
the death and burial of the man-god and vegetative deity Adonis, who leaves behind only a

‘dead land’ - April 1921 in England was especially notable for a severe cold snap that blighted
the emerging buds

2.lilacs – a symbol of Christian sacrifice - heavily scented spring flowers here smelling of mem-
ory, desire and feelings of nostalgia – we recall the dying and reviving god Attis, whose return
from the dead was foreshadowed in the appearance of lilac-coloured blossoms at the very begin-
ning of Spring - lilacs and rain together represent the revival and awakening of consciousness to
its religious dimensions - they seem to appear like magic - their automatic breeding is of an im-
placably mechanistic nature - but this release from the boring round is given in order to be fru-
strated (‘down we went’) - for E lilacs suggest powerful emotion and tenderness – breeding and mixing the constant becoming of the world, Heraclitus' change that ought to bring stability, but
here elements are separated in a sterile way, not in life-giving union - the struggle of life to exist

– lethargic wraiths – negativity and ennui - memory and desire breed not fulfillment but disgust,
boredom and unanswerable questions cf. the voices out of the cistern in V

3 even though pain now demands of them that they think of the past (memory) and of the future,

(desire) their existence now has no real thought for the future and no sure relation to the past –
this mixing quickly succumbs to the pathetic fallacy - winter has been quite comfortable for them
and there is now nothing of them beyond this composite of memory and desire – a feeling of sta-
sis despite all the active verbs - or, another way of putting it, mixing intertextual allusions with
the decadent lust of the present - birth of the new order (or disorder) necessarily ‘çruel’

leaving us with memory and desire for the good old days when winter kept us warm and fed us
piecemeal - nostalgia smothered by epidermal irony - in Indic tradition seed is a metaphor of the
scars of previous lifetimes, which, charged with desire or attachment, become activated again in
present time - memory has been "surreptitiously," as the Sutras say, mixed with desire - the tree of karma, unless redeemed by some deep experience out of time, can only bear the fruit of endless repetition - the "huge aggregate of pain" in the world and the self is the remembered impressions of memory and desire - In E the concept of desire, expressing itself in terms of the will-to-
live no matter what, appears as an image of spring, which at the same time is an image of pain -
hope and joy are twisted off - suffering, as well as the desire which is the cause of suffering, is a
cosmic trait of the total process of Nature - now roots cannot clutch and the tree gives no shelter

4 the accentual tug and clot of the dull roots, a stubborn pushing and pulling - incorporates the
rhythmic constant of the slow, almost constant four beat opening lines, tending towards spondaic
compression - it is cruel to try reawakening unresponsive roots - the resonant drumming of

'spring rain' - note the critical edge to 'dull' – what was thought dead is painfully being brought
back to life – an act of necromancy, stirring up the buried corpses of 'memory and desire' from
the dead earth - spring rain - the accession of vitality - yet neither the rebirth of nature, nor the stirrings of human inner life implied in that rebirth, are understood or really wished for - mankind has lost its memory, the natural cycle has become inverted, and the coming of rain stirs

“dullroots” in a dead land - the simple but inexorable longings and instincts of the buried spirit
have become atrophied - there is an unconscious resistance to the inflow of spirit - Spring only
renews old agonies, mixing memories of previous existences with the desires for evanescent
things of the world, causing the wheel to revolve in endless reincarnations of suffering - neither
the rebirth of nature, nor the stirrings of human inner life implied in that rebirth, are understood
or really wished for - the image is one of sterility and a desire to forget, but implicit in this opening is the idea that what can bring regeneration still remains, underlying the apparently meaning-
less present - the seasonal mystery of death and renewal are only poignant reminders of the ines-
capable fact of historical time - the speaker stands apart, unable to enjoy the refreshment of

Spring, refreshment rooted as it is in a changeless eternal pattern of creation and destruction

5 a perverse paradox, the usual values of winter inverted to suggest the impossibility of regenera-
tion - the logic grimaces - the depthlessness and meaninglessness of an ongoing present time se-
parated from the past - the false warmth of the body in a state of paralyzing numbness, not the
true warmth of a reviving spirit - they wish they had no desire - the speaker identifies himself
with the suffering human condition

6 words like "stirring", "mixing", and "feeding" profane beginnings, be they literary or organic, provoking us to ask what "cruelty" has exchanged them for the uniting, engendering, or nourish-ing that we find in Chaucer - the passage whispers of the words its words deny, and sorrows for
the things it cannot say - they wish they had no memory at all - most of the lines stretch beyond
the comma where the cadence falls, as if the words themselves had overflown their bounds,
straining towards a future state of being like the dull roots that they describe - they typify the
way the poem differs from itself, forever trembling towards another poem which has already
been written, or else has yet to be composed - the first instance of the motif of burial in earth,
water, or fire that runs throughout the poem - cf.Whitman’s "buds" of speech protected by "winter frost"

6 ' a secure oblivion seduces and comforts those who do not dare to force the moment to its cri-
sis. Memory cruelly blocks the fulfillment of desire, as the dead hand of past experiences,
formed by the history of the unconscious, reaches out to obstruct present feelings. We go from
the winter warmth of indifference and into the world of nature, woman and history' (Jay)

6 “an inattentive, barely sustaining pleasure that differs from the awakened call to being we find
in Nietzsche’s arguments for a balance of forgetfulness and historical consciousness” (McIntire)

7 the speaker a personified root consciousness horrified by nature and by his own exclusion from
its cyclical regeneration – ennui is not sin but the state of sin – the characters of the poem af-
flicted by an abjection that is experienced as desire without hope cf. Inferno IV, 42 'sanza speme
viveme in disio' – the timbre meditative, pensive, reflective - the voice’s low pitch and long som-
bre duration - the whole poem expresses a deep weariness towards such natural cycles and the
eternal struggles over desire – the hope is more for the cessation of this eternal cycle of rebirths
than on the Fisher-king's desire to renew life - we are kept from positive vice by indolence and
fear – E's student copy of Petronius' Satyricon glosses the Latin word for mushrooms tubere

1-4 flat irony, instantly evoking the modern temper - man’s incapacity for life as opposed to nat-
ure - the buried emotions, suddenly revived, of Tiresias, moving spirit of the whole poem. It is he
who appears to be expressing his inert longing and unfulfilled existence - dried tubers forgotten
links with the past, their precise purpose in the poem being to feed a little life into the dead land -
the struggles of immobile existence – the human out of phase with the seasons and other cycles –
the present is merely the remains of a world, the dry lands of memory - prophetically Spring is a
reminder of the wheel of life, constant change, the cycle of desire - a repeated sagging and stif-
fening in the struggle against numbed forgetfulness - ' feel nothing and be safe”- a combination
in the lines of unmistakeable directness with lurking possibilities of mistaking its direction –
their gist and pith are not in doubt but much might hang upon the exact discrimination of what
we are being disagreed with about, depending upon various intonations - a meditative, pensive,
and reflective tone, intimate and philosophical - the low pitch and long duration of a somber
voice - memory transfixes while desire impels –or, memory released thaws the psyche while de-
sire stymied paralyzes it - strong stress rhythms aggressively counterpoint the conflict between
the fertility of spring and the aridity of the speaker’s heart - verbs of natural quickening grope
painfully but with a dogged hopefulness across the line-endings to encounter their objects - the
spring torment of youthful love – life felt as death - the ascetic's revulsion at the senses breeding, stirring and mixing – these -ing words negative and disturbing because of the desire for stasis –
the dead weight of the line endings reveal a disturbed sexuality – the lines of the first paragraph
tend to stretch beyond the comma where the cadence falls, as if the words themselves had over-
flown their bounds, straining towards a future state of being like the dull roots that they describe

- they typify the way The Waste Land differs from itself, forever trembling towards another
poem which has already been written, or else has yet to be composed – a nod to the past but also
a flagrant declaration of beginninglessness - the passage whispers of the words its words deny,
and sorrows for the things it cannot say - most of the lines stretch beyond the comma where the
cadence falls, as if the words themselves had overflown their bounds, straining toward a future
state of being like the dull roots they describe - the rhythmic motif of the spondee, introduced
medially in the second line reference to the "dead land," is repeated initially and terminally in line 4: "Dull roots with spring rain” - as soon as a pattern emerges, a variation occurs - separation of the participles from their objects emphasize a timeless quality – the lines speak of a general
and permanent state – but change is pain – a sense of imperilled identity in the wish to escape ex-
perience - covering and feeding are maternal functions associated with the sleep of forgetfulness

– as with the whole of the poem, the opening is a barren tract of meaning where connections lose
themselves in trailing sentences, lapse into silence, incantation or gibberish, and ultimately into
animal noise and the mad discourse of Hieronymo, Hamlet or Ophelia – a fear of revelation, a
fear of full consciousness - April as the very point of maximum conflict between the forces of
life and the forces of death – the flesh willing but the spirit weak – the poetry stimulates the pain
of reawakened memory and what it forces us to perform is precisely the recall which will give
back a traditional meaning to the natural cycle – recalling Chaucer, we are also recalling a whole
tradition of response to Spring, a tradition which the forgetful world of the poem denies – E's ty-
pical implosion of individual lines into an echoing recollection of past poetry - accents and allit-
eration echo Old English poetry ( vide Pound’s translation of ‘The Seafarer’) - caesuras and enjambment give the verse a ritual air, as if we were witnessing a “rite of spring,” - participial
phrases emphasize the continual activity that underlies the winter’s “forgetful snow” and the
spring’s “dead land”: life is breeding and stirring; dry roots are soaking up water; the emotions of
the past and the future, memory and desire, are mixing in the rebirth of spring- something is
germinating - rebirth is cruel, because any birth reminds the speaker of death - the dread that this
time spring will not have its age-old victory over winter - a secret desire for requiem aeternum –
ruminations on spiritual death and our resentment at coming into consciousness – projects the hu-
man desire to be sufficient against the memory of our thrown, insufficient human, finite state –
the whole poem is full of anxiety about death and generation, and aching with desire for a separa-
tion from our limitation and finitude – a horror of nature and the speaker's own exclusion from
its cyclical regeneration - memory (the past) and desire (the future) are cruelly pulling against
each other - fragmented psychic time meets ‘natural’ cyclic time, and in so doing confronts the
enduring enigmas of (re)birth, eros, fertility and death - the past a sensuous endeavour that re-
peatedly returned to the erotic and the corporeal - the process a translation of remembered pas-
sion and desire into repugnant, implicitly repudiated forms, desire always exceeding its object -
aching roots stirred into reluctant life by the cruellest month a depressive pain, a chink in a pre-
viously blanketing repression - if the dead are indeed to be buried, it must not be by any strategy
of manic denial but rather in full acknowledgement of the psyche's own sadistic impulses. Only
then will fertility be restored to a self at present composed of 'stony rubbish' and 'broken images'

- the speaker's initial dread of confronting the terrible yet mysteriously attractive future, which
entails spiritual death but opens up the possibility of rebirth and the retrieval of historical continuity - Nature stirs memory and awakens desire; the poet stands apart, unable to enjoy the re-
freshment of nature's spring, refreshment rooted as it is in a changeless eternal pattern of creation
and destruction - the seasonal mystery of death and renewal are only poignant reminders of the
inescapable fact of historical time - a disruptive April activates the speaker's temporal conscious-
ness, his consciousness of the past ("Memory") and of the potentialities of the future ("desire") -

Spring, in the immediate wake of the Great War, struck an ominous note of resumed horror, as in
the expression “Spring Offensive”

1-4 “A spiritually subterranean world of shadows, corpses and buried seeds....they live the buried
death of seeds in winter and await the spring rains resentfully for real life is merely torpid. They
form not a community but a mere aggregate” (Frye)

1-4 ' past glimpses of integrity and confidence are cruelly because inconclusively 'mixed' with
the 'desire' that the state in which they were conceived may once more regain reality' (Traversi)

1-4 “the alliteration suggests breeding and coupling while the lyricism is in tension with the feel-
ing we have of immobility ....caesuras before the –ing participles seem both to drag against them
and to be kicked away from them and the line breaks protest against them rather feebly, as if
knowing the futility of resistance. The impersonal diction resists the mad desire to breed, to mix
sex with sex, identity with identity and, despite himself, the speaker is sensually lyrical” (Bedi-
ent)

1-4 “Sap no longer excites. Now desire causes pain and initiative causes fear” (Williams)

1-4 ' the theme of E's lines is fertility, the diction plain, the repetitive rhythym incantatory...halting verbals end each line and echo like a ritual chorus...private experience is at its greatest inten-
sity, becoming universal' (Davidson)

1-7 “the dragging participle endings of -ing that end five of the lines suggest reluctance and be-
wilderment, as between sleeping and waking” (Salinger)

8 Starnbergersee - A Munich lake in the vicinity of which King Ludwig built one of his story-
book castles – the word rounds out the line with a full and satisfying cadence– the sounded out
name of the lake gives a fresh distinctness to 'shower' and 'stopped' which more immediately en-
ergizes the scene - following the reverie of 1-7 the speaker's memory glides off into an actual
conversation in the Hofgarten, a public park in Munich – in the poem we get the overheard
scraps of conversation, miscellaneous literary tags, and incoherent cultural recollections that
would stock a modern cultivated cosmopolitan mind of 1920 - rhythm, diction and cadence
change from halting end-rhymes and measured iambic and spondaic feet to a conversational live-
liness - the voice is brittle, reminiscing, gushing, confident, cosmopolitan, unforgettable, echt,
alive in the ear - E impersonates its foreign inflections, imposes them authoritatively on us - the
voice is loud and clear, then it is gone - mental chatter in mid-sentences and rather breathless
skips and skids - a casual saunter of stops and starts – from measured beat to conversational live-
liness - the 'us' suddenly human and particular - the reader reorientated with a sudden enlivening
shift - a cold, unanalyzable restlessness - it is the first effect from the operations of memory and
desire - the 'us' is here suddenly human and particular, the reader reorientated with a sudden enlivening shift -"us" contracts into the couple in the Hofgarten, after having spoken for the human, animal and vegetable worlds - after the fatigued restraints of 1-7 with its series of verbs ending in
ing, there is a stirring into energy, a liberation - this whirlpooling process of immersion and self-recovery into renewal recurs in the poem - what begins as an editorial "we" becomes the mark of a migration, which restlessly displaces voice and origin - curiously unashamed personal reminiscence - an immediacy that comes from nowhere and lacks a centre - a strain now appears to exist
between the presumed identity of the poem's speaker and the instability of the speaker's world -
forlorn and only just realizing it - her only subject herself and she never found what that is - Wo-
man as a self-referencing whirlpool of vanity - a sequence of deadpan surprises - one thing at a
time and nothing need follow - the excited openness of childhood - a sort of flit-brained parataxis

- a schizoid loss of connection and consequence – the time is out of joint – winter provides
warmth, summer a surprising occurrence, the speaker cannot sleep at night and migrates to avoid
seasonal cycles – the desire to forget is related to the decadence suggested by the description of
meaningless activities associated with pre-war Europe - childhood by contrast was a time when
she overcame winter fears instead of avoiding them by moving south – she lives in a world of in-
tolerable paradoxes created by her compulsion to perceive up and down, fear and security, circu-
lar and straight, as contraries, paradox as an opening onto vistas of chaos - a poignant mixture of
nostalgia and boredom - she is cut adrift from any external authority, spiritual or temporal, with
an undue awareness of self and a loss of connection to the common life – summer breaks out
from the control of the rhetoric, the logic and the idea – the shift of voice accomplished by a syn-
tactical metonomy is both disturbing and liberating, confirming anxiety in the mechanism of dis-
placement, but also diffusing it in the errancy of the particular - the poem’s distinct voices blend,
sometimes cacophonously, in a collective speech – the speaker's mind the centre around which
the world gyrates wildly, and with which it makes few contacts, and those chiefly enigmatic

9 an irruption of vitality, this time more powerful and sudden - yet men are disturbed by the sud-
den accession of spiritual vitality and do not answer the call - they avoid the rain, stopping in the colonnade - ‘dull roots’ flee from reviving water - at the end of the poem spring rain will be a
saving release

10 the details in this succeeding narrative make up a world which is dense, particular and inex-
plicable – April’s lascivious stirring recalls an antithetic image of earlier innocent vitality - a
slow down in pace signalled by the dawdling 'ands' and the in-on halts of the pre-war leisure
class - the post-war haunting of watering places by dislocated German aristocrats from eastern

Europe

11 the mechanical sequence of repeated 'ands' an impulsive one-dimensional
language which can express only the unrelated particulars of experience – a detached tone - a
ghostly but poignant and pregnant nostalgia for youth, love and the sweetness of life - but with
suggestions that it is old, dated, corrupt, decadent - the mutual dislocation of general and particu-
lar, of thought on the one side, and feeling and sensation on the other – the series of consecutive
events gives the feeling of meaningful time, the time in which to do something, as opposed to the
time of empty repetition (1-7)

12 a breathless interjection -“I am not Russian at all. I come from Lithuania. I am a real German”

- a Germanic staccato burst – urgent stamm, echt deutsch, sharpening the tongue – short, ellipti-cal phrasing, suggesting an informal, colloquial dialect that is slightly flippant, perhaps flirta-
tious, but decidedly different from the first voice - its sharp-edge startles the seeming dead into
life - our cultural confusion and loss - the interplay of immutable fact and national pride - and a
mixing of memory and desire - the ethnic chauvinisms and tensions of the Hapsburg Empire dis-
placed from the Balkans to the Baltic - words actually spoken to E, not by the Countess (though
they may be ascribed to her) but by a young girl, presumably a German refugee from Lithuania,
which, in the aftermath of war, was a point of dispute between Russia, Germany, Poland and

Lithuanian nationalists – another possible reference may be to a passage from H.G.Wells' The

New Machiavelli 'Here is what this girl had gone through before seeking refuge in London:she
was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and she was telling me – just as one tells something too
strange for comment or emotion - how her father had been shot and her sister outraged and mur-
dered before her eyes' (this may have an association with Philomel and other female victims) –
and probably reminiscent too of a passage in Wyndham Lewis' Tarr except that the phrase is

'thoroughly Russian'- the female voice (or voices) seems unconscious of the desire, which we
know from inference, that conjured her up – she is oblivious to it, and she is just as oblivious to
her own anxieties which we can read from the defensive stance of her protestations – her inter-
jection, apparently meaningless, is, in E's words, 'a tremendous statement, like statements made
in our dreams' - they call their choice ‘going on in the sunlight’. In fact they are unknowingly re-
nouncing their own identity (‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch’

12 ' As Eliot unveiled his own foreignness through the encryption of the foreign tongue, as if to
admit to an irrevocable loss, so too does the narrator of the opening of ‘The Burial of the Dead’,
as if to set or give the tone. The fragment concerning true and false selfhood comes in a foreign
tongue as if to signal being’s unhomeliness within itself. In a language that plays between three
identities, the loss of self and its impossible, though desired origin is signalled powerfully in the
resonance of echt, This mourning for home is here expressed as a writing, a broken image in an-
other tongue, in the tongue of the other, so that being is unveiled as exilic, as constituted by dis-
continuity, writing, fragmentation, iterability, trait, orginary repetition, différance' (Wolfreys)

13 The voice of Marie, Countess Larisch, quoting the Archduke Rudolph (of

Mayerling fame) – the keen pre-war remembrance signalled by 'children' and

'Archduke' - a snapshot of the idle rich prior to the war – a poise both of social superiority and
social insecurity - free-floating upper-class existences, cut off from history, living in a bubble of
the present and feeling no responsibility for the future – anxious, abrupt shifts of syntax reflect-
ing her and her times - the rootless cosmopolitan type portrayed in ' Gerontion' – cf. the ennui in

' Portrait of a Lady' and

' Prufrock' – against such forgetfulness all that the contemporary world can offer is vague remi-
niscence, without the resurrection of buried memory or of the self - we are reminded of another

Archduke (Franz Ferdinand) – E actually had met Marie at a social occasion in Munich

13 “the Archduke instructs, as the Thunder instructs, both of them in the mountains. He steers, as
later the Divinity will navigate the boat of the speaker's heart....she is happy, feels free and comes alive....a release through masculine energies and guidance. But down she went, down the slope
of self-censuring sensation, the converse of asceticism” (Bedient)

13 ' The Waste Land is, so to speak, a telephone poem, the poem's multiple voices referable to a massive short-circuit at the central exchange... E is tapping into the network, the human subject
witnessing only partially the workings of the network, the totality and rhizomic complexity of
which is beyond comprehension.... signals appear repeatedly, as do the various intertextual allu-
sions and citations, implying by their frequency, varied duration, changes in direction, and ran-
domness, nothing less than the entire archive of Western culture...they gather momentarily, ‘form
patterns’, but ‘no identifiable statements, much less a fixed “meaning” ’, comes into view. To re-
cast this in terms of the text as modernist discourse network: if the subject is transformed in the

City into a human engine, then ‘mechanized communication does not respect the organic bound-
aries of grammar and sense.’ The Waste Land is readable as a discourse network the very process
of which is to render data when linked ambiguous, indeterminate or undecidable. In this network,
the signs of literature or culture, and the signs of modern business practices are not situated in
opposition to one another; both are analogous to each other under the conditions of urban moder-
nity...this is a city ‘governed and created by interpretation rather than firm transcendental bases’

What the citations and allusions, the various historical references and pastiched styles hint at in
this is how the city has always been generated and regenerated. In response to this all one can do
is give oneself to ‘The awful daring of a moment’s surrender’ (l. 403) ' (Kenner et alia)

14 'sled' connects without fear, to what he said

15 Marie's self pitying tone resembles that of the demanding lady in Eliot's earlier Portrait of A

Lady - an image of the uprooted creature that must clutch - a striking image of the effort it takes
to survive in a country laid waste

15-17 short phrases and sentences read at a rapid pace and with a raised pitch accentuated by the
naturally higher pitched sound of the frontal letter "e"

16 relived memory so intense the details flood back as events, submerging the self in a rush of
memories and voices - entrapped, the self becomes a spectator to its experience, watching its ‘de-
tails’ from the outside (others ‘do’, the speaker ‘watches’, as Tiresias does)

15-16 “Marie, Marie”- shrill and thin- a mountain echo- a sense of dependency both physical and
psychological - Marie is expelled from her childhood, as memory revives the dead past through
mourning the loss of the self - a descent into the chaos of modernity and war – 'the nations slith-
ered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war' (Lloyd-George) – 'the war was like an earth-
quake caused by the slipping of tectonic plates' (Norman Davis)

15-16 ' a child's fear inextricably mingled with the sense of exhilaration which a surrender to life
provokes and which is replaced in the adult by a retreat into a safe but meaningless routine' (Jay)

15-16 “Marie, once alive, now appears to live and travel alone, untouched at night, desire almost
successfully repressed, her very search for warmth a routine” (Bedient)

16 the heartening words of close-huddled kinship - she is caught in the tension of transition,
looking back to an idealised past as she seeks to escape an unbearable present – a union of fear
and freedom – a combination of anxiety caused by a lack of clarity and a freedom from rigidity -
regressive thrills - almost unrecognised by the conscious mind, an archetype of life’s seductions, a fantasy of ‘going down the long slide to happiness endlessly’ - an anxious homelessness – a desiccated present in opposition to vibrant memory - regressive thrills, objectless travels - all the
voices are lost in strange seas of history, culture and myth, anxiously aware they are in a place
where they feel they do not belong – a narrative world that is dense, particular and inexplicable –
with fast, emphatic relish, they plunge to a descent, and thereby rise to the heights - in effect,
down we went into adulthood, losing feelings but not fears, until nothing remains but sleepless
nights and the boring round of society’s seasons

17 ' Auf den bergen wohnt die Freiheit ’ - a cliched German expression and with a definite German inflection – ironic since it refers to Ludwig II who became a prisoner in one of his own cas-
tles - a dead, anti-climactic sound, exhausted of vitality - ‘you feel free’, but in Biblical symbo-
lism mountains signify sterility, pride and sin - she is too frightened of letting go, of accepting a
descent into darkness, of accepting the humility needed for purification

18 ‘read’- a nervous twinge, a somewhat embarrassed stress - shiftless travelling – a life out of
rhythm with nature – a rich woman’s drawl, a lazy fatigue - vacuities of a merely social existence

- the lower pitched, slower paced, and more reflective end-line underscores the loss of innocent
joy amid happy company and the loss of delight in the brisk, exciting rush of the sled - Marie's
voice when modulated may be as much a thinking aloud to herself as a communication to an-
other, the overtones of isolation and loss (loss, perhaps, of both memory and desire) are more
haunting - the uninsistence of the verse finds the ear undefensive - Marie trapped in present pain
between a carefree, unconscious past and an unconscious if vacuous future – self exists only to
perceive its instability – menory, initially a harmless displacement, becomes the desire which is
being avoided - the solution to anxiety about death is an assertion of the isolated self over the
power of desire - her vague life devoted to evading the cycles of nature – the empty glitter and
slavish materialism of the tourist meccas - probably Menton on the French Riviera - images
poise in an extremely idiosyncratic way between a sharp and definitive perception of the local
scene and the stuff of private symbol - the observer cool, calm, impassive - it becomes possible
to read the poem as by an insomniac trying to fall asleep

13-18 terror, exhilaration and freedom – the voice brittle, reminiscing, gushing, confident, cos-
mopolitan, unforgettable, echt, alive in the ear, its foreign inflections authoritatively imposed
upon us - heard with the closeness with which good verse is always heard, like a voice in the
mind, speech fragments out of ‘character’ and constitutes a mosaic of experience - an apparently
affectless reminiscence which reads like a childhood trauma in Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, a
memory without meaning or emotional charge

13-18 “the power of ‘Summer surprised us . . .’ and of the winter scene that follows is in part that
of a great human nostalgia, a capacity to see all the past as though from a new grave: a past una-
dulterated by thesis or explanation, unequivocally alive and unequivocally dead... ‘We stopped in
the colonnade /And went on in sunlight’: existence as chiaroscuro, sun and shadow. Given baldly
thus, without introduction, the lumber of moments becomes a powerful symbol, an idyll of city
experience” (Everett)

13-18 “In the mountains, there you feel free.” We have only to delete “there” to observe the col-
lapse of more than a rhythm: to observe how the line’s exact mimicry of a fatigue which supposes it has reached some ultimate perception can telescope spiritual bankruptcy, deracinated ar-
dor, and an illusion of liberty which is no more than impatience with human society and relief at
a temporary change. It was a restless, pointless world that collapsed during the war, agitated out
of habit but tired beyond coherence, on the move to avoid itself. The memories in lines 8 to 18
seem spacious and precious now; then, the events punctuated a terrible continuum of bore-
dom...like the Sibyl, the terrible thing is to be compelled to stay alive ” (Kenner)

1-18 the sequence is spring, winter then autumn

1-18 “ to begin the poem is like stepping out of a front door in the centre of a great city and
being at once absorbed by the stream of people, catching the fluid, patchy and varying noise of
voices. Endemic to the poem is the presupposition that had already given Eliot his ‘Prufrock’ and

‘Preludes’, that life is a walk through a great city: one moves, one watches, one sees something,
one gets somewhere. The advance made by The Waste Land is the discovery of a mimetic techni-
que that compensates for the coldness inherent in the vision by immersing the reader in what he
sees, or at any rate what he hears: as in Tiresias, seeing and being here come very close. For the
whole method of The Waste Land underwrites what happens in its first paragraph: we are never

‘out of the crowd‘, never anything other than subject or object of observation” (Everett)

1-18 ' Do myth and reality live so near each other, the poem asks, that one can be seen to blend
easily into the other. The question can be asked however only of the reader who is himself con-
scious that he too is a link in the ever-shifting present that resides between the past that is winter, memory, myth and a future that could be possibly spring but may only be frustrated by confused
signals and mixed desires' (Murphy) 8-18 “there is no authoritative secular point of view .... there
are only broken angles of vision, splinters of mood, tinkles or other tones of discourse that fall or
die far outside the Eternal Silence of the Fullness of God” (Bedient)

1-18 “the great virtue of the poem’s style is the extraordinary immediacy of its
speech, the sense of a thing said here and now and at this moment, and not repeated when the
moment passes. And the formalisation of the verse into continual conventions of monologue has
helped to preserve, as time passes, not to dispel this acuteness of impact” (Everett)

8-18 “the dull roots in the body of Mother Earth are complicitous with this female abjection in its
soft, fuzzy and innocuous image. The way out of this for E is asceticism - identity and order in a
beatific whole combining the sentiment of Being of the Mother and the purifying incorporeality
of Paternal Law” (Bedient)

8-18 “heteroglossia is Babel; God or the Absolute is silence. Secular beings have nothing to say,
do not know who they are....speech has collapsed to an indiscriminate heap....a virus of quota-
tion, till all appears cancerous, wild....a sickness and nausea of words becoming the desire for a
chastening silence” (Bedient)

19 the speaker's speculation on life resumes - the sterility of the isolated self metaphorically per-
ceived as this barren landscape - the reader suddenly dropped into a sandy, stony, burning waste

– 'dull roots' now clutch, the 'dead land' is now 'stony rubbish', the shelter no longer 'forgetful snow' but the shelter of this 'red rock' and the 'little life' is reduced to a 'handful of dust' - the introduced voice seems to know what is happening but may otherwise be just as lost and bewil-
dered – a run of stresses and slacks in choppy water, the rhythms cruelly decisive - a certain his-
trionic quality in the question - a recoil from the usurpation of the soul's supreme and ideal posi-
tion by secularly magnified and idealised sex - a moment of desolation - a sensation of the speak-
er cutting himself from women following 8-18 - the voice of a rhetorical, punitive superego – he
is yearning for metaphysical truths which would lend meaning to the sterile actuality of human
experience - the quest, that search of the mythic persona to validate what he knows to be true:

the wholeness of experience, the unity that transcends antithesis, time and space, disorder and di-
chotomy - the voice of judgment thundering over The Waste Land's medley of weaker voices -
the need for ‘roots that clutch’ is a need for something from below, from the dirt of society and
from the lower depths of the body, to reach up and comprehend the whole of society - art should
comprehend the whole of society and from it draw its sustenance, and so enable culture to flower

- without spiritual truth we are condemned simply to the perpetual wheel of time - the past and
the future emerge in the present as radical difference, that is, as personal and cultural confusion -
the root that clutches and the branch that grows from stony rubbish is the servant of God (Isaiah

53:) - and what is he but the righteous branch which would be raised up out of David (Jer.23:5)

20 the diction, balanced rhythms and parallel syntax of the prophets – a yearning for metaphysi-
cal truths which would lend meaning to the sterile actuality of human life – desire wishes whole-
ness which it can never achieve – only the barren waste remains – waste, ruination, fragmenta-
tion a monstrous assemblage of subjectivity - the self so thoroughly constructed it ends up non-
existent - the characters in the text blurred reflections in a street window, constantly in motion -
not so much a desert as the refuse of a collapsed civilisation - the waste land of dead internal ob-
jects - the prophetic voice represents the superego in its depressive aspect, systematically disso-
ciating itself from its primitive and persecutory predecessors (your shadow...) - the compulsive
repetition in the poem shows that the end of this state of regression is changelessness – the past
combed through to recycle its remains - a cri de coeur expressing the speaker's inability to be-
lieve, and equal inability to disbelieve

20 ' Son of Man' ' a cryptic telescoping singular that virtually implicates the listener....an open
trap....the speech shifts about in taunting, ambushing ways, insidiously mobile' (Bedient)

21 the world thoroughly secularized – a diseased subjectivism has lead us to alienation from our
fellow humans and this experience of the absence of God - the diction contemporaneously blunt

(you cannot say or guess) and the rhythm contemporaneously brisk- ' a heap' , ' the cricket' and

' the dead tree' peremptory, summatory, sharply accusing - unspeakable abjection

22 a desert landscape with decaying buildings and desecrated altars, the relics of a once thriving
civilization now sinking into sand - the sun so blinding and debilitating that the speaker cannot
even imagine answers – the past’s attempts to reconcile thought and life - the realm of the super-
natural reduced to bundles of mere qualities (a heap of broken images) - among the ruins the ‘son
of man’ is lost - in effect mythic solutions are no longer possible and the prison of the self has
snapped shut – in the poem of myth have been plucked out of context and related in an 'exploded'

structure that reflects the pre-logical faculties – a museum-like 'placing' of these artefacts in a
particular context – human history as the accumulation of 'debris' that has lost its former significance – human knowledge is fragmented and spiritually sterile - mythic structures as the point
of organization for an endless fugue - the past in dialogue with modernist despair expressing the
anxieties of the West – the presiding consciousness of the poem an awareness of the present from
the point of view of the past – lost is a mythic pattern to life which opened up sacred time and
meaning to man – only Myth/Imagination can revive the spiritually arid land

23 Eccles. xii, 5 ' dead tree' and ' red rock' suggest the burial of Christ (and our own tomb) - De-
sire shall fail and there will be no water – the cricket as harbinger of rain the symbol of rebirth -
no possibility of spiritual transformation or of hope

22-24 a severe tone and stern accents as the flesh of biblical language enters excruciated modern
nerves - the artefacts of human culture now the images of spiritual death – this is God's judge-
ment on those who worship idols - life losing meaning the human spirit now a dead tree - the se-
quence nervously drawn up - comfortless asyndeton - quicker rhythm tells of parched tension
and dissatisfaction with minatory, obscure memory traces - the more meaningless the rubbish
heap of history is the more manifest does the eternal present of myth become

24 no Moses will strike the stone with his rod and as any hope of drawing water from the rock is
explicitly denied there is no hope of drawing substance/life from matter, no possibility of Grace

(traditionally symbolized in Christianity by water coming from a stone)

24 “the tonal power is that of trepidation, welcoming and sinister and fearfully inviting....the ver-
bal suspensions suspend our emotions, draw out our anticipation, quiveringly holding open the
possibility of either hope or despair, or rather, 'the deceitful face of hope and of despair' as each
can deceitfully signal the presence of the other” (Reeves)

25 ' red rock' – Frazerian symbol of the place of bloody sacrifice - emphasizes the arid heat of
this Waste Land 'where the sun beats' - shadows as portents of death and time, eclipsing present
and past and menacing the future - the blood sacrifice of Christ – the shadow bestows the protec-
tion of divine, transcendent life - redemption through faith – an effort to transcend the moment –
but insight can be no more than suggestive - the Church as the 'only relief' – Chretien's castle of
ladies, ' La roche de Sanguin' , altar-like and sacrificial – possible reference to the pinkish-red
stone of Petras (ancient Palmyra/modern Jordan) - the monolithic character of fate, imposing and
inexorable - oven of the mother's body – Isaiah is describing how those who serve the Lord will
be sheltered

26 the tone both welcoming and threatening – repetition denies shelter and relief by its hypnoti-
cally sinister/seductive sound – we may cower in the heat of divine retribution, surrounded by
the desolate outcome of collective impiety - a play of the cadences and the sense against the de-
mands of punctuation – the ear registers no disturbance from E's bracketed line, but the eye is
disturbed by its being 'something different' from the ear, creating a disconcerting trepidation - a
note of 'wit', of ironic politeness - the shadow is known to be a shadow, the illusions offered by the church known to be illusions but they nevertheless provide a point from which a special certitude can be experienced – the certitude of dread – 'shadow' a prophetic note for the meaningless-
ness of modern life – which may be exchanged for the 'shadow' of this red rock (the shelter of the
church) - the book of Ezekiel “dooms and consolations”(37:5–6) - the revival of dry bones is as improbable as the revival of Israel’s morale; it is precisely the improbability of the thing occurring that gives the narrative its voltage and its staying power

26 ' a prophetic insistence....the image is purposely vague and terrifying, the voice declaring that
we cannot tell what life if any may be stirring in this valley of desolation....there is no comfort in its deep shadow but only the terror of our mortality. We must leave the glare of the sun, the heap
of broken images and all the paraphenalia of our life and enter the shadow to see ' fear in a hand-
ful of dust' (Gardner)

27 the beckoning of death (here as shadow) will not be denied, insinuating itself inescapably into
the syntax, internally echoic, and insubstantiality itself - functioning like the objective correla-
tive, this voice is the auditory correlative to judgment passed on The Waste Land by a transcen-
dent power or knowing prophet - this thunderous voice is heard later only as thunder, but then it
is heeded, and hopeful self-reflection begins -- man will be shown a reality which is not made
merely by himself or for himself. He will be shown the transience of all human condition

27 ' the speaker escapes this echoing repetition only when held mystically fast by what is eter-
nally the same and eternally refreshed, as in the garden' (Bedient)

28 "Come in" and see not his "shadow" but his essential condition - what the world calls substance is really shadow (one may live in this world without realising one is dead) – in this realm
of broken images the speaker can see only his own shadow cf. Macbeth 'life's but a walking sha-
dow' i.e it is insubstantial

29 the catastrophes of history loom up to confront modern man - life itself a living death, a pro-
cession of shadows, mere reflections of true selves - the encounter essentially with one’s self,
and the shadow of one’s self

28-29 ' a perfect diagram of existential illusion and disillusion - the ignorance in youth of one's
inmost death....rising to meet you is the preoccupation with death in later life....the voice at once
far off and near, strange and close, a therapy of dread and catharsis. One must grasp the non-
worldly for a solution to a conquering , earthly shadowiness' (Bedient)

29 repetitive ' shadows' - ' the feeling that what the world calls substance is really shadow runs all through E's poetry' (Frye)

30 the voice finds through denunciation the strength to renounce the life that is lost – it expresses
a reflex of consciousness contending with the loss of passion, attempting to maintain integrity
and a sense of control by insisting that things are as they are, if only this is all it can show – the purposeful anxiety of secular time, as compared to the static time of the symbolic shadow under
the symbolic rock where life has returned to 'a handful of dust' - the possibility of breakdown -
the fear that man is only dust, only matter, and that there is no transcendence from this condition

- it is only if the son of man is willing to shift his viewpoint to the realm of shadow cast by the
red rock will he be able to see something other than his own shadows – he will see fear in a
handful of dust – the end of the journey is death - the fearful associations, biblical in origin, of
mortality and man's beginning and end as matter – a rising panic belies the syntactic deliberation

– the speaker essentially is impassive and nonchant, terror a projection of the reader’s sense of
seperateness which the poem insinuatingly underscores - a failure of the sexual experience - fear-
fulness is joined to fearlessness, the emotion of fear being precisely articulated even in the effort
to control it – the terminal line of shovelling monosyllables finally buries the succession of sha-
dows – an Eliotic aside, a momentary descent into tones reminiscent of some carnival barker (a
sort of ghostlike, archetypal figure who searches for the the syncretizing universal voice and
word) - and if we can feel this fear at least there is the potential for rebirth – the heightened sense of mortality and fear of spiritual experience - once someone has experienced the inflow of the
spirit, he or she becomes aware that life without the spirit, the divine breath, is nothingness - ob-
jectless dread as the epiphenomenon of felt nothingness - by not seeking an object for his dread

(covering it with forgetful snow) there is at least the possibility of salvation - the Cumean Sibyl
was granted as many years of life as there are grains in a handful of dust – cf. Donne – Medita-
tion IV - what becomes of mans great extent and proportion, when himselfe shrinkes himselfe,
and consumes himselfe to a handfull of dust? - and Tennyson's Maud - “Dead, long dead, / Long
dead! / And my heart is a handful of dust.” (and there about half a dozen other suggestions for
this in late Victorian poetry)

30 “there are many voices which say “I” in The Waste Land. But those which speak out their liv-
ing characters are of the surface, objects of the prophetic or witnessing voices. Even when they
speak in the first person, dramatically, they are third-person voices of people looked at from the
outside.” (Spender)

20-30 “The tone in this passage is extremely hard to specify. Part apocalypse and part Gothic
shudder, it seems at once urgent with propheticvision and faintly aware of the possibility of self-
conscious posturing and pastiche. There is great intensity here and a touch, just a touch, of the

"hoo-ha's" as well. Eliot himself reads this passage, in the recording he made of The Waste Land, with a certain stress on the

Gothic shudder-"the horror, the horror," as Joseph Conrad would have it. But the sheer rhetorical force of the injunction "Come" and the tone of the line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"

break through any attempt to reduce them to a merely personal malaise, sounding and resound-
ing, as it were, in so many registers at once that their power cannot be confined to any single
speaker. Here we have discourse that fits Derrida's definition of apocalypse as speech or writing
that seems to come from somewhere else, a somewhere deeper or higher than the usual level of
consciousness of anyone person, mood, or speaker” (Kearns)

31 forward thrusting motif of the ship's movement toward Cornwall – a feeling of happy antici-
pation - a contrariety, freshening only to keep the sailor from his love - the deceptive force of ro-
mantic passion - the evocation of the sea, the fresh breeze and the desire for the other displace
the sterility of the isolated self, and overwhelm the limited and repetitive diction and syntax of
the red rock section – the vision of death in a handful of dust specifically countered by Eros – the
inward vital urge of the spirit towards its source, love (though here doomed) - the opening song
relies on the theme of desire, the wind blowing, the horizon without boundaries, and the motive
of the crossing - human passion cannot quench the thirst for spirituality - the expression both of
desire and the lack of being - images of fresh wind complement the stirrings of April

31-34 yearning fragments of Tristan,caught between a phrase of high hope and a sight of the empty sea - whether they are voicing joy or dread is immaterial, and
probably unknowable - what is vital is their loneliness; they are oblique to each other, as though
their eyes were averted, each locked in a mutually uncomprehending being - speech is answered
by thought, fact by intuition, convention by insight - the fresh breeze contrasts with the desola-
tion of the sea as romantic love does with a corresponding romantic desolation – a slightly mel-
ancholy full-throated song but rising to an unqualified yearning to have the romance of the past
restored –stark innocence - Wagnerian yearning - an echo effect, amplifying the mood - the note
is that of romantic desire - a song of happy and naïve love that prompts a vision of the hyacinth
girl - quotations act as dense cells of association creating a kaleidoscopic effect, a protean spiral
of ideas that keeps returning to the same place - 'the wind blows fresh to the homeland. My Irish
girl where are you lingering?' - Vivienne Eliot's Anglo-Irish origins

19-35 ' the speaker ambushing his phobias in an attempt to frighten them into wisdom, is all
forked tongue, part threat, part lure....his ' Not Conscious' reproves what is cravenly conscious,
the life in him addresses the murderous aridity cf. 'Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust
for fear of the Lord' (Isa 2:10) and 'A man (Christ) shall be as rivers of water in a dry place, as
the shadow of a great rock in a weary land' (Isa 32:12) (Bedient)

19-35 ' his arid, conscious mind has little access to where its roots are attempting to clutch....it is in too much of the hot, ordinary light and in 35-42 it will be addressed by its own sacral depths -
in its inner darkness a seed has fallen' (Bedient)

35 lilting iambic naivete - slightly breathless tripping, wide-eyed and wide-spaced - her speech
that of the senses - emotion, nature and myth – a sudden feeling of release from prophetic heavi-
ness and a consequent deepening, and intensifying of feeling - a kind of psychic quotation, opening into depths of feeling into which we cannot peer, its elegiac repetition here impossible, be-
cause too personal, to believe - the voice of romantic promise marked by the repeated gift of
flowers - the partner cannot accommodate sexual reality to romantic expectations (the giving of
flowers) - the flowers remain an image, a quotation from the past; like the beauty of the woman,
they resemble music - but like Wagner's sailor's song, they cannot affirm the eternity of love.- we
feel redemption is possible through love - cf. Richard Aldington - Epigram, 1919 “Your mouth is
fragrant as an orange-grove/In April, and your lips are hyacinths/Dark, dew-wet, folded, petalled
hyacinths/Which my tongue pierces like an amorous bee.” - hyacinths are said to grow from the
blood of Adonis

35 “a Hyacinth garden, then, might be a place where the lover of an actual or figurative goddess
could die, dying the flowers with his blood. Or the 'late' return from the garden may enhance any
subterranean echo of Frazer’s many tales of ritual murders in sacred groves. The hyacinths were
given 'a year ago,' one of many small reminders, some comical, of the annual cycle of Frazer's
loving and dying year-gods who may do double duty as Westonian or Arthurian romance heroes”

(Sloan)

36 flos hyacinthus in Catullus 61 (a fertility symbol with an overtly phallic shape ) – hyacinths symbolize the resurrected god of the fertility rites – they blossom in early spring and this appears
to be an annual springtime ritual of desire enacted by the speaker and the girl - another narrative
of the terrible failure of the lover - phallic initiation can bring grief and suffering rather than fulfillment and fertility to many lovers (in the myth Apollo accidentally kills his favourite Hya-
cinth) - the speaker recalls the luminous moment when love renamed her, and made her part of
the spring – the awakening of sex as a vision of idealized loveliness, and the loss of this loveli-
ness in actual sexual experience - the speaker’s memory of the hyacinth girl, figuring a deep
spiritual insight, provides motive for change - our vacillation between nihilism and visionary
glimpses - the girl's condition mirrors his own emotional life, caught for a second in an infre-
quent blossoming – childlike words, self-pitying, spoken perhaps in memory, perhaps by a ghost,
perhaps by a wistful woman now out of her mind – she is what the speaker has never been able
to realise, the purity of the rose, or a Beatrice figure who might have lifted him from a life he had
found disgusting – a teasing, discontinuous rhythm of disguise and self-revelation - violated she
will have the aspect of Philomel and having died by drowning she will be Ophelia, the female
counterpart of Phlebas

37 the speaker's tie with the girl is cut - a sudden straitening inexorably divides them – the speak-
er becomes conscious of himself, aware of the awful separation between potential passion and
any actualization possible in life - flowers the stirrings of desire warring against the memory of
previous failures

38 the accents sweetly affirming, nostalgic – the discovery of desire - sexuality simultaneously
fertile and sterile, enriching and paralyzing, fulfilling and overpowering, depending on the indi-
vidual - an ideal of transcendental sexual union (wetness in E usually suggests both sexuality and
regeneration) - the speaker's feelings swell in two pronounced spondees, trying to prolong his
memory and the feelings attached to it - 'I could not', a caesura – because speech had been trans-
cended or because the limitation of speech prevented him from fulfilling the moment – he cannot
accommodate sexual reality to romantic expectations - the speaker's ineffable passion – or his
failure to respond appropriately to his lover's passion – female imagery of fertility and sensuality
is overweighed by imagery of stasis and impotence on the lover's part – he offers phallic flowers
but succumbs to paralysis - symbols of fertility confirm the initiate’s bondage to the wheel of nat-
ure’s cycles without leading to a higher life - his consciousness cannot even seize an object

39 in the legend the girl in the hyacinth garden is the Grail-bearer (the maiden bringing love)

whom the quester meets in a place of water and flowers and whom he is supposed to marry if he
succeeds in his quest – the momentary failure of sight is an indication of neurasthenia – such see-
ing both blinds and confers a darker vision - it is the speaker’s failure, expressed as silence or the failure to see, that prompts his desperate journey through the waste land - a failure of communication between them, dooming him to his desperate journey through the wasteland - at the mo-
ment of the grail vision, those who are impure experience a failure of speech and sight – like the
blind Tiresias the speaker 'sees' – a seeming reversion to some primal state, at an inchoate mo-
ment of synaesthesia before perception has been organised into the polarity of subject and object

- the receiving silence of the attentive soul, preceding revelation - some intensely personal sexual
failure – the ultimate failure of romantic love and the compartmentalized self - the failure of ac-
tual sexual experience to measure up to the imagination's vision of idealized loveliness – the ero-
tic as overwhelming, its wonder awash with terror – ecstasy and a sense of extinction - the lan-
guage that of a tainted mysticism while the garden itself sounds queerly like a lost cult’s sacred
grove - another level of meaning is less ambiguous: perhaps in fantasy, the girl has been drowned

(Ophelia gathered flowers before she tumbled into the stream, then lay and chanted snatches of old tunes) - a symbolic relation to the death of the fertility god – cf.Dante, Inf.XXXIV, 25

39 “While the pre-Christian fertility tales reassert the generative power of the phallus, the Chris-
tian Grail legends subsume the phallus into the Word.The only traffic the chaste Grail knight has
with the goddess is to ask the right questions in the presence of the Grail maiden: What do these
visions mean, and whom does the Grail serve? His correct query results in the Freeing of the

Waters, and the Waste Land is made fertile again.Accordingly, in Eliot's version of the legend,
the failure of the phallus coincides with the poet's failure of speech in the face of a female as
dam-aged as he. His only remedy for the disastrous failure of language is to appropriate the
voices of other poets-past masters of his craft. But even his borrowed words fail to cohere, for
women disrupt him continually, their disorderly speech shattering his every attempt at intellig-
ibility. The poetic voice progressively splinters into cacophony, in which the gender distinctions
progressively collapse. Failure of the phallus is, in effect, a feminization of an imaginary male
body. From this eradication of masculinity the textual body of the poem emerges” (McCrae)

40 a rather sinister modulation – the tone that of failure and impotence - no resurrection for this
god - the expresssion of apathy - a surrealist import from the impossibity of knowing anything
for sure - the speaker appears to be in a neurasthenic state – or he finds the reality of love over-
whelming – ecstasy annihilates ordinary sense – and afterwards it is the desolation which persists

– a belated recognition, a discovery too late to be of use - the speaker unmanned by the girl, in-
capable of thought or action, this the ultimate endpoint of physical desire, individual identity
subsumed into the natural cycles of lust, desire and reproduction - romantic passion seems to
mean an empty ending - self and world annihilated in love and a simultaneous loss of love, both
the mystical ecstasy of union and an absolute bereftness, total loss of even the knowledge of
what is lost (absolute union with the other is loss of the self, discovery of the self means a pain-
ful separation from the other) - the vision is not the apprehensible amor intellectualis dei of the medieval mystical treatises, but a vision that annihilates intellect rather than fulfills
and transforms it, and it leads quickly to a line from Wagner with a strong image of emptiness:

" Oed'und leer das Meer" - this enactment of childhood trauma images the cosmic bond of death and desire - a sexual charge but the moment in its intensity is like death – she is looking not into
fullness but into blankness – life here is a kind of death – an intense ontological crisis of agency
the agonized speculation of a man asking ultimate questions and being unable or afraid to answer
them – could he not speak because speech had been transcended or because the limitation of
speech prevented him from fulfilling the moment? - later the speaker will say he can connect
nothing with nothing, the cause being that he is neither living nor dead – this however is a lim-
inal suspension that is a state of consciousness and knowledge - seeing nothing, connecting noth-
ing, are merely the gestures, not of doubt or despair, but indicate the affirmative, felt apprehen-
sion of what Levinas calls the ‘absurd element in history’ (that ‘Shakespeherian rag’ highlights
this idea nicely), out of which invention and intervention take place on E’s part - ‘knew nothing’

is the speaker’s visionary glimpse and a reaction against the romantic exaltation of the self, and
is perhaps the ultimate truth of the poem cf. the Indic injunctions in V - like the surrealist world,
its import derives from the impossibility of knowing anything for sure - did his eyes fail because
he experienced what was beyond vision or because sight prevented him from the vision that he
sought? - did he know nothing because worldly knowledge had fallen away or because he under-
stood the nothing that is the ultimate truth?

40-42 ' love passes beyond its object and for a moment is held in a kind of silence that seems outside time. Blind and dumb and rapt by another vision he comes back to the world with the cry in
his ears of the watcher who tells Tristan that the sea is empty' (Gardner)

40-42 “in an apocalyptic mode, the world may seem split into the sweetness of a visionary, ideal
and virtually unattainable world, and the sordidness of an actual, present, and virtually inescap-
able world...this kind of painful contrast is what
gives The Waste Land its poignancy. It is the viewpoint of someone not at home in the world, a
peregrine, like Augustine. Augustine was an outsider in more than one sense: not only was his
overwhelming allegiance given to another world, but he was a provincial in the Roman Empire,
one of the peregrini or resident aliens
during his stay in Milan. In The Waste Land, he takes his place among those other great exiles or
provincials who perhaps understood their city and their empire all the better for having been ex-
iles or provincials: Ezekiel, Ovid, Dante. And Eliot? One of Eliot's quotations is from the psalm
of exile, with its passionate love of Jerusalem, and its cry, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" The cry echoes behind the homeless voices of The Waste Land” (Cook)

40-42 “a ‘ nostalgie de l’enfance’, a wish to recapture an ideal and ‘remarkably happy’ early
childhood experience... it is in the nature of a wish for something insufficiently present, a
sense of loss and longing for some ineffable aspect of
childhood experience, on the border of consciousness” (Schimmel)

41 the dreamlike inversion of Conrad's 'heart of darkness', as if to denote the illuminative aspect
of Kurtz's terrible and glorious vision of the sacred, of dark knowledge and the vision of light –
light suggesting knowledge (as it did among the

'stony rubbish', is perhaps more terrifying than darkness - obscure sensings of an inner change -
paradisal bewilderment – a momentary glimpse of enlightening truth - a mystical moment of in-
effable transcendence – cf. Purgatorio, XXXI, 139-141, where water or well imagery is equated
with an image of light - a counterpart is the woman with ‘long black hair’, a compound of horror
and sensuality (V, 377) - the richness and beauty of life which in its intensity is like death – a
painful benignant silence – the beatific moment is silence, which can disperse and obliterate
meaningless identities in the noisy city street. But here only the memory of something incom-
plete and unfulfilled - a heart of darkness astonishingly flooded with light - a looking into blank-
ness – 'silence' and 'nothing' have a positive sense as in Mallarme and Lewis Carroll - the stirring
of life and beauty – an intimation of the divine (heart of light) opposed to the hyacinth girl's invi-
tation to potentially physical intimacy - the light unseeable, the silence unhearable. The end re-
sult is flight from the forces of generation and of Nature – the 'heart of light', a metonymic Abso-
lute, has proved all but fatal cf. Para. XXXIII when Dante looks upon the white rose where sight
is consumed, the mind's gaze is suspended and the narrator has no more speech than the babe at
breast – the heart of trauma – the self and world are annihilated in love and in a simultaneous
loss of love – a mystical ecstasy of union and an absolute bereftness, loss of even the knowledge
of what has been lost – this the trauma of the child – absolute union with the other means loss of
the self as discovery of the self means a painful separation from the other – thus the cosmic bond
of death and desire - his utter impotence and failure a symbolic negation of the speaker's self –
nothingness asserts itself with the full weight of its pregnant emptiness in the 'silence' left naked
to face the inarticulate without any supporting linguistic or spiritual framework - ecstasy annihilates ordinary sense, and afterwards it is the desolation which persists - romantic passion seems
to mean an empty
ending - the theme the wastage of human erotic love, simultaneously figuring the absence of con-
nection with a divine love – the absence of the sacred in modernity has resulted in the death of
the social – cut off from each other we suffer a privatized anguish - the dead land of one soul will
be reclaimed not by the Word but from the Eternal Silence which is too pure for words – the rise
through Dionysiac exaltation to an Apollonian individuality undercut by a descent from noble in-
dividuality to an horrific Conradian barbarity – the poem haunted by Nietzschean echoes of the
tragic - she is the exemplary present moment of a long line of femmes fatales stretching back to

Eve – here seen by that same sad-eyed, blank-souled man who will confirm that the woman has
real cause for her neurosis - a deafening and blinding emptiness with no hope and only loss – in a
timeless present participle the speaker is balanced between the possibilities of nihilism and mys-
tic vision - no+t only no felt intimacy but also a withdrawal into self and solitude – reduced to si-
lence she hangs between life and death - water, flowers, life and death the images of April and
winter – cf Celia in The Cocktail Party 'I have thought at moments that the ecstasy is
real/Although those who experience it may have no reality./For what happened is remembered
like a dream/In which one is exalted by intensity of loving/In the spirit , a vibration of delight...

(CPP, 363) – the man, unconsciously, has renounced passion, and in so doing, has lost the ability
to connect to the hyacinth girl – hence his isolation and lack of connectedness – the man is sur-
prised 'looking into the heart of light' the symbol of transcendence, knowledge and spiritual epi-
phany as opposed to the desire and passion he has experienced before – compare Wagner's
mythical pair endlessly yearning, to these modern isolates – however the feelings of both pairs
converge upon the hopelessness of sharing, on the one hand, a transcendental experience, and on
the other, a material union - the crucial question is whether we can only love something created
by our own imagination – if so one is alone and if one is alone then lover and beloved are
equally unreal and the dreamer is no more real than his dreams and all is illusion and meaning-
lessness – this is the feared truth of the poem which its speakers would do anything to avoid and
yet are doomed to confront - cf Job 8:9 'for we are but of yesterday, and know nothing because
our days upon earth are a shadow' – and Dante, Para.XII, 28 - the silence (of the heart of light)

reverses the din made by the wings of the four brazen creatures in Ezekiels wheel-centered vi-
sion of a fiery Jehovah (1.1-28) - cf.Woolf’s ‘A Haunted House’ - a ghostly couple haunted by
love and caught between love and death - two voices that speak, but hardly to each other

42 ' desolate and empty the sea' - the watching sailor can see no sign of Isolde's ship - at the
same time the betrayal motif is heard in the orchestra- (T&I III.24) - the tragic passion of the legend frames this episode in the Hyacinth Garden and answers the question ' Where are you lin-
gering?' - it is the anti-climactic flatness that follows some heightened experience – psychologi-
cally it is the despairing listlessness of a neurasthenic patient (‘only half-awake and in a half-
dreamy state’ (Vittoz-E’s therapist at Lausanne) - but the very emptiness of the desert can be a
place of mystical union - radiant memory turned to desolation - desire recognizes its own failure
even in the moment it is felt; the moment of desire is already strange and estranged from the sub-
ject - love lost as the memory of shared feeling ends in evasion and loss – the speaker had like

Marie his perfect moment, his vision of fulfillment. But he was unable to reach out and take what
the moment offered, and thus break through to fertility, creativity - earth and water joined so
both nature and humanity are in blossom in the presence of the vegetation goddess - emphasis is
on the fragility of life and on its renewal – even though nature and woman are full of life the speaker fails to respond – implicitly the land becomes sterile – erotic love is an empty waste, the
disintegration of identity rather than transcendence - a feeling of mute isolation from the mes-
sage to the girl being undelivered - a moment of insight despite his failure of action and feeling -
as language, sight and identification with life and knowledge disappear the speaker has a power-
ful epiphany into silence – the sea, silent and troubled, spreads like the threat of forgetfulness -
life is at its highest meaning and intensity despite a profound failure – emptiness undergoes a
profound metamorphosis into a vast sea - the lover is not redeemed, he is not living nor dead, he
cannot see Isolde although Isolde will in fact be coming.The sea of life is empty - wind and seas-
cape are both empty, conspicuous for their lack of a looked-for lover - unfulfilled human rela-
tions - the poem a congregation of voids cf. the 'dead sound' of the clock,the blank tarot card etc

– the failure of romantic love, the desolation consequent upon that, and then the mobilizing of
psychic resources to live through the failure – so to live the experience that being is not negated
but refined – the incommunicable feelings of the preceding passage objectified as a waste and
empty sea – earthly love has not been sublimated and redirected to God - feeling distanced from
the self by the use of a cultural object, Tristan's emotions depicted in a music drama – the move-
ment away from the self is where freedom lies – rather than trying to make do in the barrenness
of the self because of anxiety and death, one must realize the possibilities given to us by this ab-
sence, allowing the other to speak for us – beatific 'silence' which can disperse and obliterate
meaningless identities in the noisy city street, a memory of something incomplete and unfulfilled

- the tragic face of the poem is romantic, inchoate, melancholic, ‘Wagnerian’ (the comic face a
mad hatter tour de force spoofing romantic pretensions, canonical literature and just about every-
thing else)

35-42 a moment of remembered passion, and of passion present in the speaking, a passion which
is a mystery poised between emptiness and fullness, between failure and fulfilment - the momen-
tary glimpse of something central and formative - a snatch of song - a sudden feeling of release
from the prophetic heaviness, the sudden lifting of a burden' with a consequent deepening, and
intensifying of feeling - an instance of the speaker's memory and desire – a moment of insight
into a profound yet visionary emptiness - a visionary, timeless moment – tender, poignant and se-
cret cf. the sensuous nostalgia of Maeterlinck - a silence beyond words and a nothing beyond
matter - a synesthesia of light – like the Grail vision - a trance-like paralysis - silence expressing the inexpressible – the nothingness contains a potential – the Buddhist state of unknowing - the
syntax hesitates, phrases turn into puzzles – a queasily seductive intricacy and maze – a nausea
beneath the surface at the eternal round of Nature – the ultimate nothingness of romantic love - a
rush of the Absolute attacking senses and psyche – in E, waste lands are related to failures of
love, to failures of individuals to transcend their separate spheres and become complements in a
comprehensive unity - hyacinth associated with the slain vegetation god (and victim of love), its
red/purple colouring suggestive of blood – the importance to E as a poet of childhood memory

35-42 ' She delights in her apotheosis as a vegetation nymph....her unbroken lines drop plumb
into a vacuum of vacuity. Less subtle than Marie but rarely less childlike, she calls attention to
herself as an object to be looked at, adorned and, so to speak, dechristened and renamed as a pa-
gan goddess or floral nymph. She is all complicity with the speaker's instinct to 'place' her beauty
as one with the voluptuously vital and corruptible earth' (Bedient)

35-42 ' The hyacinth girl abandoned by a man who can no longer either see or hear her, her youth and beauty and vivacity no more to him than drops of dew or rain clinging to hyacinths, symbols
of a startled blackout and subsequent surprised resurrection into the blaze of spring light. Abjec-
tion is made speechless in him by a loving call from the infinitely eloquent Eternal Silence' (Be-
dient)

35-42 ' The Tristan legend a frame that centralizes contemporaneity, making the hyacinth girl and
her lover more vividly present than Wagner's lovers, but the potency of the legend creates a radi-
cal instability, the mythic lovers failing in a glorious burst of tragic passion whereas the contem-
porary lovers merely sputter into paralysis and silence... a design which moves in its stillness and
remains still in its movement as opposing perceptions oscillate... similarly, there is a marked lack
of communication between either mythic or contemporary lovers, yet we understand the ecstatic
union of Tristan and Isolde and understand that the lovers in the hyacinth garden remember a
previous passionate encounter' (Brooker&Bentley)

35-42 “The word ‘‘silence’’ at the end of l. 41, we should note, corresponds to three negative ex-
pressions pointedly located at the end of the preceding three lines, ‘‘not’’ (l. 38), ‘‘neither’’ (l.

39), and ‘‘nothing’’ (l. 40). The emphasis that the linebreaks place on negation is deliberate.

‘‘Nothing’’ and ‘‘silence’’ are linked in the semantics of the poem’s formal organization. They
seem to be the marks of lyric failure and for all intents and purposes, that is, the purpose of aes-
thetic beauty and redemption through art, they are. But ‘‘nothing’’ and ‘‘silence’’ are, in another
sense, affirmative expressions and point us in another direction. ‘‘I knew nothing’’ can mean
knowing nothing as an actual knowledge of something, possibly the nothing that always lies on
the other side of the material world. Silence, too, points, not to the absence of words or music,
but to what lies beyond the reach of either. The other way of putting it, ‘‘I did not know any-
thing’’ is the dead end of knowledge.” (Cooper)

35-42 'In what posture did they come back, late, from the Hyacinth Garden, her hair wet, before
the planting of the corpse? It is not clear whether he is comforted to learn that the clairvoyante
does not find the Hanged Man ' (Kenner)

35-42 “the moment”in the hyacinth garden, sandwiched between the desolate intensities hinted at
by the allusions to Tristan und Isolde, offers a distilled recollection of Romantic concerns with
the inexpressible, the epiphanic, and the non-rational. The ‘I’ ‘could not | Speak, and my eyes
failed, I was neither | Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, | Looking into the heart of light, the
silence’ (38–41). Artful en-
jambments correspond to the passage’s dual, ambivalent mood of recollected
rapture and fear of nothingness. That the speaker ‘knew nothing’ links him with
later figures who say that the wind is doing ‘Nothing again nothing’ (120) and who ‘can connect

| Nothing with nothing’ (301–2). But it associates him, too, with the Romantics for whom experi-
ence, even ‘An ordinary sight’, sometimes called for ‘Colours and forms that are unknown to
man’, and, like the Wordsworthian passage, it has its own ‘visionary dreariness’ (The Prelude,

1805, XI. 309, 310, 311). If the hyacinth girl passage is a spot of time, it annuls its meaning in
the act of affirming it. Wordsworth’s ‘visionary dreariness’ connects, however obliquely, with a
conviction of having been ‘Fostered alike by beauty and by fear’ (The Prelude, 1805, I. 306).

There is a destiny that shapes his ends. Eliot’s negative Romanticism in The Waste Land owes its
aching power to the absence of any guarantee that ‘memory and desire’ (3) have any grounds beyond themselves. Nature, Wordsworthian or otherwise, collapses beneath a weight of ironic tex-
tuality, evident in the poem’s first line, or struggles to reassert itself amidst the city’s man-made
wilderness. Christ is a slain vegetation god, lost in a welter of competing syncretic myths. Reli-
gious longing is there, as in few other poems, but it is presented with oblique irony and as a mat-
ter of textual debris, as at the close of ‘The Fire Sermon’, where words from Augustine and the

Buddha speak out of and to desperate human need, and are but truncated quotations. Or it sur-
faces as post-Rimbaudian hallucination, when the journey to Emmaus involves a ‘white road’

(361) haunted by ‘another one walking beside you’ almost a description of the poem’s dealings
with other cultures, with the past, and with, I would argue, English Romanticism,

‘walking beside’ the poem like its spectral other and ghostly begetter” (O’Neill)

35-42 “In the allusion, the incommunicable feeling of the preceding lines is brought to expres-
sion by being distanced from the self into a cultural object , just as, once again, the allusion E has chosen realizes Tristan’s feeling in an object, the waste and empty sea. This movement out away
from the self is where freedom lies. Rather than trying to make do in the barrenness of the self
because of the anxiety about desire and death, one must realize the possibilities given to us by
this absence which allows the other to speak for us. The objective correlative becomes a psycho-
logical principle” (Davidson)

43 a wilfully credulous expectation - a defensively clever tone – jaunty and journalistic – she cre-
ates an illusion of coherence but in no way is it possible for her to connect successive images
into a meaningful pattern - her attempt to
tell the future, an endeavor that assumes that the future is fixed and thus knowable, parodies the
modern quest to find predictable order - the impossibility of formulating a coherent plan of ac-
tion predicated on an ordered world - like most of the characters she is a mere type – a union of
charlatan and cosmopolitan (her answer to every question is a variant of 'so so', quite appropriate
for someone who equivocates and who is only so-so in her profession) – even so she possesses
all the poet lacks: the power of vision and speech and the ability to organize a coherent narrative

- her masculine Egyptian name links her to the androgyny typified by Tiresias and, ironically, to
the high calling of prophet in ancient Egypt - a parody of the sybil – both worldly and a patch-
work fantasy of European history and culture – a visual sharpness in the portrait reminiscent of a

Stravinsky ballet or cubist painting (as too Mr Eugenides and the young man carbuncular) – the
modernist self crazily mutable – a point of view about to change into another point of view – she
is inclined to rapping monosyllables and exactitude (her predictions into his future like weighted
darts) - foretellings and cryptic namings – parroted babble which the expression 'had a bad cold'

dismisses – desire to know the future is matched only by dread of what it may turn out to be cf.

the alternating promise and nagging insistence of spring stirrings – this will shortly achieve em-
bodiment in the fear of the resurrection of the corpse Stetson planted last year in his garden - The

Tarot Pack – destiny, chance and the eternal mysteries – tarot cards as the contemporary form of

Sibyl's leaves - its original use was to predict the rise and fall of the waters which brought life
back to the land – the extra e in clairvoyante marks her pretentiousness – the poem a cubist series
of layered 'planes' transparent to each other whose overall effect is the fracturing of the unities of time (1922), place (London) and representations of character (many sordid and neurasthenic)

44 her cold appears to be catarrhal – it suggests a ridiculously nasal voice, sounding like a snuf-fle - a scrupulously articulated non sequitur, the poise of this weightily inconsequential conjunc-
tion between caesura and line-ending paying sly homage to Mme S's inconsequential powers -
discordant ideas in simple speech - playfully ironic and teasing - a light, friendly tone - "nevertheless" makes more sense as a mocking imitation of a three-beat sniffle than as a logical, gram-
matical conjunction - the speaker’s simple colloquial diction and pleasant humor imply relative
detachment but no bitterness or condemnation - World War I slang for venereal disease

45 a certain mental confusion in these observations about Mme S, so contributing to the paranoia
about the events she cannot perceive

46 a subtle access to oceanic knowledge and treacherous depths – a rocky opposition to male
courses – Spiritualism the poem’s struggle with the Feminine, with the rescue of meaning from
debased forms and disturbing intimacies - a series of visual assaults with raven eyes - vain and
vulgar – her voice lacks the dignity, power, authority, and certitude of the seer's voice - it is flat, prosaic, straightforward speaking that runs through the cards in a casual or indifferent monotone

-
a medium through which some large, lost, near-universal import of myth solidifies
as in the emblems of Tarot within a sharply contemporaneous context - but the images are shod-
dy and soiled, made of cardboard -it is an ambiguous and expendable symbolism - we sense the
poet behind the images, coolly dealing the cards - rather than seeking some sense of the divine
outside himself, the speaker seeks an immediate sign as psychological solace - modern humanity
debases the sign to the need for immediate answers and self gratification - ‘wicked’ because mis-
leading - her reading lays out the pattern of images that determine the shape of the rest of the
poem - the cards designed to defeat interpretations by multiplying them - cf. Conrad Aiken’s

"The Jig of Forslin” and "The House of Dust" (and a number of Aiken images echo in the poem) 47 the only roots that clutch are those of fear – the speaker's fate that of a drowned sailor – one is more likely to drown in the water of life than be saved – people in this wasteland are afraid of
life - the way into life may be death itself – drowning sends the spirit back to the source of life to renew itself – a method of purification - the drowned sailor may recapitulate metamorphoses,
although the speaker does not yet ‘see’ this – a reminiscence of Jean Verdenal - the death of a
summer of youthful love - the drowned Phoenician sailor a type of the fertility god whose image
was thrown into the sea annually as a symbol of the death of summer - a hint of eventual regen-
eration, the process of spiritual and psychic rebirth as a rite de passage from a fallen or failed state to a perfected one - the poem a struggle to recover feeling through the lyrical expression of
the 'dead' state of being - the hope, to become like Philomela and Arnaut Daniel who can sing
their suffering - inner waste transformed to song becomes alive and whole

47-56 “Instead of a basis of accepted belief, the whole structure of Eliot’s poem is based on cer-
tain primitive rituals and myths, which he seems to believe must be psychological certainties,
patterned folkways defusing individual passions and torments and accommodating them to group
life” (Spender)

48 the speaker inserts his own borrowed gnomic wisdom, his own gloss on the card he holds as if
blinded by the light in the hyacinth garden, seeming to see a marvellous transformation won
from death (as Ariel sees the precious gain to be tortured from loss – both death by water and being born again, both a life image and a death image – the injunction is commanding yet elegiac
and critical, exposing by contrast the summary professional patter from which it is syntactically
and typographically separated – chat and irrelevant detail encompass the symbolic litany of the

Tarot, nicely imaging how concrete and particular existence exceeds universal meaning – she is
trying to fill the absence of purpose and self, her emptiness, with a nervous flow of words de-
manding that something of significance be uttered, but trapped in herself she has nothing to say,
inflexible in both her ideas and syntax - the overtones are portentous and cosmic – an ambiguity
and irony, from the speaker’s pearl eyes and Mme S’s bad cold -difficulties of perception accu-
mulate in the same way as difficulties to understand the poem increase as the reading advances -
the line by virtue of its parenthetical enclosure and its tonal difference seems to be a personal,

'subjective' response to the conversation, an evocation of personal mortality and a melancholy
fascination with the image of a drowned sailor - inert beauty but no apotheosis - details of cos-
mopolitan existence, often derived by E from actual people and places, from gossip and street-
noises, drown in the underwater strangeness of the verse, to be transformed into lasting symbols
and legends - the exclamation acutely ironic concerning her clear-sightedness – the dread and
awe of transformation cf.Philomena – flesh lost for the incorruptible and the precious – abjection
taken as the occasion for pure spirituality - Ariel's song from The Tempest I, ii

49 Belladonna – a siren figure – oceanic with narcissism and threatening all identity – the archa-
ic Mother Goddess dealing out death when she creates life – a harlequinade of poses – angry Me-
dusa – Mona Lisa sitting among the rocks and smiling
mysteriously – 'older than the rocks among which she sits...the fancy of perpetual life sweeping
together ten thousand experiences' (Pater) – the new thing being a development, a continuation
of all that has gone before – previous lives now voices that will suddenly speak, and buttonhole
us before they are suddenly gone - neurotic with dry hair and fiery with the frustrations of love
cf. Vivien

49 ' One will not be at rest until as blind as pearls, until his carnal restiveness has died back into amniotic slumber of eternal silence' (Bedient)

50 degraded from archetype to social type – a sardonic undertone - Mme S's wicked little gift to
herself – a note of enticement or entrapment

51 the wheel of fortune – the helm in 'Death by water' - no longer the large scheme of the natural
cycle but a mere runaround of desire – the great wheel of Buddhism, the symbol of life in a
world in which successive reincarnations lead to life without suffering – but E takes this symbol
of perfection and deprives it of its original significance, in order to reflect the idea of uselessness and futility – the nauseating, endless carnival of reincarnations – a purposeless circle of existence like the crowd flowing over London Bridge – the attempt of humankind to direct unaided
its own destiny (see IV and V 419) – three staves – The Fisher King with his sexual wound - the
speaker has sought to live by the ways of the vital world, has suffered a sexual wound, and now
awaits deliverance from the Wheel – but note that E himself stated that his interpretation of parti-
cular cards was private and arbitrary – there are no definitive meanings, the cards possessing
both a significant meaninglessness and a meaningful insignificance – in both modern art and
science in the first part of the 20C chance replaced causality and indeterminacy has replaced de-
terminacy - traditional divinatory meanings for this card are "established strength, enterprise, effort, trade, commerce, discovery - the Aeneid's figure of Neptune the earth-shaker with his three-
pronged trident. As in the Aeneid Neptune is the demanding male guardian, both chastising and
protecting the Trojan voyagers, so "the man with three staves" becomes in The Waste Land the onomatopoetic father, "Da Da Da," the Thunder, the sermon-giver

51-52 the demonstrative 'here' establishes a rhythm of acceleration – at 'this card' a puzzled, pon-
dering retardation is introduced

52 ' Mr Eugenides, Smyrna Merchant' – he is only an image in profile on a card –
he now lacks the otherworldly perspective that brings esoteric knowledge - refers to the spread
of the ancient mystery cults along the trade routes of the Mediterranean – a crude figure for the
one-eyed phallus transformed into the Smyrna merchant and Phlebas

53 the loss of the original rituals - the future itself blank and she herself uncomprehending - the
invisible burden of sin and guilt

54 lineation makes the Hanged Man sinisterly present even as he is being absented across the
line-break – loss of a religious dimension in life - a sort of negation that actually intimates – ac-
cording to Jessie Weston, Grail secrets could not be revealed to a woman - her attempt to tell the
future, an endeavor that assumes that the future is fixed and thus knowable, parodies the modern
quest to find predictable order - compare to the promise of rebirth in Ariel's song 'those are
pearls...

55 the hanged god of Frazer – the victim/god sacrificed so that Nature may be renewed – spiri-
tual rebirth (missing here) and sacrifice - Christ – 'the' suggests an ancient familiarity and arche-
typal repetition through the ages – the quester is warned that releasing the healing waters (the
springs of feeling) may also involve his own dissolution, that if he does not "Fear death by
water" he will indeed become the drowned sailor whom the Tarot announces to be his alter ego -
having dealt the drowned Phoenician sailor's card she does not realize that the way to life may be
by death itself, a spiritual rebirth (the Fisher-king card shows the back of a man looking out upon
the sea - Sosostris is wrong not in warning her client to fear water, but in masking the compli-
cated, ambivalent role water plays in the waste land - explores the possibility that sex itself is
death (in Eliz. usage sex = death) - what her comic advice underscores is the impossibility of for-
mulating a coherent plan of action predicated on an ordered world - the hooded figure in V (and
since he is hooded Mme S. cannot see him) – even though IV is foreshadowed the speaker actu-
ally feels himself lost in a wasteland where there is not even the sound of water – the fear of
spiritual rebirth which is a terrifying ordeal - a poetic, metaphysical and mystical, Christian revi-
sion of the tarot cards

55 “This fear, unlike that prompted by the handful of dust, is clearly persecutory: the crowds do
not simply image the torpor of modern urban life, but are rather the scattered fragments of the de-
stroyed internal object marshalling its forces to rebound on the aggressor. Towards the end of the
poem these crowds become the red sullen faces that sneer and snarl. Their persecutory aspect
heightened by the characteristic oral imagery ('mountain mouth of carious teeth'), they are the
forerunners of the Eumenides of The Family Reunion” (Pinkey)

56 these appear in line 62 – the apparatus of commercial civilisation as a relentless wheel - stuck
in a rut, going in circles - Eleusinian ritual wanderings - the rhythmless matter-of-factness de-
monstrates her ignorance – hopeless entanglement in the circularity and subjectivity of fallen ex-
istence – our mental self-enclosure - they think, feel and will in a Bradleyan finite circle closed
on the outside which they mistake for the infinite reality imaged by Dante as a 'sphere of which
the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere'

57 'thank you' – she has been paid – the two worn words establish not gratitude, but reflex grati-
tude, the trite elision of commercial prophecy , a bathetic zeugma –
resolutely unemphatic cadences – so gloved, these are courteous suasions of such equanimity of
tone as either Mme Sesostris is either mocking or creepily apeing - the crowning depiction of the

Madame's equitonal shallowness - a woman equal to every occasion because to her they are all
the same – in the Tarot system her name indicates the scales of justice are in balance - there is a
lack of conviction from her very name – a grey shade of equal tones capable of neither evil nor
good, now ‘wicked’ because misleading - the spiritual confusion and insecurities of a rootless
bourgeoisie - false sophistication of the "dear," - he is unable to distinguish between good and evil – a mock seriousness that fools none but those who need to believe - possibly Lady Cunard
who put up the money for The Criterion - in her company at the Lyceum Club where the Ladies

Poetry Circle was assembled E was taught the Tarot

58 the sacred cosmologies have fallen prey to astrologers and charlatans

59 a characteristic tone of cautious diffidence and stasis – a trivial concern - the latent content is too threatening to name - an unscannably flat tone - the speaker leaves and reenters 'real life'-
sharp irony as she is a charlatan – and a double irony – the fortune-telling, taken ironically, will
become true as the poem develops – chance has replaced causality and the contingencies of the
world are now regarded as merely contingent – things are merely there, neither for a transcen-
dent purpose, nor arranged in any knowable way – hence the note of paranoia - the poem’s habit
of tuming thwarted, incomplete, or inaccurate prophecy into an emblem of the futile structures
and systems that seek to find coherence within the chaos of the world - her fear of what she can-
not see - an anxiety about originality and theft - or she simply fears the police who prosecuted
fortune-tellers - the many voices of the poem united by a nameless protagonist who disguises his
faith with an ironic expression of disorder - this waste land is a place bereft of the sanction of re-
ceived
religious wisdom

59 ' the rhythmical vacuum of the last line, its collusive sucking of us into a paralysing con-
sciousness of any number of possible emphases, inflections or nuances...the line delicately lays
its finger alongside its nose, being a canny word to the wise from someone known to be the wi-
sest woman in Europe...its refusal to come clean rhythmically, shows you fear in a handful of
cards' (Ricks)

43-59 an oscillating and unstable double-exposure of Dantean Ante-Hell and 1922

London reality, deliquescing and reconstituting themselves in rapid succession – a complex of
images with the overlapping and faceted arrangement of cubist art - the format that of a vaudeville show with its display of freaks, queens and psychics –
scherzo-like – a pattern of imagery that cannot be understood until it is reread and held all at
once in memory (like the whole poem itself)

60 ancient cities were built with a centre that made them analogous to the cosmos, but in a mod-
ern city you can have no such feeling of correspondence – this is the infernal city of Dante and

Baudelaire's city of dreams and Poe’s “The City in the Sea” – but E saw the city as a vision be-
longing to the realm of nightmare - the city unreal because it is entirely physical and lacks spiri-
tual essence - it has no redemptive force but is a force unto itself, an anarchistic mechanism, run-
ning on an engine of self-interest and relentless haste - the physical suddenly becomes spectral
and sonorous-sounding cf. the spectre of 'hooded hordes' in V – the poem's fundamental radical
indeterminacy and disturbed subjectivity – an intense but futile and meaningless horror - opposi-
tion of myth and history, spatial form and time, orderly past and chaotic present, art and the pain
of life – the urban landscape too complex and transient, too eroticised and unintelligible to be
fully known and understood – physicality can no longer be taken in, is disappearing and is no
longer synonymous with locale - the modern city as hell's vestibule - the human mass defeated
by their pain – they cannot even imagine reality – the phrase itself an exclamation or short sigh –
a reluctant invocation – the start is already a dead end – a yawning, capitalized adjective and
monumental, capitalized noun – inert, inescapable, a paralyzing nomination – a gesture of actual
frustration in expression, combining exasperation, involvement in the face of things, and a kind
of odd tenderness - this city literally unreal as it is just made up out of words – syntax itself phan-tasmagorically unfixed, the centre of gravity shifting from one line to the next as city, fog,--
crowd loom up in turn - the Civitas Dei, not the modern one, haunts the poem like the rumour of

Eternity – extremes result from the absence of significant reality so resulting in disasters in the
world of actuality – London is simultaneously the swarming city, the doleful city, the unreal city,
an infernal city precariously balanced halfway between reality and the inner mind - for E the
modern individual has lost his sense of evil and any notion of spiritual struggle. As a conse-
quence he loses the sense of reality – E would not bat an eyelid at our 21C spectacles of reality

60 ' the life of the passage is active in the turn of the grim rhyme (so many), at once more richly a
rhyme than any other could be, since it is the repetition of the very word itself, and yet more pov-
erty-stricken than a rhyme could be, since it is not truly a rhyme at all... is not a creative co-op-
eration of two things but instead has what is here the singleness of a consternation without paral-
lel...the lines are alive to the very grain of the language ( so many), an obdurate paralysis, con-
veying both the utmost will to know, judge or understand, and at the same time an immovable ad-
mission that the scale of this is beyond comprehension... so many...a siege of contraries, the
thought staggering belief, while embodying too a stubborn insistence that belief is only stag-
gered, not felled...and a tension, incarnate in the unmistakable tone, is felt in this inability either to incorporate or to disown the vistas of ' so many', becoming an unanswerable conviction'

(Ricks)

60 “the "idea" or "aim" of modern society Eliot found to be single, the "hypertrophy of the motive of Profit into a social ideal." A "plausible case," he maintains, can be made to show that the multiple aims of culture have been replaced by the sole aim of a ‘financial oligarchy’... men are
as likely to focus on one "idea" as another, whereas they should integrate the several aims of a
vital culture” (Airaudi)

61 foggy, immediate air and atmospheric pressure, high and far off – it hangs in the air like a
miasma – fog, whether brown or yellow, is ubiquitous in E as a symbol of the city - a layer of in-
sulation from reality – the brown fog of commercial routine that is like the sighing up of the hea-
vy colour of the earth into air – brown symbolising spiritual decay or moral blindness – life fades
and the reality of the individual too - a Hobbesian mechanical determinism has settled down like
a vast grey fogbank of relativism and fatalism upon the modern age - they are living in a state of
suspended animation - a mist formed by the lingering dissolution of the sense of the absolute,
coweringly and despondently obscuring the heart of light – a fearful negativity given to the sim-
ple word Under by the pressure of unreal beginning the previous line – under London they are
undone - space a brown fog as time is a dead sound – in the early 20C, brown and yellow fog
provoked by huge amounts of coal smoke from houses, offices, shops, factories and public utili-
ties was characteristic of big cities such as Boston and London

61 ' The fog is, for Eliot – as it is for Dickens – a powerful rhetorical figure, which spectral mani-
festation tropes the City, thereby causing writing to counter with an estranged and estranging per-
ception of London as the only fitting response to the becoming-unreal that the atmosphere gener-
ates. The crowds who flow over London Bridge cannot help but appear to the mind’s eye as if
they were dead, so many revenant traces of the sooty spectre, and so suggestive of countless
others crossing the river in previous generations and centuries ' (Wolfreys)

62 'the lonely crowd' – 'so many' – awestruck and incredulous - as the fortune-teller had prophe-
sied he is in the city round – 'a crowd flowed' – a stiff sound – ‘flowed over’ - topsy-turvey ima-
gery - wonder and sadness, the crowd equated with the flowing tide, incessant and disjointed -
the spineless flow of the undone, lacking all joy - the slaves of time, caught up in its flow, unre-
deemed and undone – they have lost their passion, and their time-hound existence generates no
significant life or feeling - there is no internal life in these people distinguishable from their ex-
ternal role - humankind is in the grip of great events, and in a vast process beyond its control –
they are neither living nor dead - essentially, the individual has lost the capacity to change him-
self – apocalyptic connotations – dead souls moving mindlessly through their daily repetitive
motions - later they will become the hooded hordes sweeping over the arid plains – the crowd
mimics the natural flow of the river below - Dantean sighs rapidly give way to a dull pedestrian
beat, which is both that of office workers and of the verse itself, easing obediently back into iam-
bic pentameters - privatised cryptograms, their imperturbable motions in line with some predeter-
mined mechanical logic – hordes of lives perpetually rewinding and replaying cf. Les Sept Vieil-
lards which E. quotes in his postscript (seven identical figures of a demonic old man eerily pass his sight - in the Inferno, characters are sentenced
to exquisitely appropriate punishments and then doomed to replay their tiny
plots for eternity) - he is “sinister, self-multiplying fear” - E’s vision of the workers in the financial district is both comically grotesque and apposite, especially in its focus on automated repeti-
tiveness - a desperation and turmoil from this overlapping of cities (Dante's, Baudelaire's and

1920s London – in Baudelaire the urban masses are equated with the purely instinctual realm of
animal or insect life - a dissolving series of montage shots from German expressionist film -
dwellers in an eternal Dantesque film loop, ghosted out and self-enclosed)

63 stunned monosyllables – a steely directness and understated dignity - repetitive, deep sounds of d – they are passive toward death, which has undone them with a baldly undemonstrative verb

(Dante's disfatta) - an acutely pondering consciousness, the repetition of 'so many' stoically con-
firmatory - Dante's neutrals – neither hot nor cold - all those who knew neither good nor evil,
who viewed life with indifference – their ennui a state of sin – the constant brute fact of original
sin and our failure to deal with it - they suffer not only torpor but suffering and anguish - these
are men who have lost passion and whose time-bound existence generates no significant life or
feeling - all the inhabitants of the city can do is turn in circles, repeat their actions, even as their activities are dictated through their being bound to the wheel of work and the automated process
that is economics -the gap between the self and the Dantesque gives an effect of cooling wit, al-
most of painful amusement - detachment and sympathy, self-identification and withdrawal, wit
and pain blend in the uncertain and yet necessary reliance on Dante to throw light on a situation
felt as immersion merely, as living ‘Under the brown fog of a winter dawn’ - regarding the dhar-
mic symbol of being on the wheel of existence, it is obviously appropriate to E’s various sacred
references, not least those to be found in ‘What the Thunder Said’ - the ' average sensual man'

who is neither for God nor for the Devil but for himself only cf. Dante Inf. III 55-57 ' si lunga
tratta/ di gente, ch'io non averei creduto / che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta' - the eye-opener is the transformation of pedestrians into walking dead, and the very fact that so many people are
dead,(the difficulty most of us have in taking seriously the fact of our own mortality) - the recog-
nition that the self is in its extremity only like many others - ‘In Darkest Africa’ H.M.Stanley de-
scribes a scene which he compares with the human tide flowing over London Bridge ‘pale, over-
worked, dwarfed, stoop-shouldered... - other influences are a nightmare related by Bertrand Rus-
sell to E, the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Richard Jefferies ‘The Story of My

Heart’

64 sighs devoid of religion - like the pagans in Canto IV of the Inferno they have no faith and are
therefore without hope – the death of the will to engage life seemingly is universal - their mental
depression an imaginative sluggishness, low-grade and chronic - they are damned, but they are
damned by definition, not for anything in particular - at the same time, like Dante’s morally neu-
tral, they’re damned precisely because they haven’t done anything in particular - the crowd does
not do the sighing but is the passive medium for sighs - owes as much to smog as to Dante - lan-
guage has become a "waste of breath", a barren dissemination – the words of the passage themselves ‘exhaled’, moving with the expelled breath of shock, dismay, pity - their voices are muti-
lated, almost as if, like the Fisher-king they have been mutilated – writing and the stench of the
female have overpowered the priapic realm of the voice cf. 'drowned the sense in odours'

65 life in death – life reduced to numbing routine - we are at once with the speaker as the speak-
er is at once with what he sees, the verse drifting mechanically in tune to the step of the clerks,
and with as ghostly a fading: ‘so many . . . So many’ - a kind of solitary depression - actions are
not distinct from what they may be enforced to do in Hell – the general feeling of inertia and use-
lessness - imprisoned in a fixed solitude – the mass has replaced the individual, all possibility of
spontaneous or passionate action having been removed - we are aware only of the crowd - the re-
duction of life to mechanical motion is one of the symptoms of Baudelairean spleen, or uncon-
scious boredom - a man striding to and from his work is only a shadow – again, the mass move-
ment of automata without human feeling – the rhythmic and doom-laden iambic trudge of a 'dead
patrol' – since each man fixes his eyes before his feet, he is trapped in a perceptual prison of his
own making, unable to break the circumference of his closed and self-sufficient universe and glimpse the towers of the real city ( vera cittade - Purg. XVI, 96) – having willfully blinded their perception of any existence beyond their own, their perception has become animalistic, satisfying their own needs only - the city dwellers know only the circular or winding road that leads to
the centre; like Dante they have lost the straight way - the ancestral anxiety before death, and the
prospect of a potentially eternal life spent in punishment for sins, appears to be wholly absent,
since modern consciousness has rejected faith and, with it any possibility of redemption

65 ' the feet in effect are fettered just as the play of e's across the line rivets the eyes. Something (it appears to be his and the speaker's attachment to life) is not being forgiven (Bedient)

65 ' they are flowing in a spectral quiet, broken only by sighs and fatal bells and the jagged, des-
perate shout of the speaker - he at least is real enough to feel pain'

(Bedient)

65 ' they are no longer 'real' since they possess neither vitality nor subjectivity, but are merely
functions, vectors of the environment in which they live. Their lives are summarized by the 'dead
sound' which is history's hiatus, and sign of all that cannot be put right as time moves on' (Pun-
ter)

66 a pause after 'feet' – impersonal death is proceeding ineluctably with a syntactically stealthy
wrench - the crowd seems to begin moving up the hill with a reluctant jerk – 'Flowed' sounds ef-
fortless: this is the journey of so many – but it has the effect rather of restarting as it enacts an ef-fortful progress – rhyme bolts two syntactically separate units of description together, the
verse echoing the automatism of the modern city - a motion weirdly compelled – intensity of
feeling urges the lines in their wonderful controlled ‘flow’ - 'flowed up'- seems anti-gravitational

– their lives are virtually determined by the vicious circularity of the hours - the
vision of the clerks at dawn carries personal weight - the crowd is like the 'dull canal' below,
lacking all sense of free movement – a city mob conveying both enervation and degeneracy - the
unthinking hordes as gnomes and toys, flesh and mechanical, makes these strange semi-automata
all the more phantasmal, more exaggeratedly uncanny

60-67 trapped in hell – foggy, dark and filled with the sound of sighs and the faces of strangers
who seem familiar and anguished

67 the church is across the street from Lloyd's Bank where E worked – a deserted chapel, dese-
crated, and in a wilderness

68 the closure is so absolute as to discomfort with its finality and sense of completion – not so
much a fact as the reverberation of the church's somnolence - a sardonic ring – the note of office
drudgery - a final pompous comment - dead because muffled in the fog - the deaf sound a cue for
a parody of a mass - a reverberating somnolence pervades even the church – condemned to the
tedium of another day – the death of present time – the temporal seen as in ‘Gerontion’ as a vin-
dictive realm of death and abnegation cf. the unreality and absurdity of the chuckling skull in III
and ‘hurry up please its time’ in II - the crowd over London Bridge is a victim of time - the Incar-
nation indicates that Eternity partook of time. Mankind, however, does not acknowledge this -
the bell is striking the ninth hour, the hour in which Jesus died - sound in the poem a mode of citation that is both ephemeral and spectral, as temporary as it is temporal - feeling so intense as to
be almost hallucinatory, rendered through wit, through a cool inconsequentiality

69 ' city full of dreams, where in broad daylight the spectre stops the passer-by' – Les Fleur du

Mal – the projection of the speaker’s non-heroic self onto a face in the crowd - a Baudelairean
spectre - flowers growing out of evil or corruption, beauty from decay, repeat the image of a gar-
den that may bloom if the rotting corpse is kept buried – it is better to do evil than do nothing
since at least we exist - it makes no difference whether the speaker is alive in contemporaneity or
dead in a mythic city - the “waste” in The Waste Land is what constantly returns, the living dead;
the ghosts and fragments, of people and particularly of texts - mingled exclamation, questioning
and concern – a nervous, abrasive liberation of feeling - Stetson attacked with a resentful, urgent
and energetic incapacity to affect the facts of life - his answer to his servitude is to cultivate his garden and walk his dog. Any further hopes would be like ‘ships at Mylae’, or a sprouting
corpse, or an undomesticated bad dog that digs the quietly buried - the questions carry as their
shadow forms of wholly conventional social politeness so commonplace (‘The garden? The dog?

The weather ?’) as to be heard steadily under the lines of verse - they are what the voice ‘really’

says; this is what the mind only says. The corpse stays planted, the dog does not dig, and the men
go on their way - the verse, having lapsed to a slow plod, is suddenly reanimated – the abrupt
ring of an accusation - a particular ' I' and a human voice are introduced into this muffled and me-
chanized scene of universal damnation - like Dante's recognition of a face in the Inferno, this re-
cognition of the other is both a relief from the inhuman scene and a horror of understanding your
own culpability and your division from the other - a sense of bewilderment and somnambulism, a
flow of expressionist scenes - a masochistic reveling in the comedy – exhibitionism, malice, in-
genuity and fun - the narrative now so agitated it cannot continue, shattered by an unexpected in-
cident and a feverish inquisition - jerky phrases define the 'you' as the always false other – the
outrageously merry tormenting of the Crippen-like albeit fashionably hatted Stetson with his
murderous secret - a semblance of one's own spurious subjecthood – the mere pronunciation of
his name pins him to bloody history – the speaker seems to know a deeper fear or sense some
hidden evil. He feels everyone, like himself, is alone and involved in a world of death – the
hearty welcome to a familiar face a reaction to the seemingly blank faced automatons the speaker
has been moving among – a compound of questioner and accuser evoking a painful sense of lost
chances for transcendence - the line ballooning beyond pentameter, beyond that which might be
thought to happen of itself – both one man hailing another across a London street, while at the
same time, with no overblown rhetoric, greeting a comrade across the centuries - Stetson,
whether in ancient Carthage or post-war London is still a pawn subserving some huge economic
empire – the name obviously refers to Pound although E denied this, presumably because Stetson
is to be taken simply as the man in the street (the name is also that of a fellow Lloyd's employee
of E, and Eliot’s mother belonged to a ladies’ club addressed by a Mrs. Stetson) - a sort of every-
man, drawn by the speaker into complicity with his own overwhelming sense of doom, anguish,
anxiety and guilt - both E and the reader are implicated – the consciousness of the poem, (the
poet, the speaker, Tiresias or London itself), is a machine or engine for the transmission of Lon-
don's voices, acting as spirit guide, medium and telecommunication device - a Phantasmagoria,
its language that of the unconscious with its condensations, substitutions, displacements, opaque
with the opacity of the concrete or transparent lamps around a spiritual flame, unified, abstract,
conceptual - it is the sickening collapse of boundaries that disturbs the text, be they sexual, ra-
cial, linguistic or authorial - not fear of the dead man himself as his invasion of the world of the living - like dreams the text has no beginning and no end - a sense of urgency, of phenomenal rapidity in reaction to the perception of becoming disconnected, and of Being’s being haunted by
discontinuity as a fundamental constituent of Being’s modernity.

69 ' both strange and familiar and alien enough to shock....the ghostly deadness of the city,
fraught with literary echoes, provokes this aggressive confrontation releasing a torrent of ques-
tions and exclamations that betray the speaker's anxieties about the human, vegetative and espe-
cially literary sterility in which he finds himself' (Gross)

69 “The characters in The Waste Land, however, are nameless, faceless, isolated, and have no
clear idea of themselves. All they have is a sense of loss and a neural itch, a restless, inchoate de-
sire to recover what has been lost. But in this very minimum of restless alive-ness, they repeat
the pattern of the Quest. And it is the archetypal Quest pattern, as manifested in the Grail legend,
that gives whatever form there is to the protagonist's movement through the poem” (Langbaum)

70 a lapse into a kind of long time frame that can exist in the afterlife and that will suddenly
jump back into secular time - references to the past that gather around Stetson incorporate past
time into an intense consciousness of the present - all wars are the same war, all cities the same
city, all love-making the same love-making and for all men bound upon the wheel the same bore-
dom and terror – the inhabitants of the city are ghosts of former lives, enacting the same roles
again and again - a dread of consequences (and more anxiety from breeding flowers) – from gar-
dens in spring, revelations of horror - the corpse a buried memory arousing intense fear and hor-
ror at what will come to light – the warrior from Mylae returns as a cowboy – as is the way with
corpses, his sudden appearance is that of an aggressively larger than life automatism – a haunting
recognition scene in which conscious recognition derives from unconscious recognition of an-
other life - a certain devilry – a pantomime scene exceeding realism - Mylae – the 1st Punic

War/The Great War – Mylae is connected with Carthage and Carthage was originally a Phoeni-
cian colony – the speaker is associating himself with the Phoenician sailor - both men are devo-
tees of rebirth, and it was the Phoenician sailors who carried the Mysteries or vegetation cults
around the Mediterranean

70 “Instead of Webster's "keep the wolf far thence that's foe to men" ( White Devil, V, iv, 113 ), the friendly Dog (perhaps, as Cleanth Brooks has suggested, modern humanitarianism) is the
more likely animal and the more likely danger. Webster's dirge says it is good for the dead to be
buried, and Eliot tells why—by digging up the corpse, the Dog would prevent rebirth. But we are
all, protagonist and hypocrite readers, with our advanced ideas that cut us off from the natural cy-
cle, engaged in a conspiracy against fertility and rebirth. So we return to the theme with which

Part ι began: "April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land"—the fear of sex, of burying the seed that will sprout” (Langbaum)

70 “the protagonist's consciousness emerges from the collective consciousness of the time, as an-
other nameless, faceless modern voice. The protagonist has no character in the old-fashioned
sense; for he acquires delineation or identity not through individualization, but through making
connection with ancient archetypes. The point is that Eliot introduces a new method of character-
ization deriving from the reaction against the nineteenth-century belief in the individual as the
one reality you could be sure of. Eliot's nameless, faceless voices derive from the twentieth-century sense that the self, if it exists at all, is changing and discontinuous, and that its unity is as problematical as its freedom from external conditions. Hence the mechanical, automatic quality
of existence...the breaking out from and enlargement of self through archetypalization. Behind
the solution lie the demonstrations by Freud and Jung that when we delve deep into the psyche
we find an archetypal self and a desire to repeat the patterns laid out in the sort of myths de-
scribed by Frazer and Jessie Weston” (Langbaum)

71 unable to see, speak or hear he has become a corpse – a morbid humour – the buffoonery of
an emotion which can find no outlet in action - the sprouting body (shockingly) suggests the

Christian belief in the resurrection of the body - is this indeed Christ himself? - a corpse is a kind of seed, this truth being symbolized in the old vegetation rituals - suggests that an awareness of
death creates an awareness of life: hence the sprouting corpse - suffering becomes the pathway to
something of great value - the possibility of a new beginning - no morbitiy in this image of a
corpse, who is an effigy of a god whose sprouting bodes well for the growing season - the speak-
er's complicity in the matter of the corpse - roots are no longer quiescent but bloom and hurt –
the dead of the Great War - the corpses of Syrian fertility gods somehow get into our flower beds

- the gardener has planted death rather than regenerative life - memories are Baudelairean spec-
tres that walk in sunlight - horrifically pointed – nightmare associations with the dead god – an
erotic dream from the pagan cult of vegetation – an attempt to bury/repress some traumatising
memory – fear that is in a handful of dust finds its name – indubitably it is fear for one's sins -
the corpse planted last year may resurrect to point a withering finger of accusation – the corpse
of a failed love affair, signifying the painful psychical damage that remains after the demise of a
romantic relation - the whole image, in any case, astutely attests through metaphor to the return
of the repressed - it will return again, either through the seasons of regeneration, or through the
mind’s repetitive processes and patterns – it will be a kind of Freudian compulsion to repeat - the
past both threatens and promises regeneration: the infertility of the waste land demands the influ-
ence of desire to (re)discover and recover/uncover its potency - history occurs as a symptom -
the past emerges as both the psychic and material symptom of a failed burial - the corpse’s antici-
pated blossoming repeats the past as a still vital physical effect and affect - history is a still living, palpable presence which, like the corpse, is always ready to return, modified by the desires
of the present(for E past and present are contiguous) - a wish to touch the past whose enigmatic
imprints remain legible long into the future - a search for lost time where past desire and time
crave restoration to a purified instantiation whose perfection might exist in the remembering - an-
other figure of seasonal repetition and organic decay - the repeated desire to return to and re-ex-
perience the scene of abjection to try to grasp cognitively what only the body and the uncon-
scious have come to know - the paradoxical notion of the earth as both garden and grave - a bur-
ied fetus (the reproductive theme) - the horror of formless female fertility, product of the mad,
meaningless and libidinous cycle of Nature, sprouting again and again out of the same bed of
death – hysteria at the felt emptiness of bodily life – modern cultural memory is animated by
nothing but the corpse of personal life – there is no rebirth here but the corrupted afterlife of un-
redeemed personal memory incarcerated in the carcase of its own decomposition – the speaker's
buried life erupts to the surface in a doubleness of language that parallels the doubleness be-
tween our apparent and buried life - as in the opening there is a universal condition of forgetful-
ness – in modernity ancient memories do not return to revitalize the culture – there is only an
horrific stasis – the fertility of nature itself, cyclic, repetitive and endlessly merging creation and
destruction (cf. Lil in II) - they only bring the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action - the dead 'grain' mentioned in the Anglican burial service - the impression is that the

'planting' of the corpse has been done completely without hope – there will be no resurrection of
the self – such memory as these lines offer is animated by nothing but the corpse of personal life,
the corrupted afterlife of unredeemed personal memory incarcerated in the carcase of its own de-
composition – each of us has suppressed his most pleasurable, most anguishing memories down
into his deepest feelings, there where it may sprout, blossom or bloom later in strange ways, in
unusual transfigurations - in ancient fertility rites images of the gods were buried in the fields –
the sudden quickening of the slaughtered Osiris, who, being triple phallused, may be identical
with the 'man with three staves' – the garden of The Waste Land, like the body of Polydorus

(Aen III 24-29), produces a harvest of warriors, an "iron harvest of spears." Death had undone so many - a common homicidal practice in late nineteenth and early twentieth century England was
to bury one's victim in a garden bed – the corpse that figures so fantastically, is like Hamlet's lev-
ity, a form of emotional relief – only by something so violent and unreal can the need for a burial
of these walking dead be asserted - the continuity with schemes to regulate nature and human life
can now only be viewed as absurd or comic – the apprehension that displacement, disjointing,
rupturing are all reminders of the uncanny estrangement of the self from within itself, this a func-
tion intrinsic to all acts of representation - in myth death and burial are part of a ritual that in-
cludes rebirth and new life and that will lift a curse from the land (in effect, to restore fertility) The dog that's 'friend to man' suggests a modern god substitute, (dog backwards is god) which
seemed to be a friend but which has become in numerous senses a destroyer. A modern scientific
reductionism will dig up and destroy the corpse –the impotent poet is no god, nor can he muster
any heroic act, his only accomplishment being the resurrection of the corpse he summoned ne-
cromantically "out of the dead land", a deed which he begins to regret, as the secrets he tried to bury begin to surface - as if the Egyptian god, whose image E claims to draw from Frazer's

Golden Bough, had become one with Baudelaire's charogne - he, too, was once a sailor before
succumbing to commerce - he has interred his past, and perhaps also his hope for the future - a
big, flaunted casualness - the line is in the sly manner of an antic improvisation on the vaudeville
stage

71 “The Waste Land presents a series of subject positions that reveal a stuttering inability and a
desire-laden refusal to flee from the histories that pervade them. The poem stands as a major
modernist example of the tropological and affective presence of the past within a consciousness,
a form, and an aesthetics that push toward a different futurity by insisting on the “newness” of
the present traversed with the dead” (McIntire)

72 an anxiety quelling regularity of beat asserts itself – this is presumably the Hanged Man
which Mme S. did not find – 'sprout' – a macabre humour – the speaker's anxiety imagining the
corpse (himself) shaking off suffocation in a 'bed' that deprived him of breath and sending up
shoots into the air – the “planted” body that promises regeneration, repair, and rebirth from death

- in some latent sense both are terrifying questions – images in these last eight lines are surrealis-
tic in a prickly, disturbing way, as opposed to the monotone depression beginning the episode,
and the rhythm of the language is conversational and questioning – more distinctly human - two

Englishmen discussing their tulips, with a note of the terrible intimacy with which murderers
imagine themselves being taunted - the past is never inert or dead but will suddenly blossom into
the present – ’Is there, he asks, hope for regeneration of the buried spirit or does the buried spirit
find him inert and recalcitrant? - history is a still-living, palpable presence, always ready to return, modified by the desires of the present - the uneasy feeling of inversion from a corpse that
sprouts - intense and terrible desperation - the victim a psychological spectre - a living response
to the present requires a living response to the past – a reminiscence of the dead land breeding li-
lacs – another disturbance of spring and a digging up of the past that meets resistance even as it
is contemplated – images of sprouting and blooming now convey paranoid horror - in myth no
contradiction between death for the one and rejuvenation for the other, between the finitude of
the hero's biography and the infinity of the cycles of nature his biography represents - the seed
that germinates is poetry sprouting up in the text from the dormancy of dead things – a fled rea-
lity - the upraised note of questions tauntingly lifts into consideration a buried body - some phal-
lic excrescence of the Baudelairean passant – Osiris vulgarised as victim in a pulp-crime novel -
cf. Polydorus in the Aeneid whose corpse sprouts a tree

73 a numbing failure in the speaker? - something is not being forgiven, perhaps his attachment to
life – a sexual bed

74 a neurasthenic and wobbly interruption, frenetic and slightly unhinged – Webster’s words re-
turn as extravagant and erring spirits - dog for wolf domesticates both hellhound and the dis-
course of the past - the familiar strangeness of the past - the dog within, the lust of memory that
will not the past be buried, but digs it up for a psychic confrontation that may be terrifying, paral-
yzing or even castrating - 'friend to men', a copybook phrase that does not mitigate our feelings
at the thought of the corpse, as horror is mixed with canine familiarity – Possibly, "humanitarianism" which is "friend to man" but which invalidates the supernatural, digs up buried gods and prevents rebirth - man's best friend, either as disturber of the dead or 'something lost in a past
life', can bring about a therapeutic catharsis or can disrupt the process of rejuvenation – the
speaker gives a stern warning to keep the dog “far hence” lest the dog, by animal accident and
curiosity, perform the archaeological work of disinterment - it is a manikin of the mind upon
which many virtues and sins may be displayed, in turn or simultaneously, as one chooses to per-
ceive it - the ‘Hound of Heaven’ chasing the spirit of man, no matter how resistant or ‘buried’the
latter is - the dog our guilt or conscience - a quote from the dirge in Webster's 'White Devil',
which sings of the friendless bodies of unburied men and reflects the superstition that corpses of
men who have been murdered will be dug up by wolves – the Dog-Star Sirius, an ancient symbol
of sterility and death that is, at the same time, the navigator's guide, a "friend to man." ( the paradoxical nature of the earth as both garden and grave) - in the O.T the dog typically lives on
corpses in the (universal) charnel house – the dog the speaker's fear, shame and lust – the capital
letter of "Dog" implies that Eliot is referring to the Dog-Star Sirius, an ancient symbol of sterility and death that is, at the same time, the navigator's guide, a "friend to man." cf. Aen. III 137-142

(Sirius a creator of waste lands) - Sirius/The Dog Star appeared above the horizon when the

Nile Valley was inundated - there is no satisfactory explanation for the significance of the dog. It
appears to be a poetic flourish, half humorous and half malicious, on E's part

74 ' the psalmist's cry of 'Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog'

(an unclean animal) blends with the familiar image of a dog in a back garden digging up and
bringing with familiar eagerness something his master had buried' (Gardner)

74 ' fragmented memory is what the poem challenges us to complete and make whole so that the
tradition can be total...the poem an access to all of history, and so a defence against the madness of the dionysiac, escaping both the purely personal memory of sentimental reminiscence, and
also evading the horrific potentialities of our buried self by maintaining the bulwark of history

(the dog far hence)' (Craig)

75 the urban shock - animal mockery, or the jeer of a deformed sexuality, strikes home with the
insidious jollity of a song from The White Devil, revised with an extra-'friendly' rhyme (en) – the
horrific potentialties of the buried self – the exhumation of buried desires and unconscious mem-
ories - the very idea of resurrection repulses the inhabitants, this land having rejected the trans-
formative power of water (l.55) - the fear is that new life comes in only with the annihilation of
the old - the effect of refusal is that no revitalization is possible - dried-up lives will drag on until they can accept, like the Fisher King, that the Grail must be passed on to its next keeper - the
corpse must stay in the ground if it is to 'sprout' - rather, we must follow the associations to their roots in our buried memory through all the accumulations of the tradition – memory would be
our salvation from dessication - some buried memory or past disgrace which has not been left to
germinate? - memory “stirred” from the “dead land” just as “dull roots” are stirred with “spring
rain” - the past both threatens and promises regeneration: the infertility of the waste land de-
mands the influence of desire to (re)discover and recover/uncover its potency - history occurs as
a symptom - digging up the corpse discovers guilt, the common human condition and shared
with the hypocrite reader - the dog of bad conscience digging up our secret crimes - trauma pro-
duces a repeated desire to return to and re-experience the scene of abjection to try to grasp cogni-
tively what only the body and the unconscious have come to know - the poem presents a series
of subject positions that reveal a stuttering inability and a desire-laden refusal to flee from the
histories that pervade them - the speaker now knows his charge:to seek life or to seek death, to
awaken or to die - by digging up the corpse the dog might be preventing the possibility of rebirth

(the “sprout” and “bloom” from the “dried tubers” of human entombment) - the corpse Stetson’s
own lost body, divided from the ‘shade’ who is being directed to discover a reflowering into the
spirit world - or the corpse of a failed love affair, signifying the painful psychical damage that re-
mains after the demise of a romantic relation - the whole image, in any case, astutely attests
through metaphor to the ‘return of the repressed’- the past emerging as both the psychic and ma-
terial symptom of a failed burial - it is an act of sacrilege to disturb a buried god – the culmination of the death theme in lines 60-76

70-75 “In the sprouting of the seed, in the rising of Jesus from his tomb in the
garden, the Christian found hope for life beyond the apparent limits of nature, hope for resurrec-
tion into life everlasting.The ending of "The Burial of the Dead" not only depicts the failure of that hope, but its absolute reversal: from hope of immortality, to fear that the symbol of our mortality will be exposed to view; fear,
perhaps, that we are now incapable even of that fertile decay suggested by mingling with
the earth. The passage thus perfectly caps the failure of spiritual renewal suggested at the begin-
ning of the poem by the cruelty of April; makes the address to Stetson an especially poignant cry
of man trapped in a natural order expressive of nothing beyond itself; but also suggests addi-
tional promise in the rain that comes at last at the end of the poem” (Spear)

76 ' O hypocrite reader, my fellow man, my brother' - Baudelaire's defiant self-distancing from and complicity with his bourgeois public - he accuses himself and the reader of being hypocrites,
that is, unwilling to admit it is in the other that each human individual is compelled to recognize
himself among the living and the dead,

'my reflection, my brother' – as if the speaker recognizes in the reader a fellow in suffering, af-
fected by the same major illness of modern times, the terrible spleen – the worst depravity of all
is ennui - the only thing that prevents us all from being felons is lack of nerve - we are forced to be one of the characters, a character who is the image and brother of the speaker - in this prefa-tory poem to the Flowers of Evil Baudelaire scourges a humanity captive in sin ‘each day we
take another step to Hell’ - the atmosphere of Baudelaire’s poem, as here, is that of ennui - the mournful, neutralized atmosphere which comes from a universe of evil and even from the diabolical universe of " Les Sept Vieillards" - a fraternal, scornful upsurge - abrupt, accusatory and shocking – seemingly from out of nowhere the fragment confronts us like the menacing ravings
of a lunatic – an end in clear cut syllables and dualistic feelings that extend beyond the page to

'you' the reader, with a wilder fraternalism and attack - shatters the distinction between artifact,
poet and audience, E insisting on our participation in the world we think we merely observe - we
necessarily collude with the text in its hypocrisies - we are forced into the poem to be one of the
characters - the image and brother of the protagonist - his journey now becomes our journey,
seeing through his eyes the things of his vision - whatever charges the image from below has
come so close to the surface the sequence can no longer contain it, and so disintegrates - the cul-
minating point of this unwilling resuscitation of remembrance and pain, the reader denied the
prerogative of standing in judgement; but trapped in complicity, in misery, suffering with those
we see suffer - the reader as both double and brother locates a collaborative coupling - he can
impose intention and meaning into a text that has open boundaries (in many of E’s discussions of

Shakespeare, he identified the dramatist’s ability to suppress any personal philosophy in his work
as one of his greatest traits, for it ultimately gave the audience authority to impose its own mean-
ing upon the text or to ‘‘live through’’ the play) - the reader suddenly surprised to find himself
more central than Stetson - the sardonic tone implies irony of some sort – we are all part of this
universe of death, all guilty and we must acknowledge it – We too belong to the scene and ex-
clude ourselves from the company of these undead only in hypocrisy - the speaker suddenly
draws the reader in - reading the poem we are looking into the mirror – all these confusions and
torments,uncompleted ecstasies, cryptic insights, questing urges, all touch the common human
soul – as if Baudelaire's line had already entered universal conscience and need not be marked as
foreign by italics – the Other is assimilated to the self in a union which transcends linguistic or
time frontiers - his is all the product of ennui (as in Baudelaire) - the cameraderie and hypocrisy
are the speaker's belatedness and felt inauthenticity – the reader too an active participant and

Grail Quester who is suffering the same condition. We follow in the steps of Exodus, Aeneas,

Dante and St Augustine, connecting the fragments and creating meaning, not passive readers but
active seekers – Stetson's pretense of uniqueness is rejected by the speaker who insists he is a
double, precisely like all who now find themselves incapable of religious consciousness – the
speaker knows what transcendent knowledge is but also knows he has lost it – he and his readers
alike have laid their lands waste. Readers of the poem too will do all they can to disown their
spiritual longing and resist the call to awaken to spiritual life - the poet, whether Baudelaire or E, brings to the reader's attention that he is not only listening to a voice but decoding signs on a
page – a synaesthesia of writing as speech and speech as writing – the collapse of a supposed
unity into a problematic relation, of reading words as though one were listening to a voice - our readings must endlessly participate in rereadings of the past literary traditions that the poet rei-fies and redeploys - the poem also must always be reread through the prism of our own contem-
porary cultural and historical locations - the desire to have the reader partake in (re)creating the
poem: to both become and resist becoming the dissembling reader whom E both appeals to and
admonishes as his likeness and kin - the Baudelairian dandy has no secrets from himself and will
allow his audience no self-forgetfulness (experiencing the city as random, contingent, discontinu-
ous) - author, referent, reader, language have all been dislocated or deconstructed and the result
is to foil or confound every attempt to construe a total meaning or to provide a unified or single
interpretation out of whole cloth

76 ' the poem intimates that at some level it suspects it is demonstrating what it denigrates, that it is itself an exemplar of hyper self-consciousness, a true product of what E himself called 'the present self-conscious century'. In a note on Baudelaire's ennui he described it as a type of acedia,
arising from the unsuccessful struggle towards the spiritual life.' (Reeves)

76 ' The last line of the "Unreal City" paragraph addresses the reader directly, but as continuation of an address to Stetson it also identifies him as a hypocrite lecteur, an identification which provides a fascinating twist. In both technique and content, the last line focuses on problematic rela-
tions and on the grotesque reductionism resulting from the scientific explanation of the victim of
vegetation rites as a kind of fertilizer. Calling Stetson a hypocrite points to his participation in
this narrowly relational way of thinking. The speaker realizes that he himself exists on several
planes in perpetual oscillation, and he reminds Stetson that contrary to his pretense, whether he is
in London or the vestibule of hell or Paris, he is also trapped in unstable relations. Calling Stet-
son a reader is far more interesting than calling him a hypocrite. The Stetson passage was intro-
duced with the words, "There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!'" Beyond all possibility of misunderstanding, Stetson is a hearer not a reader, and the following passage is
cried, not written. Nevertheless, Stetson is a reader. We might say that he is the listener to a
speech that comes from a cursive-recursive source and that he is also Baudelaire's reader. It is
much more to the point, however, to realize that the last line of the passage draws our attention to
the "crying' speech as something that is written down on paper and only through the conventions
of reading is mistaken for something spoken aloud.' (Brooker&Bentley)

76 ' the reader is the speaker's 'semblable', his friend, yet hypocritical, since he does not care to
admit that not even reading, though he is subconsciously aware of its futility, can chase away the
feeling of acute boredom ... ennui is nothingness so damnation itself may save since it at least
gives a significance to life... so, a call to action, to make something of our lives regardless of the consequences, rather than follow the road to nowhere...the reader is addressed first in English
and then in French, since boredom, this ' monstre delicat', as well as its expansion, cannot be
stopped by mere linguistic barriers' (Birsanu)

76 “A. David Moody notes the relevance of Baudelaire’s poem to ‘The Burial of the Dead’, at
the close of which Baudelaire is quoted (‘hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!) and
to The Waste Land more generally: ‘It is as if the poet had been striving to create, out of the con-
sciousness of the experience in the hyacinth garden, an oasis of horror in a desert of Ennui.’ This
assertion is close to saying that Eliot’s vision in The Waste Land involves a negative Romanti-
cism, one in which the lost, elegized experience of visionary intensity in the hyacinth garden stirs the poet and the reader out of the benumbed condition evoked so often in the poem, as when
the poet describes and summons up the ‘Unreal City’ (60) in the first section” (O’Neill)

76 “The Waste Land's "you" is more than a manner of speaking. It is a direct plea to the reader to enter the poem's discourse, to overcome the inhibitions that allow its riddles to go unchallenged,
and to ask of this disturbed text, of its speaker, and of the culture from which he comes, "What
ails you?" By refraining from asking this question, from unearthing the corpse buried in this garden, we participate ("You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere") in Parsival's evasion, when in the story he refuses to ask questions that might make the soil fruitful again... the
evasion is of some "overwhelming question" or moral issue by inhibition, lack of seriousness, or fear of unconscious repression... the quester who must ask the saving question and free the
waters of cultural and personal fertility, is not a "character" within the work, but the reader”

(Kearns)

76 “the poem’s opening chorus prefers a blanket of “forgetful snow” (WL

6) to the pain of spring growth and the stirrings of life. The commuters on

London Bridge are in the typical commuter zone: they “flo[w]” together, indi-
viduals reduced to traffic (WL 66). The woman in the “Game of Chess” bed-
room is so passive she’s almost invisible; the rattling gossip in the pub is both
boring and born of boredom; the compulsive repetitions of “What the Thunder

Said” are boring in the way that all obsessions are” (Booth)

76 “So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we
do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil
than to do nothing: at least, we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is
his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for
damnation” (T.S.Eliot)

60-75 the pattern is one of dream condensations, substitutions and displacements

69-75 ' brittle, anxious, ironic questions....he and Stetson schizoid wanderers through the ages
each a many disguised as one....the tone about to split under its own pressure. The speaker comes
further and further into voice till voice itself grows shrill and he is breathing into the face of the reader his own anxiety” (Bedient)

77 the lady of situations – Belladonna – a merely sensory enchantress – the setting a synthetic
temple of Venus whose sign is fire - idle, sensuous and anguished with overtones of sterility - a

Cleopatra manque, the voluptuousness of that queen becoming metallic, her liveliness degenerating to neurosis - Cleopatra coming on her barge of state to meet Antony for the first time, (in

Antony and Cleopatra) and The Rape of the Lock - like Cleopatra, the woman is cool, calculating, isolated, independent and powerful - the woman seeks to dominate, she can checkmate Ant-
ony - marriage and sexuality are here debased into a game of strategy - in chess the Queen is the
most powerful piece, but if the King fails the game is lost - in the Fisher-king myth the kingdom
fails as the king has suffered a wound to the generative organ - the woman as a fetish, an isolated
artifact or body part, cut off from reality, immersed in her immediate surroundings but dimin-
ished by them - we are conscious not of the actual chair but its reflection – we ourselves blinded by the reflections – the table, glass and cupidons blind spots of attention - etherialized and
stripped of reality - we infer the lady's character exclusively from the surrounding objects which
express her emotional state and social status – the interchangeability of emotion and object, as
well as of intellect and sensation

77 ' this is the lady of the rocks, the lady of situations, as foretold by Mme S. She is a weak de-
mon, a victim, at once pathetic and caustic. He has married the hyacinth girl, the epitome of a fe-
male narcissus, who was fresh but is now depicted as flammable' (Bedient)

77 ' Titian's brush, Cleopatra's barge, Strauss's Salome – he brings to bear all the forces of past
great art upon her....there is a kind of buried irony in the way great masterpieces of the past are
now reduced to pure artifices' (Spender)

78 the minutely constructed interior of a modern courtesan evokes immense inner emptiness,
compensated for by an overwhelming profusion of material artefacts

79 in The Lord’s Vineyard the vine is fruitful; here it is artificially wrought - and no love is left, and its place is ironically supplied by a golden cupidon - a kind of Spenserian Bower of Bliss
where the natural is submerged in artifice - the occulted locus amoenus of heightened experience
and vision has finally been made concrete only to be petrified - words move in a grand melodic
line, tempo maestoso; rich colour and sonority give full orchestration to the passage

80 she is surrounded by the culture of the past but is not part of it – it does not sustain her - cf.

Dido for whom "lighted lamps hang down from the fretted roof of gold and flaming torches drive
out the night." (and like Virgil, E compares Dido to Cleopatra)

81 as if in mock self-castration

82 cf. the seven candlesticks of Revelation I, 12-18 – 'doubled' = reflected – an acoustic doubling
and also an extra burden for the voice

83 a 'wilderness of mirrors' from the mutual reflection of shiny tops, mirrors, jewels and flame-
feeding odours – a conspiring together for self-absorbed glorification – a bewildering circularity
of selfhood – the all-obliterating light claustrophobic – 'as' rises on the upstress to make a con-
cocted link with 'rose' - entrapment in a system of qualities

84 underworld flickers – jewels vanish into their glitter as the candelabra do into their light and
flame, and the marble into its glow – light swallowing the objects it is supposed to reveal, and all
sources of light meeting and being reflected in the mirror, which normally would reflect her face

– nothing is solid – all is a shell without content or a cloud of free-floating adjectives – nothing
means what it says, nothing is at home, though everything glows surreally, nothing in the poem
has its rooted and formal place- a spectator would alternate between feeling distant from his per-
ceptions and being swamped by surfaces

85 'poured'- the confusion of space and time – a nauseous ambiguity that confirms the worst – a

Baudelairean mixture of the senses - accumulating images create a stifling atmosphere of synthetic richness, an insulated realm choking on its own artifice

85 ' in the slipped syntax a weary disenchantment as well as a frightened confusion' (Bedient)

86 unstoppered – a calculated inversion - strikes an insidious note – a nausea of slithering from
one object to another – evanescent syntactic sinuosity – the main subject flamboyantly absent

87 she herself seeking to establish her absoluteness as a cult object - the sinister, unstoppered es-
cape of the odours as tall flames double each other and flame light meets jewel light – as if the
unmannerly seethings of their contents had elbowed their corks and stoppers aside - and yet the
perfumes still 'lurk' within, tenaciously
clinging to the internal depths whose thick secretions they are - a morbid acuteness of the senses

- an inchoate force self-imprisoned by the objects of a luxurious room, partly articulating a desire
to reach out of solitude to another – what is so underneath (unstoppered, unguent) can only rise
odorously to a closed in coffered ceiling - opulence and meaninglessness - the atmosphere itself
heavy and overpowering – the neutral and denatured 'modern'- the tyranny of the modern – its
compulsion to fascinate – 'lurked'- hints of paranoia, as in the hallucinatory 105-107 where ob-
jects seem to aggressively project from the walls - the passage out of this suffocation traced by
the breaths of scent moving upward on the warm air - the fragmentation of parts a sparagmos of the physical body of desire, torn by its conflicting responses to the excitements it tries to lift into the wholeness of meaning

87 ' the staring forms more horrifying for being amorphous and unspecified as if in a bid to take
over and subdue the passivities and the emptiness around them and thus he feels the woman tak-
ing over and subjecting him' (Bedient)

88 reminiscent of Belladonna (her name suggestive of the woman), no less narcotic than cos-
metic - the word connotations maliciously derogatory - the confused and 'synthetic' quality of the
scene is caught in the ambiguous syntax, as in the end of the line which hovers between looking
back and forward - like Dido and Cleopatra, she is linked to the irrational and dangerous aspects
of sensuality

89 memory and desire are being mixed and we 'drown' (an oxymoronic touch, potentially sacra-
mental objects suggestive of Hell's fire and deathly water) in the multitudes of sense impressions

- the text itself bewitched by this odorous and seemingly diffuse flesh - a morbid acuteness of the
senses (speaker and reader suffer this scene after scene) - a strong sense of imprisonment, as
though an eye were ranging round this intensely ornate and suffocating artifice silently looking
for a way out - objects completely obscure the figure of female desire - the reader, his senses
drowned, cannot see Belladonna for all the finery that surrounds her - the human is immersed in
reflection - the feminine and soothing, if not cathartic, satiation of the senses in sensory proper-
ties - motion becomes an appetitive disturbance – no one's thirst is satisfied in this parched was-
teland –the splendour quickly becomes ambiguous or excessive - woman as the embodiment of
dislocation and loss of boundaries - the poetry a replica of the room in that it too is full of bits
and pieces of art, words and things pointing at each other like facing mirrors - the suffocating
hothouse atmosphere pointing paradoxically to the actual sterility and cold barrenness for which
they are intending to compensate - an insulated realm choking on rich synthetic artifice - cf. the hearty stench in the pre-Poundian MS - as effluvia, the feminine dissolves the limits of the private body, and the boundaries of the self subside into pneumatic anarchy - the father’s impotence
has entailed the dissolution of identity, imaged as asphyxiation in the body of the female (and as
the miscegenated mix of tongues at the finale of V)

90 a stony pastiche which glows rather than burns, but the energy is not static as the long, unbro-
ken sentence strivingly makes clear – a quick glide with closely harboured breath, a psyche held
together by luxurious décor, if the whole sequence is not to collapse, one must compulsively go
on and on

90 ' the air that freshens from the window actually serves to fatten and prolong the candle flames
so that they fling their hell-smoke through the perfume laden air and stir, without animating the
pattern on the ceiling (coffered/coffin)....an imaginary death-bed, a corpse-space, stirred yet find-
ing it hard to breathe' (Bedient)

91 ‘fatten’ - sexual parody - parody the mode for a distorted, cheapened mode of existence - both
flame and the woman flickeringly restive – as with the glow that superimposes its significance
upon marble, intangibles permeate and transform tangibles - dense and cloying voluptuousness
the objectification of the slow viscous inner fermenting of the female body - even flame, most

'spiritual' of the elements, is clogged and choked, 'fattened' into an obscene corporality of its own

- the perfume odours cause the light to fling smoke against the loquearia - panelled ceiling cf.

Aen. i. 726 – a hint of the 'unholy loves' of Carthage (line 307)

91 ' mock erections of the fat and prolonged candle flames are applauded auto-erotically by the
doubling glass....the carved and cut male member has an auto-erotic glitter – the penis is 'petri-
fied'... the lady of the rocks is Medusa, making everything around her lose its living principle,
and the speaker himself is as still and oblivious to woman as a statue, as it was in the hyacinth
garden, and his eyes are now blinded pearls” (Bedient)

93 the smoke of Hell – ironic wriggles of the conscious worm - coffered – decorated with sunken panels - the spectacle is viewed with totally disenchanted eyes and a disillusioned clarity, language mingling admiration with distaste - a collection of pieces that are like works of art that go
to die in museums

94 the flames denatured and sea-wood turned to ashes – the remnants of distant tragedies now
put to trivial decorative purpose

96 carved – a cruel, indelible act – 'sad' because artificial/chemical – the impossibility of regen-
eration – there is no freshening water in this parched land

97 one looks through this painting “as though” it were a window because the world of 1922 ‘still

. . . pursues’ the violence and the lusts of an ostensibly distant and barbaric past

98 cf. P.L iv.140 – Satan at the borders of Eden – the Fall reenacted again and again – cinematic
and vaguely surrealistic – the opening scene synaesthetically animated through the objects them-
selves which do not seem to be dependent on an experiencing subject for their for their life –
both a glimpse of Paradise and the knowledge that it’s temporary, both a relishing of the present
and the apprehension of its impending corruption - a scene from literature - the enclosed self-in-
volvement of a culture prevented by its own inanition from finding any refreshment in, even any
reference to, nature, in the sense either of environment or of natural law - what in Milton’s poem
was a place of abundance and harmony becomes, in the poem, a site of crisis exploded into trans-
formation - actions are ascribed to objects not to an observing I - cf. "tum silvis scaena coruscis /
desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra" (Aen I.164-65)

99 Ovid - Metamorph.VI – Philomena raped by Tereus – a rape victim and accomplice to murder,
is wrested into the form of a bird - Tereus, king of Thrace, married to Procne, had her banished
and her tongue cut out so that he could marry her sister Philomela. Before the ceremonies, he
raped Philomela. Procne sent a message in a woven robe, relating Tereus' crime. Philomela saved
her sister and before they escaped together, Procne killed her son Itys and left him to be served to

Tereus to eat unknowingly. Realizing he was tasting his son's flesh, Tereus pursued the women.

The gods interceded, transforming Procne into a swallow, Philomela into a nightingale, and Ter-
eus into a hoopoe. The violated women thus were transfigured through suffering, and the nightin-
gale's song is a transcendence through art - the figure of sexual violation is akin to secularization
as lust methodically drives forward to the extirpation of immediate desire – sterility, violation
and nothingness are eternally present but now the ideal which transcended time has been lost -
the world partakes in the barbarous king's action and is still partaking in that action - a sharp dis-
junction between the violated Philomela and the nightingale's song – passion and terror are now
reduced to a mere nothing in a contemporary drawing room – eloquent discourse is now mean-
ingless chatter - for the woman all is well in this world if ‘still the world pursues’ the beauty and
passion represented by Philomel - speech lost for the inviolable music of transcendence – the in-
violable Philomela at least does not passively resign herself to romantic suffering as do the other
female characters - eg the typist only fills the silence with the mechanical voice of the gramo-
phone - violation through lust and purification through transformation - a voyeuristic glimpse
through a window of man's sexual fall in the garden of Eden - for E a choice between the fire of
the senses and purgatorial suffering - an aesthetic discharge – out of suffering comes art, some-
thing universal and impersonal, and in death it becomes rich and strange - Nature provides relief
from this suffocating boudoir

100 the rape of the sacred – eroticized, bloody, violated, speechless and yet possessed of un-
speakable knowledge – rewarded for her pains with a pure art, powerless and desolate - the in-
comprehensible sign of an inviolable voice that becomes transcendent other, her 'change' offering
redemption to the waste land – “yet” draws attention to Philomela’s stunning refusal to be silent,
even after she is no longer human - horror and mutilation permitting the inhuman music of bird-
song cf. Hieronymo - out of suffering comes art ravishing the senses, just as the drowned sailor
now has sea-blessed eyes as compensation for his drowning/blindness/castration – the pure song
in contrast to these concentrated essences with their suffocating glint and glamour begging atten-
tion – the inviolable voice of a potentially echt human speech, disturbs the boundaries of the room with its fakeries - lyrical intensity asserting the persistence of virtue even in the desert of a

'dirty' world – film noir – vague, staring forms which hush the room as strange, shuffling steps
are heard on the staircase - feeling is so strong it turns the sentient being into a sounding vehicle

– sheer, urgent, expressive form cf. the inert feelings of the typist in III – to be metamorphosed is to be saved (the drowned sailor) – the female victims of the poem are 'flesh' that the speaker cannot infuse with 'spirit' - the violent invasion of the female body by some transcendent and/or ab-
stract force as a response to the 'material chaos' of modernity and moral anarchy – the female
body as meaningless material proliferation inviting the intercession of absolute force - a psycho-
logical displacement for E's faith in utter subordination in the face of transcendent, impersonal
force, and his longing for absolute, full surrender to God - cf. Lycidas ‘And with forc’d fingers
rude’ - rebirth as a poet after this violation of Mother Nature and the Muse

101 the nightingale's voice, the story's meaning, is inviolable; but the violation of innocence in the waste land goes on - a transcendence through crime and agony into peace – anguish transmuted into song stands against mere dulled despair – the poet in this secular age the one who
most clearly and fully voices those processes which make us human – his struggle brings us into
touch with powers which can metamorphose into life-giving song what threatens to negate life –
the pre-logical mentality becomes available only to or through the poet - beneath the meaning-
less surface, the underlying tale tells again of violation in the desert, the violation of innocence,
sex, fertility - all these women are Belladonnas

102 echoes down the centuries – stretches the present moment to a demythicized present which
is immune from the notions of magic sea-change or inviolable song - the transcendence is only
momentary however – the poem itself exists in a secular world - the violent change of tense
places the painting of Philomel in a contemporary context, suggesting that the story haunts us
even now.(initially Philomena appears as a decorative detail) - her voice (as with Ophelia) is
brief and broken, urgently passionate; and in feeling their tragedy both women stand against
mere dulled despair - cf. Whitman’s "song of the bleeding throat"

102-106 ' the chase has not ceased and the nightingale's sounds are both representatively Eliza-
bethan and associatively modern. If the other pictures are 'withered stumps' like Philomela's ton-
gue, they come into the class of 'broken images', but at least provide an inclination, 'leaning,
hushing, the room enclosed' (Williamson)

103 polyglot voices raised in the brutal discourse of sexual aggression - how beauty sounds to

‘dirty ears’- the 'dirty ear' perceives the night's inviolable voice merely as 'jug jug' (Eliz. slang for sex/rape) – the language of sexual animality - the vulnerability of even the most ecstatic past to
the mere present of a verbal repetition that cannot recreate it - the ironic violation of the nightin-
gale's inviolable voice is replete with biting sharpness, bitterness, and hopelessness - the myth of

Philomena commonly degraded to a story of lust - but the nightingale has a voice that cannot be
violated - she rises above the torment and corruption to achieve transcendence - pure song cannot
be heard as pure by impure ears, which, feigning worship, will violate it if found – in Plato's

Phaedo the nightingale, swallow and hoopoe, are figures of prophetic philosophy – what is not
understood in the message of the seer is in that sense violated and falls upon deaf ears - desire al-
ways transforms leaving nothing inviolate, nothing static – their calls are cries of meaningless-
ness, sounds calling attention to their status as both meaningless syllables and conveyors of un-
limited significance as the primal purity of insignificance returns - all of literary history returns
degraded - Philomel’s rape and dismemberment are supplemented by their change into “inviol-
able voice,” but that sublation is now “Jug Jug” to dirty ears - what characterizes the modern waste land if not an ineluctable passage from the high to the low, from the first appearance of
superior art to its digestion by a mediocre culture and its return in a fallen form?

103 “memories cruelly block the fulfillment of desire, as the dead hand of past experiences,
formed by the history of the unconscious, reaches out to obstruct present feelings” (Jay)

104 originally 'and other tales, from the old stumps and bloody ends of time' cf. Lavinia in Titus

Andronicus – suggestions of impotence - the stumps are the remnants of innocence after it has
been subjected to the ravages of lust, repeated instances of which appear like phantasmagoric
writing on the wall - history heroic and magnificent, present reality represented by a stump –
myth has become as substantive as decorative wallpaper – it is now dead culture, having piled up
from raids upon the past - the poetic sparagmos of the body of the literary fathers - the useless decorativeness the past has assumed for the modern individual cf. Philomena’s tongue left a withered stump - she had to speak to Procne, like the past to us, through lifeless, static images rather
than with words expressed in living breath

105 a strangled silence emanates from these staring walls – Munch's The Scream, a near contem-
porary, would easily fit in here - a note, pervasive throughout the scene, of the difficulty, and the
human incapacity, for effective communication - the difficulties of ever reaching direct knowl-
edge - foretelling the desperate isolation the subsequent scene - ‘staring forms’ the manifestation
of her fragile mental state - the dissolution of equipoise between her mind and external objects -
an interchangeability of emotion and object, as well as of intellect and sensation - a human iner-
tia with activity reduced to movement of light, shadows and flame - the speaker reacts with neu-
rosis of the poetic libido

106 claustrophobia – a futile expectancy from which only disturbing images of dream can
emerge – an oppressive sense of waking nightmare from the mingling of realistic and phantasma-
goric detail - an atmosphere of desperate isolation from that which is felt to be real

107 free-floating anxiety of a sinister type - an air of mystery and agitation as she awaits the
man’s arrival, presaged by muffled sounds - things are beginning to sound almost sordid

108 an image of a faceless woman brushing her hair before a lighted mirror – like the medieval
figure of a hypostatic Christ, a simultaneity of earthly body and heavenly substance, finite and
infinite, visible and invisible, the absurd simultaneity of physical and metaphysical demanded by
the Incarnation

109 Victorian indicator of sexual availability (as with 133) - she herself expressed by her hair,
jewels, perfumes - hair no longer artlessly dewy but has a hint of the demonic – possibly hints at

Medusa - her hair/sexuality alternately glows threatenly or pleads in dependency or frustration –
archetypal imagery of fear or rage, sometimes even connoting Maenad ecstasy – a tormented
mien is inferred - fiery points glow into words which she produces both effortlessly and exces-
sively – female creativity rendered uncanny - her hair a premonition of the singing grass of the-

Chapel Perilous - her frazzled nerves a symptom – the static electricity suggestive of sterility
cf.the wet hair of the hyacinth girl - manically brushing her hair, highly charged Shakespearean
rhetoric, and Miltonic syntactic suspensions that ingeniously dazzle the senses yet confuse the sense, illustrating the effect of the allure it attacks - the medical theory at the time was that nervous conditions were indicative of misfired discharges of nerve ends – synaptic sparks frayed out
like the strands of an unravelling weave, in a flicker rather than a surge – the brain is both over-
charged with stimuli from the outside and because internally it is starved of blood – hence the
dryness and the absence of anything like flow (the poet was told by his doctor 'Mr Eliot, you
have the thinnest blood I have ever tested') - the woman a vacancy at the centre of a field of pure
surfaces

110 as if she were herself a living tree of the sort that might once have risen from those withered
stumps. But she is no Daphne either - a surrealist metamorphosis rather than description – cf.

those figures in Dante's Inferno who speak through the flickering tip of a flame - like Marie and other female figures her appearance is secret and she is without significance, even though the
things around her are thick with significance – the savagery just held back so that her actual
words erupt with extra frenzy – her staccato jabs match in bizarre bits the smooth, strange rapt-
ness of his answer, an entranced tone drifting off to desolations and phantasmagoria - a fetishistic
replacement of the woman that is never visualized, a replacement for which he immediately sub-
stitutes a voice - surreal and timeless, whether it be in the renaissance or modern sense - "sav-
agely still" - a forced composure - even the beauty of the past is without energy or movement

110 “the dispassionate description of the Cleopatra type in "A Game of Chess" is central. The poet apes the implications that this little room is an everywhere. The woman is separate and
alone; her garish toiletries are hers alone, as are her fears. But the "history" is not hers, not even obliquely. Both the historical and the present experience may have some limited value, but the
twain can never meet, not even as links in a causative chain. The transitory "fiery-points" in the lady's hair, like the allusions to Cleopatra, Philomel, and Belinda, are "withered stumps of time,"

nonpredestined events, subjective and relative, with no more universal significance than a collec-
tion of antique "pieces" gathered from sundry periods. The past does not weigh the modern generation in the balance and find it wanting; instead, the past comes in fragments, "fractured
atoms," without the least inkling of superiority. In the same vein, the present is only a "rat's alley" where "dead men" of history, imposing figures or otherwise, have "lost" even "their bones."

Section II is suffused by this cool description of the ruins of absolutes. "OOOO that Shakespe-
herian Rag" evolved because standards are purely relative; there are, as in a game of chess, a
thousand possible moves, a thousand variant perspectives. "A closed car at four" does not preclude the chance that elsewhere there are those who desire rape more than chess...like the Rela-
tivity Theory's conception of the universe, The Waste Land is a mathematical and symbolic
scheme of forces, pressures, ten- sions, oscillations, and waves. It does not adhere to any classi-
cal structure by the character of its rhythms, stanzaic pattern, vocabulary, or general style. Essen-
tially a poem extolling flux and discontinuity and an impressive variety that recedes into the ob-
scure and inchoate, its symbols are neither regular nor precise; its allusions echo and re-echo
with changed voices; it treats time and distance contemptuously, as if they were random acci-
dents; it is obsessed with events rather than persons...the poem a theoretical experiment in struc-
tures” (Foster)

111 an embittered, staccato puppet-drama, acted out between two of what the manuscript draft
calls 'the little light dead people’ - both are ‘stuck’ or paralyzed - densely orchestrated prelude –
speech sparking off electrical hair - a fraught, staccato, neurotic, non-communicative exchange -
the diabolical routines of marital powerplay - jabbing pizzicato phrases – savage gabs of speech

– staccato gasps - a burst and twang of cacophony – schizoid splits and leaps of speech black-
ened and wire bare words each a spark of rancour and dissatisfaction – whip and sting of words –
jagged rhythmical units - echo of the hyacinth girl's speech – an expression of anxiety about
being suffocated by objects in an enclosed space – 'stay with me'...the words clutch and rasp –
doubles Lil's fears that Albert will leave her – but while the woman seems bodiless, Lil, though
absent, is vividly and empathetically evoked – the women are trapped in the empty revolutions
of repetitious days, longing to escape the tormenting cycles of nature – self-consuming sterile de-
sire - the static electricity of her dry hair in contrast to the “wet” hair of the hyacinth girl, sug-
gesting infertility - the women are depleted physically, intellectually, and spiritually, a reflection of the ill-health of the earth itself – their existence and health contingent on male potency - 'my
nerves are bad'...the haggish iambs are nervous twitches scratching to take hold of an elusive mo-
ment of objectivity – speech drowning in perfume, smoke and artifice and her mind confined in
airless, nauseous space – the poetic voice, losing coherence, splinters into male, female and inhu-
man, inchoate birdsong - the crisis of heteroglossia in the hysteria inducing, hyperhistorical
awareness of modern culture – she is excessive with blood and nerves and words that cannot be
contained - E figuratively entering into Vivienne's body, using her descent into mental illness as
a poetic expression of madness - the women in this section desperate for a structure they cannot
provide for themselves – aimless intellectuality governs their moves, providing action without
spirit or passion, for the players are spiritually dead - the game of chess in The Tempest, is an image of regulated, civilized behavior, a love sanctioned by “All sanctimonious ceremonies.. . With
full and holy rite” (1V.i. 16-17); here, it is an image of sterile convention, a tense war of nerves
in a stifling boudoir - Chess an Elizabethan euphemism for contrived or loveless sexual gratifica-
tion

111 ' the twitch of an organism or action of mere behaviour....history, our corrupt and partial
knowledge, is entangled with our will, history becomes the extremity of action, is the final heave
of the process. Suspended in time the characters all wait for some expected event, but history
waits and nothing happens' (Gross)

111 “the lady does not speak much, but her repetitions and rhythms precisely suggest, not only
her physical movements in brushing her hair, but her nervous agitation, while the Cockney wo-
man has all the volubility of her nasty self-righteousness” (Sell)

112 the woman a ghost asking the man if he can see a ghost – the woman is pleading for a con-
nection that is at once emotional and erotic – but words fail and the connection is broken – when
this queenly figure begins to speak and changes, almost magically, to become a bored and pam-
pered modern socialite, she speaks in quickened tempo and broken rhythm and with a more shrill
sonority - chess may be considered a set of compulsive strategies for distancing oneself from an-
other person – she is a figure of both mundane horror and an almost supernaturally powerful ter-
ror that unmans him to near silence - a dry presentation of the recurring and unalterable human
helplessness, its irrationality, will-lessness, and subjection to fate

113 thinking....the snap of a vicious, mock command – a hunger to scrutinize his mind as an ob-
ject - a world of the anxious present – humans like jellyfish pulsate in their private world-spheres

- the passage captures that sense of highly strung, grotesque hyperbole and pastiche, verging on faintly camp hysteria, that was in London's atmosphere in the wake of the war, and felt as a
strained heightening of the city's usual 'carnival blaze', here exciting the poem's spectral reso-
nances

114 the speaker again blind and without speech, yet she also appears to be a voice emanating
from empty space, as if she were a ghost that speaks – a series of pitifully nervous questions -
she appears to be in some isolated mental cell - she wants him to reassure her he is alive but his
replies only mock or disregard her – an hysteric asking questions of a neurasthenic who has lost
his will (and with it his senses of sight, hearing and touch) and who is unable to respond to her
frantic questions - she is a cubist overlapping of viewpoints - we feel the woman's sexual needs -
as if thought had to work against invisible pressing barriers

115 her comments trigger this 'objective correlative' of neurosis in his mind – his ritualistic im-
passiveness - he is paralyzed by knowing, by remembering, by thinking, by interpreting – his
meaningless thoughts perhaps suggestive of the despondency and mental disorder caused by
post-traumatic stress disorder (the horrors of the trenches) - the power of words to create the pre-
cise emotion which the woman's repetitive emptiness lacks - formally a dialogue with the woman
but he is trapped in mute isolation and feeling that speech is futile – sepulchral murmurs and dea-
dened stresses - a smart theatrical trope – the woman's vociferousness contrasts with the male
speaker's speech, terse and to the point, but registering the depths of horror of their situation -

Shakespearean forgiveness and redemption turned to facts and dirty images – the sacrifices of
past heroes have lost their significance and have been completely demythified - in Ezekiel the
breath of the Lord was a mighty wind that shook life into dead men's bones, the fate of those out
of touch with their physical and spiritual natures – a name given to the labyrinth of trenches at

Gallipoli where Jean Verdenal died - see also Our Mutual Friend and the reference to Mr Venus, articulator of skeletons

115 ' he is separated from her and indeed from humanity....he has all but reached the limit of
nothingness. (nothing is what he sees) He is at the border between abjection and purity, Nothing
and the All, cultivating self-hurting meannesses of sardonic irony until the ingathering bright
bolt falls of rat's alley” (Bedient)

116 the man's unspoken replies a dull pondering undercurrent to her shrill, anxious voice - his re-
plies are much more deliberate in speed, more controlled in rhythm, and of fuller sonority -
weary knowledge touched with vivid moments of horror - squalor and skeletal dismemberment
or pillaged graves - reeks of the trenches and the “No Man’s Land” between them, where rats
nightly devoured the corpses of the slain - recurrent references to the body in the poem due to
hystericization of poet, poem, and Vivienne Eliot

117 the neurasthenic's hypersensitivity to noise - reminiscent of dialogue in Lawrence's novella

'The Fox'

118 a feeble assertion that he, the corpse, still lives, though just barely - wind as absence of spirit

– the man is aware of hearing wind that is only wind and wind that is both the spirit and the
agent of God (as breath, spirit, ghost,mind,soul,gust/ghost) – the woman as wind producing
wind, signifying fear of wind – the door is shut but beneath the wind still moves - a hovering or liminal experience, an elastic space where one is neither fully alive nor fully dead - implied reference to Paolo and Francesca (Dante, Inf.V), two who go together carried lightly on the wind - in

Webster “the wind under the door” refers to the fading breath of an injured man, victim of a mur-
der attempt ( The Devil’s Law Case) - three spaces, Shakespeare’s magical island with its ethereal music, a room where surgeons bribed by an assailant ignore the gasps of his victim, and the Western front with its mud, rats, and corpses - a bedroom conversation where we see not intimacy
but disconnection

119 like the singing grass of the empty chapel, which is only the wind’s home

119 “her very preoccupation with the need to do something shows that she does not understand
that the game of spiritual chess demands, as check, the giving up of the individual will, and, as
mate, the patient waiting for God’s grace, that is, the patient waiting for a knock upon the door

(after an analogy to chess in St Teresa’s ‘The Way of Perfection’) The woman equates passivity
with nothingness and nothingness with death. In effect a quest for the world of the senses and a
demand for constant stimulation. He is satisfied with ‘nothing’ - for the mystics naughting of the
soul leads to God” (Childs)

120 dead eyed and blank souled - words and images in air – his obsessive sense of failure - air it-
self disembodied, thick and sensual – such 'loathing and horror of life', E says, is 'a mystical ex-
perience' of life - a noise in her mind – 'nothing' becomes a drumbeat as she pounds against his
lack of response - is it nothingness or is it a divine wind? - in eastern thought 'nothing' is the fullest of concepts since it is the foundation from which all existence must spring – the speaker may
be drawing away from the woman and her world of appearance to approach the void of the Abso-
lute - the insubstantiality of madness – the absolute failure of communication and an absolute
void between general and particular viewpoints – entrapment within particularity and failure to
situate experience in a larger pattern – all the women in II., like the Sibyl are in their own parti-
cular cage, isolated and withered in their ability to know, to be, and to bear – and like the Sibyl
these women are enclosed and dangled as decorations or amusements for men – a wasting of hu-
mankind from the separation of perception from reason and experience from faith – at root, the
separation of male from female modes of knowing and being – unable to escape stale plots of ex-
istence, stale words and stale ways of thinking and feeling the speaker is trapped to the point of
horror – his dead response only confirms her hysterical terror of a void at the heart of life – he
seems not to feel what he sees – sad-eyed and blank-souled, he can flee only momentarily into
the soundless beat and frenzied rhythms of the Jazz Age – silences are sites where residual emo-
tion breaks through the clamour of horoscopes, dirty weekends, brothels et alia

121 the diabolical routines of married life without the transforming power of love – the central
fertility situation overwhelmed by the ugly monster of nihilism - the numbness and uncompre-
hension which cuts us off from the past, the blight of unconsciousness that curses the waste land

122 the questions a counterpoint to his paralysis in the hyacinth garden and similarly trigger a vi-
sion of death and rebirth – those are pearls... the 'glass cage' of the modern subject's isolation and the tragedy of our finitude – a pure subjectivity, in atemporality, referring to nothing other than
itself, – a tragic chasm between subjective voice and any stable objective reality, which is sug-
gested but which is constantly denied by the poem's fractured subjectivity – the text unable to connect to the world it attempts to address

122 “his dead response can only confirm her hysterical terror of a void at the heart of life. His
state is the more terrible in that he seems not to feel what he sees. His violence, savagery and
burlesque are perhaps desperate efforts to stir feelings. But they are the reverse of sympathy -
rather a matter of 'Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.' (Moody)

123 cf. Hamlet III.iv.132-5, where 'nothing' refers to old Hamlet's ghost – Gertrude's meaningless
excess is the female surplus of talk, emotion and rationalisation

123 ' Nothing assumes a sarcastic cast, implying that the target of her nagging has withdrawn
into a disturbed silence, another aspect of the void, the silence of the inner world suddenly thrust
into the full impact of solipsistic isolation, the realisation that communication is, after all, not
taking place' (Schwarz)

123 “Eliot has mimicked the original dramatic effect with one purely verbal: he replaces hu-
man responses in his dialogue by silent thoughts, or by the sound of wind in an empty room, or
by a snatch of music, or by ‘nothing again nothing’. The spiky, fragile demands of the woman
are menaced on the one side by the gigantic beauty and artifice of a context (the room itself)

that ‘puts her out’, as the sun would a candle; on the other by the engulfing silence of a relation
always emptying itself under her ravenous approaches. The result is that an apparent dialogue
of lovers shimmers down into a terrifying mono-dimensional monologue, one great image in a
mirror - the entire scene being observed in fact through that glass that appears in the second line
of this section. Hence its brilliance, its iconic style, its look of being throughout ‘savagely still’

(Everett)

124 the man’s voice low- pitched, dull, unexcited, and acquiescent , her’s high-pitched, sharp,
excited, and demanding

125 pearls – the longing for transformation together with the mystery of the transformation of
life into art – transformative possibility an escape from doing nothing - the understanding that
death allows metamorphosis, even as the lack of self allows potent world and cultural forces to
speak – encapsulates the 'sea-change' of Ariel's song, a kind of ironic resurrection, but a resur-
rection nonetheless - a sea-change that suggests an objective correlative to the forces of fragmen-
tation and petrification in his Waste Land - announces a final fixing into opacity of the human
gaze which precludes once and for all the beneficent visual circuit for which Prufrock yearned -
also evokes the unenviable fate of the Bradleyan centre, 'every sphere . . . opaque to the others
which surround it ' - the element of play prompted by anxiety - even though in general he is med-
itative, somber, and impersonally self-reflective, the tone is now edged with bitterness and cyni-
cism (like the voice which opened the poem) - he is unable to talk with his wife; instead he goes
on inside his head for too long about things which do not matter in language which cannot be
believed - so his introverted fustian is necessarily at his own expense and that of language as
self-affirming discourse in general - answers 'do you remember Nothing?'

125 “he realizes this particular death is a rebirth, a death transformed into something rich and
strange, perhaps associated with that of the drowned god whose effigy was thrown into the water as a symbol of the revived god (and antithesis to 'the corpse you planted last year' and to the
bones in rats alley...whether Phlebas undergoes a sea-change (spiritual rebirth) is left hauntingly
ambiguous' (Brooks)

126 his dead response can only confirm her hysterical terror of a void at the heart of life – the
idea of being suspended between life and death is one of the poem’s most persistent preoccupa-
tions - the experience a door that is shut but beneath
which the wind still moves - his own state is the more terrible in that he seems not to feel what
he sees – his violence, savagery and burlesque perhaps a desperate effort to rouse feelings – but
he is still in his state of emotional detachment – she insists upon answers but finds only empti-
ness - language goes back to language (line 48), the poem going back to itself in an apparent vi-
cious circle in which no way out is to be found - the effect of a tense opera-dialogue in recitativo,
one can imagine the line of the woman's voice sparsely harmonized with abrupt chords; that of
the man's with sustained chords on the string

127 the transforming sea-change fades orchestrally, and, as if by a process of magical thought'

turns into ragtime' – the woman a parody-temptress who arouses him to nothing but burlesque - a
mere tatter, a derisive song accented by the extra syllable tucked mockingly in Shakespeare's
name – like other characters they hang between life and death – the objects of the poem are alive
and changing, losing definition and fixity under the pressure of allusion, metaphor and meton-
omy – the whole movement of the poem is towards an acceptance of the absence of essence, me-
tamorphosis itself being the whole point of the poem

128 in the tinny voice of the gramophone, life proclaims a jubilant 'Here I am' - this in spite of
the felt idiocy of the phrase and its obvious contrast with God's breath – a berserk mimicry, a let-
ting loose of tension – the expression of empty verbage, so intelligent we do not know its mean-
ing - the text is aware of its inability to be decoded - Ariel's song returns to an inconsequential
ditty, as the world flows into the void of the self - it seems not to mock high culture so much as
to suffocate it in a deep but uncomprehending embrace - it points to an implosion of the cultural
system that has collapsed all distinctions and discriminations - transforms the O of nothingness
into the cries of woe Apollo wrote on the leaves of the hyacinth flower, and that E writes on the
leaves of his poem - the repeated O's perhaps reminiscent of Lear and Othello in their agonies

(esp. Othello's cry of horror when it is made clear to him that the newly murdered Desdemona is
innocent) - a tragic dénouement is changed to a jingle: Othello's howls of inarticulate agony be-
come a rhythmic chorus - the rhyme of 'elegant' with 'intelligent' increases the effect of witty pas-
tiche - the felt similarity of jazz techniques – their richness of allusion, the smooth transfer from
one theme to another, the seeming incoherence and rupture of line and rhythm - just as jazz im-
provisation combines strands of melody and patches of harmony to 'make it new' so the moder-
nist poem rhythmically weaves scraps from many hands into a new syncopated setting of the old
highbrow stuff – in the confusing rhythms of everyday existence, and in the lack of order and sta-
bility, jazz and modernism resist the standards of the time and are at the same time representative
of the epoch – a clipped carictature of syncopation - art should be a guide to action and give
meaning – but here it is reduced to a manic energy - the simulation of a simulacrum, as if the
speaker literally acts out the emptiness of his response to the question of the woman – the ex-
posed nerves of pain and pity frozen in a quote - Nothing is precisely what is in his head - the
value of the moment is its nakedness: it has little other substance - but any involvement it induces is completely contained by the opposite, a detachment both alienated and alienating, that
so governs the scene as to constrict all natural feeling - the song 'Shakespearian Rag' featured in
the 1912 Ziegfield Follies

128 ' the failure of the phallus(the Fisher-king) coincides with the speaker's failure of speech in
the face of a female as damaged as he is. The disastrous failure of language leads him to appro-
priate the voices of other poets...but the disorderly speech of women shatters his every attempt at
intelligibility. The speaker's voice progressively splinters into cacophony in which gender dis-
tinctions progressively collapse...in effect a feminisation of an imaginary male body' (McRae)

128 ' Ferocity, intensity, violence . . . the strange, the surprising, the fantastic, something very
near to parody: here is the core of Eliot’s aesthetics while he was writing The Waste Land . . .

[Eliot was] responsive to caricature and music hall, modes of cultural production which thrive on
wild exaggeration, hyperbolic
repetitions, which pivot on the play of likeness and illusion, a grotesque machinery of extremism'

(Rainey)

128 “In Eliot’s global village, is not the medium compellingly the message? Is the dry-docked

Minstrel Show with all of its serious absurdity not more than just a metaphor for that part of
modern consciousness which rues less the banana peel than the spectacle it may formulate of us

‘in a phrase,’ which fears lost boundaries; becoming automatons as time crumbles and mental
space vanishes; being suspended among ‘worlds’ none of which we fear we may inhabit in emo-
tional integrity again?” (Sanders)

129 a stiffening just-so-ness of decorum and frantic illusion, a downfall after so much reaching
for the heights that descends to 'what shall we ever do?'

130 the schmaltzy play of language a healthy release from the woman's isolated self-conscious-
ness – the world can now be seen as diacritical and linguistic, a play of possibilities, the allusive
combination of the transforming power of metaphor and the cultural connectedness of metonomy

– no irony may be detected here in the reconciliation of high and low cultures – a ray of hope in
the possibility of a common ground

111-130 “a series of questions which points to his forgetting of being: to his alienation from the
authentic historical process and the consequent negation of his primordial identity by way of un-
derstanding the present "metaphysically," or, to anticipate, as "a pure sequence of 'nows' " ... he replies (though not to her) this time: "I remember/ Those are pearls that were his eyes." His cynical amplification ("O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag") of this sudden remembrance of a line
from a song about a mysterious renewal, "a sea change" of the familiar into "something rich and strange" suggests the protagonist's bad faith, his effort to evade his real, his temporal, "identity"

and the projective existential imperatives towards continuity and community it activates. But the
content of the trace (as well as the prosodic form of the utterances: the emphasis in the lineation
on "I remember" in the context of forgetfulness) works against him. It intimates a repetition in the Heideggerian sense, not only his analogous relationship vis-a-vis being with the poet in the
past (identity) but also the inevitability of the primordial encounter with Nothingness: the immi-
nent rite de passage, the death by drowning, the burial, the journey into the underworld (difference). This is also the burden of the speaker's anxious expectation of a knock upon the door”

(Spanos)

131 the game of chess ends in stalemate - the futility of daily routine and its opposition to intense
inner feeling - the voice modulates into a whine of genuine distress – the woman's hysteria is as-
sociated both with Philomel and Ophelia's farewell, that is, her death-in-life is anguish trans-
muted to song, and the anguish of those who feel it and go mad – these urgently passionate
voices stand against mere dulled despair – as opposed to the fixity of death there is at least the
possibility of a return to life and an escape from blank nihilism

132 she cannot decide to go out or to stay in, as if she were at enmity with their distinction - the
street in E a motif representing the ugliness and repulsiveness of reality – thus there is no relief
from the private agony of a closed room

134 the question is both ethical and ontological and is driven by the perception of the self as too
unstable to make commitment or union possible - life/history has no meaning - meaning is as-
signed and arbitrary, by convention only - chess the inhuman abstraction of the modern mind -
life only as the repetious cycle of the Wheel, mechanical fertility and its opposite, abortion -
there is no answer to the question as history has no meaning here

135 the painful order of human life – the tedium of natural cycles – recalls rituals of purification
and rebirth through water, deriving from the poem's underlying patterns - a reassuring, but also
potentially deadening, assertion of routine - routine as the unconscious repetition of ancient ri-
tuals - it is the consciousness of the poem blending imperceptibly with the speaker's conscious-
ness that makes us aware of what the speaker can only know unconsciously - chess itself a way
of structuring time

135 keeps out reviving water

135-138 a listless, brief, empty and seemingly bored catalogue – bows down to the material and
cautious secular limits - the responses flat, distracted and enigmatic – it is neither refreshment
nor rest – the prophetic mind and refreshing water will only appear in V

137 in Middleton chess is a cover for seduction, especially for the upper class 'lady of situations',
and, as in Middleton, the lovers though together, are trapped in terrible solitude – the old, famil-
iar routine of a physical relationship, abstract and mechanical – chess as a metaphor for con-
trived or loveless sexual gratification – it is also an inhuman abstraction of the modern mind – a
metaphor for life as an abstract game - the chess mentality cool, cerebral and scheming - this the
only way they can connect, strategizing, outwitting the other, entirely without communion - life
is static, a set of procedures without meaning or value

138 death approaching, bones lost, tissue gone - a process of decomposition - panic held at bay
by a grid of prescribed activity - trochaically, endlessly waiting - eyes that cannot evade the per-
sistent glow and glitter of their irresolvable world - does the door lead to Nothing as annihila-
tion? Or nothing as a luminosity beyond knowledge, sight, or memory? - the couple, in Dantean
fashion, seem eternally damned to the condition of unsatisfied longing - the two exist in a private room in a private world and long for change, for some significant catastrophe that would impose
structure and interject meaning into their daily round (the other side of the chess board can be
found in a letter that Vivienne Eliot wrote to Mary Hutchinson – ' Of course, he is so reserved
and peculiar, that he never says anything and one cannot get him to speak. That makes one much
more lonely' )

135-138 ' Life has no meaning; history has no meaning; there is no answer to the question: 'What
shall we ever do?' The only thing that has meaning is the abstract game that they are to play, a
game in which the meaning is assigned and arbitrary, meaning by convention only – in short a
game of chess' (Brooks)

139 switch from an excess of light and mostly silence to shadows and rapid speech – banter now
biting satire - physical and spiritual narcoses symbolised in the poem by burial in earth and water

- sterility and stalemate - two female wrecks with bad nerves and bad teeth - the once fruitful hu-
man body now rotten – Lil as the usually working-class woman whose inability to control her
own fertility is inscribed on her pain-wracked, weakened body - despite this a life sustaining vul-
garity and sense of power over life (Lou's hard, confident tones) – coarse energy, minced, cavi-
tied and broken – vulgar but vital, in contrast to the lifeless anonymity and mechanical repetition
of the modern bourgeois urban and, more significantly, suburban subject - E similarly responded
to the vitalism of a popular entertainer like Marie Lloyd - for all the gusto and frankness a passiv-
ity in the face of female destiny - polite in a tired, cynical manner – the meaningless reproduc-
tion of appetitive life - a conversation about a conversation about a conversation . . . the regres-
sion could have gone on for ever, only to suggest the barrenness of the communicative process

-Truth is being "deferred" all the time: we are trapped in language (Derrida) - an inference that the true crime is birth itself – Lil a part of the purely natural, repetitive cycle of life that knows no history (as too those awakening to spring at the beginning of the poem) - anonymous speech
belonging to no one and anyone - an air of overheard conversation ('pure Ellen Kelland' - his and

Vivienne's housemaid) – 'lily', the flower of Easter, the flower of the cruellest month - Lil as Li-
lith, both fertility and death - the portrait of the lady at the centre of the poem is cubist, i.e the juxtaposition of many perspectives upon the same object, the elements of which are Cleopatra, a
neurotic at the dressing table, a pub gossip etc

140 again, the apparent impossibility of direct, effective communication - female speech is mate-
rial noise, or 'chatter', the meaningless fragments of modernity – she does nothing but talk - a
kind of ruthless rhyme, its words floating free of application and constituting a fantastic realm
where I don’t mince my words, where I get myself some teeth, where if I don’t like it I can get
on with it, and where I marry in order to get the beauty of it hot.

141 time itself is passing, now unused in the search for purpose in life, modernity now locked
into a series of repeated actions from which meaning has been drained away

142 female existence and health defined as contingent on male potency, like the earth, and the
ill-health of the earth makes a wasteland – women supporting players in the dramas of their per-
sonal experience - the sterility and luxury of the rich and the indigence and eugenic incontinence
of the poor

144 Philomela's mutilated mouth has become Lil's bad teeth

145 idle talk deprived of teeth - the push and pull on the reader by this narrator demonstrates her
immense skills at manipulation, which she also employs in her role as Lil's friend

145 “the conversation's twice-told and triangular structure, whose parenthetical asides make a
confidante of the poem's addressee, restores the implied reader herself to the masses. It is among
the poem’s projects to break up this mindless abulia of the masses by using the text's erudition to
babelize its readership, carving its homeogeneous philistinism into polyglottal segments and cul-
tural elites. By refusing to translate or reference many of its citations, the poem's cultivation cre-
ates borderlines of incommunication and minefields of incomprehension that recreate the condi-
tions of geopolitical war and class revolution. The unified empire of culture the poem conjures
up in its referenced appeal to the cosmopolitanism of Cambridge anthropology and the archetyp-
alism of comparative religion becomes no more than a bogus sublation of the poem's politics into
a myth of universal order that its own textual babelization ritually destroys” (Norris)

149 rape has become an endlessly repeated event, legalised and routinised - as though sex were
analogous with homeliness - Lil's fears echo the woman's 'stay with me'

151 Lil, though absent, is vividly and empathetically evoked, as compared to the bodiless wo-
man, but her body is a severe burden to her – the woman's story diverting, shapeless, full of
asides, unfinished, pointless and opaque to any meaning other than the narrator's smug nosiness
and Lil's weary plight - tone color is as dull and hollow as Lil's own existence - the general aural
effect is that of senza vibrato, except for the urgent leitmotif of the bartender, with its insistent rhythm and brassy sonority

156 time collapses in the combination of Cockney vernacular and classical reference – Lil an-
tique not only physically but because she lives in an ancient eternally repetitive cycle of life that
knows no history – like the mad Ophelia she is lost in the dark

160 her labour produces 'the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor', a reflection of
contemporary eugenic fears about the defective elements of the population multiplying too ra-
pidly – her too-productive body speaks to the disastrous condition of surplus production and eco-
nomic crisis

164 upper-class sterility/working-class fecundity – isolation and consequent barrenness from a

Cartesian split of reality into subject/object – the waste land itself the equivalent of a barren or
unhealthy woman – deserts can bloom and metaphorical waste lands can be transformed only
through the harmony of the sexes, of subject and object (and thus only Tiresias, having been both
male and female, can fuse reason and perception into complete knowledge)

165 in the pub dialogue burlesque is carried off with a classical detachment, sins are confessed,
and all is retold with almost journalistic starkness, a strictly non-committal reportage – life is a
kind of game, here a game of love, an effort to escape solipsism - articulates playfully our exas-
peration at the poem's indirection as well as to dramatize a moment of la vie moderne - every-
thing in the text is both an allusion and an expression of E's ironic perception that controls and orders the allusions

167 a capacity to endure: seduced, defeated and down, they nonetheless survive - it is this that
gives them their peculiar strength and pathos as symbols, and not desire or lack of desire

168 the willingness of E’s characters to accept lives that are so minimal

168 ' a half polite, half peremptory call....a plea, a typographically thundered reminder cajoles
and urges him to spiritual desire' (Bedient)

169 the insistent voice of the barman speaking in urgent capitals implies more than he is aware -
the more he repeats himself, the more its meaning strays from his intentions - the urgent cry pro-
voked by the wasteland’s sterility, echoing Ecclesiastes in theme - and also a parody of Eccle-
siastes' calm celebration of God's diurnal cycle which, without haste, offers a time for everything

- time is catching up with Lil, in the form of dentures and decay, and rushing her culture to apoc-
alypse – in her case the implication is that of a perfunctory and brutal sexuality – in the whole
poem there is a sense of urgency and a sense of pending – gallows humour, a comic eschatology,
which leaves us in no doubt that death will ‘undo’ us, will ‘undo’ so many as Eliot puts it, of the
crowds on the Bridge, a final time arriving again and again, to erase the self - this is what is
shared, this is realization, itself written as potentially endless termination, of more than one end
but never more than the one ending for the subject, and which was caught epistemologically and
formally for Eliot in his original epigraph, that performative utterance Conrad’s Kurtz, ‘the hor-
ror, the horror’

170 a pleasant feeling of drowsiness – soft jazz rhythms, soothing, accessible, indolent, and frag-
ments totally lacking in inhibition

172 the drinkers companionable 'Goodnights' merge gently into Hamlet's 'Goodnight ladies',
words which are used as an echo rather than a sharply ironic contrast – the bartender's repeated
call has undermined the solidity of the narrative world – this achieved, the voice of the woman
metamorphoses into that of Ophelia - as the office workers are interpellated by Elizabeth and Es-
sex, so the barmaid is transmuted into Ophelia – like a line from a light-hearted song in a poem
whose movement mimics the scan function on a car radio—voices heard for a moment, then van-
ishing; heard for a moment, then vanishing - the poem, radically anachronic, accounts for its psy-
chological disturbing qualities - Bill, Lou and May have staggered out into a phantasmagoric
night in which they melt into the smog and rematerialize at the royal court of Denmark - a vale-
dictory sneer (hints of death by water) – ironic reiteration evoking the doomed Ophelia (and
death by water) – with Belladonna, Philomela and Lil, she forms a single figure of violated wo-
manhood blighted by the sexual malaise of The Wasteland – sex now means vampish posturing
and death, desertion and death, or fertility and death. And both romantic and married love mean
death - all the women are imprisoned in a life reduced to the empty passage of time – whether
neurotic, hypertrophied and sterile or poor, ugly, fertile and depraved, they are both the products
of romantic delusion, depleted physically, intellectually, and spiritually, innocents driven to mad-
ness, trapped in the empty revolutions of repetitious days and longing to escape the tormenting
cycles of life (in myth the feminine represents the circularity of seasons and generations) - verbal
graffiti - the poet in delicate psychic balance, making an ironic comment on a scene overheard, a scene that he has translated into the language of his own personal anguish - all the characters
who appear in “A Game of Chess” are imprisoned within selves that no turning key can reach -

Shakespeare reduced to snatches of quotes - these taboos against the dead, with their mixture of
veneration and horror - cf. Jules Laforgue ‘ Hamlet ou les Suites de la Piete Filiale’

156-172 its times, repeated, connotes perfunctory and brutal sexuality - time not only catching
up in the form of dentures and decay, but rushing us to apocalypse

173 i.e the leaves have fallen – Autumn, the season in which life burns up - perhaps indicative of
the loss of some sacred or mystic quality – the poem’s fascination with, and revulsion from,
waste - the poem’s ‘waste material’ both an object and valuable surplus - once nature formed a

‘tent’ of protection over the river of life in homage to the Divine - the sad anguish of a summer
gone - 'clutching' like fingers trying desperately to resist sinking and 'death by water' – the inap-
propriately violent adjective emphasizes the feeling of grief behind the loss – the sordid finger-
ings of the pure naturalism of instinctive sexuality - the deathly clutchings of anthropomorphic
nature - by displacing pastoral, religious and mythic nature, empiricist nature deprives life of
spirit - evolution reverts to an animalistic stage - an antiphonal opening - a sinister undertone,
perhaps the fear of being devoured – cf. 'where are the roots that clutch....'

174 and so do all who live by this river that ultimately flows into the sea, clutching and sinking
in the waters of Leman unless they are plucked out – ‘clutching’, the last gasp of anthropo-
morphic nature as opposed to the sordid fingerings of purely instinctive sex - the gone
harmonious order, by a half-realizable metamorphosis, struggles exhausted an instant against
drowning - a continual ironic and pathetic commerce with the dead forced on those who are, or
who would like to be, alive - empiricist nature is bleak, reduced, empty of nature - a stubborn
desperation and a refusal to relent in the line-break though the internal off-rhyme of 'sink' and

'bank' seals the doom of these 'fingers'- a spectral scene haunted by half-heard echoes, a radical
thinning down of opportunity to consciousness, a dried out discourse and emptying out (kenosis)

- instinct now weak and unhealthy, the body of being old and historical culture a kind of inborn
grey-headedness - at once febrile and feeble it is the opposite of the clutching of heroic roots
where the sun beats – a heap of leaves under the bare tree of an exhausted history – post-coital
suggestions - a combination of the risque and the resonant uttered with an unnerving sang-froid

175 the winds unheard – 10 lines later this becomes a cold blast – dry wind across barren land
does not support fertility – 'cross' repeats the shallowness of human affiliation – the word tra-
verses but also afflicts - the streak of meaninglessness in human bonds – and the broken bond be-
tween nature and the supernatural (which has ‘departed’) - the irksome behaviour of the voyeur-
istic wind with the infertile land - the fairly straightforward defencelessness of the previous line
becomes a shrinking from attack as the leaves fade away and are driven away - a sense of utter
desertion and romantic disillusion – as a Christian symbol brown symbolizes both 'spiritual
death' and 'spiritual rebirth' - a spasm of longing for human being in a landscape devoid of being

– the wind in vain makes a sign of the cross over the dead land - only the wind and the speaker
can remember the high dream when the tent was the tabernacle of the Lord – the wind here the
breath of God – summer to winter figured as the transformation of a canopy into dying hands cf.

'white bodies naked on the low damp ground' - the nymphs determinedly now flesh and blood,
the debris of a purely material civilisation - the opening a montage image of differing poetic tones, causing incongruities like the intentional discords of cubism or 20C music

176 mixed emotions of irony and pathos – beginning of a tour of the sexual
topography of London that will end in a rupture of disgust - E's vision a morbid one of sexual
violation, inanition and disharmony - the Thames is water that no longer fertilizes

177 the clutching is over save for what the fingers of leaves mockingly remember –
nostalgia is impossible because of the blending of past and present, the poet wholly absorbed
into his object becoming the voice of present, past and future

178 the silk handkerchiefs cast away prophylactics (the section is mostly a set of variations on
sex that is mechanical and without affect or consciousness of the knowledge of good and evil) –
the hymens of the nymphs as broken as the river's canopy of foliage – an aimless motion of
voided containers – both a predicament and a means of staying afloat – the ambience that of 'the
morning after' - suggests
why the landscape is dying by alluding to the fructifying act of love in the devastatingly reduc-
tive context of contraceptives that are simply items in a series of waste objects - the positivized
and memoryless wasteland of the age of technology

179 this soiled and infected water is the epiphenomenon of lust – a feeling of once polluted is
polluted forever – a bitter perversity - any sense of romantic loveliness has gone - the nymphs
not only have departed but now decidedly figures of flesh and blood – the attempt to be positive
becomes rather limp – the instinct for life is faltering as the historical sense hauls and deposits
load on load of accumulated rubbish – no human pleasure endures as this remnant debris testifies

– a clean slate of memory, mirrored by the topographic correlative of the river - 'the nymphs are
departed' E's attempt to recuperate a lost sense of fullness in the world of pastoral poetry – and is
immediately followed by a series of jolting colloquialisms that express his disgust for the quoti-
dian

173-179 ' a series of unconnected images in a medium where ego-integration seems to be non-ex-
istent (river, falling leaves, the brown land etc)...all become extensions of a non-continuous
whole, a state of anxiety projecting feelings of isolation, vanished protection and loss, first onto
the river (broken leaves), and then onto the falling leaves which animistically have fingers that
clutch for support as they sink into decomposition and oblivion...then defencelessness becomes a
shrinking from attack as the leaves fade into the brown land (emotional fantasies, sometimes of
self-loathing)' (Bush)

180 'loitering heirs' trails after 'the nymphs are departed' like a stray dog sniffing after another
dog – a like shabby decay of syntax – the line loiters around its many 'r's, with an additional
slack in 'loitering' – thin, flat, dead sounds eg. en, in, em, ym and am are scattered like so many
rottings leaves through the first eight lines – and b's and p's add their news of minor shatterings –
the realisation that the great phrases of the past are as unreal as they are beautiful – a glissando
effect

181 sardonic modern twist to the idea of transience – a genuine sorrow in the repetition of 'de-
parted'

182 Leman – a medievalism meaning 'lover'- also a lake in Switzerland where E went to recover
from his nervous condition – an echo of Rousseau and the romantic heresy – an artful pose but to
act is at least a sign of life, if only in a theatre of exile and imposture – he is pacing with con-
scious drama the boards of his temperament, creating in rats alley grateful intimations of inviol-
able voice - a repetoire of roles in a passing pageant of unreality, finding himself bereft on a bank
hearing aerial news of his father's sublime death - posing as a belated and disillusioned Spenser
the speaker then echoes the Hebrews lament by the waters of Babylon, the tent broken – he too is
in bondage to the senses and exalted to a religious longing for a metaphysical homeland - in the
text the presence of water is linked to movement and release

182 “the passage ends not with a phrase or even an image intended to suggest the ineffable, but
with ineffability itself, with speechlessness: ‘by the waters’

What is unbearable, what cannot be written even when concluding the poem, is the rest of that
line: “. . . I sat down and wept.” The ineffable is that sense of immense commiseration, at once a
profound pity at the lacerating horrors of modernity and an unspeakable sorrow that there is no
language, whether in narrative or lyric (epitomized by repetition), adequate to the terror which
the poem wishes to account for. Fictively situated beside the heart of modernity which is the fi-
nancial district of London, the poem offers only speechless weeping, a wild pathos at once unut-
terable and irredeemable, over the conditions that have governed its production. Perhaps that
truly is ‘the substance of the poem’ ” (Rainey)

183 the river of time waits for no man – self-conscious nostalgia as if the voice inhabiting the
lines were feeling its own inauthenticity – the tone of numbed negation near to elegy – the dis-
missal preserving a direct feeling for what is lost – against its flat and harsh surroundings a feel-
ing of love – now dulled or desperate reactions are being replaced by the first direct expression
of a state of loss and the springs of feeling, so painfully sealed up, at last begin to flow – the

'dead' conscious mind being reintegrated with the suppressed realm of feeling – music expresses
the feelings the conscious mind cannot admit - the "termination" in winter of the seasonal process cannot be denied, despite the speaker's (by now weakened) resistance

184 the warmth and repetition of the melody means that the speaker can now
sympathize with instead of coldly judging the Thames-daughters as spectres or grotesques – he
has achieved at least some capacity for feeling

185 a shift from the melodic Spenserian line to harsh, quick motion with short words and heavy
stress on k, t and b – the speaker's awareness of the inadequacy of rhetoric to sustain true feeling
or ward off grief suddenly explodes in mid-air – a feeling of desolation - a swelling out into bit-
terness rather than the expected completion of Marvell's line – a ominous and mocking pursuit
by and identity with the dislocated past) - an ominous and mocking pursuit by and identity with
the dislocated past) sardonic confirmation of the here and now – to pretend that cherished words
from the past can charm away the bleak realities of life is a fraud

186 Marvell's figure of time has become a figure of death – time’s winged chariot a grinning
skull - 'chuckle' opposes cynical laughter to silence, caricaturing death as though no longer ut-
terly afraid of that handful of dust contaminating any possible idea of natural pleasure – the 'cold blast' is rattling sensitive bones and then is metamorphosed into the insubstantial malevolence of
a chuckle - a synaesthetic construct – sound connects the rattle to the rat, as opposed to the se-
mantic link between them. And it is the rattle of the words, rather than their meaning, that pro-
pels the poem forward. Indeed, the sound preempts the sense and spreads like an infection - an
intense intimation of ontological invasion, of ominous and mocking pursuit by and identity with
the dislocated past - chuckling underscores the horror not of death but of rebirth and endless suf-
fering - the existential authority of time and presaging the inexorable coming of winter and
death

186 "Sweet Thames," like London Bridge and London itself, is uneternal. Its "tent is broken" ; leaves "clutch" at its bank and drag it down. What ought to be a symbol of shining duration has been threatened, its waters polluted, rendered meaningless: "The nymphs are departed." Absolute time has been shattered by relativistic time. "At my back" "I hear" as in "a cold blast" not reassurance that the river yet "runs softly" to the song's end but "the rattle of the bones," a dismembered faith in con- tinuity. "Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year," the Thames seems to murmur fitfully even as the poet perceives it in fragments of time and space” (Foster)

173-186 “the whole of this verse paragraph is an impressive vocal performance of emotional re-
lease and holding back, of flowing and retention, as the voice searches, moves into deeper regis-
ters, stalls, checks itself, lets itself go again, winsome, wry, upbraiding, plangent and caustic by
turns. The miracle is that the verse can turn and turn about like this, and still retain, triumphantly, a poetic coherence' (Reeves) 187-189 ' abjection and its subversions of clean and proper bodies,
distinct and secure identities, and horribly ready to disregard articulations of form...an aggression
against as well as a slithering companionship with inert, low and anonymous matter, all the vital-
ity that lies against the soul, the organic not-self. Reduced by a close-up to a creeping digestive
system it subsumes the horror implicit in the signs of oral appetite recalled from the summertime

Thames...the rat is active when our higher nature slumbers, when we are beset...in the image of
fishing there is a hunger for the incommunicable, for what surpasses articulation. It is an attempt
to bait the silence cf the Grail Legend with its hunger for the mystic meal, for proof of purity and
redemption from sin...yet he is distracted by the sensual, held back by fascinated disgust... the
fish itself an otherness in relation to human warmth and sensuality, a totem animal for remote
and alien abstract power and death...yes, something in him is preparing to be drawn up like a fu-
tilely struggling phallic creature into the marbelizing heart of light' (Bedient)

187 rats trigger decay and squalor - the repugnant image of nature - a surrealist landscape

188 after an interlude of deep-seated loss, isolation turns into self-disgust as the speaker projects
himself into a rat with a human body – rat-bloated repulsive matter - both rat and vegetation are
extensions of the decomposing leaves

189 Ferdinand in the Tempest has now become one in the line of Fisher-kings – it was while sit-
ting on this bank that Ferdinand heard the dirge, now fixed in the speaker's mind by its associa-
tion with the Phoenician sailor - the Fisher-king must await the arrival of a Christ-figure who
will lift the curse of sterility his land and people live under - the mingling of realistic and phan-
tasmagoric detail produces an oppressive sense of waking nightmare - in myth the fish was
sacred to those deities who were supposed to lead men from the shadows of death to life and its ceremony was connected with fertility ritual – the Buddha was often referred to as a fisherman

(as St Peter was and the fish is a symbol of Christ) – fishing is in the wrong hands as the wheel
in IV is in the wrong hands – the Fisher-king himself is an ironic antitype to Jesus the fisher of
men - wounded in the genitals he rules a kingdom cast into sterility and drought, a wasteland - he
does have knowledge of the Grail’s location but because of his wasted sterility, he settles into the
discomfort of fishing - the dull canal waters without life - autumn defines the spiritual condition
of the speaker/Fisher King contemplating the Thames (i.e., the renewing waters) as one verging
on despair - c.f the watermen fishing for bodies in Our Mutual Friend (Dickens Thames a sewer
carrying death, its banks slime and refuse) - in Jesse Weston the Fisher-king is physically impo-
tent but in E he is a psychic victim. The land is like him and he experiences not love but mere
sex cf. 'groping for trouts in a peculiar river' (said by Pompey in Measure for Measure)

190 the figure of the drowned sailor in Dante (Inf. XXVI 139-142) coalesces with that of the
shipwrecked Ferdinand in The Tempest sitting on a bank and undergoing an interior transforma-
tion, a death and rebirth of the self, E associating this with the ancient fertility rite of taking the effigy of the drowned god out of water as a symbol of resurrection - the gashouse district of the

Isle of Dogs - a scientistic and commercial redaction of pneuma

191 Parsifal, Anfortis' brother: "His name all men know as Anfortis, and I weep for him ever-
more." The reference is also to Ferdinand's lament, "Weeping again the King my father's wrack,"

as Ariel's song comes to him: "Full fathom five thy father lies." - the calamities cause the fester-ing and grow verminous - the speaker imagining himself to be a Grail character and in Ferdi-
nand's situation, 'the wreck' - applying both metaphorically and literally – in The Tempest death by water signifies purification and rebirth – watery identities, blessed, recalling his card, the
drowned Phoenician sailor, promising future sea-change – thus the speaker is both the wounded
king and the son/lover who imagines a transforming death, as he will also be the drowned sailor
and the merchant – Amfortas and the ‘wreck’ his physical condition - the father would be Frimu-
tel or Titurel, and Alonso as well, Tempest and Grail, being brought together - he will be
thoughtful, repelled, satiric and longing by turns as he takes on different characters and imagines
death and love in different forms - his fishing a type of ascetic contemplation, both equally pas-
sive - in the context of The Tempest music allays passions and waters, and figures Ferdinand's entry into the tranquility of Lower Paradise. He finally achieves Celestial Paradise, symbolized
by Miranda - ‘this music crept by me upon the waters’ - Caliban, monster and fish and inhabitant of sensuous water, especially speaks of music viz. "The isle is full of noises . . ."

192 the wounded hero a living death - the Fisher-king's wound is linked to the death of the land –
the speaker expresses a sense of guilt and need for restoration – modern man haunted by
thoughts of hidden bones and bodies – Ferdinand’s curiosity gives him energy, wholly missing
from E’s numb fisherman stuck in a place where it’s not music that creeps, but rats - the impotent

Fisher King the ‘fall of the father’, the loss of all authority and control, unleashing infinite dis-
placements, be they sexual, linguistic or territorial - E's father had died in Jan.,1919, disagree-
ments with his son still unresolved – the 'brother' may be Jean Verdenal

192 “III reveals the Divine has virtually disappeared from this arid land having been reduced to a
wreck, bones of the spiritual past now littering a ‘little low dry garret’ for the musings of hermits. Not surprisingly the Fisher-king narrates here. His wounded genitalia represent both the ab-
sence of a vital life force in the land and also the pronounced separation from spiritual signifi-
cance figured in the absence of rain, the fouled river and the blasted aridity of the land” (Tim-
merman)

189-192 ' an ironic self-awareness in this phenomenal series of fabricated shapes, metaphors of a
still constricted and ill-lit passion for metamorphosis, bitter fruit of the historic sense...he has
only a kind of knowledge of culture...looking to paternal authority for a thread to follow out of
the maze of the engulfing Mother (earth, woman, time, the senses) and attempting to fish out
something from the unknown, despite the dullest of conditions, urban, sensual, belated' (Bedi-
ent)

193 – a river of lust and lamentation, dead nature and death – the fate of the carelessly sensual –
they are utterly passive and may as well be drowned corpses that will in time become dry bones

– and ones not rattled by the divine breath – linked with images of sex and death and with the
bodies of lovers on the riverbank - the land cursed by an amorphous hence unhealthy sexuality -
the bodies dejectedly verbless and inertly repetitive – a glimpse of innate depravity – the descent
into dark spaces without life or vitality - a sickening miasma that bespeaks dissolving limits and
a sinking into abjection – obsessive, disgusted sexuality will ultimately seek a solution in faith -
horror arises from osmoses, exhalations and porosities as a dread of epidemic – corpses and
unburied bones, encroaching upon everything, are the utmost of abjection – a horrified fascina-
tion with the process of decomposition – the rat's living body merges with the corpse's and the
speaker apprehends himself as rotting and sodden flesh (then as dry bones, rattled by the rat's
foot, as before he was by the cold wind – in a nightmare one can be both rat and bones) – no
sooner does he realize the pathology of literary utterance than he rebukes himself with this image
of death – his own death as well as his father's – in this section an anxiety-charged and increas-
ingly agitated self-laceration that indicates some nightmare fantasy is being worked through in
successive imagery– a terrified awareness of death and a near-desperate sense that there is no es-
cape from it - the essential problem is the individuals attachment to the material universe naked
torsos nicely illustrating the point – E's consciousness torn between hating what it saw and hav-
ing only the intensity of its seeing as recompense for the sight

194 a sterile death from which no life comes – a skulking bad conscience – a hole and corner as-
sociated with crime and the fetor of death – exile equated with excremental waste – where skele-
tons of the dead have met regularly in this place of nightmares, where they are rattled by the rat's
foot – the garret clinks out the bones' fright merely, letting the speaker cast away, unextrava-
gantly, any lingering sense of horror about the bone beneath the flesh - the artist's bare scene of
hopeless struggle, relegated to a cultural rubbish-heap save for the shiny animal instinct for sur-
vival - bones as dice, the play of chance

195 a line of resurgent confidence - garret sparks rattled, which sparks rats foot – and year in-
spires hear in the subsequent line, turning the oracular into a jingle – it is the rattle of the words, rather than their meaning, that propels the poem forward - sound preempts sense and spreads like
an infection - the recollection of death rattles the bones, reminiscences of lost ones, year to year -
despite the disturbance the bones suffer from the synecdochic feet of passing animals, the bones
do not threaten resurrection - and because the garret is “dry,” we are assured of their preservation rather than decay - here dryness is a condition of serenity cf. line 390 - a dialectic in the poem
between the body’s waste and its regeneration

196 Marvell – To his coy mistress – 'but at my back I always hear...' Marvell's 'deserts of vast
eternity' are thus reduced to a metropolitan waste land - the degradation of the present and the en-
during passion of the past fuse together – the poem remakes the past in the very instant when
what the poem describes turns the present against the past – sex and death are simply recorded
differently between the centuries, memory and desire adapting their tropes to the discourse net-
work in which they function - the whole poem relates the pain of reawakened memory – the
sound of backbiting betrayal - more positively it will reawaken traditional meanings of the natur-
al cycle and an echoing recollection of the art of the past, words borrowing their beauty from
those that used them before - the move is from Marvell’s mythical-sounding charioteer, the
sound of time advancing and death getting closer, to a funhouse version of death that has already
occurred and is explicitly associated with winter - E’s “cold blast” reminds us of Frazer’s ferti-
lity rituals and how threatening the onset of winter would have felt when spring was understood
as something that needed to be effected, year after year, through ritual human exertion - the dan-
ger in Frazer that E alludes to is that winter will arrive and never leave;
its deadness will be permanent - implied in the Marvell poem is the double idea of the fall of
love from the Greek ideal, where it was looked on as a god, and the preoccupation of mankind
with commonplace amusements which divert their minds from realisation of their insignificance
in the face of eternity – the coy mistress of modern times can arouse no such associations – eros
so far decayed as no longer to be a god, or even a devil, but a mere mechanical device or toy –
the tone shifted back to the grotesquerie of a danse macabre – he is turning his back on anality,
decay and disease

193-195 ' the grotesque now the signature of the Prince of Darkness, a figment created by purity
or horror of life, a morbid passion for the void' (Bedient)

197 Time's winged chariot now claptrap – the leering swell mocks the legendary powers of mu-
sic itself - the transition from chariot to traffic jam is a transition from the last vestiges of transcendence into the realm of random montage – that threatening vital force that had been appre-
hended as the wind's blast reasserts itself as raucous sound and the impinging moon – the poem
reacts with revulsion, animating Mrs Porter and her daughter, who insulate themselves in a vivid
but ineffective gesture – cf. E on the Rite of Spring which transformed the rhythm of the steppes
into 'the scream of the motor-horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels... and the barbaric
cries of modern life'

198 Sweeney - that element of humanity, and more specifically modern humanity, which is vul-
gar, physical, uneducated, and without human or spiritual values - a representative sex seeker - as
in a medieval morality play, the incarnation of lust and temptations of the flesh - like Actaeon
stumbling upon Diana bathing, Sweeney stumbles through sex to his own death - Day’s Actaeon
had become an animal, while Sweeney is already animalistic - Day’s bee Polypragmus had
turned violent myth into exhibition, a strange fresh effect of bombast, crudeness, and comedy - E
turns this into an annual springtime itch for purchased sex - a frisson from the image of client
and bawd with a stag and a goddess standing behind them, an intimation that there may be more
archetypal rituals at work than we imagine in even the rawest appetite for sex - Diana now bestial, repulsive and self-destructive

196-198 ' facing away (despite receptive ears) from this travesty of copulation 'in the spring', he
sees himself as putting the arid plain behind him if only in being (as if obeying an obscure thirst)

at the riverbank, his back to the nearby mechanized sounds of death' (Bedient)

199 from moon-high merriment delight is impelled higher by mechanical instigations - E coyly
notes he was not certain of the exact lines of this bawdy Anzac ballad – the word that appears as

'feet' was actually the plural of a four letter word beginning with c and ending with t – a comical
fertility goddess with an incremental suggestion of horror – the fearful power of woman to pro-
duce life, her body as porter/portal - the moon special to the virgin Diana/Artemis and symbol of
her purity – mortals cannot survive certain types of knowledge, such as the sight of naked divi-
nity, but Sweeney, immersed wholly in disguising surfaces, is safe' - 'Mrs Porter' was a well
known brothel madam in Cairo, which Australian and New Zealand troops passed through en
route to the Dardanelles

200 abrupt rhymes of 'ter' doubled by soda-water – the push that lifts the line to the rapture of

Verlaine's O ces voix... - thus higher than the failed exultance of the Shakespearean Rag's ' O's,'

and gaining an upsurge from the full-breathed roundness of 'O the moon shone bright,' Ferdi-
nand's O ces voix marks the summit of his rise to the unaborted melody of those 'enf an ts, ch an
tat d an s la coupole'

200 ' this is the music of resilience in the poem. E has created through Ferdinand a stretchable
vocal outline, an 'I' that began without exaltation just above the creeping rat, and climbed to ' ces
voix' by means of Mrs Porter's mechanistic song, can absorb the automatic sameness of the typist
putting a record 'on' the gramophone and build 'upon' it ...death is not the memory of 'pearls that
were his eyes' but the incremental sound of 'this music crept by me upon the waters'... an ungran-
diose persistence tracks the way eastward through the dull, metrical thoroughfare of 'Queen Vic-
toria Street' to a city where the voice's down-thudding tread to a 'public bar in Lower Thames

Street' is no obstacle to an ear which enjoys there 'the pleasant whining of a mandolin' (Swigg)

201 Her smelly feet a sign of corruption – white, naked feet upon damp ground and the clean
flesh as opposed to indiscriminate, inanimate earth – her feet (of clay) defiled just where the
weight presses on the earth - rituals of purity are perverted into ersatz desecrations of themselves

– Sweeney trapped in a present-tense modernity which is an ironic repetition of ancient and pri-
mitive fertility rites - the ceremony of innocence is drowned, and the baptismal rite becomes its
own defilement -
bicarbonate of soda was a douche in use among prostitutes, suggestive of sterility –
the compulsive defensiveness in their unexplained washing - suggests reborn by baptism – insis-
tently hard iambic segments, providing the push to Verlaine's line - in Parsifal, a choir of children
sing at the foot-washing ceremony that precedes the restoration of Anfortas by Parsifal – cf. the
washing of Christ's feet by Mary Magdalen

202 – And, O the voices of the children singing in the cupola! - Verlaine describes Parsifal's ef-
forts to keep himself pure in order to understand the meaning of the Grail –the sacred relic has
been recovered, the king has been recuperated, and the grail illuminates the hall, saturating the space with its light - the character in the Verlaine poem has sodomistic intent - in the chapel the
choir responds to the washing of Parsifal's feet – the softest voices are singing of the highest
healing – Platonic/Virgilian souls still unborn in their dome they are a privileged group apart,
trans-oedipal but blessed by the eternity of childhood - a tremendous burst of light/Wagnerian

Grail music – a startling antithesis which is magniloquent with shame - after rats, decay and ca-
cophony a sudden and piercing evocation of the beauty and joy whose absence the speaker has
been lamenting – irony and pathos and strongly sonorous and as compared to the previous jingle

– the antithesis magniloquent with shame – the line charged with cold irony – the speaker's dou-
ble binds are his attraction to poetry combined with a horror of literature and a yearning for the
vitality of common life combined with a revulsion from its vulgarity - – the world of uncon-
scious impulse is brought into contact with the humanized world of language - the syllables on
the face of it, seem non-sense that comes from nowhere, pleading for registers beyond the demo-
tic where utterance has been voided of human meaning and suffering, thus twit, twit...

202 ' one of the speaker's terrors is that he has forfeited life to literature and has become intensely aware of the second-hand nature of his utterances... he is trapped in ways of thinking and feeling
acquired through convention...self-consciousness shadows every attempted escape from isolated
emptiness into the poetic imagination.

Et O ces voix survives as indescribable aspiration and also as the feeling that to quote poetry is
less to relieve genuine feeling than to succumb to a sort of monkish temptation' (Bush)

202 “to put the point succinctly, The Waste Land, by quoting Verlaine's line, invites us to see its
world for a moment through Wagnerian lenses. The land is laid waste through the maiming of
the Fisher King (in Wagner, Amfortas), and it waits in vain for a redeemer (in Wagner, Parsifal),
who will again make available to the world the Redeemer (Christ). In The Waste Land, Parsifal
is without Parsifal. Eliot's poem has much to do with the parallel wounds of Tristan and Amfor-
tas, but the healing figures of Isolde and Parsifal do not appear. In Eliot's different context, the

"voix d'enfants" evoke something yearned for but not found, and Verlaine's line points to the opening of "What the Thunder said" with its echoes of the journey to Emmaus and the absent Redeemer” (Waldron)

203 cf. the nightingale of line 103 – the hope of transformation through suffering –
only the most intense feeling can arouse us, with its capacity to evoke the opposite– in the poem
horror is close to ecstasy – syllables out of nowhere, perhaps as ironic counterpoint to 202,
which seem to plead for some realm beyond the demotic where utterance is voided beyond hu-
man meaning and suffering – mock ritual, the mindless repetition of an animated machine enact-
ing all earthly repetition – “twit” is not only a chirp or a taunt or a fool but also a tangle of thread that hinders the process of weaving (the princess resorted to weaving when she couldn’t speak
and resorted to birdsong when she couldn’t weave) - the twitching cries of animal desire and the
jug jug of brute satisfaction - the language suggests the unwilled, undesired character of such co-
pulation

204 overtones of rape

206 Tereus, who forced Philomela, is being addressed – his act of violation, the fact that it is
being rued and the sound of the bird’s singing the myth of Tereus - a theme of instincts masquerading as love - the sin of concupiscence - greed and lust, are caged primitive instincts masquer-
ading as love, but in fact entrapping the self, weakening the call to spirituality - Tereu the voca-
tive case of the name – suggesting not only the sound of the bird’s singing but that it it is to be
rued - a pun on the phrase 'to rue' (following Elizabethan practise) – excision leaves only the root

(radix) of both tongue and word, the final 's' requiring a tongue to pronounce - a mutilation to
match the violent "change of Philomel" - her swallow song is doomed to repeat the name of the rapist

207 like the name on a city gate, of which Mr Eugenides, impervious and self-satisfied, takes no
notice – he does not know he is in Hell – unreal in the sense that life has been levelled down to
the plane of sensation

208 the atmosphere being blanketed, the temporal order is merely that of the day, thus hinting at
the arbitrary order and motion of time on any given day, to which the ‘I’ can only bear passive
witness

208-214 the tone is rather clinical, astringent, sceptical, intellectual, like the poem as a whole -
what little emotion there is radiates from the irony which makes the poem work

209 in Greek 'well-born' – a satire on the futurist superman,dreaming of a purified future, touted
by post-war eugenics – an intruding alien or swarthy Levantine type with a seedy, commercial
self-interest – a shambling rootlessness and loucheness - the debased shape of modern trade - a
merchant, he is not only the product but the sinister conductor of miscegenation, intermingling
verbal, sexual and monetary currencies - currents dissolve identity and definition - repetion has
become a virus and words a plague of echoes - phallic properties and a disturbing physical pre-
sence – we can readily imagine stereotypical mannerisms captured in ferocious caricature – a
rather battered representative of the fertility cults – homosexuality is now his secret cult – he is
the prophet or seer with only one eye - the 'one-eyed merchant' who should be carrying on his
back the knowledge of the Mysteries (Syrian merchants reputedly were carriers of the Grail le-
gend)

210 the‘loitering heirs of City directors’ have given way to this Levantine Metic - the stream of
commerce - cf. the 'currents' that pick the bones of Phlebas, another commercial traveller - the
joyous grape itself has shrivelled in this wasteland – dried currants impotent tokens of the ferti-
lity rites - the seedless raisins of homosexual sterility - a faintly anal effect – hints of animal
droppings in a nest - ' Food Prices:Shortage of Smyrna Sultanas”-' The Times' (23/9/1922) – in

1922 cosmopolitan Smyrna was in flames in a war between Greek and Turk

211 'carriage and insurance free' – the brutal efficiency of an economic exchange of bodily fluids

– the ego's puritanical need for mastery – the one-eyed merchant's Blakean singleness of vision –
the metre reflects the character's hustle and bustle, hard manner and heartlessly hearty tone –
breathless yet crammingly factual syntax is the character

212 the verse is enjoying its vulgar vitality – he seems a figure ripe for comedy or revel in its
early sense – considered as heraldry this one-eyed figure in profile is static and two-dimensional
but as a Levantine unshaven traveller who has lost an eye in unknown adventures he is empathetic, three-dimensional, present - both ‘me’ and ‘Mr Eugenides’ constitute the subject/protago-
nist of the poem (Mr Eugenides is identified with Phlebas, the ‘one-eyed sailor’ and Phlebas with
the protagonist) - a cubist split of the self into fragments, a heterogeneity of attitude and variety
of tone, refusing to resolve itself into the attitudes and tones of an individual personality - the
characters are points of view or perspectives which merge or pass into one another - not the jux-
taposition but the interpenetration of fragments

212 “the Smyrna merchant, identified with the Tarot one-eyed merchant, propositions the prota-
gonist, who is identified with the Phoenician Sailor. Yet we are told that the one-eyed merchant
melts into the Phoenician Sailor; so that the protagonist really stands on both sides of the propo-
sition. In the same way the protagonist is identified with the Quester of the Grail legend, who
sets out to find the Grail and thus cure the ailing Fisher King and restore fertility to the waste
land. The protagonist is the Quester inasmuch as he moves through the episodes of the poem to
arrive at the Perilous Chapel. But in the following lines from Part in, he is the Fisher King,
whose illness is in some Grail romances assigned to the King's brother or father: While I was
fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king
my brother's wreck And on the king my father's death before him. He is also—according to the
method of shifting references—Prince Ferdinand (from whom, in Tempest, I, ii, 390-91, the last two lines derive), Hamlet, Claudius: all of whom have to do with dead kings who in turn recall
the murdered kings of vegetation ritual. All this combines with the modern industrial setting to
portray the modern moment with modern voices and collapse them into timeless archetypes. At
the end of the poem, the protagonist is both Quester and Fisher King; he is the Fisher King quest-
ing for a cure: "I sat upon the shore/ Fishing, with the arid plain behind me." Since the protagonist plays at one and the same time both active and passive roles, we must understand all the
characters as aspects or projections of his consciousness—that the poem is essentially a mono-
drama. It is difficult to say just where the various characters melt into the protagonist and where
the protagonist melts into the poet. We have to distinguish the scenes in which the protagonist
himself plays a part—the recollection of the Hyacinth garden, the visit to Madame Sosostris, the
meeting with Stetson, the scene with the rich Belladonna— from the scenes in the pub and at the
typist's. We can either consider that the protagonist overhears the first and imagines the second,
or that at these points the poet's consciousness takes leave of the protagonist to portray parallel
instances. I prefer the first line of interpretation because it yields a more consistent structure on
the model of romantic monodrama. We must understand the other characters, therefore, as am-
biguously objective, as only partly themselves and partly the projection of forces within the pro-
tagonist and ultimately within the poet. If we take the line that Eliot's poem is what the protago-
nist sees, then Tiresias becomes the figure in which the protagonist's consciousness blends perfectly with the poet's so that the protagonist can see imaginatively more than he could physically” (Langbaum)

213 sex is sterile in this pass Mr Eugenides makes at the speaker - the Cannon Street hotel was
close to Lloyds where E worked in the City

214 a little giddiness in the dip into slacks initiated by 'Followed' – smartly recurring ee's and o's and buoyant l's with skipping stresses add to the effect - the Metropole is a hotel located in

Brighton, a seaside resort – Eugenides constitutes a perversion of the life-giving faculty - the
city characteristically is mapped and
traced by desire – it is defined by the current of need that flows through it or is
blocked by it (in an excised section of “The Fire Sermon”, E writes of London as a murderous
and wildly proliferating sexual force: “London, the swarming life you kill and breed, / Huddled
between the concrete and the sky, / Responsive to the momentary need, / Vibrates unconscious to
its formal destiny.”)

215 the time is twilight, at the end of a working day - it is not a person but 'the eyes and back',
which turn from the desk – body parts rather than whole bodies - an extreme impersonalism –re-
calls a Picasso distortion - an anxious waiting, a fusion of human and mechanical, throbbing bi-
sexually - the “human engine” throws pathos down into mechanism - humanity reduced to the
lowest common denominator of bodily impulse and sexual appetite - his status is that of a type or
general category that Tiresias sees - there is a perilous disconnection between the eyes and back
of the same body – as if controlled by light sensors - a bizarre efficiency in the way it rises from
a desk - an eerie and disturbing collocation that uneasily calls attention to his lack of sight – as
too with the end rhymes of 'sea' and 'see' – a labyrinth of disjunctive twists in which the subject
of attention gradually shifts, like the perspective at landings descending a spiral staircase – the
whole perceptual vantage point is suddenly transformed as in a dream - where 'violet hour' sus-
tains the definite article 'eyes' and where 'back' feels pointed at by it – freakishly isolated – but
grotesquely eyes and back are in unison in the same direction – thus the machine decenters and
partially dismantles the human organism held together only by the main force and lie of a me-
chanical syntax - an alternating rhythym - a badly tuned internal combustion engine in which the
motor idles in fluctuating cycles of smoothness and unevenness - the denatured quality of the
characters lives - all nerves and sterile passions – the pathetic desire to pull oneself together and
so go home – inner chaos, broken connections and heartless manner – a sure and perfect line
composed according to the best eighteenth-century models - but the harsh sound and incongru-
ous specification of “back” shift us instead to a plane of prosodic disintegration - Sappho had
said of the violet hour of evening that it brings in all that bright morning scattered

216 the average worker – a beating pulse in these two adjacent, cunningly unpunctuated, present
participles – a life in which apparent movement conceals even from those in motion a constant
waiting – the throbbing heart a temporary conveyance with nothing to convey – an 'unnatural'

falling and throbbing rhythm – the conflation of machinery and sex - the syntax shakes like an
aged hand – he takes a single direction and is striving onwards – a breathless interest – Tiresias is
fabulously old and experienced – his listeners must expect to be patient

217 the protagonist of the poem, 'though blind' is 'throbbing between two lives', one dead, the
other powerless to be born. But, like Tiresias, he can see the nature of the 'dead': his vision
springs from similar experiences – people are assemblages of instinctive drives, bodies without
souls, that simply pullulate and perish -the cold imagery of the automated machine, the city as a
purely biological mechanism - light, the moment of city routine, the throbbing engine of matter
in motion - there is no telos apart from activity itself - all are working together and against each other – a hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness – the implicit assumption of the
poem is the simultaneity of every age, and one of its subjects is the life buried in history and
myth – the poem is enacted in a permanent present tense

217 “Eliot described poetry as “approaching the condition of automatic writing . . . not a vision but a motion terminating in an arrangement of words on paper,” again suggesting that it is the
throbbing of the “human engine” (as the poem describes it) which concerns the modern text – the
noise of the body, of consciousness as process” (Armstrong)

217 “Eliot links the human engine that waits to Tiresias who throbs through the middle term of
the taxi, which both waits and throbs. In so doing, Eliot suggests a link between the reduced con-
ditions of the modern worker and the mythical hermaphrodite who includes all experience. The
passage contains within itself a representation of this link in Tiresias's throbbing "between two lives." Tiresias appears here almost as a metaphor for metaphor, throbbing between two lives as
the common term that joins them. But the activity of joining, the throbbing that seems to evoke
human longing, is in fact the noise of the taxi engine, the drumming of its pistons a travesty of
human sexual activity. In this way, the passage mocks its own insertion of Tiresias between two
lives by positioning the taxi as the true medium between individual and race, present and eter-
nity. Even stylistically, the passage undermines its own assertion of metaphorical identification
by merely juxtaposing the two elements that both terms share: There is no "between" between
throbbing and waiting, no comma or other punctuation, and yet this is where the all important
connection between Tiresias and the modern worker is accomplished. Read in this, way, the pas-
sage suggests that the process by which Tiresias represents all men and women is no different
from the process by which the modern industrial machine conglomerates them into one mass,
that what looks like metaphorical representation is but the additive accumulation typical of in-
dustrialism.The uniformity of modern industrialized life is but one instance of the uniformity of
all human life. Adorno makes this point when he says of Kafka, "The absence of choice and of
memory which characterizes the life of white collar workers in the huge cities of the twentieth
century becomes, as later in Eliot's 'Waste Land', the image of an archaic past." That archaic past is not the one the Victorians fondly identified with Athens but one in which human beings are

"driven together like animals." Adorno may well be thinking of Tiresias, in whom a sterile conglomeration of male and female represents an ancient situation still repeated in the modern city,
inside, in the loveless sex of the typist and her young man, and outside, in the inorganic relation-
ships of the crowd.Tiresias symbolic of the two opposite fears that gripped Eliot, a fear of frag-
mentation and loneliness and a fear of featureless uniformity. In the modern world, it seems,
freedom cannot be had without fragmentation and loneliness, and community cannot be had
without coercion and conformity” (North)

218 a spectator to, and commentator on the protagonists - Tiresias melts distinctions and con-
fuses personae - an assemblage - vates/seer/prophet - he is the rationally inexplicable process of
the combination of points of view, the fragments of the poem made ‘whole’, from an individual
consciousness to a universal mind that encompasses the whole truth - so many individual con-
sciousnesses are unified that the voice intoning the poem often seems to be the voice of history
itself, an expression of the “entire past” woven into the texture of the present - the only truth is
the “whole truth” - the very prophet of abjection, personifying the text’s porous membranes, fore-
seeing what he has already foresuffered, mixing memory and desire, self and other, man and wo-
man, pollution and catharsis - the exchange of eyesight for insight, the speaker’s gradual acces-
sion of a prophetic identity through taking on, successively, the voices and visions that recapitu-
late his experience - the speaker becomes absorbed into an historical consciousness - assuming
the voice and eyes of Tiresias, he recognizes that the experience of others confirms the meaning of his own - it is the universal condition - individuals melt into this archetypal personage - day
melts into night as he melts between genders cf.the craving for violet and mauve of fin-de-siecle
aesthetes, as well as their morbid voyeurism - in a method similar to that of the Cubist painter,

Tiresias chooses various historical moments and then places them into a new juxtaposition - the
poem does not re-present an objectified version of the past, it evokes the past by quoting frag-
ments out of the context of time, the original apposition of these fragments creating an autono-
mous field which establishes its own, intrinsic meaning - or, to express it in terms more conso-
nant with Eliotic thought, the poet redeems meaning from exhausted time - and in the same way,
the reader must create his own meaning from this constellation of historical fragments - the poem
a system of signals for the subjective reorganization of history, or time - the aim to induce a fu-
sion between thinking and the world, to practice that orientation by which thinking might con-
template its own complicity in reality, in determining and understanding the nature of what-is -
the Cubist juxtaposition of isolated fragments of time in a new context is an attempt to discover,
or to create, some sense of value by reorganizing a body of history from which value, or meaning
has somehow escaped - he personifies all the poems slippages and porous membranes, the very
site of anarchy rather than containment - the figures and shapes through which the prophet reads
the condition of his world - they cannot comprehend, performing roles for ends they cannot see
while Tiresias penetrates appearances, time and purpose - blind, he ‘sees’ and ‘sees’ and can do
nothing - he looks in though blind, but the blind can see truth - he is a momentary embodiment,
driven into being by exasperation and contempt, of the self‘s intolerance of its own obsessive
images - he is all the different characters in the poem, his own self being endlessly reincarnated
in different lives, which are yet one life united in his consciousness - as an inclusive human con-
sciousness it is precisely the multiplicity of points of view Tiresias possesses that gives assurance
of his reality - past lives unroll before his mind’s eye - time-bound and timeless, a withered
demi-god – a particular resonant and authoritative organizing point of view (there is something
very Miltonic about the emphasis on the blind seer) - yet Tiresias (as impotent in his way as the
superannuated Sibyl, locked in her jar wishing only for death cf.Gerontion) has no truly empow-
ering prophetic voice - he is less a seer, perhaps, than a helpless voyeur, trapped in a cycle of in-
numerable metamorphoses and enduring the same wasteland subsistence as those whose lives,
and subjectivity, he temporarily shares - his hermaphroditic status emphasizes how the meeting
of the sexes is the very site of the waste and degradation that obsesses the poem - he is literally
the embodiment of sterile sexual union - suffering is universal, omnipresent and endless in the
phenomenal world - he is a being outside birth and death, a finite centre in which all experience
is enigmatically focused – Tiresias is merely a bundle of fragments and not a genuine self - a
voice over artist, a figure of inner knowledge whose head is full of echoes - a prophet hypnotised
by an eternal machine, eternally seeing repetitions – a throbbing automatism of perception akin
to a camera eye - he cannot see the whole but only shattered fragments, lacking an ' I' that can
control or comprehend experience – a would be voice over that would stay above and outside
and deliver judgements both dour and covert - a repetitive voyeur in an echo chamber who has
seen too much and has found that his knowledge has purchased only a paralysing sense of futility

- an aspect of some collective psyche - “what Tiresias sees in fact, is the substance of the poem”

- that substance is sex that fails, here, the complete absence of sexual pleasure - the tormented
human psyche turned back upon itself - both a detached observer and some total human sensibil-
ity, capable of taking any role and an infinitely suffering thing – from pain comes prophecy as
the sybil too can confess – traditionally disability is linked to superhuman gifts but he only sees
banality and insignificance - condemned forever to sexual alternation – the bearer of Eliotic pain

– others merely functioning parts in a machine – humanity a ticking taximeter - even coition is
clockwork - blind from the sheer intensity of introspection - an aspect of some collective psyche

- a transcendental ego of the various temporal and empirical selves of the poem, that represent lo-
calised embodiments of his own dilemma – Tiresias a projection of the speaker's deepest fear –
that the link between man and woman is simply nothing at all – the voice of Tiresias shows the
speaker's own incapacity to respond with any feeling at all – he is in a state of aboulie (lack of
will, seeing all effort as in vain) - an hybridity of genes, ethnicities and genders of which he is a
mirror – more hermaphroditic than homoerotic, a melting together of voices, genders and sexua-
lities - blindness here signifies impotence (and the wrinkled breast his inability to give suste-
nance) – and yet he still sees, unable to avert disaster, and, the worst curse of all, the futile pro-
phet of timeless ennui that can take in nothing new – he has lost the sense of other people as in-
violably other and who is capable neither of pity nor terror - we are in an enclosed mind alie-
nated from the immediacy of feeling and passion, and hence merely objective about it - he is the
eternally suffering consciousness and locus of our most basic desires, paralyzed by the very ac-
cess it has to the underlying conditions of these desires – Tiresias a parergic “spectator” called
upon from long ago to tell the fortunes and futures of the poem’s present. The poem thematizes
such gender slippages as part of the general unpredictability and even volatility of desire, which,
it proclaims, never fully knows either its object or its subject - our being as pervaded by voices
that articulate a common despair, his 'throbbing' the neurasthenic symptom that accounts for the
poem's polyvocality - it becomes impossible to sustain an uninterupted, continuous narrative -
the confessional turned into ritual to depersonalize desire and escape the pain of self-betrayal -
cf. Prajapati, an androgynous visionary who is said to be the narrator or visionary consciousness
behind the Upanishads, and who is also a drastuh, the part of the deep self that is the witness or observer of the play of seemingly outward events - he is a sakshi, or "Inner Witness," who sees from a highly detached and reflective point of view the "weariness of ceaseless change and unresting desires" and the vagaries of all personal selves, including his own, "passing through innumerable existences, forever whirled about with the wheel of mutation, forever seeking and never
finding peace" - cf. John Harmon, ‘The Man from Somewhere’ in Our Mutual Friend, blind and old, shape-shifter and anonymous guide, unifier of the whole story, who is human nature at last
brought to life by spiritual rain

218 ' Tiresias is not restricted to a single perspective at a single moment, and is unlike the human
knower who perceives the world not as a whole but as a constantly shifting array of patterns,
with images continuously appearing and dissolving, forming and reforming in the air. The per-
spective changes even if the knower stays in the same spot, for he is in time, and the world
around him is in time. Because all of the perspectives in an endless series of perspectives are
within a system, the series is bound to generate a feeling of disorder – the knower's task is to uni-
fy jarring and incompatible sense data in some (impossible) god's eye view, 'the intersection of
time and timelessness' that holds history in its imagination, seeing from the inside part to part
and from the outside part to whole' (Brooker/Bentley)

218 “It is an inescapable shared guilt that makes us so intimate with the contents of this strange
deathly poem; it is also, in an age that has eaten of the tree of the knowledge of psychology and
anthropology (“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”), an inescapable morbid sympathy
with everyone else, very destructive to the coherent personality, that (like Tiresias’ years as a
woman) enables us to join with him in “foresuffering all.” These sciences afford us an illusion of understanding other people, on which we build sympathies that in an ideal era would have gone
out with a less pathological generosity, and that are as likely as not projections of our self-pity
and self-absorption, vices for which Freud and Frazer afford dangerous nourishment. Tiresias is
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 twenti-
eth century’s special mutation of indifference” (Kenner)

219 Tiresias dodderingly muffled by the cotton wad of exposition and in a state that is half for-
getful and half nostalgic –what Tiresias sees is metamorphosis, transformation, and this is what
we see too, the sea-change of art, the metempsychosis of word and image in the flux of time -
what he sees is myth and the mysteries playing themselves out, without salvation for those who
embody them (a modern
resuscitation of myth is impossible, and like April and Spring will merely result in the reproduc-
tion of an evil world) - he can see all because he is a complete, self-contained structure of oppo-
sites in an isolated mental cell – he is this invisible spectator who is seeing this 'film' – similarly the Sybil has seen the futility of all prophecy to warn and wants to die (and having seen the future wants no part of it) - T. ‘sees’ through epistemic agony - through a struggle we ‘see’ in read-
ing the poem - the plurality of the text compressed into simultaneity - the sad recurrent falling
rhythms during the violet hour of a late autumn day

220 the purplish-blue dusk – the past certainty of the violet hour - now at the evening hour we
are dragged down to trivia (stockings) - the menacing continuity of what has been played out be-
fore will be played out again in a series of acts of exhaustion - 'strives' reflects the speaker's
sense of how hard it is to make an ending of all that the modern age has scattered - the violet has
classical and medieval associations with sex -

221 from Sappho the sense of the violet hour as possessed of a particular energy that strains to-
ward home at the end of the day (morning/evening, venturing out/returning home, work/rest,
dawn/dusk) - the Sapphic lines are startled into a new significance by the introduction of the ty-
pist - the dailyness of coming home - the sanctity and peace associated with the word 'home' in

Sappho's Vespers and R.L.Stevenson's Requiem, is in ironic contrast to its use here – the paral-
lels sea/tea and sailor/typist mock-heroic

222 the typist and the clerk both literally apathetic, i.e without feeling, both morally and emo-
tionally, and have become human machines – metaphors of machinery that rape both men and
women - relations become a merging of cogs - she is a "type," identified with her type-writer so thoroughly she becomes it, acting machine-like with ‘automatic hand’ - this is horrifying both
because she is reduced by the conditions of labor to a mere part, and because she is infinitely
multiple, her very status as a "type" is dependent on a prior reduction from whole to part - she can become one member of the faceless crowd only by being first reduced to a "hand." - she is the very type of metonymy, of a social system that accumulates its members by mere aggregation

- it is not her own will but the ‘evening hour’ which brings the typist home at teatime - the envir-
onment itself is animated, the source of a particular life, while the typist herself is without inten-
tionality and has even less personality than the objects that surround her - they are creatures left
to their own devices, totally bereft of guidance from without – a scene of pathos rather than an
occasion for either mockery or satire – a flat style, if elevated for lovely woman - a mechanical feel in both rhyme and rhythm to this passage – a smartness and snap – syntax, like his sensibility and her routine, undergoes collapse - the efficient, alertly formal manner a means to force
himself to concentrate on some millionth empty moment – she is the product of a society which
has made pleasure a part of a utilitarian/hedonistic system – sex another duty like working and
preparing food or any other grim routine – a recreational doll/industrial sex-worker – the loss of
reproductive and creative functions as a result of our spiritual drought - Tiresias the mordant and
melancholy voyeur, whose lens exposes the dehumanization of the scene, reduced to the frozen
lust of a peeping tom – an epistemic agony pervades the poem - a continuum, typical in the
poem, between the observer and what he sees – the object of interest as much his state of mind as
the scene itself – the misfitting present tense a sort of earnest that he is truly awake - the insis-
tence on "home" establishes an expectation that the typist cannot fulfill - a mindscape in which the observing eye becomes inward looking and the result is an internalised 'vision' – a blind
seer's internal thought - E’s aim to push the quotidian experience of the brain into seldom ex-
plored extremities of torture - the gaze of Tiresias transforms reality into myth, acting as a meta-
phor for the visionary gaze of the inspired poet

224 satire mixes with sadness – a fine throbbing line - 'perilously' blending comedy with a hint of
her situation – an evocation of the Chapel Perilous – cf. the passage in Keats' 'Ode to a Nightin-
gale' beginning 'thou wast not born in faery lands forlorn...' - here ‘perilous’ refers to the wind
that may blow away her ‘drying combinations’, evoking the empty chapel in V that is only the
wind’s home - empty sexuality conflated with a symbol of meaningless

215-223 ' line 217 rhythmically both throbs and waits, reaching forward and holding back...the
bold waits/waiting repetition intensifies the apprehension and lack of resolution...the first use of

'throbbing' sees the alienated human as a mechanism, while the repetition reinvests the human
engine with 'throbbing' humanity...in line 218 a mixture of passion and horror of passion:he is bi-
sexually torn and also sympathetically throbs with the life that is between the two sexes...a single
sentence in which we 'wait' for a resolution which is waiveringly proffered and then withdrawn
in a state of grammatically suspended animation...Tiresias himself as troubled syntax at once sin-
uous and uncertain...time has trapped Tiresias in its continuum and he 'foresuffers all' in a state
of horrified ennui, participating in the lives of others though himself empty of life' (Reeves)

215-227 ' Tiresias's language throbs more than reasons, seems half a self communion that, while
indifferent to the reader, creates an intimate effect, the twists and iterations charging the syntax
with a nodding music...fit only for the leisurely bag stuffings of description' (Bedient)

224 comedy blended with a hint of her perilous situation - the adverb quickens anticipation
which is just as quickly disappointed by 'her drying combinations' (underwear) – bathos does not
wholly overtopple this completing Alexandrine - the mechanical quality of the rhythm suggests
denatured life – the first line of stylistic deadpan, that, with wall-eyed phrases and sentences,
mocks the incoherence of the modern – the severe form that mocks the disorder erases all doubt

– sprawling like her sensibility, like her will, it suggests the window itself is perilously spread
open – but no, only her daintily named 'combinations' are perilously spread, with mock female
alarm, an alarm mockingly nearly justified by the naughty touch of the sun's last rays, even if
they are elderly rays that the passive voice renders doubly harmless - the wind, which is at

"home" in the Chapel Perilous in Part 5, is the cause of peril at the typist's "home". And similarly, both the Chapel and sexuality are emptied of meaning

224 ' E's usual way of surprising the reader into a new perception of reality is by means of the
nuance rather than the conceit, by the rapid associations of his shifting thought, and by the ac-
companying deft and subtle exactness of verbal contrasts' (Matthiessen)

225 a phrase of traditional loveliness making a sharp contrast – a thrill of fear, a horror of sully-
ing, that the typist herself is beyond feeling – underwear left to dry in the window is unthink-
ingly displayed to the outside world – identity and propriety are consequently troubled – the taw-
dry aspect of her economic independence and sexual freedom - bathos does not wholly overtop-
ple this completing Alexandrine line - but the 20C imagery is in violent contrast to something
like Keat’s ’ magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’ the home exists for copulation, that is its law

226 a mimed slovenliness

227 rustlingly and insidiously female – she is neurotic like the woman in II - bored and indiffer-
ent, the typist tosses these articles together and, sympathetically, their sounds slither together into an indiscriminate heap

228 a seedy and weary figure from exposure and over-exposure to abjection and the common-
place, who in a final self-punishment, resigns himself to being the most apathetic of voyeurs of
the sexual game – he epitomizes the barren condition, capturing in voice and perception the
poem's ennui, sterility, and automatic sex, site of the futility and degradation that obsesses the
poem - the steady throbbing cadence and lack of modulation grooves his voice deeply in a rut -
as perhaps with E, a figure of great passive suffering and tortured knowledge - part of a skit in
which everything sexual is reflexively automatic, degrading and comic - the tormented human
psyche turned back against itself as in the Oedipus myth – he is a withered, Struldbuggian andro-
gyne, who knows everything and feels for nothing, and has come from a mythical faraway realm
to scout out living lovers of the present, and like many an alien since is disappointed in what he
finds – constitutes a completely detached point of view, who, because hermaphroditic and blind,
realizes the impotent imprisonment of individual selves within their blank presentations - a see-
mingly hypertrophied cranium perched on a wasted, anaemic body and in search of elemental
life – the world too a mirror of what he has become, the desiccated, labyrinthine reflection of a

'dry brain' – modern sensibilities are so 'drugged' that the capacity to feel pain has atrophied - kill pain and you kill feeling - this evasion of what body and blood tell us will lead finally to a lust
for oblivion - motions lost in mazes and fallen into a futile circularity that bleakly mocks the re-
generative cycles of nature - we are in the enclosed world of a dead mind, alienated from the im-
mediacy of feeling and passion, and hence merely objective about it - Tiresias represents less the
all-seeing sage than the deceptions of a mind all too obsessively attached to its objects, suffering,
as it were, from that error the Yoga-sutras define as the identification "of the power of the Seer with that of the instrument of seeing" - he thus enacts that split between knowledge and experience that so troubled Eliot: He can see, but he cannot know - the poem’s own failure to achieve
unity of vision - a claustrophobically closeted rationalism lost in its thoughts and feelings and
tangled in the knots of earlier devisings - a disjunction between the divine ability to see the total-
ity of events and his humanity which can see only a puzzle of disconnected particulars – it is the immediate experience of these types depicted that Tiresias is called upon to raise to the level of
self-reflection - his very being is ironic and reflects the divided, ironic condition of the modern
secular sensibility – he speaks with the consciousness of lost social dominance - the tragic isola-
tion of the individual intensifying our solipsistic quandary - the culture itself has lost the capacity to impose any unifying or purposeful scheme - a schizoid walk through history with voices singing in his ears – the poem considered as the continuous vision of Tiresias adds no illumination to
the whole - the necessity of pure concern for one’s fellow humans without the sins of lust that
make individuals incapable of genuine love - Tiresias the split between knowledge and experi-
ence that so troubled E: Tiresias can see but he cannot know. As a result he cannot mediate from
a third point of view - what he perceives is a collage of images, mystifying statements, and dra-
matic encounters superimposed by his own mind on the basic substratum of reality - suffering
born out of self-deception and egotism is seen by Tiresias to be universal, prevalent in the lives
of the ancients as well as the moderns, among the heroes and saints of yore as well as among the
typists and clerks of the modern world - the disorganized flow of past events in his consciousness
is so vivid and arresting that these events become present - in short, Tiresias relives his mem-
ories, as Kurtz does in Conrad's story, witnessing all his past lives "in every detail of desire, temptation and surrender”

228 “Tiresias' role remains a dominantly symbolic one, in keeping with the metaphoric conven-
tions of the poem. While what he "sees" gives the impression of some confrontation between a human consciousness and the society which threatens it, Tiresias in fact is merely an indifferent
observer whose prophetic powers belong to a world antithetical to the human, not sympathetic
with it. He remains part of the mythical sphere from whose perspective London becomes an "un-
real city," its inhabitants recognizable as neither "living nor dead," and his purpose is to show

"fear in a handful of dust" . While Tiresias shares in the knowledge of male and female con
sciousness (he has been condemned to the androgynous perception), he participates in neither,
and remains "throbbing between two lives", incapable of sharing either” (Benstock)

228 “Tiresias is more than mere observer, he shares as well the culpability for what he ‘sees’...he
is a prophet who has been endowed with illicit knowledge, a knowledge he refuses to impart to
sufferers in the wasteland, something that directs itself to the ultimate "sin" of the poem...Tiresias is he who has lost the sense of other people as inviolably other, and who is capable neither
of pity nor terror...the lesson of The Waste Land informs against all who inhabit it: that which
the soul thirsts after is that which it should fear” (Kenner)

229 Tiresias not a detached observer with a basilisk stare, but is as trapped within the particulars
of subjectivity as anyone else – yet Tiresias is an inclusive consciousness to the degree that his is
a representative human experience rather than any particular person's – less a seer, perhaps, than
a helpless voyeur, trapped in a cycle of innumerable metamorphoses and enduring the same was-
teland subsistence as those whose lives, and subjectivity, he temporarily shares - hermaphroditic
and blind, he ironically realizes the impotent imprisonment of individual selves within their
blank presentation - from a position inside the modern world, the characters are distinct and sepa-
rate, but from the perspective of Tiresias (the mythic position), the characters 'melt' into each
other - the speaker's fear from this universal vision of all time and experience that everything is
always the same and that no alternative human world is possible – he endlessly sees the scene of
the crime, the origin of his own blindness or castration, from witnessing the difference between men and women - what he sees is ‘substance’ itself, physical life (or signifiers) unredeemed by
spirit (or a transcendental signified) - a unity achieved for the reader by means of the superposi-
tion of multiple points of view, and, implicitly, multiple interpretations – each period can be seen
from within, as a self-reflection, but also from the outside, through reference to a different epoch

- a strain of futile pathos pervading the lines which reveal their terrible knowledge - he possesses
in his mind a reflection in miniature of all the stages of the development of civilisation, insights
into the timeless truths of human nature and the cycles of life, the things that the occupants of the
waste land are blind to - the whole poem an anxious expose – he is a peeping Tom – it is con-
tempt for the sexual act as the coupling of beasts or serpents that releases in the speaker, like
some instinctive mechanism, his prophet identity - he is throbbing between an intimate fore-
knowledge of what has been enacted on this same divan or bed, and the typist's separation of her-
self from its enactment - he perceives, foretells and foresuffers the scene as we ourselves con-
stantly interpret our sensations by referring them to objects - he perceives that neither the actors
nor their deeds partake of the ultimate reality; they are all mere shadows, insubstantial as a
dream - his consciousness may be described in the words of Bradley, which E quoted in his notes

: it forms "a circle closed on the outside," a private world peopled by appearances - the pathos that clings toTiresias is the way his watching of behavior does not translate into empathetic understanding - typist and clerk too remain solitary and mysterious, indicating little of their inter-
iority to Tiresias or to one another - all are alone in their thoughts and actions most of the time,
and deriving their sense of personhood, for better or worse, from this solitude - Tiresias typical
of the magical thinking of the period which combined solipsistic withdrawal together with fanta-
sies of total surveillance - suffering born out of self-deception and egotism is seen by Tiresias to
be universal, prevalent in the lives of the ancients as well as the moderns, among the heroes and
saints of yore as well as among the typists and clerks of the modern world - the disorganized
flow of past events in his consciousness is so vivid and arresting that these events become pre-
sent - he relives his memories as Kurtz does in Heart of Darkness, witnessing all his past lives

“ín every detail of desire, temptation and surrender” - the collage of images, mystifying thought
and dramatic encounters so vivid they become reality, a private world peopled by appearances

229 “In Bergsonian terms, Tiresias assumes the role of the poem’s central self because it is his
superficial social self who provides the stability necessary to relate the poem. Since all the char-
acters in the poem “meet in Tiresias,” then in Bergsonian terms they are all layers of Tiresias’

self, merging and interpenetrating throughout the poem. The many other voices that vie for pro-
minence provide the subject matter of the poem just as the layers of self which exist below the
social self are ultimately responsible for its shape. The tension which Bergson and Eliot see as
existing due to the collision of the various aspects of self provides a dynamic element in the
poem, while placing these aspects within a superficially stable self (Tiresias) gives the poem a
semblance of stability. The complexity of Tiresias’ role is, therefore, within the bounds of what

Eliot stated in his note to the poem itself” (Gillies)

229 “Having said in his "Notes": "What Tiresias sees in fact, is the substance of the poem," Eliot adds, "The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest." He then gives the episode from Ovid in full, in which Ovid's four levels are clearly manifested. At the literal level is
the encounter with the snakes - Tiresias "knows" their knowing. Representing the figurative level, he is punished by being made an allegory - a "knower" of both man and woman. As the mor-
al mode, he is blinded for not "knowing better" than to take a playful dispute seriously. Finally (anagogically), in return for his loss of sight, Jove gave him the power to "know" the future. This quotation is one of the several ways which Eliot uses to train the perceptions of the reader in
multilevel awareness. Mythic "narrative" is not sequential but simultaneous, requiring prolonged meditation” (McLuhan)

229 "the substance of the poem" which Tiresias "sees" is in fact the private experience of individuals ; what he has seen in the past is much the same, from Thebes to "the lowest of the dead."

But what he "foresuffers" has more significance. As a figure strangely boundless with no definable past and no crystallized present, his observance of a mindless modern affair justifies his opi-
nion that he "throbs between two lives," between man and woman, between history and the spe-
cious present. From his limbo he cannot but validate his own inability to bring relief or to inte-
grate disparate worlds. His role is tragic because even as a prophet seemingly beyond time and
space, he cannot control what is the property of others: " Ί can connect / Nothing with nothing'."

Myth and present seem equally impotent” (Foster)

230 Tiresias remains detached and scornful

231 gross upstart with an unsightly strut - at once primitive and mechanical - 'carbuncular'- full,
deep vowels so unfortunately altered by its human referent - an affected inversion – the implica-
tion that he is heraldically rampant – derived from 'climbing' and 'claw' – luxuriant growth insi-
diously and uncontrollably spreading - yet ‘carbuncular’ transfigures the line - the alchemical
power of language over inflamed skin - the hoi polloi’s time off from Arnoldian anarchy spent in
animalistic copulation

232 'one bold stare' – modifies both 'arrives' and 'clerk', not only describing him at the moment of
his arrival but also suggesting the whole contour of his character – arrogance and paltriness – a
kind of erection – an alerted, almost military style – a go-to-it – every syllable deployed with a
placing moral intelligence – his assurance and “bold” stare, his ego swollen to maximum tumes-
cence, his avidity to overwhelm someone weaker than he, suggests his own ultimate fragility -
the clerk a creature who occasionally has an itch that requires scratching

232 “the ‘One bold stare’ of the house-agent's clerk, put back in the bourgeois context where
staring is one of the major lapses in manners, does not hold up the mirror to a simple gesture, but
illuminates the underlying conditions that make a mere clerk's swagger possible. What is ex-
posed is the "fact" that clerks in general no longer know their place. What we are to make of this fact is pointedly signaled by the disgust that the specifics of the rendering provoke and the social
distance generated by the Tiresian foresufferance. . . .” (Cooper)

234 the somewhat disreputable class of Yorkshire businessmen 'with deep pockets and short,
stubby fingers', considered at the time to have done remarkably well out of the war

236 a pernickety phrase - the episode a Heideggerian spatialized time that erodes freedom in the
subject and uniqueness in the object and thus neutralizes the perceiver's will in boredom - the
forgetful and paralyzing time of the circulus vitiosus - "When the imagination is allowed to rule this way it prostrates and anesthetizes the soul, robs it of all moral tensions, and makes of life a
dream." (Kierkegaard)

237 prosody is at a formal distance from the clerk's hot, raw, physical energy – the verse washing its hands of his lack of breeding – syntax erases him with the ironically elegant 'endeavours' and

'bestows' – stand-offish diction - the understood pronoun mimes his presumptiveness – he is
merely an agent of lust, not an emotional and morally complete person - a touch of swagger – his
conceit the sub-text of the mechanical syntax – he does not even merit a pronoun - an Augustan
skit, not unlike the clerk's 'one bold stare' in its histrionic and arrogant qualities – an effect of irony given the eighteenth century's studied calm and coherence

238 'unreproved', 'undesired' – formally distant, clinical and abstract expressions that correlate
with the prevailing boredom – an effect of fastidious observation and holding at a distance (the
versification strongly contributing to this) - language is fiercely antagonistic to life – it requires those who act to have their excuses ready - the bouncing burlesquing verse states that meaningless seduction is ludicrous: as dated as the mock-heroic quatrain

235 - 238 a gentle lyric melancholy, with repeatedly disrupted rhythms, automatism of its
cadences and alternate lines aspiring and falling nervelessly - a perfect liaison between the self-
sustaining, gesture of the verse and the presented fact - sustains with a cadenced gravity the mor-
al context in which the dreary business is played out

239 a monitoring perspective at once absent and all-seeing - in his ambivalent and confusing po-
sition, Tiresias, in his unwillingness, or inability, to do anything, seems almost as much a creature of our own moment as the era that produced him - Tiresias' terribly watchful superego de-
nies and distances the horny adolescent youth still somewhere within himself – a brief poker and
ash fire of lust in Tiresias from each such repetition – the zeal of automatons – like the other
characters they feel nothing, expect nothing and resent nothing – the language terse, spare and
uncomplicated -Tiresias was once transformed into a woman as punishment for having watched
the copulation of two snakes in a wood outside Athens ( Ovid l.327-30)

240 the mechanical act, endlessly repeated by the living dead, who, even in the most intimate
moments, remain insular - the act of love so pathetic it is almost shocking - the scene shows not
what man is, but what for a moment he thinks he is

241 the clerk's individuality is submerged in his vanity with the added implication (from the
complicated syntax) that Tiresias is complicit in the emotion so enacting his 'foresuffering' –
each gives and receives nothing-at-all – half-rhymes (at once/response, defence/indifference)

render her capitulation – the automatism of technique - the speaker's voice is keenly sensitive
and aware, but Tiresias's voice giving the routine narration of vanity meeting indifference is spo-
ken in a tone of unadulterated, condescending, disdainful boredom

242 a minimum of involvement requiring absolutely no response – the soulless indifference the
product of industrial era sex - the clerk's technique seems mainly to consist of an utter lack of in-
terest in his partner - in III an alternation between indifference and horror whereas in I it was be-
tween routine and fear - the organised sensibility of the verse lowers on them like a boom – ma-
caronic cadences - the four-square quality boxes them in as if they were specimens being scienti-
fically observed, the external neatness judging and dispatching them – her passivity is as if he is
copulating enthusiastically with a bundle of bones and flesh - again, sexual failure is associated with spiritual crisis and again an aggressor victimizes a passive subject – the rhetoric which
seems such a contrast to the wordless scene it describes not only comments on the theme of lust,
it embodies it - sex is boring in real life and titillating in imagination - E's use of third-person
narrators allows him to create the eroticism of a scene by insisting upon its absence - the culmi-
nation of a quatrain style alternately highly stylized and surprisingly awkward. A meticulous and
even wearisome realism counterpoints and syncopates an otherwise elegant finish in these forma-
lised rhymes - the shamelessness is from the removal of religious taboos from modern behaviour

– Tiresias sees in this affair his own lustful habits, his suffering and his guilt

243 the pathetic potency of the forgetful confronts the appalled impotence of memory – grace
has been withdrawn from him and he is dying of spiritual starvation while conscious of every-
thing - modern London doomed to terrible repetitions of the past, undistanced from the bestial by
the power of memory - constant repetition within such narrow and desolate limits numbs the
mind – London’s inhabitants live out their lives in an iterable fashion, surviving as the spectres
of London through their iterations, even though there is nothing, other than utterance or action,
to connect one to another - connecting nothing with nothing - an entrapping disillusionment and
a nearly pathological apathy - the attempt to invent or witness the new falls back exhausted - the
stripping of illusions ends in nullity - all locations, all trajectories, all directions are ultimately the same - a draining of affinity – the eternal human condition of loss, mutability and desire – he
is not so much the expression of a sensibility as of a world - a painful heightened awareness of
things – his memory loses itself in endless association, incapable of bringing its knowledge of
the past to bear upon the present cf. Gerontius - Tiresias a mind without a body as the persons he
is viewing are bodies without minds – he has foresuffered all because he has experienced sexual-
ity as both male and female, and is correspondingly split between real and ideal and fact and fic-
tion, living in some transcendent dimension where time does not exist – oscillating between per-
spectives on others and on himself he sees himself as a fiction within the organism of history and
also as an isolate, cut off from the rest of mankind – Tiresias a type of the impotent observer
spectator to his own participation In the rituals of a debased civilisation - 'throbbing' as an aspect of the moral ambiguity of his situation

244 having escaped the limits of finitude, Tiresias can see the absence of an authentic self which
human errancy obscures – he sees the sad shortcomings of human desire, man being possessed
by infinite desire though finitely limited - he sees how little control the human has over the
throbbing nature of reality, the gap between desire and attainment – the pain of his conscious-
ness, like that of the Sibyl, is the consequence of a mental accumulation over centuries culminat-
ing in the disaster of modernity - in merging the typist with her surroundings Tiresias reveals
how little there is of a self apart from the world

245 a memory trace of extreme Oedipal suffering – the speaker is condemning the phallic upstart
in himself – the transpersonal and transhistorical anguish of one who suffers both in postwar

London and in 'Thebes below the wall' – in Dante, Thebes was the city of particular, secular
damnation

247 Tiresias’ quasi-identity with fallen man is enclosed in parentheses and sandwiched neatly by
his condescending, cynical, and mocking description - he foresuffers all with extreme patience,
but his disdain suggests that he resents carrying the burden of guilt from others' weaknesses - the forgetting of being with a vengeance

247 “easy analogies fail: is Tiresias like a closed- circuit camera with foresight? Is he like those
photographers who, during the siege of Sarajevo, would camp out at known hot spots waiting for
innocent passersby to be shot? Is his inaction a symptom of anomie, an illustration of McLuhan’s
claim that “the price of eternal vigi-lance is indifference”? Does he represent a more thorough
breakdown in the relation between knowledge and action that some see as an effect of omnipre-
sent surveillance? In fact, we would argue, none of these scenarios quite works; rather, Tiresias’s
actions (or inactions) have something to do with the condition of being an artist during a time of
social unrest and uncertainty—and are best understood as an exploration of the possibility of
authority within the peculiar temporal logic” (Rosen & Santesso)

248 groping down the stairs after such a quick, insectival coupling, he becomes a piece of inco-
herence, antithetical to the heart of light – the intense despair and depression that follows in the
wake of meaningless sexual excitement - Tiresias's complacent superiority, as he, who has
learned by necessity to find his way in the dark with relative ease, sneers at the clerk who gropes
his way because the stairs are unlit - the difference between the quester and Tiresias parallels that
between the Publican and the Pharisee - the clerk, like Satan, symbolically descends down into
the darkness, and underscores the mechanical aspect - dismembered into a stare, an air of assur-
ance and exploring hands – a scapegrace lack of ceremony – the tendency of characters in the
poem to be reduced to mere emblems of vice, lust, weakness and mediocrity - a psychological
hell in which the speaker is quite alone, gazing in fascinated horror at his mental projections - no
principle of asceticism or spiritual taboo can now check the drive of desire. For E it will reach its
crisis in a hallucinatory state of continuous and ultimately meaningless mutation. Its discourse
will become irredeemably incoherent, reduced to stammers, charlatanism and silence, the din of
a corrupted inwardness. The humanist injunction to self-knowledge ends, once the resources of
mere personality have been spent, in nihilism

215-248 “Tiresias adopts a formally elaborate, but oddly slipping syntax that suits the immense
spread of his experience and the probable strangeness and sleepiness of a mind that has endured
so long and seen and suffered so much...bisexuality and sagging longevity of mind focus the
chance splits and perpetuities, the tenuous orders of the waste land, abject region of heterogene-
ity, abrupt disruptions, strayings, violated borders...' (Bedient)

215-248 “the representations of literature and sexuality in The Waste Land join in overdeter-
mined settings, as Eliot draws upon the capital of a certain body of texts for his poetic treatment
of failed passions, violent conquests, mechanical copulations, and purgative fires. In the strange
logic of condensation, literary potency and sexual potency become a single problem, their result
a common issue. The literary surrender of self that negatively produces an authorizing tradition
coincides with images of emasculation that negatively body forth a sensation of the sexual sub-
lime. In the metaphor of the corpus we may avoid imposing an a priori discrimination between
sexuality and textuality, resist totalizing the poem’s vital differences of detail in some metacriti-
cal order, and point toward the relations of crisis—between the body and writing, nature and cul-
ture,
women and men, sons and fathers, talents and traditions—that sound throughout The Waste

Land” (Jay)

249 vanity thus has been dulled in her - as she looks, awareness disappears - the verse takes
leave of her almost equitably, resigning her to a limbo of mild, mechanical throbs and habitual
circlings as automatic and soothing as those of the gramophone

250 she is a blank page on which desire has been deleted – the power of memory asserts what
mirror and gramophone deny, the interaction and mutual qualification of past and present – the
pathetic potency of the forgetful confronts the appalled impotence of memory, the accumulation
of time and history undone, doomed to bestial repetitions, in a world where we can connect 'noth-
ing with nothing', as we ascend into a primal dark

251 like some empathetic, omniscient narrator he can read her thoughts

252 the form of love without the function of love – the flatness of actual life - the nervous agita-
tion of syncopated gramophone music - the failure of subject and object to merge for a non-dua-
listic moment is especially pointed and poignant

249-252 a darkly comic effect (feminine rhymes) - a disjuncture between the low subject matter
and the formal style with which it is described

253 another muted voice of a wronged woman (Olivia in The Vicar of Wakefield) - but in Gold-
smith sex outside of marriage constitutes family tragedy - here, it barely generates a ripple

254 the only outlet for nervous energy is this self-absorbed pacing – stately quatrains

255 an almost post-coital ease – in effect the hand is devoid of any sort of feeling – she is merely
an extension of a machine – the hand no longer the instrument of human reason - now her ges-
ture erases precisely that boundary between willful human action and the helplessness of automa-
tism - paradoxically the gesture also invokes what might be called a lyrical temporality and ef-
fect for it interrupts, shocks, and freezes the scene - Gesture, here, is being summoned to substi-
tute for speech, being assigned a total expressivity that rests upon the ineffability of what is to be expressed and becomes the consummate figure for what cannot be figured, a sign of what resists,
exceeds, or dwarfs signification - a will-to-automatism in the poem animating the pleasures and
the psychopathologies of everyday life

256 a cheery automatism which is at the same time the realisation of her blocked emotions – a
softening of detached observation towards anguished sympathy - it will become a pervading un-
ease that will barely mask terror - a numbed sense of hopelessness cf. Baudelaire for whom it is
better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing-at least we exist – good and evil now
unintelligible concepts – people are as incapable of lust as of mystical experience, or transcen-
dence of any kind that can rise above quotidian consciousness – a mocking rhyme yet the Gold-
smithian music sympathizes with what the seer would repudiate - in the age of mechanical repro-
duction we are all bored (just as Melanesians in contact with modernity are) - the text itself the
reassembled bits of old recordings, sampled and then repurposed

253-256 ' E makes Goldsmith's line seem off-key by moving the innocuous seeming 'and' back from the start of Goldsmith's second line to the end of his first....the original tetrameter had a dying and melancholy fall, but E, turning it into a pentameter, has given its wistfulness a questio-
ningly acerbic edge – questioningly because the added 'and' is unassertive; it unsteadies the
rhythm of the line without asserting a new one. From here E's lines can shift into the surer penta-
meter irony of

'She smoothes her hair... The melodrama of Olivia's remorse contrasts with the absence of drama,
the remorselessness of, the 'automatic hand'. But even as E's lines suppress the lyric voice, its im-
portunity can be felt. The phrase 'her departed lover' is plainly ironic, but it acknowledges the
possibility of what is absent. What is choked back signifies as much as what breaks into strangu-
lated utterance, the sadly jaunty 'Well now that's done:and I'm glad its over' ' (Reeves)

256 ' we have to see in such incidents as the seduction of the typist who lets her body be used
like a public urinal because 'she is bored and tired' the full horror of denied humanness' (Frye)

256 “sex has become a kind of enervated reflex. Love is reduced to the purely personal, detached
from past or present or wider society-in short mere copulation' (Brooks)

256 “the metric, the rhyme scheme, and the ending sight of the 'automatic hand' that 'puts a re-
cord on the gramophone' enforce a feeling of remorseless repetition of a scene 'foresuffered' a
thousand times in memory and desire. Tiresias endlessly the scene of the crime, the origin of his
own 'blinding' or castration in witnessing the difference between men and women. What he is
seeing is substance unredeemed by spirit-the 'disassociation of sensibility' as E technically called
it” (Jay)

257 Ferdinand speaks, amplifying Ariel's dirge on a watery grave and possible rebirth – it is the
music from the gramophone that is creeping upon the waters – the line both listens to what has
just been happening in the poem and anticipates what is to come – a condensed memory of Got-
terdammerung III,i - the gold shines beautifully in the sun as the Rhinemaidens sing the flowing
motif Wei-a-la, wei-a la... a struggle into lyric utterance though they can at least articulate more
than the violated and tongueless Philomela - the sensuously remembered fragment, lodged in the
mind, has now erupted into consciousness - a cinematic dissolve from the gramophone record via
the Tempest quote to the 'pleasant whining' – a mental event becomes a warp in time, playing a
musical saw - a musical glissando and presto, he is himself again – cf the creeping rat – a miracu-
lous purification of flesh into what does not fade – a primal religious shudder, hairs raised in re-
sponse to the praeternatural

259 All cities as well as London – in particular, a reference to the 'square mile', or financial dis-
trict – in the sibilants not only rebuke and accusation but tears of pity - a small, sudden shift to-
wards the light - hence a possibility of forgiveness and thus redemption - the city an otherness
that is not simply other – London is realized only with a confession that it is not realized - it ‘is’

nothing as such, but simply names 'otherness' or 'alterity', which is what is being apprehended by
the speaker's consciousness as the wholly and absolutely other - belonging, being- such, is here
only the relation to an empty and indeterminate totality (London) - impossible to connect to
others, London functions only as a border or threshold at the limit of representation - the histori-
cally grounded experience of subjectivity’s nothingness, its own ‘being’ being inseparable from
the urban surrounding in which it finds itself and so gives utterance to that orientation - what is

‘actual’ is defined according to the interweaving of space and time, which, as a phenomenon, can
never be repeated – I connects nothing with nothing – The poetic or lyric ‘I’ are expressions of
singularity to which the city gives shape. And they are singularities rather than beings, properly
speaking, precisely because, in being merely the articulations of that which intersects in space
and time within London, and which returns iterably at another moment, in another guise, they
have neither existence nor essence as such. That so many voices arrive from other literary works
admits to this insubstantiality, this absence of being - the atmosphere of Baudelaire's line is ap-
propriated the repeated "O City, City." - the "jerky motions of these huddled puppets" aims at the effect of Baudelaire's "monstres disloques" who "trottent, tout pareils a des marionnettes" in "Les Petites Vieilles."(as with Baudelaire’s Paris, the inhabitants of E's London are "dazed," "half stunned," "knowing little what they think, and much less what they feel")

259 ' As with so many unassimilable reminders of the way in which identity is shot through with
the signs of its alterity, the past is always at E’s back from time to time (l. 196). This phrase, si-
milar to the comment that the subject only sometimes hears (l.259) is powerfully suggestive of ir-
regular, unpredictable, and therefore uncontrollable transmission given to random broadcasts.

The motions of the City felt, its sounds heard, its texts returning to be cited, albeit incompletely
and with incomprehension, the City’s force is thus maintained, the nominal indicators of topogra-
phy so many hieratic clues in the archive that is London. The traces of literary language and
other cultural discourses intrude as a general economy of the City’s identities and histories, mak-
ing audible the noise of codes, as so many remainders irreducible to, and marking the rupture of,
the economic(s of the) subject...If everywhere is foreign, and one is everywhere a foreigner, Lon-
don offers the possibility endlessly of the eruption of the fragment, the ruin, and the revelation of
the singular experience of difference, despite the enforced regulation desired by the middle
classes. The city is composed and discomposed not by fragments to be assembled, to be con-
nected to one another, but as so many events, sites, locations, voices, caricatures, ruins and in-
ventions of the other. The poem, The Waste Land, is structured like the city, from out of which it
unearths its pastiches and palimpsests, suggesting forcefully that this is all there is. There is no
centre, no governing order or truth to London and to the identities informing and deforming it. In
its predicative assemblage then, The Waste Land seems initially to assert the emptiness of parti-
cular culturally determined examples of selfhood. This takes place in a modern world where all
that can be grounded occurs apparently only in endless repetitions of the selfsame , through an
economy of containment and the concomitant evacuation of intellectual energies .Yet despite
this, the poem’s bleak hope lies simultaneously within that very same world, in the emergence, as

Derrida has it, of invention, of disjointing, disruptive and haunting fluxes, all of which may tend
towards and so seize the merest glimmers of invention. Inventing an apparently machinic poetry,
making of poetics a tekhne, Eliot kills off verse to bring back to poetry the vision of poets, a vi-
sion that is both a poesis and a mnemotechnic of he city. This is what is recognized by Hugh

Kenner in describing The Waste Land as being a form without a form, a genre that is no genre.

Without disagreeing with Kenner in the least, I would like to supplement his assessment, that the
no-form, the no-genre that is The Waste Land is also radically inventive. It invents a performa-
tive discourse on the city, each and every other city bound upon the wheel as it were of The City.

A weak messianic hope therefore remains, not a representation of the New Jerusalem or the City
of God, but nevertheless emerging from within the notion of a waste land. There are to be read
the traces of a cryptogram, as E has it and as we have argued, of other Londons, the others of

London, the others within London, others’ Londons, and London’s others. Herein lies the poem’s

‘ideological potency’, to borrow Terry Eagleton’s phrase in his assessment of E’s classicism. The
inventive power of E’s text – and equally the inventive power of the London he comes to appre-
hend – is ‘in its refusal of static, rationalist forms’ (Eagleton 1978: 147). E’s writing responds to
the invention the city inaugurates repeatedly from within the habitual, which is a ‘labile, self-
transformative organism extended in space and time, constantly reorganised by the [idioculture
of the] present’, clutching and penetrating ‘the turbulent, fragmentary character of contemporary
experience’ (Eagleton 1978: 147). In this invention of the city, The Waste Land dreams a poetry
equal to the experience of every other London in all the city’s experiences of the singular, which
is to say a writing ‘without the horizon of reappropriation, programmation, institutional legitima-
tion’ and allowing ‘the adventure or the event of an entirely other to come’ (Derrida 1989:61)'

(Wolfreys)

260 both the pub and church, in different ways, represent the unified, organic community – a
sense of the phantasmatic fleeting discernment of ’somethig else’ beyond modernity - a driving
desire to escape from the present, the wasteland of atomised souls - the lowest possible limit of
abjection - an image of the necessary ultimate dark which the mind must endure before turning to
the light (as revealed in the next lines)

261 the same old song – both clamant instrument and the subdued music of sociality - commerce
of the dreamed and the real - a refusal to impose any coherent external structure on what passes -
the immediate workings of the poem open to the eye - the substance is sharply felt, but is often
organised so that all becomes interaction of seer and seen, consciousness in process - the penta-
meter dwells with qualified but real contentment - a refrain expressing desolation – a release
from routine, a brief moment of warmth – the unexpected possibility of happiness - only the un-
earthly music of death and transformation (as invoked in The Tempest for example) will carry us out beyond the endless rounds of birth, copulation and death - even the mandoline conjoins with
water to unclot and dissolve in him the meaner self-hoardings and tighter self-inquisitions – cf.

the dirty water and fallen speech of II and the fatal because romantic combination of water and
music in Tristan of I – perhaps the music is a harbinger of renewal and ease – 'whining' aurally
made pleasant by 'mandoleen' (from the italian 'mandolino') - for the first time there is a feeling
of simple goodness and human warmth; and although these qualities in themselves do not consti-
tute grace, they accompany it and signal its presence - the speaker a city worker, only strolling,
as E himself was fond of doing, to Lower Thames Street during the lunch hour

262 sounds from the public bar – grittily particularised - real things are swimming up out of men-
tal states of strangeness and reverie, from ‘the brown land, unheard’, to ‘the pleasant whining of
a mandoline’ - iambs easily strummed – a chatter from within – merrily quickened music with
skipping scales and staccato recurrences and a charmed echoing resonance – cacophonous 'clat-
ter' rhymingly eased with 'chatter' - the beer slops themselves momentarily enobled – an instant
of eternal silence

262 “the fishmen's "clatter" and "chatter" from inside the bar, a convivial noise, whether dignified or not, that implies a friendly relatedness that contrasts sharply with all the previous failed
relationships in the poem. Together with the mandoline music, it creates for a brief moment a
sense of well-being, of participation in a human community still simple enough to be responsive
to natural impulses, still spiritually sound, a community where salvation is still possible. They are unquestionably connected with the life force, both with the search for its renewal, represented by the Fisher King's need to be healed, and with the force itself, represented by the fish-
men's trade” (Huberman)

263 the camera eye moves along the waterfront - fish are a fertility or life symbol (and a fish also
the signature of Christ from the early Christians' well-known use of the fish as a secret sign-

ICHTHUS- Iesous Christos Theou Uios Soter, and thus the maimed and impotent king is a fisher-
man) - living by the river and the church the fishmen i.e fishmongers, are one of the few positive
manifestations of life - the wounded Fisher King is recuperated, temporarily, not by curing his
impotence but by imagining him as a simple fishman having lunch with friends - the church an
unused relic of a past community and, exuding communal warmth and a feeling of moral coher-
ence, becomes a rare affirmation amid epidemic isolation – in this poem they can only exist in an
alternative universe and the reader is required to extend his imagination - detente with aspects of
the lower fertility - the present itself prolonged which, potentially, is the true, eternal present

263/4 monosyllabic alliteration and the rhymed, paired words themselves the deliberately crafted
architectural pattern of a facade – more obliquely it recurs with the syllables 'splic' and 'splen' -

'hold' a reinforcement to the enduring preciousness of

'gold' – from the landmarks mentioned in this section of the poem it appears that the speaker has
been going round in meaningless circles

264 the six brief syllables and suspended verb seem to wall in an adoration no longer able to re-
strain itself, pouring forth in a rich profusion that is in sharp contrast to the poem's asceticism –
the lines build toward, aurally build the columns of, the riverside church in Lower Thames Street

-strangely isolated and haunting two words - the name itself rings out like a bell - it enshrines the
speaker's devotion to the non-verbal, non-objectified silence cf. Philomela's inviolable voice –
implicit is the perhaps delusory hope that 'song' might succeed where mere speech fails

265 a sudden blaze of light - something remotely beautiful and solemn – ‘inexplicable’ - the
mystery of a faith made visible - the rhythm itself worshipfully breathless - the ceiling touched
with gold on chaste rosettes, so flooded with light from the clear clerestory windows that even on
a typical gray London day, the effect is dazzling, almost "inexplicable." (but what gives the interior of the church its peculiar radiance is the sheer contrast with the dismal black of the church's
outer walls and the whole surrounding area) - the lines of this passage imply or relate to some
contrast of dark and light, of sin and salvation - the restoring power of the music is all the greater because of the darkness around it - the classical epithet “Ionian' dignifies and straitens the image,
suggesting both purity and incalculable riches – the vowels in 'Ionian' themselves embrace the
two qualifiers 'white' and 'gold' – and too an opulent echo of 'n' and the four major stresses fall-
ing on two pairs of vowels, 'in', 'splen', 'on' and 'gold' - a positive counterpoint to 'white bodies'

and 'golden cupidons' – a transcendence of the too-earthen brown of the unreal city - the beauty
is inexplicable in itself, but so also is its relation to the belief it celebrates; and there is also the fine 'glitter' in the sound of the word - what the church holds is 'inexplicable' but not unhinted – a world apart from the material world, perhaps suggestive of the Grail – Zion by the waters of Babylon – a case of frustrated natural impulse as he does not seize the moment (or is it that salva-
tion must be achieved by self-sacrifice - suffering and the surrender of self are required for the
healing of spiritual sickness and the renewal of life - a church surrounded by poverty and the poverty into which religion has fallen

257-265 a series of contrasts, framed between the two and a half concluding lines of the St. Mag-
nus passage and the single line from Shakespeare that opens the sequence - all nine of these lines
imply or relate to some contrast of dark and light, of sin and salvation, the grime of London and
the dirty Thames and the glow of white and gold, the light, grace and regeneration of Ariel’s mu-
sic and the physical darkness of unlit stairs and gramophone music

257-265 “Between a nearly inaudible preposition and a brief, monosyllabic verb, "Magnus Mar-
tyr" rings out like a bell, compelling attention and declaring its
special significance. When listened to in this way, furthermore, for sound and root meaning
rather than for specific reference, "Magnus" ceases to be a given name and resumes instead its original Latin meaning, "great." "Magnus Martyr" thus becomes "Great Martyr"; and martyrdom, or the sacrifice of self, through suffering and love, to the needs of another, becomes the
way to the new life made manifest in the church's white and gold. At the same time, since the ar-
chetypal exemplar of suffering for love's sake is surely Christ, then Christ himself may well be
the "Magnus Martyr" implicitly invoked in those strangely isolated and haunting two words; and the possibility of his hidden presence not only confirms and magnifies the sense of the name, but
suggests the direction in which Eliot himself, "beyond the frontiers" of his own consciousness, was apparently being drawn. Since, however, to submit to martyrdom, to accept the necessity for
self-sacrifice, is too
difficult a way for most of us to follow, it is no wonder that both Eliot and his protagonist at
this point falter and turn aside. Yet the fact remains that the vision they turn from, embodied in

Magnus Martyr's name and "inexplicable splendour," persists at the very heart of the poem, and by its presence there testifies that even in the dark there is light, and even in the wasteland,
water” (Huberman)

266 brisk, staccato measures – a two-beat rhythm, swift and choppy – an unvarying pulse in their
single nature – a verbal gusto and vibrant rhythms – a switch to small, terse segments, as if Ferdi-
nand's voice were still there, but transformed - heroines of the lower vitality they stroke their
way through language – watery, they sing with the slipping impulsiveness of a river - their song
drinks in all appearances, non-judgementally, with a primal appetite for sensory spectacle – the
river is endowed with the persecutory horror of its nymphs and becomes a nightmare of heaving
slime - the change of style and pace a pretext for the speaker's self-evasion and self-extension,
his mercurial identity

269 pleasurable echoes of 'tar' – by taut, out-pushing tenacity, rather than languor, the lines re-
quire that 'barges' should not let 'tar' lie, but be freshly re-echoed in 'the turning tide'

270 portentous 'red sails' as if dimly remembering the awesome, ambiguous accents on 'red rock'

– a light accent - the colour of the sails daubed with an incisive, disturbing twist of the palette
knife – a Conradian style

271 the word suspensefully prolonged – wide-eyed isolation, a heavy, swinging feeling is wanted
for the spar – with the 'turning tide', 'red sails' do not hang lifelessly but, in a curt thrust against
the rhyme with 'tide,' swivel harder 'Wide/To leeward - out of the extremity of its own imagined length 'spar' points to 'tar'

277 embodiments of the river itself, but stilled and quickened into feminine form and voice and
seem wholly song – an onomatopoeic, agonized wailing of a
degenerating emotional state - the breakdown of signification - the river is their intelligence, theirs its stream of impressions, its sensory genius - the Thamesdaughters cannot connect their
inner feelings with anything that is vital or significant – a feeling of paltriness about them - if the river is slack and soiled so are they – and if brisk so are they too – the speaker refreshed they
will sing with gusto – shallow and dazzling with a flawless adaptation to existence they are pure
surface and creatures of an instinctive lower vitality- a paradisal equivalence between their de-
sires and the things within their reach – creatures out of this world they represent a perfect equa-
tion between vitality in human form and natural elemental energy – hence the absence of pain
and suffering in their existences – like the mermaids in 'Prufrock' - previous characters have shown numbed negation and either dulled or desperate reactions - here for the first time are direct expressions of the state of loss - springs of feeling in the speaker, so painfully sealed up, at
last begin to flow - the transmutation of the poem's burden of anguish into song is begun - com-
pares the vulnerability of the twentieth-century women to the gorgeous emotional chill of

Wagner’s nymphs - the grime of the Thames has not just an industrial component but an emo-
tional one as well, the privileging of power over love as in Wagner, whose mythic Rhine regis-
ters the griefs and grievances of the beings who inhabit it

279 brutal aimlessness, the rough swings and blunt, almost accusatory accents now disappear –
the poetry becomes civilly muffled and accompanied by sibilantly pleasant stresses – the image
of order and institutional continuity - 'Leicester' echoes 'the river sweats' - a remarkably similar
passage is in Lawrence's The Rainbow, describing Ursula's reverie, just after she has applied for
a job as a teacher

280 a muscular image - the river in streaming plenitude, pouringly alive throughout its breadth,
ripplingly washed

281 note the purring 'r's' in the line and the passage as a whole

282 a note of enchantment – however glorious the passage is also transient, illicit and unfulfilled,
and ends in a lament for lost beauty – suggestive of Cleopatra's barge but now great passion and
tragedy is petty and passionless

283 the red and gold gilded shell reminiscent of the Ionian white and gold – the world's false
concepts and institutions that we take for real – the boat is just a red-sailed barge - the successive colours, white, red, and gold (indicating liturgically innocence, martyrdom, divinity, and alchemically, ascension to glory through revelation and suffering) is achieved in lines of gathered
tempo - the fire of sterile passions burning against the watery background of the Thames

284 momentum carries the 'gilded shell' forward on the 'swell' - at least in Renaissance times our
senses and instinctive drives could be refreshed by a pagan/christian synthesis – a contrast with

20C drift

285 rhymes with 'oars'

287 they are all carried down the river into the sea, and the moral journey is similar, ending in a
state that 'can connect nothing with nothing', that calls its violation merely the 'broken finger-
nails' of people who expect nothing

288 bells pealing from white towers as against the final dead stroke under the brown fog – no
drifting then but a purposeful and buoyant energy – note the rhyme with shell and swell

280-289 a subtle eroticism in the imagery

285 the river supremely self-contained and gloriously distinct from any energy other than its own

- its darkness indicates suffering, a world responding to the pain of its inhabitants

290 Weialala – the cry seems, by proximity, to almost pour out of 'White' – a sudden breeze or
note of agitation against the river’s calm flow - how should moving water, here a happily indif-
ferent liquid babble, be pierced by pain? - their song has diliquesced into a meaningless ripple of
syllables, the vulnerability of even the most ecstatic past to the mere present of a verbal repeti-
tion that cannot recreate it - nature no longer fertile and overflowing, their songs merely those of
an earthly, mechanical sex - the power of music to express the feelings the conscious mind can-
not admit - not spectres and grotesques but fellow beings - he begins to break out of the prison of
the alienated self, and to re-integrate the 'dead' conscious mind with the suppressed realm of feel-
ing

290 ' a compassion almost palpable, if dry, in the solos sung by the Thamesdaughters...the crime
is the impure life of the senses and this because a selfish greed of appetite drives them. The body
is always a rage of self-reference and even in its decay it milks its decrepitude for pleasures' (Be-
dient)

292 The three Thamesdaughters are speaking in turn and we are again in the
wasteland – she speaks in a manner utterly without hope – concise but emotionally revealing and
colloquial but with an underspoken dignity - this is tight-lipped speech, bitter with all that goes
unsaid – a break-up into sentence shards - as with the subsequent speakers this is a listless,
lonely substitute for song - there is nothing in this world that can check the drive of desire and
thus they all burn – brute matter is not only ground into the flesh but weighs heavily on the spirit

293 London suburbs noted for anonymity, stultifying similitude, mordant drabness and numbing
conformities of habit, without dissent or any pause for reflection – not gardens of love but gar-
dens of loss - a moribund acceptance and rote condition of existence, regularity and repetition
enacting lifeless, mechanical orthodoxy 'bound forever on the wheel' - a formality of syntax
combines with an effect of laconic notation - the ends of so many spokes of a radial map, the hub
of which is the City, mapping E's 'conservative containment strategy without content' (Jameson) -

' Siena mi fe; disfecemi Maremm a' (Dante, Purgatorio V, 134)

294 the tricky line-break springs this pithy and pungent antithesis on us – formidable reserves of
acuity and a sort of tail-lashing unforgivingness – a bizarre union of sex and sardonic intelligence that puts the seal on her disillusion – as much the gesture of childbirth as it is of sex - the
step to degradation flattens in neutral acceptance - the deceptive elevation ironically suggested is
immediately, deliberately and effectively quashed by the artfully suspended follow up 'supine',
giving expectation a sharp thump – the word 'undid', denoting the unfastening of her clothing, re-
calls the catalogue of her drying combinations – a related sense connotes her ruin by seduction,
while a third echoes 'I had not thought death had undone so many', connoting cosmic spiritual
ruin – raising the knees in dumb complaisance she consents to degradation as if it were fore-
doomed - the city which undid her decomposes too in a random concatenation of its parts - body
and city will melt together - the exhaustions of an artificial inwardness that has finally collapsed

- this and the subsequent two women the sexual experiences of the Thamesdaughters - cf."Man-
tua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc/ Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces” (Virgil’s Epi-
taph)

295 the details and the place suggest a hidden act, associated with guilt, along with a lack of re-
sistance, confusion and humiliation – a tightly formed, witty solo, even though she is in a state of
abjection – disillusion has hardened her to the point she expects nothing-at all – she and the other
women share the fate of the river nymphs in that they are all violated – a parody of Elizabeth and

Leicester

296 her tone that of an emotional wreck, tragically conscious of her debasement – fake-naive
confession of a feeling of self-disassociation and oddly self-atomising – so empty of feeling she
cannot even react with anger or resentment - a sense of desolation - with the second daughter's
implied emphasis, it is 'my feet', rather than a regretful self, which 'are at Moorgate, and my
heart' (rising at the line-end in possible grief) 'Under my feet' (in firm downgrading of such a
possibility) - moral bleakness is rendered sad and wistful rather than bitterly resentful or scathing

297 a devastating line-break, implying 'my heart is elsewhere' - a jumble of grammatical frag-
ments and body parts - her heart is not in the right place - she is stepping on it and it is liable to be broken - what she is saying is that the whole of her is at Moorgate and that she is treading on
her dreams, such as they are or were - numbed and pained anatomical synecdoche – bodily parts
unsettlingly dispersed and subordinated – a sense of debasement, an emotional derangement
speaking with chilling matter-of-factness

298 the semi-biblical 'he wept' is murderous - the impossibility of this ’new start’ dogs the poem

299 she makes no comment because signs are now useless - the women have no sense of what is
lost or denied them – she lacks even the resources to “resent,” to “connect,” or to “expect.” - an
inability to feel and the absence even of suffering - with nothing that matters at stake both apolo-
gies and resentments are beside the point - the weary realisation of an awful separation between
potential passion and any actualisation possible in life – medallion-like self-summaries, stoic re-
cognitions of a point of no return - a quasi-prosaic syntax of despair – an unlovely bareness and
inertness of language – drily shrewish – a lucid disillusion in all of these women that can win
sympathy and respect – all three voices speak in choppy, fragmented sentences with the same un-
resenting despair - they are as chillingly 'knowing' as the speaker himself – masterworks of uni-
ted bitterness, traps for innocence, complicated verbal machines – a hopelessly static condition, a
soul that has gone out, followed by a little narrative of the snuffing of whatever romantic flame it may once have suffered – all the women unaware that they are ‘burning’ - the senses have fallen
to ashes and the last remnants of romantic desire dead - a catastrophe of sensibility – emotional
emptiness uttered with a flatness that achieves a finely tuned lack of cadence – depending on the
words the reader stresses, the emotional emptiness comes from either stunned emotions or inade-
quate emotions – like Philomela all the women express only a futile and quiet despair – life’s se-
ductively all-consuming allure has gone awry - there remains only the final extinction of 'death
by water' – she recognises she no longer possesses a distinct 'self' in need of expression – self-ef-
facement in the name of knowledge follows effacement in the name of power – the recognition
of her essential emptiness the beginning at least of the possibility of redemption, pointing to a
purgatorial cleansing – she can become a vessel for the expression of transcendent meaning, as
force and horror

299 ' In Eliot’s hands, the whole sordid history of sexual seduction that The Waste Land portrays,
culminating in these last three instances, is introduced primarily as a vivid and dramatic way of
demonstrating and emphasizing how the seductive vitality of life itself, of the call to risk life, can be debased into its own brutal, brutish opposite in acts of violence, emotional or physical or both,
one against another” ( Murphy)

299 ' The body and the city melt together, no longer themselves but not yet other. It is as if the
metaphor were stuck between the tenor and the vehicle, transfixed in an eternal hesitation. Both
the woman and the city have been raped, but the "he" seems passive in his violence, weeping at his own barbarity. The victim, too, consents to degradation as if it were foredoomed: 'I raised my
knees / Supine .... What should I resent?'... 'Un-done', the woman's body crumbles in a synec-
dochic heap of knees, heart, feet, weirdly disorganised: 'My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart /

Under my feet.' But the city which undid her decomposes, too, in a random concatenation of its
parts - Highbury, Richmond, Kew, Moorgate - and ends in broken fingernails on Margate

Sands...itinerant and indeterminate, the "I" slips from the woman to the city, and then assumes the voice of Conrad's Harlequin in Heart of Darkness, who apologises for a humble and
exploited race. At last it merges with the "I" who came to Carthage in St Augustine's Confessions. As the last faltering words suggest, it is impossible to "pluck" the speaking subject out of the conflagration of the poem's idioms. The 'I' cannot preserve its own identity intact against the
shrieking voices which assail it, "scolding, mocking, or merely chattering" according to their whim.In The Waste Land, the only voice which is "inviolable" is the voice that does not speak, but only sings that phatic, faint la la ' (Maud Ellmann)

300 expecting nothing she is now ‘broken’ and mentally confused by a world of lost connections

- a site of lower middle-class tourism - or it may be the artificial beach in Bishop’s Park, Ful-
ham, called ‘Margate Sands’ as the sand was imported from Margate in Kent, and Fulham is
more in accord with the place names here - chimes with Moorgate – E for a time was at a sanitor-
ium at Margate during the composition of the poem

301 a symptom of neurasthenic pain – she is bereft of a personal 'I' - even his words fall apart -

‘Nothing with nothing’ deflates ‘I can connect’

302 an inner chaos and bewilderment at the meaninglessness of life - the "death" by water of the

Thames maidens lies in their inability to find meaning in "the event" - this section’s eventual de-volution into a series of verbal shards and sentence fragments - we can hear the poet's own ex-
pression of despair, a despair not personal merely but reflecting a universal experience of the

Buddhist duhkha, or the sorrow stemming from the “deception of all worldly experience” - her
hollow experience becomes deep enough to provoke recognition of the "non-ego" and pain becomes a form of purification (“burning”) rather than a burden of despair

303 this is referring to her seducer – he is left with the ‘dirty’ residues of the past - her eyes seemingly glaze over and she waxes impressionistic – an evocatively exact imagist equation for the
futility and abjection of striving amid stony rubbish – a felt violation, whether of body or soul or
both - these fingers, in attempting to 'hold on tight' against physical threat, have momentarily
clutched, then sunk, victim of some psychotic collapse -“broken” is the sign of Eliot’s sexual
failure, shattered memory, and disorganized language - a lack of desire and ambition, mired in
memory and anomie

304 the helpless and depraved state of a society whose cultural fabric is in tatters – an inability
to sustain coherent thought, dwindling to glossolalia – that which builds in the verse-line is the
rising expectancy of others, not herself, falling to a small, emotional bareness which will be sung
to by the now barely audible river chorus – the anonymous voice takes pride in belonging to a
community of suburban conformity and humility - the very lines enact the unadventurous senti-
ment of the collective psyche for which this voice speaks - the religious resonance of the phrase

‘‘humble people,’’ like the allusions to Wagner and Elizabeth, functions as a sardonic diminution
of the three singers and of the paltry inwardness that they express - here in deceptively mild ex-
pression is E’s cynical dyspepsia manifested to the middle classes once more - the intensity of

E’s animosity is sounded out in the apparent reasonableness of utterance, which still manages to
imply complaint in its repetition of ‘business’, and the fact of its limitations as indicated through
the location of the family home, the destination for the annual holiday and the remembrance of a
day’s excursion to the somewhat wealthier, and certainly genteel suburbs of south-west London –
the litany of paltry middle-class resentments and discontents render the sexual surrender all the
more dismal

305 a bodily fragmentation and discontinuity of experience – the ‘I’ cannot preserve its own
identity intact against the shrieking voices that assail it in the text - the reader cannot ‘pluck’ the speaking subject out of the conflagration of idioms - the helplessness of Tiresias to organise the
atrophy and entropy he reviews – all is incoherence - exhausted flesh and shattered community
will subsequently fuse in purgatorial conflagration – the elemental obliteration of physical self –
a montage – items flicker in and out of the reader's gratuitous points of attention in random fluc-
tuations of consciousness – Hell is the state of being alone and in this situation, as in a bad dream
or a psychotic delusion subconscious anxiety is projected onto human and non-human objects –
the women mourn their violation and loss of the past, the events not directly narrated but
mourned from some future moment – the material event is subordinated to an abstract lament for
modernist decay generally – she articulates the rhetorical function of her own body, acknowled-
ging herself as metaphor, echoing in her violation the condition of humanity in the waste land,
undone and sexually erased – hers is a face wiped clean of secular illusion, a face brought low
before the Absolute – her body a receptacle and become the logos whose meaning is an expres-
sion of some greater power – the interpenetration between the City of God and the City of Man –
the women all speak their effacement - their nerveless, flat songs falter on one word – ‘‘Nothing’’

306 he is finishing the song and ironically connecting it with meaning which has failed him – the
line hangs in thin air - nonsense language yet with overtones of lament - heard from very far
away, as if warbled by the Rhine- maidens as they disappear - a final expression of listlessness -
mirrors the symptoms of a nervous disorder in its inability to sustain coherent thought, and
dwindling to glossolalia - an echo of the gramophone, again ironic – a contemporary suburban
woman's acerbic, poor Ophelia routine – she is awarded for her pains with a pure art which is
powerless and desolate -"la, la." - the repetition a listless and mocking post-nymphic echo –
merely tra la la – an ironically distanced interjection – almost a casual and dismissive ring, com-
ing as a 'who cares?' - a nadir in the poem where all value has disappeared - a musical throwing
up of hands – their poignant song cut off perhaps as an emblem of their emotional debility – yet
unlike the typist they can recognize the fact of their loss - female lives that have sunk or
dwindled past the phase where romantic illusions are still entertained – defunctive lyricism col-
lapses into whimsical madness - the personal integrity of individuals, the redemptive potential of
intimacy in personal relationships, free choice, and instrumental rationality have disappeared -
the briskness of these verbal fragments is curiously unhappy and flat – a witty yet bored effi-
ciency and low in tone – a severe shutdown of lyricism - truncated, the siren song will be over-
whelmed by fire

307 the sudden voice change demanded by an assertion – the individualized 'I' returns with the
force of Augustine, a clamourous intrusion into the compliant, unresentful mood of the previous
passage - 'red sails' still carry the leman, like St Augustine, to Carthage – Carthage, like Mylae,
was familiar to the Phoenician Sailor, the card given to the speaker

308 damning urban fires of lust - a tormented prayer delivered in an anguished pitch, the erup-
tion of the speaker's own agony, before evaded in personifications of others and following the
tracks of an historical maze – we burn with desire for the things of this world - the craving that
devours man, binds him to the turning world and prevents him from attaining nirvana or union
with the divine essence - a purifying process - sexual desire turned into religious language - its
flame the power to release the spirit – redirection from the fire of concupiscence to the fire of the

Spirit - a man seized by some stronger power than himself - a movement towards an ascetic dis-
position - a devout ejaculation, surprising his self-dramatizations, the 'dirty' fingers of his voyeurism – gasps, twists that signify violent spins and that reduce sweeps of unnecessary narrative de-
tail to an understood, swift, world-departing blur – ghostly pentameters - a repetitive choric feel -
dangling gerund, which may suggest either a satisfactory purgation, the burning-out of sin, in the
divine fire that transforms and purifies, or a sense of being continuously consumed by one’s own
burning desires - syntax itself totally consumed in this confessional, repentant and anguished line

– and the corpus of literature itself is burning - a kind of incantation embodying the human strug-
gle with reality, and, more narrowly, the consuming passion of lust - an involuntary act of contri-
tion, acknowledging his complicity with all he has seen - the sin of the actors is in the sterile
burning of their lust, with heat but without light and as opposed to the refining fire of Purgatory

– the activity of the senses(fire) on the soul(water) – the Soul can reincarnate at will in Fire and
when it does there will be a revelation - E uses the sensual as a typology for the spiritual, essen-
tially from a belief in the transmuting power of poetry - fire may be an image representing the
lust of the flesh or the purity of the spirit - the Fire Sermon was preached by the Buddha against the fires of lust, anger, envy and the other passions that consume men – the sensations themselves are on fire – most critically, the senses are responsible for the instability and unreliability of our knowledge – all becomes meaningless when knowledge strips value from transcendence -

' the eye is burning:visible things are burning....with what fire is it burning? I declare unto you
that it is burning with the fire of lust...' - Tiresias has foresuffered it all – the burning of lust, the sterility of love, the physical and spiritual drought, can be quenched only by the coming of the
life-giving water, though this may mean paradoxically, as it does in IV, physical death by water

309 and so they clutch and sink into the waters of Leman unless they are plucked out – biblical
firebrands plucked from the fire – breath-short ejaculations – Divinity exercising its power on
our behalf - passivity before earthly aggression reflects spiritual weakness, but passivity before
divine power makes grace possible - to be plucked out is to die to this world through the power
and election of God, or to empty oneself of ego and release from this world - the speaker has be-
gun the process of being no longer for this world - the series of diminishing fragments mark the
gradual submergence of self in the higher role of prophet - he becomes the burning vessel of the

Lord, the inspired voice of the fire-spirit (the Buddha’s fire sermon) - for a brief moment he ex-
periences the grace of God - grandly insistent on his personal salvation, yet in the following line
left clutching at the air – a more softly spoken energy is invigorated - abridgements of instant
speech and thought working epitomizingly - here they are too vertiginous and ecstatic for nic-
eties of syntax – oral, swift, contemporaneous and intimate with the nerves – a conversion of
writing, by intensity, into speech – writing over the surface of Augustinian quotation to speak it
anew and trying to surprise and baffle momentarily even the reader's voice – the speaker, like

Augustine, cries to be plucked out of the whirlpool, the senselessly pointless cycles of birth, co-
pulation and death – the wish for release, for removal from the world of desire - an invocation of
the power to resist temptation, but the battle with the senses cannot be victorious unless assisted
by divine grace - the original quote is 'I entangle my steps with these outward beauties, but Thou
pluckest me out, O Lord' (from statement to outcry)

310 a burning consciousness - demoralized, imprisoned within a suffering female body, the
speaker’s's voice takes on an anguished pitch, the serene prescription for detachment of the Bud-
dha's Fire Sermon now a tormented prayer for release from desire

310 "One now not with women or even with kings and princes, but with church fathers, priests of
priests; one now not with lost sons but with fathers of wisdom, he feels lifted out of the feminine
and demonic cauldron of sensuality and hence
from the jaws of death: as violently plucked out as a fish is pawed from a stream, saved from its
life of abject writhings. For him, no more nature, or as little as
possible. Now he knows: the mother's flowery blossom is on fire, the father's
frigid austere law comparatively a bower of bliss, and the Unnameable itself the true name of
joy" (Bedient)

311 awash in the intolerable tension of sexual anxiety - a syntactic ambiguity here – 'burning'

may define the means by which one is plucked out as well as the state from which one is plucked

– the preceding lines strain towards this incandescent word – or the last lines falter forward in a
diminuendo, hardly making it to the final isolated syllable before petering out – the final word
suspended and syntactically floating – the unresolved cadence and irresolution that nothing is closed or decided - syntax enacts the abolition of both object and subject, "me" and "Lord," leaving only the process, "burning. " - the word understated, tragic and indicative of what happens when the sacral centre has collapsed - a submission to ascetic wisdom – burning is liberation, a
cleansing of passion, of attachment to matter, not the emptiness of sex but of desire - the speak-
er’s personal wasteland the universal condition - the voluntary desiccation of the senses so that
the rain of otherness may fall – a one word gist of the charges that the Buddha prefers against the
senses – Buddhism as a gesture of resignation – an acceptance of the world as suffering, the
world in which everything is consumed in fire – all are burning whether in London, Carthage or

India - may define the means by which one is plucked out as well as the state from which he is
plucked - the voices of St Augustine and the Buddha provide fragments of intense concern and
the extinction of desperation itself – a core of precise, undeceived feeling, a quiet, yet differently fired 'burning', a small, unclamorous yearning to go up again, whether through phantasmagoria,
or the concrete, physical world - the old desperation about cooling the fires of lust falls as a se-
quence of aftershocks on a city already cooled to the point where not only lust but feeling itself
has departed – all this does not touch the characters of the poem since they lack even the will and
power to abandon themselves completely and wholeheartedly to such erotic practices - no direc-
tions of significant motion are imaginable now - the only restoration for the "exasperated spirit"

is the "refining fire" of suffering and sacrifice cf. the “familiar compound ghost" of F.Q (LG) -
fragments of the Buddha and Augustine combine to make a new literary reality which is neither
the Buddha nor Augustine but which includes them both, producing, like the symbolist poem, a
new system of knowledge

311 ' in Purgatorio XXVI Dante purges himself of his last sin, lechery, and is about to enter the
ring of fire that separates him from Eden....the last line of the canto is 'the fire that refines them' -

Buddha and St Augustine are seeking this in contrast to those who are burning in their own lusts
with heat but without light' (Frye)

311 ' the previous self-dramatizations snap with a slap as of broken film, lost in a passionate final
flickering and stopped breath, a blare of naked projection light and shattering of linearity....a het-
eroglossic babble and relentless rehearsal of others words (so he must be theatrical) and the con-
stant threat of a blackout, heaven blazing into the head.... the method abbreviation and parataxis
and jazz and cinema-age intercuttings with a ground-bass of suffering' (Bedient)

311 ' The Buddha's Fire Sermon uses the figure of the material universe burning – that is chan-
ging ceaselessly as it unfolds or undresses before the seeker's hungry eyes, even as he witnesses
it. The lesson is that the created world of space and time, which for the average sensual man is
the only reality, is an illusion...so, then, the soul must seek the sources of its peace elsewhere'

(Murphy)

311 “Human beings are confined to an existence given over to reproduction and death. It is a tor-
ment to be caught in such a cycle, since our sexuality is something which possesses us and
causes us to live unhappy and distorted lives. This is so whether one is a queen or a prostitute.

The great religions all deal with the topic of liberation from sex; that is, from the body and from
sin. In the case of Christianity, the anthropological studies of James Frazier and Jessie Weston

(referred to in Eliot’s ‘Notes on the Waste Land’) tend to reveal that the notion of resurrection,
which in Christianity stands for escape from the present way of living, is derived
from ancient fertility rituals in which a human sacrifice (of one who has been made king or god
for a year) is made to satisfy the gods and ensure a good harvest. This sacrifice has been reinter-
preted in Christianity as the resurrection, but it seems that the original pre-Christian narrative,
rather than confirming the idea of an escape from the body, confirms instead that we are trapped
on earth. The cycle of the seasons continues and the sacrifice is made only to guarantee ferti-
lity.So the meaning of the fertility rite which underpins the story of Christ’s sacrifice is that we
are confined to the cycle of reproduction, not that we can escape it” (Ayers)

311 “In an apocalyptic mode, the world may seem split into the sweetness of a visionary, ideal
and virtually unattainable world, and the sordidness of an actual, present, and virtually inescap-
able world. There is no middle ground,and practical, temporal concerns and governance are left
to others. This kind of painful contrast is what gives The Waste Land its poignancy. It is the
viewpoint of someone not at home in the world, a peregrine, like Augustine. Augustine was an
outsider in more than one sense: not only was his overwhelming allegiance given to another world, but he was a provincial in the Roman Empire, one of the peregrini or resident aliens during his stay in Milan. In The Waste Land, he takes his place among those other great exiles or
provincials who perhaps understood their city and their empire all the better for having been ex-
iles or provincials: Ezekiel, Ovid, Dante. And Eliot? One of Eliot’s quotations is from the psalm
of exile, with its passionate love of Jerusalem, and its cry, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in
a strange land?” The cry echoes behind the homeless voices of The Waste Land.” (Cook)

173-311 “in The Fire Sermon the poetry has broken forth from the depths of the mind, after what seems a long gestation, taking its form first as a particular rhythm, gradually solidifying into words, taking into itself a series of visual impressions which in turn attain narrative and symbolic
significance. It is a product of the 'unified sensibility,' the imagination heightened, the will kept
down to its humble task of arrangement. A critic who is to write adequately of such a passage of
poetry cannot, therefore, approach it as if it contained an 'intellectual scheme,' slightly obscured,
but deliberately planted to be found." (Stead)

312 Phlebas, ie Penis the Phoenician – a memento mori, a reminder by the poet who invites the
reader to contemplate the fate of Phlebas cf. Palinurus Aen V - a rite de passage or psychic dying through which the speaker can be reborn into the identity that enables him to continue his

Quest - this ensures natural renewal through ritualising the death and rebirth cycle - his whole
life passes in review as an instantaneous memory - the death of the personal self through reliving
the passages of one’s life, and, after purgation, a release from matter and its cycles - a liberating
remoteness and fictionality in the persona – opens onto a world, despite the sadness, that is pure
and filled with light - the subject has drifted along a river, the soiled and infected water of which
symbolizes lust - here the river has flowed into the sea and culminates in the drowned man - he
has wandered through a waterless desert, a phantom city and a polluted river, in a chaos of anxi-
ety and sensual frustrastion that has ended in shipwreck - the image of a friend drowned young
during the First War fused with a profound sense of a death in the inward self, to make the de-
tached symbol that is Phlebas - the coolness and specificity of the style - in the ritual sense death
by water is the prelude to rebirth – similarly, baptism washes away a man's sins so he is dead to
sin and alive to the spirit– the poem asks ‘is regeneration achieved by an invocation of peace,
through purgative fire or building from gathered fragments?’- the innocence of cleansing waters

- Phlebas' death is the final sacrifice of the ego that must precede the full release of insight and liberation - a transformation scene weighted with the accumulated associations of poignant memory, failed desire and sexual disgust – E’s characteristic shipwrecked, solitary, solipsistic lyric
self - drowning a necessary part of the excruciating labour of rebirth - neither self-discipline nor
asceticism have extinguished the fires of passion in Phlebas - the speaker cries out to be plucked
from the whirlpool, the senselessly pointless cycles of birth, copulation, and death - in the literal
sense however he has drowned and his death is final – the cruel fact of human impotence – he
has merely drowned in matter - the end of the journey on 'the waters of leman' - the ultimate fear
that is represented by the drowned Phoenician sailor in the Tarot pack – a matter of factness
about 'dead'– the line eased of anxiety with a great calm and distance from previous events -
brevity and sobriety - a soothing rhythym, gentle syntax, elegiac tone and a simple and universal
diction – a release from tension, complexity and anxiety – but soothing simplicity may mask a
tortuous confusion, an irresolvable complexity, and end in the simplicity of death – a dissolution
of personal life, a recapitulation of memory unpicking his existence from age to youth - from the
false spring of the world of illusion toward the peace that heralds liberation from rebirth - the
drowning of the empirical self in the sea of samsara - ‘when the mind runs after the roving
senses, it carries away the understanding, even as a wind carries away a ship on the
waters’ ( Bhagavad Gita) - Phlebas loses the ability to surmount death by a consoling idealiza-
tion, and rises and falls repetitively in the "turbidity of delusion" (Gita 2. 52) with his fears and desires neither exorcised nor resolved - he is drowned in memory - in ceremonies enacting the
vegetation myth, the image or effigy of the fertility god is thrown into the sea to symbolise the
death of summer, without which spring could not follow (Christ's death and resurrection is as-
similated to these traditions) – the head, being retrieved, was subsequently worshipped as a sym-
bol of the god reborn, as in baptism

312 “these are persistent themes in E, from Prufrock to Four Quartets - drowning as the result of
paralysis and solipsism, as unresolved ritual and finally, untimely end that responds to the divine
order of things; shipwreck as the consequence of vain ambition or as the critical crossing of the
frontier between mortality and eternity; sailing as determined spiritual progress, the courage to
accept and surrender” (Llorens-Cubedo)

313 ‘Forgot’ - the word makes final everything before it that is a process of remembering - by

‘forgetting’, Phlebas in death reaches beyond the things of this world, just as the initiate does in
life through the way of detachment - the seagull has a special association with the end of the cy-
cle of the seasons (cf. Gerontion) - the entire line swells with the sound of 'gulls' half echoed in

'swell' – a iambic swing, lulls like waves, and three strong stresses to each side of the caesura -
the wearying, tireless, periodically cresting cyclicity of natural life, only to imply how delicious
it is to enjoy it an absolving last time, passively with the perfect abandon of a corpse – water,
which once cleansed and purified, now drowns – a suggestion that consciousness survives death

– the ocean the permanent symbol of eternity - water in the poem more an ontological than a
purely spiritual prefigurement, a supersensational “still-point”, cf. the neo-platonic concept of
water as the one and the many, immortality and mutability, changeless change - but water as ab-
solute knowledge is now known by moderns to be a bagful of mathematical symbols, a colour-
less, impalpable mish-mash of quanta, the rattle of dry bones - thus why should we fear ‘death by
water’ if by the nature of the world there is no such death, however much in this world men fear
death as a reduction to á handful of dust - Dry Salvages off New England

314 Phlebas drowns in a sea of sterile lust that is commercial and sexual at the same time – Phlebas forgets sound, nature, movement, and money - a sacrifice of the body that in life engaged in
profit and loss - all the profit and the loss is instability and evanescence – the profit and the loss being the scorekeeping, as it were, of a commercial civilisation – he now forsakes this secularism

- the profit and loss the economic cycle (the deep sea swell the natural cycle) - he is freed of the

'profit and loss', of the
banality and materialism of quotidian existence - as Mr Eugenides' currants were eaten so the
currents now eat Phlebas – insofar as Phlebas is the Smyrna merchant he has forgotten not only
the profit and the loss but also the prophet he propositioned – Tiresias and the merchant con-
nected by fusing the occupational concerns of each - the doppelganger himself consumed by the
current and the currency upon which he formerly floated, and now he rises and falls – trailing on
in a series of 'ands', the flux and multiplicity gradually being left behind - the universal moral
balance sheet weighing all that we are and could be - like the commuters flowing up the hill and
down King William St - cf.Dante Inf. XXVI, 139-42 – Ulysses is sucked under within sight of

Purgatory 'as pleased Another' – the psyche's interior swirl encountering and reliving past emo-
tion – this and the other half-line

315 draws the mind back into the dark backward and abysm of time, and stands out against the
conscious expressions of mind, the world indivisible in its indifference, a world not to be ac-
counted for profit and loss - Phlebas being 'under water' implies heavy debt and 'liquidation' –

“Current,” derives etymologically from the same root as

“currency,” and there are overlapping associations with financial parlance, viz. “cash flow”, “in-
come stream” “stream of commerce,” “floats” and “liquidation” - subliminal menace of death in
this image of a corpse – 'corpse' implying 'corporation' – cf. 'Dans le Restaurant', Romans vi, 3-4
and Ariel's image of sea-change – under the cradling influence of undersea currents he enters the
whirlpool of liberation – sea/water both a death image and a life image - an eerie submarine qual-
ity – entering the deepest layers of memory, being able to turn back to our lives and judge them

316 whispers – an intimation of the divine, a vital quieting - soothing lyricism enacts physical
decomposition and the release from matter and its cycles, an emptying of the self by detachment
from the world, from the shadow self to the real self, leaving behind this world of earth and vege-
tation, flesh and instinct - simply the final end of nature - a melancholy recognition of the rise
and decay of all things on earth - ‘dry bones can harm no one’ - the purgation of frustrated de-
sire, and of the terror of nothingness - Phlebas’ self-sacrifice however fails to generate new life,
free the waters and restore life to the land as in the original myth - offers the ghostly presence of
language only as murmurous undertones semiotically resistant to interpretation - dismembered
undersea, he is implicitly unmanned, and the "current under sea" that "Picked his bones in whispers" punningly links this drowned sailor with the homosexual Mr. Eugenides and his "pocket
full of currants” - sea currents pick the lust from his bones, and he can reverse the course of his
life as he enters the vortex - a phantasy of underwater devouring, the current an exquisite con-
noisseur of cannibalistic incorporation - a self-stripping, the painful giving up of selfhood, a pur-
gation towards illumination - a space of nothingness - an inverted baptism - the renunciation of
worldly things and the renunciation of knowledge as power, denoting the self-surrender that en-
ables the contemplative soul to hear God speak, a prefiguration, even perhaps a partaking, of

Christ’s passion - the reiteration of Ariel’s song, but its theme is dissolution, not resolution - not
pearls but a skeleton coming apart - a shipwreck of carnal desire, romantic love and precursor poets of nature and desire (as distinct from poets of divine will such as Dante) - a symbol of surrender and relief – our will is tranquillised by the strength of love - cf. the bones rattled by the
rat's foot – the sea-change music of the Tempest (echoing the other 'water music' of the poem) – a
hint of Gothic horror – the sea-current picks at the bones with a conspiratorial fastidiousness –
removed bit by bit, as meat from bones, eating sparingly or mincingly, without enthusiasm, as in
picking at one’s food - a concentrated, hand-pulling activity – 'hush hush' assonance of the short

'i's' - the enjambment after "fell" half masks the swell/fell rhyme - fascination and horror, compulsion and revulsion – just as the body of the narrative voice in the first section of "The Burial of the Dead" is feeding the spring flowers, the body of Phlebas is feeding the water, which
cruelly "picked his bones" - in the poem bodies become only another aspect of waste and detritus, Phlebas’ body here moving rapidly from youth to old age during its process of decomposi-
tion - as he rose....a leisurely, rising rhythm without any afterdread – shall these bones live? or
shall they be only picked in whispers by the sea? or rattled by the rat’s foot? shall these bones
live does the poem say, or shall only the corpse in the garden sprout and bloom? - in ancient epic
there was death by water but now water can potentially revivify cf. Palinurus and Misenus in Ae-
neid V and VI – E is replying to the epic convention of the burial of a comrade – the drowned

Misenus (Aeneid VI) will experience no rebirth and the murdered Palinurus will be held by the
waves and tossed by the wind - cf. Lycidas ‘whilst thee the shores and sounding seas/wash far
away, where’er thy bones are hurled...’

317 from amnesia back to recollection through dissolution - reliving the details of his life he un-
dergoes purgation as he passes through the stages of his age and youth - the characters in the
poem both fear and crave an underwater life, a state of dispersal and reorganization in which hid-
den organs can more comfortably display themselves – the language of the Fire Sermon is trans-
muted in the whirlpool dissolving and aestheticizing Phlebas' material body - makes for a rather
pleasant-looking pattern on the page, resembling somewhat the rolling waves of the sea in which

Phlebas the Phoenician sailor-merchant must have drowned

318 Phlebas' fate further merges the 'crowds of people, walking round in a ring'

with this death from being pulled into a whirlpool - Mme S's wheel, which, for E
denotes temporality - life without meaning is death and so sacrifice may be life-giving, an awa-
kening to life – the possibility of a natural or pagan salvation - she warned against death trans-
formed by Dionysiac illusion into beauty but the drowning is essential and is not a Dionysiac
drowning into primal darkness and oneness, but a dissolution of personal life, a recapitulation of
memory, unpicking his existence from 'age to youth' – the whirlpool he enters is not that of end-
lessly whirling time in which all ‘turn the wheel’ and ‘look to windward’ to keep in motion
bound by the Great Wheel, but that of an apocalyptic vortex - he enters the deepest layers of
memory, the mythic landscapes of Part V – cf. Aeneas’ descent into the maze - it is through the
recovery of ancient memory, the deepest layer of our selves, that we will be able to turn back
again to our own lives and judge them the tone a kind of easy exit into a condition of complete
simplicity, but 'annihilation and utter night' – he has gained a sort of peace in his renunciation of
identity, dissolving into nothingness - a fantasy of a death that is utter, a complete reducing back
of the natural and psychical creature into nothingness –is death just another round of frustration
and fruitless hope? the poetry seems to be asking, even if it asks the reader to recognize in Phle-
bas’s fate the fate that awaits every individual - the modern individual cannot steer and has no
port, and so he enters the void, not a Dantean new life - 'pool' waterily swallows the sound of

'youth' - all that is not wholly of the spirit disappears – the watery death and sparagmos of Phle-
bas in the very midst of a superfluity of the forces of life is merely a resonant inversion of the
slow death and dissolution of those who cannot tap and control those forces to bring refreshment,
not destruction, to their waste land - a narrowing spiral of increasingly rapid rotations, of delir-
ious circlings back into the nothingness of the elemental – cf. the maze carved in bronze on the
doors of the Temple of Apollo at Cumae which prefigures Aeneas' descent into the maze,"the
whirlpool," of the lower world, in the great trial of spiritual initiation of Aen.VI - a terrible plunge as sympathy shuts down – but horror at being sucked in is assuaged by the active volition
of the subject – cf.the 'vortex' of Pound and Wyndham Lewis – the work of art a whirlpool that
pulls all meanings into it - passion is replaced by freedom from desire and a dry garret with vast
seas – the spiral pattern an echo of the Purgatorial stair and the fate of Ulysses in Dante (cf. Bau-
delaire in ' Le Voyage' wishing to leave the sea of ennui and the sexual sea of Rimbaud in Le Ba-
teau Ivre ( L'acre amour m'a gonfle de torpeurs enivrantes...) - the sexual act potentially restored as sacrament, institution and duty - death to this life and birth to a better - a mnemonic journey
into his past that brings him to the whirlpool as place of origin - the nadir point, the zero-zone,
as it were, where the horror of Kurtz's "Nothing" may become the glory of
the Hyacinth girl's "Nothing." - it is here, in the de-centered realm of absence, of radical temporality, of differentiation, that the being of Nothingness may be discovered and re-membered

("the still point of the turning world.")

319 all mankind, both those who are believers and those who reject God – a simple call for the
acknowledgement of our human connection - the address whirls out of the sounds of whirlpool,
as with the threatening possibility of being sucked back into its sonal vortex

320 struggling monosyllables...he has developed now a feeling for a will - the imprisoned iambic
pentameter rhythym suddenly springs free - surrendering peace – submission to God's will (the
wind brings life to picked or dry bones, as in Ezekiel and Ash Wednesday) – the wheel the cycli-
cal processes the poem critiques – the vegetation cult renews life but this releases the soul bound
upon the Great Wheel of endless rebirth - the ever presence of change in the phenomenal world
and the universality of suffering, the result of craving (maya) for man in his imperfect condition
and the affirmation of possible release from the wheel to its centre, E’s still point - We and Phle-
bas are part of the larger pattern - renunciation can be our only response to the wheel of life -
characters in the poem are ‘bound upon the wheel’ as Baudelaire’s are under ‘ la griffe effroyable
de Dieu’ - here are no disturbing archaizing women, no abject mirages of mortal beauty - he is to steer his ship to avoid the perils of lust leading to the whirlpool cf. Mme Sosostris' 'wheel of
fortune' – ultimately this wheel will become the self-disintegrating , all-turning whirl of the ele-
ments (as in Gerontion) – only the circumferenceless reality of God chastens this whirl – His
oceanic will, not the upstart carnal will of man - Phlebas is turning both the ship's wheel and this
wheel of fortune – he has been released from the Great Wheel of endless rebirth and can now
reach beyond things of the world - his imaginative ear now concentrates on the muscular strain
of turning a wheel – 'wheel' harks back to 'whirl' - to look to windward is to sail against, not
with, not from, the Breath of the Lord – self-direction as opposed to submission to a superhuman
will – Compulsion to manipulate and control, "to turn the wheel," is the ubiquitous stamp of human existence in time, and yet events set into motion by "profit and loss" are not the only or even the final word - is it the reference to the Buddha who plucks hapless souls from the Wheel of

Samsara, or is it the Christ who plucks them from the waters of destruction? - a true drowning of the senses and burial without objectionable sproutings – if you pilot with stiff neck your own
small craft of will, you thereby withdraw from the 'Other' – throughout the poem, relations
among individuals, things, and events are abstractly patterned, connected largely by a rationality
of commerce and trade - the logos of exchange characterizes human life and joins otherwise dis-
parate persons, places, or events - compulsion to manipulate and control, "to turn the wheel," is the ubiquitous stamp of human existence in time - the speaker, like E, is bound to the wheel of
commerce – the drowned, in effect, is Everyman

321 a gentle transition, preparing the emotions for the next stage - the peaceful surrender of the
body to the water suggests an acceptance of death and change, a gentle memento mori in contrast
to the anxiety of 'burning' – death as the prerequisite for life – he attains spiritual renewal
through an extinction of personality and an escape from time - not a surrender of the self to a
greater good and goal but to letting go, giving up, drowning – life itself, seducing back to its own
primal vitality the weary soul that would otherwise, if it could, remain numb and motionless - the
struggle to end the repetitive cycle of death and rebirth, to get off the turning wheel of life - the
rush of extra syllables in the final line suggests a bursting of the (already somewhat irregular)

bonds of meter - the image, but not the substance, of a genuine release - the insufficiency and va-
nity of the bodily state rather than its rebirth - a release from the world of loss and pain - a fable both of how to die to carnal pride and how to navigate the soul towards the Absolute – the quiet
affirmation of a stoic sensibility, a mantra of an egoless, mature speaker who has grown toward a
fuller acceptance of fate - a cool, written detachment that projects absolute knowledge and assur-
ance - a mental strain in the word 'consider' – cf. Dante's Ulisse 'considerate la vostra semenza...'

- the conquest of death and time i.e the perpetual recurrence of determined seasons such as
spring and autumn, and birth and dying, through means of death itself – ends in a flourish of
post-crisis calm - an authoritative summing-up – 'handsome and tall' the world's spurious attri-
butes and nostalgia for phallic pride – the speaker empathizes with his drowned alter ego, even
as he cautions against so empty a life and death – 'death by water' as the only salvation from an
endless round of sexual desire and worldly despair, may itself be a saving grace - a feeling of the
sense of damnation may offer a better hope for salvation – a resolved music confirming the con-
quest of the earlier negative states of fear, terror and revulsion – simply the final end of nature –
frustrated desire and the terror of nothingness has been purged - consider the struggle to end the
repetitive cycle of death and rebirth and how to get off the turning wheel of life - the Phoenician
dies but he’ll come back (Spring rain will fall, and life will return) - nihilist despair or movement
toward the transcendent? - the possibility for redemption in renunciation of the existing and
worldly self, and an attitude of humility in the face of death; a death by water not fire - a visitor
to E’s subterranean office at Lloyd’s remarked on the ‘distorted view, as if underwater, up
through the thick squares of green glass that filtered in a watery light, and upon which hammered
all but incessantly, the heels of the passers-by’

312-321 ' there is a strong feeling of Adonis about him....he is a sort of figure of energy, heroism
or beauty cut down in life, contrasted with unheroic man....like Burbank, Floret and La Figlia

Che Piange, he belongs to the world of innocence and the image chiefly associated with these
figures is water as a cleansing agent ...the Thames carries the filth of London into the sea, where
we meet Phlebas and the healing waters turn to rain at the end, reminding us of baptism....the
sea's task is that of pure ablution, as a contrast to a burial in earth that symbolizes physical life
which is spiritual death' (Frye)

312-321 ' recovering from searing conversion cries he plunges his burning senses into the fantasy
of a prolonged, ambiguously soothing subaqueous exhaustion of his birth, annihilation of his at-
tachments (even, of the bonding of his flesh to his bones)....Phlebas, the speaker's one-eyed sen-
sual part, his surrogate, travels back through the stages of his life, end to beginning, unwinding
and undoing all that he was.... a contemplative discipline, a rite of self-purification' (Bedient)

312-321 ' water and dead land the two binary opposites of the poem...water here is literally an
element in which to drown rather than a symbol carrying a sacramental value – water simply
means death... the reader is split between water as simply water and water reflexively taken as a
natural symbol of hope amidst the aridity, lovelessness, anomie and disorder...(it is hard to ima-
gine water in a context of dryness, lovelessness, anomie, and disorder failing to be a symbol of
hope. Its defeat as a symbol, its status as antisymbol, is thus a special achievement)” (Brooker
and Bentley)

312-321 “the lesson of the fertility myths, in which a sacrificial death (often a ritual death by
water) is necessary for life to continue, is the connection of life and death. Death is not the only
horror, as the Sibyl, incapacitated with age and loneliness after being granted her wish for im-
mortality, well knows. Kurtz's cry of horror at the vision of his wretched life and death is
matched by the Sibyl's horror at a sterile, changeless state without life, death, love, or loss” (Da-
vidson)

312-321 “the central paradox of the poem is that life without meaning is really a kind of death,
while sacrifice, even unto death, may be life-giving” (Smith)

312-321 ' the suggestion is of an ineffable peace, a passage backward through a dream, to a
dreamless sleep in which a stain of living is washed away' (Gardner)

312-321 “the words woven around Phlebas are an imaginary spiritual epitaph, an invocation to
eternity not to be forgotten nor judged too harshly” (Schwarz)

312-321 “This prompting further petitions us to recall the fragile nature of our own
relation to time and mortality. History and desire are as inseparable for Eliot here as eros and tha-
natos are for Freud. The life drive at the core of psycho-sexual existence finds, inevitably, a counterweight in the death drive, while the transmutation of (past) life into history and memory
means that something vibrant has ceased to be outside of the parameters of pure experience: his-
tory, that is, marks both the death and the dying of the passionate body. The speaker’s request
yokes death
and youth, and recalls another modernist figuration of this same binding in Yeats’s homage to

“The young / In one another’s arms” in “Sailing to Byzantium,” where the young are both al-
ways ourselves and always Other, precisely because youth is eternally impermanent: “Those dy-
ing generations.” Eliot entreats us to “Consider Phlebas” not by what he did, thought, or accom-
plished, but by his physicality. What is left of Phlebas’s beauty are swirling bones in an eddying,
unlocatable whirlpool – the unconscious and the ocean as a vast tabula rasa, where beginnings
and endings are undiscoverable, and where culture is displaced by the signs of longing.” (McIntire)

312-321 “Curt, composed, and ironic, "Death by Water" is a little exercise in metaphysical "wit."

Phlebas the Phoenician, the poem's most definite Christ type, has died. "He who was living is
now dead," and his time for Christ type, has died. "He who was living is now dead," and his time for glory, if there was one, has passed. "Consider Phlebas," suggests the poet who knows that due to temporal fragmentation such an act is impossible except in a corrupted form. Though he

"entered the whirl- pool," like Christ he is not of our country, of our generation; nor can he compel us to encounter the vortex unless we choose to do so within our own enclosed experience,
from a dungeon which does not allow communication. As Eric Thompson remarks, "The agony
in the desert, the ecstasy in the garden are alike in that they involve encounters with a supernatur-
al reality that the protagonist can not respond to." We live without the supernal tradition of Phlebas not because we are so totally depraved, but because there is no final significance to any tradi-
tion in the first place, just as "there is no water" in the final section...in a poçm which reflects the finiteness of the universe and the loss of the old world's immortals, water must not necessarily
signify salvation by baptism, death to self and submission to grace. The symbol is bigger and
more amorphous. Within the passionless tenor and disorder of the poem, water becomes more a
compendium of events than a particular one, more an ontological than a purely spiritual prefi-
gurement; it assumes the frustrational value of a ruined abstraction: an Absolute if you will, a
consistent Gibraltar-like rule of some suprasensational event firmly anchored in an objectively

"real" space and time, a "still point," or a "moment in the rose garden." (Foster) 312-321 “Is Phlebas a materialistic and morally corrupt merchant reduced now to physical corruption, a lesson based on the motif that it profits no man to gain the whole world and lose his
soul? Or is he a restless wanderer who has found peace at last, whose bones themselves can be-
come things of beauty,whose death by water is a symbol of purification and life?... the point is
that death by water can mean either of two extremes, and the reader who, still in control of his
destiny, can turn the wheel and look to windward is invited to contemplate the possibilities and
choose
between them. Yet, in the context of the original draft, the drowning of Phlebas seems a parable
of hope rather than a message of despair. This impression is strengthened by a consideration of
the dominant literary allusions, (Tennyson and Dante) in "Death by Water."... the poem as originally written contains a real turning point; we do not have to wait for the voice of the thunder, so
near to the end of the poem, to hear a note of hope ... the shipwreck narrative and especially its
conclusion, in which the moment of death brings a surrender to truth and reality... the fishermen,
common humanity are able, in the person of Phlebas, to find in death by water a way to beauty,
for the bones, picked clean by the sea, become something rich and strange. They show us that
salvation is never impossible” (Pecheux)

312-321 “The "past lives" in The Waste Land are those of many people, including Marie, the
adult who is reduced by nostalgia to a life of nocturnal reading; Stetson, with his buried corpse;

Phlebas the Phoenician, "a fortnight dead"; and the uneasy son and brother fishing in the dull canal in Part V. All of these figures indicate the ambiguity of unfulfilled and deeply repressed
forms of memory and desire. Unless brought to the surface these can only lead to "death by
water" in the ocean of Samsara, or "worldly experience" - or, to change the metaphor, to "fear
in a handful of dust"...Phlebas is, as Madame Sosostris warns, our card, the card of the mere reading personality, which must ultimately either fail to establish the universality and cogency of
its reading or surrender itself to greater criteria and obligations.

Either an individual reading risks drowning in a sea of particulars and points of view determined
by material and psychological factors outside its control, or it puts itself in relation to a "community of interpretation," surrenders or sacrifices the ego to an ideal order which may be only an enabling fiction but in which the individual
reading finds its freedom by binding itself to values beyond the material sphere” (Kearns)

312-321 "What the critical mind might sum up and judge to be just the inevitable end of a merely
material existence, is felt as if it were a release and relief. . . . the unwanted life is being dis-
solved away, done with... Phlebas's death may be read,
then, not as a merely natural or fated one but as sacrifice, the final sacrifice of the individual ego that must precede the full release of insight and liberation" (Moody)

322 the agony of spiritual struggle and the vigil of silence are not limited to Christ's disciples or
to one garden but belong too to the perilous quest of Percival and Galahad – the futile diurnal
round now a search for the way out, a sea-change after helpless predicament – the text now expli-
citly expressing its longing for death - the modern age has come too late for salvation, Christ’s
resurrected living truth ‘now dead’ to these diminished people - the frosty silence, cf. Gethse-
mane, the hyacinth garden, Stetson's garden - a new tone, catholic, universal, meditative in the
quieter, more collected sense - and a voice that is communal, balanced, and free of the distortions
of the individual ego, carrying the difficult and disordered impulses of April to their unstable clo-
sure in "shantih."

323 a crisis of belief, the speaker’s despair the subsequent journey through the desert

324 a chiastic, pinching pattern of repetitions – each line a separate, irritable, arid consideration -
the repeated ‘after’, and the accumulation of nouns, imparting a sense of urgency - colour, sound
and touch all painful and intense – post Phlebas, the attempt to 'escape downward' is over once
and for all in the rebirth of conscious anguish and desperate searches for ways to interpret the
universe, however painful and insufficient they are, and constitute in effect an exhilarating affir-
mation - all the violations come together in the figure of Jesus, the arch-victim

325 big historical noise - not only from the mob at Jerusalem but from the swarming hordes in
the East and the death of the pagan gods – the world we are trying to escape, a world of agony,
shouting and crying - the scene of the Crucifixion looms - the first four lines of the passage, like
those of I & III, spoken by a voice ‘not long or loud’, and with a slow, halting rhythm suggesting a voice ‘dying with a dying fall’ - the tone which dominates most of E’s poetry is that of the progressive or defeated quester reviewing his experience for the benefit of an almost casual audi-
ence

326 in the thunder of spring the possibility of renewal – the question in the poem whether and
how human relations can be genuine and fruitful and life therefore have value – the last rumble
of political optimism - the 'reverberation' of the quake that shook the earth when Jesus died
merges into the sound of thunder promising rain - a thrilling effect from the drawing out of ‘re-
verberation/ Of thunder of spring...

327 a hint of rebirth as in the vegetation myths (Adonis, Osiris and Orpheus) – after the lurching
constrictions of the preceding lines, the scene opens up, mercifully if ambiguously, to distant
mountains, the emotions to the advent (still painfully away) of spring

328 Christ as another of the hanged gods who in dying takes everyone with him into death – he
is the aggregate of all traditions grounded in fertility, magic and vicarious atonement through
blood sacrifice – a cubist picture with multiple facets – Christ, a Frazerian dying god and com-
monplace urban figure – someone died to put it bluntly, but he cannot be identified – his identity
thwarts interpretation at the same time that it thwarts any attempt to avoid interpretation – both
meaning and meaninglessness cease to be available as options in reading - perhaps salvation
through sacrifice of the hero is itself dead, no longer operational in the modern world - man has
betrayed Christ and He is yet to save us

329 he identifies with others, the poem’s crisis deepening - the 'We,' at once personal and inclu-
sive, is a new voice, a new subject . . .all the voices present; but chanted out of themselves into
an intensified common voice, as individual speaking voices can become one in song or incanta-
tion, a turning from 'doing' others to discovering the inmost part of oneself - the speaker is split
between agents good and bad however ferociously single-minded he has become - an allusion to
the Hanged Man - the dead have been awaiting the last judgment to be freed from their death and
to be resurrected - the death by water to be feared is the possibility that the judgment may be
damnation rather than salvation, with the supplicants being cast from their coffin-barges into the
water rather than raised to grace.

330 the speech impulse itself is dying away, in audibly perishing accents as if the voice awaits its
own extinction – the turnings and returnings of sentences patience itself in its slow pulses – the
phrase conveys something unforgiving in the speaker, albeit something almost mute, too discour-
aged to make much of a noise – in the space of this open-ended verse paragraph the reader is sus-
pended between 'living' and 'dying', between hopefulness and hopelessness. But the lines do not
dither though they equivocate. By means of intonation and incantation they enact patience, the
sense of what it feels like not to know the outcome, the feeling after the catastrophe as we antici-
pate the final coup de grace, on the part of those who once were living and once had hope – the
plain, humble note is the foundation for further upward striving - the poet withdraws the option
of meaninglessness, forcing maximum emotional pressure on the reader - despair and a crisis of
belief on the part of the disciples - death ends all and living is simply dying ‘with a little pa-
tience’

330 ' a touch of both exasperation and weariness, as if the faintest last rumble of the thunder
struck into the sky so long ago, is a quiver now past all expectancy, exhausting itself quickly in
two syllables... it reverberates with 'faces' and 'places' ' (Bedient)

331 an imagined desert landscape where a figure, who is still the narrator but who now has a
companion, journeys somewhere toward some unnamed goal while cities collapse and fall in the
background – the solitary quester’s failure to become enlightened when he abandons civilisation
for a new life in the desert - a succession of visions in the deserts of the world without God, the

Christ who has not risen and whom the disciples cannot see - a spiritual not physical world, nightmarish and surrealistic - we have the feeling the demonic desert has prevailed - progress is
registered in the poem – a surreal shift – he sees, imagines or has a vision of the waste land he
has left behind - the stark bare rocky directness of modern poetry – a direct lyric voice - the
voice of immediate experience – the speaker's response is like that of Philomel, Ophelia or the

Thames-daughters – here the two sexes meet and his self becomes whole in a voice that sings
what it suffers - the phrase shines with the glare of a fiercely and freshly released spiritual agony, springing out of the appalled immediate pain of the disciples and implying the Beckettian view
of birth as given astride the grave - a landscape of horror and drought which may be the illusion
of exhaustion or the supreme reality – the horror of the self-created desert – the real of modernity
seen with x-ray eyes – the mind's eye can see the abandoned secular realm, its vast geographical
expanse and its rush toward apocalypse - nature itself frightens – intensified both by the thirst for
water and doubt of its existence – the missing water in the modern world is the water of life
about which Jesus spoke to the woman of Samaria - the worst horror is a barren, changeless en-
vironment devoid of human life, of pain and death – the human world is full of meaningful frag-
ments where at least we may attempt to escape the absence that defines our existence – like the
sybil lack of death means there is no desire except for death - sensory dryness creates an oasis
for the spirit and, at the last, will force the release of its waters from the baked red rocks - an impatient imperative – there ought to be water, faith requires it, is athirst - until this point in the
poem water has been feared and avoided – the desert as familiar symbol for spiritual aridity, for a
failure of feeling – it is an inhuman landscape where repetition suggests a pointless circularity –
the speaker's revulsion at self-sacrifice as he recognizes its necessity – his inability to commit
himself to belief and the mounting fear that makes him recoil even from the vital forces of life in
his dread of defeat and failure - the rift between man and his natural surroundings (travelling
through the States between the wars E remarked upon the evidence of ecological disaster)

332 the pilgrim takes a step back - he could be a prophet in the desert or a Grail Quester - the tor-
ment has developed, by thematic imagery, from the 'red rock', through the 'lady of the rocks' to

'only rock' – the repetitions insistent, mesmeric, like the beating of the sun or the throbbing of
the mind in the desert - the text encourages a speedy delivery, 'rock' chained to 'Rock' so making

'the sandy road' inescapably the road winding...

333 the road is leading onward, upward and beyond to intense suffering – the traveller is even
deprived of sweat and spit - this an inner ascetic ordeal, in terms of a parching trek along a white
road winding upward toward clouds big with rain and with mighty repressed utterance – the final
part of the poem a space of endless, mindless, thirsty movement - insistent and mesmeric with
the accumulation of repetitions - a whirling, obsessive reduplication of single words carrying the
travellers through a desert - a binding together of the acoustic linkages 'above among' , with no
relief from sameness, 'among...the mountains of rock without water' – this is to be thirst-mad-
dened in the flesh as much as the spirit - the reversion to allegory due to the human alienation
from objective reality – a 'pop up' Gothic world of bare dry mountain-scape cf. Mantegna, Belli-
ni and the Ferrarese painters

334 bones of rock mirror the extremity - a physical and spiritual death

335 short and gasping - the poetry enacts the agony of going round in solipsistic circles – intense
in its efforts, the labouring mind tries to climb out of itself - sliding statements overlapping from line to line in a sort of double syntax resembling the free functionalism and modular language of

Le Corbusier

336 memories of pain amid the stony rubbish (I) - a dragging, persistent movement as of hope-
less exhaustion and hallucination, for his whole mind is saturated with almost uniform impres-
sions of aridity and thirst - despair reflected in the landscape - collapse of the material world -
the mindset which is, in terms of sin, a teeming city, is a burning desert in terms of salvation

337 a sound of stupefaction in the monosyllabism and lurching syntax cf.'my feet are at Moor-
gate'

338 lines toil stiffly on - 'ifs' spurt up as if through cracks forced by impossibility to churn out
permutations repeatedly fumbling in attempts to loosen the tight knot of the negative – we are
lurching hopelessly forward - longing tries to cheat the gruff grammatical negatives by clustering
lines in its own favour – the incantatory repetition of syntax a rejection of the secular world - the
platonic anti-world of an ascetic metaphysics - the narrow white road toward an interior purga-
tion, an hermetic saintliness to be achieved by pain - dryness the ‘dark night of the soul’, the
stage in which one overcomes the senses - the desert the ineffable meeting place between the
soul and God

339 Lil's ruined teeth – she is the symbolic earth in a condition of barrenness and ruin, miserable
but still clinging to life, still breathing the air that is the absence of spirit – Hell as an open
mouthed monster, a sea-beast such as Leviathan, the world imprisoned in its belly - an analogue
to the barren, inhuman red rock – a state of produced by exhaustion with and rejection of the
constant movement of thwarted desire - the distorted, carrion mouth produced by industrialism
and finance - drying repetition in the syllable 'mou' – dogged rhythm and plodding rhyme - the
labour becomes incantatory - a sun-drilled stupidity and reeling repetition, thought itself is at the
end of its tether – a crazed onwardness as speech is deliriously choked with stone – ca rious, ex-
asperatingly, ca nnot - not just mountains that look like teeth, not just, therefore a mouth of
mountains, and not just teeth that are carious, because the mountain is dead, but a mountain-
mouth that cannot spit – psychologically the landscape of inward desolation, equivalent to E's
physical and mental exhaustion in Switzerland – the poet’s own parched cry the voices of all the
thirsty men of the past - the burnt-out aftermath of passion – the poetic psyche struggling against
its death – suffering without feeling - E remarks in his 'London Letters' for the Dial that in 1921
an outbreak of the flu left its victims with an extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth

340 'nor sit' – a dogged determination not to forgo the rhyme of yet another denied posture – en-
trapment within a field of reciprocal meanings - both the tendency towards mixing and dissolu-
tion, and the restless quality of the voice itself: "Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit"

341 these are the mountains of the spirit where persons and communities as such do not exist but
only the entirely Other – there is something of a whine in the expression 'not even'

342 a confused, disturbed world where a divine voice cannot be heard – all that remains of the
lightning of the Word (logos) in the contemporary world is the belated rattle of the sign, the "dry sterile thunder" of the desert - the spring thunder has no meaning – there is only the delirium of a self-conscious spiritual death - it carries no rain and is mere noise – both speech and silence are
lost along with rest and solitude - the thunder an enigma interpreted in terms of his own life as
rain, as some longed for resolution, as an answer to the riddle of existence – a bitter Prufrockian
response to the thunder's wisdom with remorse – Christ, all the heroes of fertility myth, the tradi-
tion of revering such figures and mythic consciousness itself, seem to be dead in the reverbera-
tion of spring thunder over distant mountains - his ordeal in the rocky wilderness awakens him to
the supernatural signs of the divine thunder but he remains enclosed within a finite circle, iso-
lated from divine reality - the text is seeking the lightning of the word, not the belated rattle of
the sign and ‘the dry sterile thunder’ of the desert - words lead only to more words and at the end
implode - words catch the infection of their cure, their attempt at a purge

343 there is not even solitude – there is neither silence, signalling that precious moment of strug-
gle toward significance, nor solitude in which to approach the silence 344 sour sibilance - the
verb withheld from the as-yet ungiving thunder is added as a snarl to the sneer - the ill-tempered
denial of parallelism itself nose-crinkling – the red faces of paranoid projections – the hostility of his own flesh to the new obsessive goal

344 ' faces baked, parched and full of rancour, the visions of daemons induced by an asceticism
that projects these needs, desires and hates...this is the part of him, the unrewarded flesh, that re-
sents coming this far. The red faces of history give way to inner demons...the verse becomes all
but liturgically formal, enacting the repetitions and circlings of obsession, dry-retched swallow-
ings of extreme thirst and the doggedness of sun-crazed faith' (Bedient)

345 the cadence has been kept going beyond endurance, going on that bit longer than they
sounded as though they would – no resolving cadence but simple perseverance - the doors of
mudcracked houses are in Eccles.12, as too the cisterns

331-345 cf. ‘Our Mutual Friend’ - the dust mounds compared to an arid mountain range, the hid-
eous rumbling of the carts as dry sterile thunder and Wegg’s red, sullen face - the novel replete
with actual and figurative drownings (‘fear death by water’)

346 the focus of the sequence contracts and expands, turns inward and then outward – like fur-
iously edited celluloid – the serial claustrophobic confinements and tortures of a particular mar-
tyrdom – the mention of water quickens the verse like hope – a refining fire like Purgatory, the
speaker being able to suffer what before had been too intolerable to be acknowledged or felt – he
has recovered a motive for life – at each line end of this short line paragraph the mind's voice can
stop and think - sanity can breathe again - for the space of this song he will find his own voice
and inward self – from now on he will repass the stages of experience which previously had
meant negation and alienation and can contemplate these nightmares with virtual serenity and a
cool detachment – the images have a music which accepts their associations undisturbed, and ac-
commodates them to the harmonies of patience and resolution – the sequence approaches as
nearly as possible to pure rhythm - a mere grotesquerie of the disordered mind without power
over the newly integrated self

347 he adjusts the wish

349 the renewal of anguish comes as an exhilarating affirmation – the journey takes on propor-
tions of obsession and hallucination, as if across Limbo in the dark night of the soul – water and
rock reiterated as images in a compulsive delirium – mental agitation as an incessant and inter-
locking pattern of repetitions - a wish fantasy, dreaming of water while dying of thirst - desire
the key to the line as the reality of water seems to be urging its way up from deep springs within
the self - visions appear and the historical framework is shattered – a breakdown of identity

350 the rising stream of surrealist impressions drops gently into the limpid, slow lyricism of
yearning, quickening in lengthening lines at the thought of the sound of nothing but flowing
water - the intonations of a voice that comes as much from without as from within the egocentric,
personal, daily self

352 absence of punctuation contributes to the sense of lurching hopelessly forward - repetition
imparts a sharpening, a honing to the thinness of acuity

352 ' the rising strain of surrealist impressions drops gently into the limpid, slow lyricism of
yearning, which quickens in lengthening lines at the thought of the sound of nothing but flowing
water, with no cicada etc...the sense of a trickle reaching sustained increase...' (Pinion)

355 in effect, endurance, fortitude and perseverance supplement the pilgrim's patience – a poise
from natural elements - a religious rather than a sexual resonance -
a wish for restored nature, cool and quiet without the disturbing motions of roots, lilacs and
sprouting corpses – the imagery repeats in fragments repeated words such as 'rock', 'dry', 'sand',

'water', like the whirlpool in IV but now in desert – he can only babble the sounds of the water
that will not come

356 an emblem of his longing – cf. Whitman's thrush, an image for the healing power of poetry

(When lilacs last...) – a moment of sweetness and a purity free of all associations with genera-
tion and decay and the anguish of sensual experience - the aspiration, felt throughout The Waste

Land, for the condition of music, in which anguish is at once felt and transformed - a desperate
need to create water, even in illusion - poetic creation and its redeeming quality

356 “By 1930, Eliot was beginning to see or admit to problems in Baudelaire. Baudelaire had
achieved the awareness that no object is equal to human desire, Eliot argued in his essay of that
year, but he had not attained to the belief that there exists, beyond the material world, a further
object equal to that desire. He had not, that is, as Eliot put it, “learned to look to death for what
life cannot give.” Whitman had done precisely this, in his great odes to death. Of Whitman, Eliot
elsewhere wrote at about this time: “beneath all the declamations there is another tone, and be-
hind all the illusions there is another vision.” For Eliot, that tone and vision surfaced in Whit-
man’s (very American) images of mocking bird and lilac, and he heard them, too, if The Waste

Land is testimony, in the voice of the hermit thrush, caroling “death’s outlet song of life.”

(Kearns)

346-358 ' in the short eager bursts that the lines demand ('And water – A spring – A pool among
the rock') the 'sound of water' actually seems to lead (if only the impulse can be sustained with the right integrity and one's voice can uphold a mounting delight) past thought of 'the cicada/

And dry grass singing' to 'sound of water over a rock' where 'over' ascends to 'Where the hermit-
thrush sings in the pine trees. As with Philomela, the creaturely sense raised to its keenest, un-
tainted level, it is the clean, inviolable song to which human words aspire in attunement, as the
speaker moves 'Drip drop drip drop,' in concordant rise and fall with the bird's waterlike chords
and tremolo. Then in separate pieces, 'drop drop drop,' the fluid imagining falls away, unable to
sustain the upwardness any further. 'But there is no water' as the plain fact must be stressed at the
paragraph's end. That however is the sound of a clarity which is scouring the mind of its ter-
rors...the hooded hordes, the 'Who's and 'What's' of unanswered questions flailing in the void, all
left behind by the poem's surreal onward motion' (Swigg)

357 the hermit-thrush's song imitates dripping water in the desperate need to create it, even in il-
lusion, symbolic for the poetic process and its redeeming quality – water is there but only in the
form of a refreshing cadence and in the lyrical moment – the power of sound itself releases the
waters of renewal - almost a liturgical chant with images of moisture, coolness and sweet song –
life-giving song, its value not in any 'meaning' we can attach to it but simply in the direct power
of its transmutations – as inner and outer landscapes merge the pure idea of the sound of water
urges it into being - the speaker's self-sacrifice has led to nothing, language fails him and he can
only babble the sounds of the water that won't come - the poem has lost all hope of renewal in
life except in this Orphic form where being enacts itself in the ideal mode of song – a jeering
steady as an eternal clock - an absolute end – the beloved is irretrievabably lost, and there is no
recourse except in song and death – this the condition of his enacting so powerfully and comple-
tely that potentiality for psychic renewal – the poem does come through its negative state to one
of intensively felt sufferings – the recovery of the ability to feel is vital – song can penetrate to
the deep levels of the psyche where all experience must be positive - the hermit-thrush sings in
the pine trees, and the sound of the water for which he yearns is finally realized in the last line of the section: "Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop." - as if in recognition of its separation from gender, this temporary poise immediately issues in the appearance of the third figure, "who
walks always beside you ... hooded / I do not know whether a man or woman. . . ." - the onoma-
topoeia makes, it, like the sound of the hermit thrush, the voice of a "real" bird - echoing with both natural and cultural connotations, this sound probes beneath the conscious levels of identity
to awaken kinds of awareness suppressed by the falsifications of memory and desire - It awa-
kens the poem, as it had Peter, to a simultaneous knowledge of truth and failure, that truth we
come to know "only by becoming damned"

358 the magical metamorphosis abruptly stops as the categorical voice of the desert insists, 'But
there is no water' - bleak indicative declaration - stated dully in a reasserted hard discipline of
near patience, rippling shallowly over the categorical negative – a liquidity in the verse belies the
statement - E's poetic of incantatory, cathartic ritual – the recovery of the ability to feel insepar-
able from lyric utterance and the resurgence of vital powers – our death is imperceptibly slow, a
falling away from meaning, the ultimate existential angst – obsessive repetition of the symbol of
sterility, sand and the source of fertility, water, which here is a wandering journey into delirium –
the failure to convert the voiceless Tiresias/fragmented self to the voice of the ‘word in a desert’

- only the renunciation of the ego and disciplined emotions can find the whole self - a trial of
faith that prepares the speaker to hear the voice of release - at the extremity of the speaker’s de-
sire for ‘death by water’ that promises release from the Great Wheel, he experiences the deception of creating it (the third man) only to realize that ‘there is no water’ - the culmination of a
passage reflecting purgatory's refining fire in which an Arnaut Daniel plor e vau cantan . . . e veij ausen loj orn, qu 'esper, denan, weeps and goes singing, and sees with joy the dawn he hopes for cf. the merely arid (and infernal) lines 22-24 - a recovery of the ability to feel, inseparable from
lyric utterance - the beloved is irretrievably lost and there is no recourse except in song and death

- the Orphic form where being enacts itself in the ideal mode of song - the expression of unfulfil-
ment intensifying the desire which before had been deadened; and so it recovers, not the lost ob-
ject of love, but the suppressed passion for it - a fugal sequence, broken up by enjambment as if
the speaker were mulling over his thought, unable to phrase it adequately - for the space of the
song he has found his own voice and inward self - he can now suffer what before had been too
intolerable to be acknowledged or felt - Pluvia defit, causa Christiani sunt (“No rain! It’s all the fault of the Christians”) - a complaint against the Christians often quoted by St Augustine, and
read with varying degrees of irony, can be applied throughout the poem

358 “Despite the concretions of rock, mountain, and sand in which it is most effectively housed,
the water symbol is phrased as a conspectus, a synopsis of ideals. Its use is an unorthodox adap-
tion of the old neo-Platonic concept of water as a symbol of the one and the many, immortality
and mutability, changeless change. Here Eliot has slyly suborned the multified and transitory
side of this oxymoronic symbol to that of the unified and abiding, but the former ironically throt-
tles the latter, vis a tergo, with subtle inferences drawn from the whole poem. Water is the abso-
lute knowledge of world and experience toward which classical thought had climbed. But
science demonstrated that the barrier between men and whatever ultimates might exist was im-
passable. Whenever men attempted to conjure up the "real" or the "ultimately valid," they changed and distorted its workings by their imperfect observation, and when they divorced this real
world from their own perception they were left holding a bagful of mathematical symbols. Then,
and now, such seekers are "blind men trying to discern the shape and texture of a snowflake."

The impeccable "ideal" which the ancients held to be self-evident has been turned by the poet into a sophisticated mockery. Crouching somewhere beneath the only world we know, the world
of "appearance," the water symbol, like the "handful of dust," functions exactly as it does in modern thought, as a colorless, impalpable mish-mash of quanta, the rattle of Ezekiel's dry
bones. The irony is evident: why should one desire it if it can do him no lasting good? Why
should we "fear death by water" if, by the very nature of the world and ourselves, there is no such death, no such "sweet immolation?" Conversely, we ought to fear water just as we fear "a handful of dust" because both signify the loss of what all men through history have held dear”

(Foster)

346-358 ' a movement from a desire for water to a desire for the sound of water to a desire for the
suggestion of the sound of water...if water is not to be found, if the sound of water is not to be
heard , then the sound of the hermit-thrush, or some such auditory mirage, will suffice... a despe-
rate move in search of hope, a dramatized desire for some occasion, however preposterous, for
making a favourable interpretation, the absence of the illusion of water's sound being the final
stimulus for the onset of self-conscious hallucination. The speaker wanted a sound to misinter-
pret on purpose but he receives visions of shapes he is unable to interpret” (Brooker&Bentley)

346-358 “a kind of sympathetic magic; a certain vibration creating its own echo, as one tuning
fork sets another humming, it mediates between the shamanistic functions of healing, making rain, and raising the wind, as well as with singing, chanting, and prayer. The immediate effect of
the song is to make sound both material and immaterial, both tangible and ethereal... it is in some
sense the poem’s "rain mantra," helping to inaugurate both a poetic and a cultural renewal of creativity. By its dialectic of presence and absence, its careful attention to the "dryness" of an apparently sterile mind in which the sound of song can still be heard or overhead, its lines provide that effect of "syllable and rhythm" that, Eliot had written, penetrated "far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word, sinking to the most primitive and
forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the
end" (Kearns)

359 a presence both unreal and real, threatening and familiar, companionable and distant – brings
into sharp focus the intimations of spectrality which have coloured the poem so far - a blindness
to a living presence one longs to acknowledge but cannot, a failure of faith or will– but it is only
suggestive of a divine presence – it may be an illusion a figure almost precipitated out of the
light striking the brown earth, a shape more image than body, more motion and colour than even
a figment of flesh, unable to be caught in the coarse grid of sight, obsession begins to still the
preceding hysteria with its echo chamber of voices, and will translate into a quest - the 'third' is
in keeping with the logic of allegory as part of the speaker's serial encounter with various aspects
of himself – an evocation of the resurrected Christ's power and mercy - the speaker as human and
as other, the 'third' being only a projection of an intimate otherness and as such not recognizable,
at least by the self-centered ego, as really part of the human individual himself – when he counts
there are two and when spiritually engaged only one for then he is no longer split into agonists –
just as the disciples eyes are opened and they 'know Christ' he vanishes – eyesight is irrelevant;
something else looks into the heart of light – Christ and the Holy Spirit symbols of the self that
cannot be distinguished empirically from a God image – the 'third' evokes the doctrine of the
unity of man with the substance of God – the speaker making absolving submissions of himself
to the Absolute – risking the terror of surrender - or is this figure the work of grace? - or the re-
sult of an obsession with purity itself? - or the Antarctic delusion/metaphysical vision that there
was one more member than could actually be counted? - or the projection on the part of the reli-
gious novice of the subtlest registers of his faith and his being – or the split substance of Tiresias (potentially at least ) to be fused into wholeness as a divine androgyne - or the account of a delusion rather than the promise of resurrection - the god has returned, has risen, but the travellers
cannot tell whether it is really He – an apocalypse – the unrecognized apparition of Jesus born of
the disciples despair - a figure of salvation or a delusion brought on by life in extremis? - an ago-
nized agnosticism – gender insecurity – unrecognized salvation - the invisible presence of the ri-
sen Christ accompanies scenes of terror and chaos as the valley of dry bones becomes 'an exceed-
ing great army' (Ezekiel.) - cf.Whitman 'When lilacs last...'

359 ' the speaker states that he counts only two people including himself and yet he sees a sha-
dow suggesting a third person, 'wrapt in a brown mantle' ...a bizarre mixture of reason and fan-
tasy subverting all rationality. In distinguishing the brown colour he has contrived to see a detail
that contradicts his interpretation of the figure as a mere shadow. In effect, the poem's population
has been compressed, rearranged and compounded into a single but at the same time double im-
age, the shadows which appear to fill the void the speaker feels. The whole population of the
poem has been reconfigured as a cubist microcosm and the hallucinations that follow add facets
to the image. The shadow appears to fulfill his wish for an illusion to interpret as water or as its symbolic equivalent. That speculation is thus redrawn as a cubistic structure, layered, faceted,
multipaneled and unrecognizable except from the perspective we have invented in the process of
reading ' (Brooker & Bentley)

360 the final temptation of the quest, that of the prophet urging his own vision into existence,
seeing the third, but counting ‘you and I’ together

362 Christ may be thought a delusion in the modern world – man is sometimes made conscious
of something beyond the senses and science - a passage from the flat world of appearances into a
third dimensional world of depth - "Wherever two or three are gathered together in My name,
there am I in the midst of them"

363 indistinct because spiritual – excremental abjection? - brown now suggests hope for spiritual
rebirth - a feeling of maternal attending in this hoodedness, as well as authority, aloofness and
superintending – the unsearchable wisdom of the divine 364 the ego numbering differences for
reasons of security – male and female thus conjoined in one body are safely contained, obviating
the perils of sexual union, the speaker distancing himself from his desire – the effect is one of
sterility, a barren body which mythic saviours died to rejuvenate - the spiritual imagination deli-
cately divinatory, his conscious mind surprisingly dull – as if the 'third' may be some quirk of the
human of his own – a caricature of the upstart human mind

365 a gliding shadow has appeared; then another insubstantial gliding shape, hallucinatory, is no-
ticed suddenly in another position - communication is always ‘shadowed’ - there is always

‘something else’ to be reckoned with in the penumbra of the simplest of history - a rhetoric of
disembodiment, the nameless and faceless third figuring the "continual extinction" of the self -
the speaker rehearsing his own death as he conjures up the writings of the dead, sacrificing voice
and personality to their ventriloquy – the speaker is like one who suffers traumas in his dreams,
triggering repeats of death as if this were desire cf. Freud

366 the heard elevation of sound in the kinetic and stressed monosyllabism of 'that sound high' –
the air heavy with portentous answers - the soul now prepared for the experience of emptiness
that it will need to be able to respond to the voice of the thunder - from the very beginning man
has experienced spiritual failure – the whole section is a series of infernal visions born from this
failure - cf. the Aeneid’s frequent descriptions of destroyed cities rolling heavenward in smoke
and flame - racket-filled sky, wailing women, shifting masses, exploding structures and falling
towers

366 ' the syntax hovers and trembles in preparation for collapse, with clauses like buildings held
upright by the momentous pitch of interrogation... here the roll and rumble of the unstoppable
catalogue of horror and chaos is quasi-biblical and out of the mouths of anathematizing prophets'

(Bedient)

367 cf. Procne’s mourning song for her lost son, Itys, the biblical weeping of Rachel and the
death of Adonis, – traditionally, a 'dying god', a spirit representing the fertility of nature, was
thought to die and rise again, in a three day festival. A red or purple flower was associated with
the god's blood e.g hyacinth – rich, liquid consonance and evenly flowing quadruplets - Christ’s words ‘daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but for yourselves and your children’- which
becomes sub specie aeternitatis the destruction by fire of civilization after civilization - softly flowing wails - a lamentation over the dried tree of the senses (cf. trees and dusty trams) and the
green tree of pagan generation – the wailing of infants in the Virgilian underworld - the mothers
are weeping for the disinheritance of their children, their cries reaching him only as a wailing
sublimity of the negative, a sound that grief carries high into the air without, without, it may be,
piercing into the aether or affecting the heart of light – surrealistic intensity and spiritual delu-
sion on the edge of the abyss – it is as if the speaker has succumbed to despair himself and en-
tered the all-consuming whirlpool of life-in-death and death-in-life that had engulfed Phlebas –
the lamentations of Mary blend with the overriding cry of mothers whose sons were lost in the
war - the longing like despair of the isolated individual - a Tennysonian line

368 – the people of the waste land – cf. the streaming crowd in I is indistinct because completely
unspiritual – cf. the narrow vision of city workers eyes fixed before their feet - the masses of
humanity lost in the spaces of a flat horizon – cultures without myth lose their healthy, natural,
creative power, leaving the horizon as the only boundary - the woman with long black hair seems
to have conjured up these hordes, engulfing the male cf. Le Bon ‘when the crowd takes over so-
ciety, the feminine is in charge’ - a surrealist landscape - a levelling of culture with overtones of
instinctual and purely collective drives – the anarchic masses feared by fin-de siecle intellectuals

- their hoodedness a cowering of the mind below the denied reaches of the sublime, a cowardly
retreat into animal darkness – a literal impression of WWI newsreels – an image flicker indica-
tive of mass automatism - a dionysian abandon and race to destruction – a sense of exhilarating
despair - primitivist images from the break-up of Eastern Europe (perhaps reminiscent of the

'Rite of Spring') – 's' sounds themselves are swarming – the splurge of allusions in the section to
violence, horror, murderous vengeance, purgatorial pain, self-mutilation and ultimate voiceless-
ness is in open confrontation to the ultimate voice or order, self-control and peace - E’s harrowed

Kulturpessimismus - an overwhelming sense of bereavement - the impending collapse of civilization as historically inevitable, and even as a necessary precondition for any rebirth of culture

369 they are without a central guiding force – the endlessness of the plains is that of a life with-
out hope of conclusion - the flatness that of the crushed hopes of existence – a cleansing away of
something irredeemably rotten - like Spengler,

E presents the impending collapse of his civilization as historically inevitable, and even as a ne-
cessary precondition for any rebirth of culture - an acceptance that will be embodied in “Shantih,
shantih, shantih” - yet an overwhelming sense of bereavment - a disturbed, fainting and obfus-
cated relation to both the supernatural and the natural - as if the speaker has succumbed to des-
pair himself and entered the all-consuming whirlpool of life-in-death and death-in-life that had
engulfed Phlebas.

370 'flat horizon only' – a nasally restricted phrase – without myth culture loses its healthy, natur-
al, creative power – its loss leaves the horizon as the only boundary

371 urgent, obsessive assonance – delicately piercing

372 a surreal dream – a collapse of boundaries disturbs the text, be they sexual, national, linguis-
tic or authorial (abjection upon the sickening collapse of limits) - the city splits apart, re-forms, and explodes in air that is violet, no longer white with dry heat - cf. the violet hour of 215 – here
the twilight of civilisation – historical progress crumbles - chaos and violence - a climax in
which we reel, drunken and hymnic, into the abyss - vision of the destructiveness of war, burst-
ing upon the mindscape like the flare of a bomb, bringing cities ancient and modern crumbling
into dust - a nightmare of accelerated mutability – a livid, final flame - as ecclesiastical symbol,
purple is repentance and baptism – 'air' poverty announcing, emphasizing the disappointed and
vacated hierarchy of space and a mere vanishing point – an echo of 'high in air'

373 a metaphysical as well as physical collapse – in our modern present time the catastrophe has
already happened – all previous fixed points and coherences have collapsed - the preceding four
beat lines finally crack and burst into pieces – a sickening collapse of limits/boundaries, a night-
mare of disintegration, where the dead invade the realms of the living and the identity of the indi-
vidual dissolves into entropy and a welter of babbling tongues - the abandonment of the city, ci-
vilisation, and history or the world as we know it – a vision of the collapse of successive civili-
zations into dream-like unreality - the speaker, impotent and paralyzed, can only watch the world
collapse as he recites a pitiable catalogue of falling erections - E hints at cycles of recurrence;
that which cracks, reforms, and presumably not a single time only - the immanence of a recurring
circularity that ‘undoes’ the linear, in this case from within – a hieratic resonance coming from
the ruinous and undone condition of spectral survival - every word or phrase can come back but
never as itself, the ‘violet air’ itself a partial reiteration, with its recollection of the already twice-mentioned ‘violet hour’ (ll. 215, 220). Thus signs return, but only as fragments or echoes of
themselves - cf. Poe’s “The City in the Sea”

374 simultaneous visions, ancient and modern, of the significance of Christ's passion – past and
present held together but not integrated – the historical 'unreal' and unfulfilled reality – the de-
struction of Babylon implicitly is the arrival of the New Jerusalem – a Yes in thunder

374-384 ' a scene of Hell in which the figure of a woman, charged with the personalities of the

Duchess of Malfi, the Empress Elizabeth and Vivienne Eliot, is seen half-demented in a

Boschean phantasmagoria in which London inexplicably holds within it, within the Tower, the
cistern from which the voice of John the Baptist rises with the cries of others left to die'

(Schwarz)

375 the ticking-off of a paratactical list of cities is a remorseless trashing technique, as is the dismissive placement of 'unreal' – the city, civilisation, history, or the world as we know it is being
abandoned - the five cities before it rumbling with the reverberation predicated in 'Falling' (each
vibrating with a nasal m or n) - impotent and paralyzed, he can only watch the world collapse as
he recites a pitiable catalogue of collapsed erections

376 a graphic isolation and irony – with the loss of a transcendent foundation for belief and hu-
man activity all beliefs are condemned to a circular relationship and no direction informs the pro-
cess of thought which is obliged to begin or re-begin indefinitely – the word is both a displaced
adjective tumbling fragmentarily from the falling cities and an austere summary and indictment –
the use of the word a desperate attempt to deny real chaos – a cogent distrust of history and civi-
lization -
these are human hives of ghostly frustrations - theme of the relation between the broken inner order of the soul and the smashed outer order of Europe

377 Belladonna, 'the Lady of the Rocks' (and also the lady from the 'Game of Chess') appears
with her black hair down (hair traditionally has been a symbol of fertility) – a demoniac reversal
of 'high in air' (366) – mimetically tightened by contiguous stressed monosyllables- a nightmare
eroticism - fiddling music on her hair while in a state of madness suggests her life is a waste
when there is no water – cf. the Degas picture in which a woman with long hair provides the
strings for the cello of her naked body, whose comb is the bow – and also contemporary portraits
by Picasso of women with long black hair - a late 19C twilight aesthetic - end of the day, dim
and undefined - art ghostly and undefined - a contemptus mundi, a severe abdication of the natur-
al and human orders – she is a manically and even maniacally self-absorbed woman fiddling
whisper music on the strings of her hair – a wounded, malignant silence that speaks to us through
her hair (glowed into words) - the type of anxiety typical both of allegory and compulsion – a re-
sponse to the thunder's soul thrilling exactions – a vision of horrifying magnification and distor-
tion – desperation and turmoil from this overlapping of cities - the recurrence of the woman at
the dressing-table

378 the delirium of thirst produces this eerie music that is fainting and falling - a vignette of dis-
tracted, autotelic composition that might suggest artistic fiddling while Western civilization goes
to ruin - a touch of Hammer Horror

379 in "A Game of Chess," a woman brushing her hair suggested hellish landscapes to the mind of her husband and here gives way, with a surreal dream-logic, to a menacing landscape at dusk -
thinking of erotic whisper music and fiddling fingers he sees crawling "bats with baby faces,"

grotesqueries that reveal the fear and loathing with which he views his own sexual impulses -
the sexual allure of the woman causes the speaker to think of the instinctual, predatory motions
of animals, collapsing Tiresias's two instances of voyeurism - his horror at the fallen nature of
the offspring that the sex act might produce - as warm-blooded creatures that live in darkness,
bats may be taken as symbols of original sin and of the fallen nature of man, and also, represent-
ing death-in-life, they may serve as a dark inversion of the white dove of the Holy Spirit - the
flow of the syntax pours from her to 'bats with baby faces' almost as if along a well-known and
irresistible current – this nightmarish female narcissism, creating on its own, would breed mon-
strous Boschian children – an almost horridly cute persuasion in the phrase – the ironic place-
ment of baby faces on hallucinatory bats is at a moment that is about the consequences of literal
and metaphorical infertility – aborted foetuses - the external world sheer hallucination - degrada-
tion translated into nauseous anatomical horror - the infant's face a gothic image standing for all
human faces embedded, trapped, within relational nature – cf. The Hell panel of Bosch's The De-
luge - the "violet light" of dusk - in part 3, the "violet hour" is associated with sexual yearning (a taxi throbbing)

380 a variation on words and whisper music, the wings the potential for upward movement that
is denied, even reversed

381 the world stood on its head - the aspect of a camera oscura, things backward and mirrored -
colours of a perfect scene depicting a corner of Hell – “golden Cupidons” are transmogrified -
the image dominated by screeching that rising in a crescendo verges on insanity - cf. Bram Stoker’s Dracula ‘I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down
the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like
great wings.’ (the story takes Dracula as representative of atavism at large, a manifestation of im-
perial anxieties about degeneration and collapse)

381 ' As if driven out of sheltering dark female enclosures by an indifferent and even hostile fem-
inine principle they crawl downward in a parody of birth, victims of the holocaust of Nature... al-
ready they creep restively, already they seem astray... narcissistic mothers make their children
feel like unnatural parasites, bloodsuckers who go hungry and are forced to crawl... rage at feel-
ing an outsider to woman's exclusive self-preoccupation... an incremental horror of female vanity
and of a suffering female abandonment (hair wet and unteased, brushed to electric points, tight
and made to yield a dry whisper music... the need grown psychotic, for the illusion of being a
physical source of enchantment' (Bedient)

379-381 in the Grail Legend the Knight, as he approaches and enters the Chapel Perilous, is
tested by various terrors, including bats with human faces – the impropriety of such obscene ima-
gery is a sign that desire has not been burned away 382 cf. the towers and bells of Elizabeth and

Dudley, but here the towers are inverted and the bells merely reminiscent – the word order itself
upside down and surreal –
rapidly collapsing space swallows up Euclidean geometry – forward, backward, sideways up-
ward, downward all directions fail and civilisation itself is breaking up – the childlike creatures
of imagination's plunge lift the plagued mind on the iambic's upstress - the arid intercourse of
towers and wells - the force of a shock - cf. Bram Stoker’s description of the first sighting of

Dracula “But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly
emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face
down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings”

382 an image of dissolution, reversal and memory

383 Europe hymns on its way to destruction, but here some of its music is mere echo of its past -
cf. St Mary Woolnoth, which is now upside down – oscillating images – the towers not collap-
sing but re-steadied against discord as the bells chimingly keep the hours

366-384 suggestions of ‘hellish vision’ sent to try sainted hermits

384 an anti-climactic dead end – all spirits have departed and have given way to their etymologi-
cal origins in words that mean only wind - the very sources of human culture and civilisation
seem to have dried up – the horror of the indiscriminate desiccation of ennui, maternal grief must
have sickened into this, into regret for fertility itself – the period after 'wells' acknowledges the
need to rein in the preceding mad impulse – 'voices singing' – a muted sibilance – an 'emptying'

duple tilt in the music – the persistance of time and music where space has collapsed into a set of
undecidable dimensions – voices with the same wide-voweled openness of the bells – they are
singing out of but not trapped inside the wells and cisterns - recalls by contrast the Hyacinth Gar-
den - a sexual fantasy that represents the collapse of civilization as an engulfment within an ex-
hausted and blackened vagina, suggested in the images of empty cisterns, exhausted wells, and
bats "with baby faces" crawling "head downward down a blackened wall."

377-384 “the speaker's fascination with the baby-faced bats may help to explain the image that
follows their appearance: "And upside down in air were towers." The image of these inverted
towers is phantasmagoric and surreal, but it is so for a reason. So fascinated is the speaker by the
bats with baby faces that he either momentarily adopts the bat's point of view, or-perhaps more
compellingly- tilts his head so as to scrutinize the bats' babylike faces right side up. In doing so,
he briefly shares the bats' vision of towers that hang "upside down in air." The towers are upside down precisely because the bats are crawling "head downward." The scene of crawling bats is a vitally important one because it gathers so many images and themes from earlier in the poem, redeploying them in a vision of sexual revulsion and spiritual damnation that serves as the poem's
nadir. It is only on the far side of this nightmarish, psychosexual landscape that the poem offers
some release in the chapel, the mountains, and the voice of the thunder” (Bolton)

385 having travelled the grail road to no avail, he ends in the knowing but helpless state of the

Fisher-king, who similarly follows a path to purity that winds through a landscape of horror – the

'decayed hole' nothing but the hollowness of the poem itself – metaphorically, the chapel is in a
hole and the mountains are decayed teeth in a dry, dead mouth. Yet the wind is a sign that life is
still continuing, a breath that does not sing but nevertheless causes the door to swing and the
grass to make music – an absence of the fear of death

386 a sickly luminescent decay, the dead skin of glory – a suggestion of the feminine – the grass
singing like a demented Ophelian nymph over graves – a lyricism of decay and emptiness – as if
working out a puzzle the grass sings in a hole among the mountains in the moonlight over
tumbled graves about the chapel – syntax itself sidles up to the chapel

387 a descent into the grave, into the underworld, so that the initiate can achieve some spiritual
knowledge – graves have overrun the city - the living and dead have changed places – there has
been a sickening collapse of limits – cf. 'prayers to broken stone' (Hollow Men) and 'Old stones
that cannot be deciphered' (East Coker)

388 the Chapel Perilous where the knight, in the myth, suffers nightmares, part of his trials be-
fore he arrives at the castle of the Fisher King - a site for initiation or baptism - a decisive stop, prosodically suggested – the final word of indifferent nature - the last meaningless sound of a vegetable process upon which man attempts to impose a significance, the context being the point-
less journeys that recur within the poem - the arid plain is behind him - the chapel's decay and
isolation suggest the ruins of formal religion – in our world Christ’s passion and shed blood has
been reduced to this inanity - 'fear emptiness' the chapel is saying – where God might be there is
a void – the soul being initiated to the otherworldly, is empty, is only ‘the wind’s home’(a rhyth-
mic brake in the form of a spondee, as too, ‘door swings’) - the soul now ready for the encounter
with the Word - intense feelings of meaninglessness without the union of God and man - a long-
ing for belief – mere wind as compared to wind that is the spirit and the agent of God – the over-
whelming question that the symbol of the grail prompts is its spiritual significance - for Jessie

Weston the mystery religion of the Grail symbolic of archaic religious feeling - the poet ought to
be situated in relation to what has gone before if he is to make something that will itself recon-
figure the tradition - the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own genera-
tion in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous order - at the heart of
any retrieval of meaning buried in the past is sacrifice, the poet willing to undergo "a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress
of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice." - for E, modern culture's insistence on the unequivocal in expression, its manipulative orientation to control, its closed attitude toward mystery, is a sign
of spiritual malaise

388 “Sacrifice, the surrender of personal interest in the reading of literature, in the interpreta-
tion of the book, in the revival of meaning, all this is involved in the translating of meaning, and
yet the very act of putting meaning into a new language entails the generation of meaning itself,
and this meaning establishes the terms for an entry again into history. Creation and sacrifice,
meaning and history, these constitute for Eliot basic complementarities, and his welcome of the
mythical method is but another expression of this fundamental insight. Sacrifice is the precondi-
tion for control and for mastery, but in the last poem, "What the Thunder Said," the meaning of sacrifice is enlarged to encompass the idea of world. Mastery has taken on rich implication indeed for a poet who stated that the human place in time is uninteresting to the imagination
apart from a "belief that there is a sense and a meaning in the place of human history in the history of the world." For the poet to participate in meaning making in human history, history itself must somehow be seen in the light of cosmic drama; by the same token, the poetic word must be
thought of as analogous to sound or word in cosmogony. This is a significant cause for Eliot's en-
thusiasm about myth, and the basis for his vision of myth in poetry.” (Helm)

388 ' the emptiness is perhaps the most significant feature, and constitutes the essence of the or-
deal; for it is vacancy, the mere absence of all belief or content, that contemporary man, so the
poet would seem to be saying, is called upon to face' (Traversi)

389 a sense of being in a den of snares for faith, as reflected in syntax and scenery – the moon-
light, a steepness, a height and, because descending, a depth that dwarves the mountains and the
depth of the hole - the door an overused and essentially futile passageway – the perpetual ambi-
guities of sense and syntax ('we think of the key...') 390 cf. rat's alley in III and 'fear in a handful of dust' – dry bones the only legacy of myth and history – the dead have been buried - the scene
is not an occasion for despair – it is almost a nonchalant aside – now an absence of the fear of
death – he can now plainly acknowledge and compassionately revalue his relationships with
others – he has integrated into his psyche the intolerable experience alienating him from himself
and from life - the forceful assurance of a proverb, springing up from an interior source of
strength, a spurt and defiance of monologue – a thought like a cock crow that sends ghosts pack-
ing – the force field of this decayed hole neutralized – 'no one' – self abdicated ego or no one
who is part of the one? - monosyllables create an effect that is carefully deliberate, firm and pre-
cise

390 a slowing down with the stress on ‘no’ - vide Ezek. 37:1-5 - what most testifies to the spirit's recovery of its powers is the absence of fear of death - a new vision of the dead, no longer threatening to break decaying from the ground, but “dry bones” which “harm no one” because the
closed and self-conscious personal self that animated them is at rest

391 'stood' – an instantaneous reference point in his spiritual progress – the moment he finally proves free enough of the fear of death to receive instruction on the necessity of 'surrender' - a
lone remaining symbol of Christianity, loaded with a history of denial – the concentrated result
of history, the inner core of all events which, signifying failure, can hold them together only in
the form of irony and unable to be integrated – the 'end' of history is simply a need to return to
the beginning:real history has not eventuated – an intimate, swift and intuitive intervention –
annunciation both of enlightenment and of God's saving advent – the annunciation linked gram-
matically to light from the cosmos and the cock's fellow, the wind, is seen to have been announ-
cing the imminence of both that light whose sound will follow, and rain, pure water, falling on
the waste land, coming from above - talisman against the annihilation of life signified by woman,
a phallic presence, transcendent over the graves with its air-shaking and hailing music – panic
has shocked the impotent hero into functionality – he discovers in a flash that his testing comes
when he least expects it, in an unpromising place - the desperately anticipated erection rises at
last, and the rains will come - deep uneasiness before the morbid strangeness of the scene is suc-
ceeded by a direct showing of the thought that dispels it - the cock ‘only’ strips reality of any
spiritual dimension

392 'cocorico' – French onomatopoeic for 'cock-a-doodle-do', as if in a French nursery rhyme –
an eruption, as if impatient of delay – a synchronicity of visual and aural impression – a sound-
track in sync with a cinematic image – it strives to be thick and fast with visual depiction - the ir-
ony of the naïve - the sound announcing a possibility for change – caught between surprise and
adamancy he discovers he does not fear carnal death - skeletons can harm no one, there are no
demons and the cock is not ominous – evil has been rendered powerless and morning is about to
break on the dark night of the soul – the spell has been broken and the rain about to fall will be
life-giving – or simply that the continuation of desire is forthrightly announced – the sudden
eruption is the speaker's discovery in its perfect presentness – the meaningless sound of time’s
measure - recapitulates with concentrated intensity the agonies of spiritual dying that the prota-
gonist had dreaded at the beginning but has nevertheless undergone, and then a spring, as the
cock crow and especially the thunder suggest, holding out at least a possibility of renewal - the
rat-a-tat speed immediately vivifies the line that follows

393 the crowing of the cock signals the arrival of dawn when wandering ghosts must return to
their graves (Hamlet sc.1 & Peter's denial in the Gospels)– more particularly, morning is about to break on the long night of the soul - lightning a violent corrective to the moonlight, a repudiation
of faint heartedness as from the very heart of light – damp gust...a directional thrust that effec-
tively brushes away the earlier syntactic circlings like a tired cobweb, a new alertness, the more
brisk for the open position of 'gust' – no ghosts but only a gust are present at the signal to depart

– exorcism redundant as no spirits exist to heed the message and rain will now arrive purified of
its symbolic and sacramental content, its blunt facticity assured - illuminating the empty chapel
of Christianity is not a chalice but the Vedic scriptures in an abbreviated yet apocalyptic flash -
knowing that he need save only himself, the speaker experiences revelation – only the individual
can accomplish meaning and resolve inner conflict, not a culture or some swarm of confused
humanity – the cock crow compresses alternative readings of renunciation of a beloved friend

(Jean Verdenal?) who offers the salvation of human connection and temporary escape from a
ghost - a promise of grace

394 thunder no longer just an acoustic phenomenon that follows a discharge of electricity, but can now be understood as bearing a spiritually healing message - rain too transcends its purely
naturalistic function - a singing resonance, the lightest and springiest of pingings – the first hap-
py conjunction of wind and water since the Elizabeth and Leicester passage – an incipience,
something fresh in its very essence – the rain about to fall will be life-giving, not some new uni-
versal deluge - the Himalayan floodwaters as the fertilising and threatening power of sex cf. the
sterility of impersonal and meaningless sexual encounters – the Ganges was said to originate
from the Himalayas (Himavant), the house of Lord Shiva, a place of continous peace and bliss

394 “Now, as it were in the sunlight of sane consciousness, the uncertainty of the other's pre-
sence, the falling of the unreal cities, and the nightmare intimations of death, are all contem-
plated with virtual serenity. There is sympathy and involve-
ment, yet the main effect is of cool detachment. The images which might appal have a music
which carries their associations calmly, and which accommodates them to the harmonies of pa-
tience and resolution. The nightmare becomes unreal, a mere grotesquerie of the disordered mind
without power over the newly integrated
self; while that self gives an affirmative stress to the voices singing” (Moody)

395 i.e the water level is down (but the rain promises to restore it to a full flow and it will speak
primal truths) - the dried up river, like the chapel, is apparently devoid of its sacred power - the
reader seems to be 'placed' in a position near the river in the silent jungle – after a series of hallucinatory images that recount a treacherous movement up from the ocean in search of fresh water,
the speaker is at the top of the sacred mountain Ganga to receive a message from God, which ul-
timately comes in the form of the thunder's simple statement: "DA" - India a temporary escape from the relational heap of perspectives within Western consciousness – alien and exotic - a
sense of release to sexual and spiritual desire – even the word 'Ganga', when first pronounced,
seems sensuous – the calm before the storm, vowels and consonants express the nervous tension
they contain - now, with nothing less than thunder speech to report he is happy, his imagination
races – he virtually imagines himself as part of the expectancy of the crouched jungle, hearing
thunder not from fable but from terrifying air and responding as passionately and instantly as if
his brilliant mediations had been startled out of him – a winding repetition of contiguous term-
inal stresses, breaking and pausing to build tension, till by contagion the clouds themselves seem
ready to burst – the jungle lies low against this – a spinal hump of defence and resistance – 'limp
leaves' – monotonous alliteration and flattening accents – as if ready to spring erect – the damp
gust will not be sufficient but only continue the cycles (spring rain) – ultimate oblivion is still the only hope of escape - the past tense used in the passage seems to acknowledge that the fable has
descended to the speaker from written tradition - 'Ganga' - another name for the Ganges River

(and Himavant is Everest) - both, in their original language, possess sacred and metaphysical as-
sociations - the sunken river, therefore, symbolizes at once the debased state of life, the shri-
velled stream of civilization, and the low level of existence - thoughts, feelings, emotions and
sensations are simultaneously realized in terms of nature, clouds, hill, river and forest

396 the sense of refreshment comes and then goes swiftly, as it does at other points in the poem -
in a few touches the ominous oppressiveness before a storm is palpably evoked, building up, hea-
vy with coiled power and unspoken voice, to the first
thunder-clap and utterance - this is not the water of natural renewal but the accompaniment of
the black thundrous clouds of divine judgement calling the individual to reckoning

397 the 'm' in 'Himavant' adds weight to the word's volume (as too 'humped' in the succeeding
line – rumbling suggestion of 'imminent' - structures that protect, support and shelter - Himavant
the Hindu Ararat, with Manu the equivalent of Noah - what is portended is not a restorative
downpour but an annihilating deluge,a Noah's Flood; not a blessing but a distinct and definite
doom

398 a region quailing below a hierarchical presence, the terrorising power of the beyond – E. ap-
proaches, with a sense of danger and sacrifice, the great assertion of the identity of the deep self
with the divine, fully realized only in and through both a literal and a metaphorical death - this
has real, physical, and emotional implications - mourning for the death of a father, with all such
mourning implies of violence, ambivalence, self-sacrifice, and pain - a horror which is at once
heraldic and animal - the premonitory rumble in ...ant and short i's oppress, are heaped up, mena-
cingly concentrated – a sudden close, huddled and self-shutting – a brute response – as if the
world waited for relief – Conradian diction - the jungle is waiting for rain though the pain of re-
newal is dreaded - a juxtaposition of inanimate object and animate characteristics, the image one
of impending danger and alert watchfulness - the jungle appears to be animate itself

398 ' the rhythms of phrases suggest drums beating through the jungle darkness, the scuttling,
clawing, shadowy forms of life in the sea, spears of savages shaking across the immense width of
the river, rough-hewn images of prehistoric sculptures found in the primaeval forest, huge cactus
forms found in deserts, whispering of ghosts at the edge of darkness (cf.'Heart of Darkness')' (Le-
han)

399 an ancient, non-human voice – its deep cracklings and rumblings evoke a primordial awe
and become human speech with DA – the cacophany of belated and mutilated tongues now re-
solved by the originating word/ logos - the father’s logos is the son’s introspection - an echo in the soul - an abstract imperative – the shaking of the earth at Christ's death/the imminent hearing
of thunder as articulate speech – 'thunder' the authoritative 'word' of silence – the human mind
cannot understand it except through inspired interpretation – inexplicable ontological power as
the one reality of religious terror – a sense of danger and sacrifice, the great assertion of the identity of the deep self with the divine, fully realized only in and through both a literal and a meta-
phorical death - God will manifest himself by a divine blow – a bursting out from the intolerable
claustrophobia of positivism - truth outside of ourselves - each soul can only interpret the thun-
der in his own way - it may merely be noise - the curse upon the Fisher-king can only be lifted
with the arrival of a stranger who can put or answer certain ritual questions – the dramatic mo-
ment before meaning - the thunder speaks as a voice sought for by the poem but remaining out-
side it - the fertilizing and threatening power of sex - the paternal voice of the thunder announces
or brings the rain, but the engendering of new life in the earth also suggests the maternal function

- there is a creative union, restoring at least a partial vitality to the wasteland - a moment of pure insignificance – in the Vedic tradition history begins in myth – the speaker now at a point of receptivity - he can now hear the inarticulate growl of the thunder and translate sounds into signals
for a way out of the wasteland - the bursting of the first storms of rain and thunder after the torrid heat of an Indian summer - an appeal to the thunder of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

399 “the utterance of the sacred Upanishadic words portends cosmic victory, the triumph of the man god (as Indra is frequently called) over Vritra, the primal serpent whose coils hold fast the
generative "forms" or "ideas" whose release is requisite for the renewal, the ordering, the creation of cosmos. Spring rain harbingers much more than relief for the parched plains. Vritra,
though originally the serpent of drought, in this later tradition has reappeared as mayin,cosmic magician whose charm holds existence in the grip of the nonmanifest. Indra signals creative possibility. The symbolism of fertility and of the dying and rising god scattered through "The Burial of the Dead" has taken an enlarged and altered meaning. Of course, the archaic element of that
symbolism persists - water, death, fecundity - but these persist by reason of values and relations
established by the symbolism of cosmic sacrifice. Where nature once proved exclusively genera-
tive and speech was vested with the power to express that mystery, the word now is apprehended
as performative, as event in time, as generative of world. Yet the poem does not lose hold of a
hard-won truth: vitality accompanies sacrifice. As at every age, so in this one, men and women
live their lives by the logos of probability and calculation. Nevertheless, the creative word, the
word buried in text and resurrected through interpretation, holds out the promise of new meaning
and indicates anew a way into history. No less certainly than archaic mysteries, however, this too
is mystery, begun in sacrifice, The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of pru-
dence can never retract" (Helm)

399 ' a romantic quest for the primitive, for early man giving tongue to impassioned communion
with thunder and falling water, united with a romantic orientalism (e.g Xanadu) to draw the phi-
lological imagination back through Sanskrit to Indo-European roots...Augustine and the Buddha,
the Thames and the Ganges, English and Sanskrit are aligned to the same archetypal and contra-
puntal logic...a praeternatural kind of hearing and listening into the languages of the Indo-Eur-
opean legacy registering montage, polyglossia and dissonance... a cubist soundscape which re-
cords and amplifies the decadence of modern culture through attention to its many languages,
genres, dialects and idiolects' (Kenner)

399 “the gods spake, 'Teach us, Exalted One.'—Unto them he spake this one syllable Da. 'Have
ye understood?'—'We have understood', thus they spake, 'it was damyata, control yourselves, that thou saidest unto us.'—'Yes', spake he, 'ye have understood.' Then spake to him human
beings, 'Teach us, Exalted One.' —Unto them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. 'Have ye un-
derstood?'— 'We have understood', thus they spake datta, give, that thou saidest unto us.'—'Yes', spake he, 'ye have understood.' Then spake to him the demons, 'Teach us, Exalted One.' —Unto
them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. 'Have ye understood?'—'We have understood', thus they spake, 'it was dayadhvam, be compassionate, that thou saidest unto us.'—'Yes, spake he, 'ye have understood.' This it is which that voice of god repeats, the thunder, when it rolls ' Da Da Da, ' that is damyata datta dayadhvam. Therefore these three must be learned, self-control, giving, compassion - Such is the story, a bit of the oldest Indo-European narrative prose, by which the Great-

Forest-Upanishad gives to some of the cardinal virtues the sanction of supernatural revelation”

(C.R.Lanman - Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard and E’s teacher of Sanskrit and Buddhism in

1913)

395-399 fulcrum of the poem’s energy and a moment of maximum compression - the calm before
the storm -a pattern of vowels and consonants express the nervous tension - the u vowel predomi-
nates and, by contrast, the m and n consonants - like the sacred mountain “Himavant,” they add
weight to a word’s volume - they protect, support, and shelter - climactic cosmic theatre 400 a clap of thunder – successively thunder, onomatopoeia and Sanskrit - the voice of Prajapati,
lord of thunder - the instant effect of each Sanskrit invocation, as if a response to inward thunder
pealing against his spiritual ear, is to release a heartfelt understanding – a flood of intuition, a
thunder quickened speech, an act of the acutest self-examination, releasing springs of feeling and
realisation hitherto hidden in his soul – an ecstasy of acquiescence and understanding – the pri-
mal voice of the earth heard by all and demanding interpretation, obedience and reverence – the
syllable itself the reborn god that can rejuvenate the desert - the one and the many, heard as one
and repeated diversely – gods, humans and devils hear the same syllable but what they under-
stand, and what is measured, are themselves - the voice of the father of all creatures egoism - the
promise of rain in token of a lost and forgotten vitality - the thunder an authoritarian monolin-
guist whereas he is in passionate, persuasive dialogue with a 'you' – oracular authority or the si-
byl at the end of her tether? - primal unity or ultimate fragmentation? - prelapsarian wholeness or
postlapsarian disintegration? - fullness or vacuity of utterance? - the beginning or the end? - the
whorl of language centered in the last strophe, is suddenly and paradoxically, pacified and
quieted by DA, the primal sound which sounded at the beginning, resounds in every portion of
the Vedas – all utterance has to be taken as mere noise before meaning is assigned to it – Lan-
guage, existing neither in immediate experience or transcendent experience always fails as no
authentic bonding of signifier to signified is possible – the gods hear the word as damyata, hu-
mans as datta and the Asuras as dayadhvam - a profound silence after its enunciation – we are
approaching a point where, by a process of self-discovery, we can set the failures of our personal
life within the context of that mythic memory which represents the deepest layer of the self – his-
tory itself must somehow be seen in the light of cosmic drama, and, by the same token, the poetic
word must be thought of as analogous to sound or word in cosmogony - how a primitive revela-
tion of “the whole truth” is disseminated, by the process of tradition, throughout history - man’s
act of faith in the divine word which revealed at once both language and its meaning - a fragmen-
ted syllable now sounds like a Babylonish dialect to those locked in their own circle of words or
prison-house of language and so goes unheeded - cf. Aen VI 730-747, recapitulating Aeneas’

purgative experiences, as a Western version of Indian philosophy

400 ' a softly breathed vowel rather than a superhuman crash or vast resonance. In earthly wis-
dom rather than transcendent might the Hindu Lord of Creation is addressing his students on the
principals of human conduct with the open-ended sound of DA which must be made terrestrially
specific by the closed consonants of Datta – the instantly rapped Sanskrit which sharpens with
urgency the English question demanding an answer – 'what have we given? My friend, blood-
shaking my heart/ the awful daring of a moment's surrender...' And memory of that keen moment,
defying prudence's retractions, must be kept by the fast paced pressure of the voice (' this, and' –
with stressed repetition this only) that allows no deathly faltering...breath pushing its way
through cobwebbed endings and imprisoning 'ins' (obituaries, memories, empty rooms) only just
expires at the sentence's end before it is revived by another DA...' (Swigg)

401 Datta – an atmosphere of tense expectation that comes with a feeling of gathered force - a commentary on existence, declaring that existence is dependent on irretractable choices and irreversible surrenders – surrender not to love but to lust - to give is to surrender the ego to moral
authority and duty, to diminish the claims of the self: it is daring, but it liberates - the speaker is
responding with images that acknowledge his failure to follow the precepts in his life - he realizes he is a lost soul praying for the waters of heavenly grace - the meaningless repetition of the

Spring thunder is interpreted in three ways, the three commands forming an invitation to give
and take - 'the awful daring of a moment's surrender' – we have only ourselves to give which
means an unspoken gesture that totally opens the self to another with the explicit expectation, or
hope, that the exchange will be one of understanding – accepting and allowing the Other to ex-
press himself while effacing the self is the true act of renunciation – 'give' and 'sympathize' are
fused, transcending material barriers - giving is not a matter of generosity but of surrender. Giv-
ing is about giving up, or giving in we forget ourselves and feel our own existence – it is this that
will not appear in our obituaries, nor will 'the benificent spider' appear on our gravestone - the
question leads to the knowledge that he had yielded to the desires of sterile lust, but not surren-
dered to the demands of love essential for the preservation of life and race, the "surrender" which cannot be redeemed by human prudence

402 an almost blurted admission, unexpected, in its first person exigency – as if profoundly sha-
ken by memory - power and exhilaration in the drive towards action, towards the wonderfully
strong and clear judgments pronounced by the thunder - E’s perception of the reduction of possi-
bilities in his modern world; within the prison of consciousness, man does not seem capable of
giving or sympathizing, except for a gesture like this - heteroglossic but every speech knows its
relation to God – the speaker has reached such an altitude – a spiritual surrender (and not the sort
of gift one bestows on heirs – gifts to others as in wills are morbid) – the sublime here is terribly
inward – passion and desire placed at the very core of being - desire finally gives over to pas-
sion and to life - the encounter with the Divine through an unbearably palpitating heart unme-
diated by allegory – the felt impact of reality shaking a continuum of body and soul – the drama,
blood and thunder of sudden conversion after years of conscious self-direction - art, religion and
philosophy all spring from terror – the 'Other' seems to interrogate the abjectness of human exis-
tences as if it were still a phenomenon of the jungle and knowledge of redemption had still to be
wrested out of the lowering clouds – renewal lies in climbing above the debris of a shattered cul-
ture to confront the terror of the silence – my friend – the intensely private self – the moment of
comprehending the agony of solipsism – each command is diffused into the opaque particularity
of lyric interpretation - the index of existence is not exertion but yielding, not asserting oneself
but abandoning oneself, as fluctuating pronouns demonstrate

403 the sole evidence of existence, despite our tendency to locate evidence of existence in legal
documents or in the inscriptions on tombstones - surrender to sexual passion at least represents
an intense, intoxicating moment - having existed is not a matter of having been recorded, the
poem tells us; instead, it is a matter of “daring surrender,” of having lived fully if shakily and
having taken chances that may or may not have panned out - the goal is to do more than merely
exist, it is to live more riskily than “prudence” dictates. not something that can be captured in
documents - the memory of the stunning moment of self surrender still resists the voice of pru-
dence - to have given something in a will that will be received after we’re dead is not an ade-
quate response to the thunder’s instruction - man cannot be absolutely self-regarding (even mere
existence calls for such a self surrender) - surrender is the supreme moment of giving – the loos-
ing of the self into the exchanges of romantic love - we must dare to surrender as lovers surren-
der to passion - how rarely we dare to give ourselves and how far reaching, even disturbing, are
the results when we do - we have merely ‘existed’ rather than lived, as merely legal identities
used in obituaries and wills - he cannot attain a state of grace by any act of will - a reimagination of the Fall, perhaps some unique but secret moment – a surrender to lust rather than love – the
surrender of the individual self or ego to the overwhelming reality of the noumenon - intense
spiritual distress - a thoroughgoing renunciation of the life of the senses - an intense moment of
surrender to the senses – surrender to desire, to the shaking heart, is life, not the safety of pru-
dence nor the lifeless 'empty rooms' – the speaker intellectually grasps the notion that passionate
relations with others will leave a mark upon the present but cannot put this into action – charac-
ters in the poem reach out for some ungraspable, offered hand, but there is no communal re-
sponse – people live their lives between hysteria and oblivion without the passion of belief –
only violent dreams and a residuum of physical disgust are left – a culture of falsehoods and si-
mulacra practices an aggressively futile non-attachment – one can either be defeated by dwelling
on such intense memories, or be redeemed through them, as with the key that can both lock and
unlock a few lines later – the only decisive thing is the firmness of the indecision – cf. Marie,
holding on tight, and surrendering to fear by saying yes to a perilous and irreversible descent –
the individual emerging from the cycles of nature and taking steps an age of prudence can never
reverse – the price is mortality - that inexorable entrapment in the toils of morality which no
amount of subsequent prudence can undo - that murderous moment whereby our acts become
eternal as we cross the frontier, a grim initiation 'not to be found in our obituaries' - E’s ideal is the overcoming of desire itself - but longings to instantiate an ideal or realizable eros bubble up
through the cracks of his all-too-fragile repressive gestures - the speaker has not the daring for
such a self-surrender - he has insight enough to see that such a surrender is not something that,
once made, can be forgotten - ‘prudence’ here a pejorative term, descriptive of the careful, rou-
tine, superficial life led by the Prufrocks of this world - self-surrender also a higher love, man’s
response to the eternal - he shows a wistful awareness of what he has missed, of which no record
remains in the world - the impossibility of love, the gulf between one human being and another,
is the answer to the command to give, that is to say, to give oneself or surrender oneself to an-
other human being in the act of making love - the lean solicitor, like the inquiring worm, breaks
seals that in lifetime were held prissily inviolate; the will he is about to read registers not things given but things abandoned - E builds resistance into the concept of surrender with Flamineo’s
judgment (in Webster’s White Devil) that women are untrustworthy and that the instant a man
surrenders, a woman will betray, humiliate, or even kill him - What E sets up is a strong state-
ment about living fully that is undercut by irrational anxiety (how scary surrender can be and
how monstrously high the stakes can feel, as Flamineo’s message is one of paranoia and miso-
gyny) - it is exactly his conjured up disasters that might prevent one from giving in; their force is
what makes giving up both “awful” and “daring”

404 prudent non-surrender defined by an acute awareness of the irretrievability of past actions –
in spite of lawyers a person who has not submitted to 'the awful daring of a moment's surrender '

cannot be said to have existed - surrender is not a lapse but a mustering of nerve: to surrender is
to be “daring” - just as water, once poured out, can never be regathered and taken back, so the
gift, the utterance of the Hindu sacred word, once pronounced, will never be taken back - cf.

Pope – Epistle to a Lady - “Of the Characters of Women' – the reference being the sexual impli-
cations of moral surrender and consequent guilt - not only an attitude toward experience but a
way of reading - the reader enjoined to "surrender" to the impact
of the words at a subconscious level before a sterilizing censorship or self-censorship can inter-
vene - just as water, once poured out, can never be regathered and taken back, so the gift, once
given, will never be taken back (as in the Hindu notion of gift-giving)

404 “the speaker is thinking not of what he has given, but of what he should have given (and has
not). This giving operates on two levels. The first is a complete surrender of himself to another
person in love (a gift he has not made, though he has recogni2ed, his heart's blood shaking, the
time when he should have made it; hence his moment of failure in the garden with the hyacinth
girl). This self-surrender is 'awful' in the older meaning of 'full of awe', not in the rather slangy
more usual acceptation of the word. And the speaker had not the daring for such a self-surrender;
in short, like Prufrock, he was afraid, for he has insight enough to see'that such a surrender is not
something that, once made, can be forgotten: even 'an age of prudence can never retract' it. 'Pru-
dence' here, we think, is a pejorative term, descriptive of the careful, routine, superficial life led by the Prufrocks of this world. But, if we recall the Hindu context of Prajapati's command, we
have a clue to another level of meaning in this passage, for the most important gift the Brahman
could give was the 'Sacred Word'. Hence we believe this passage operates not only on the
level of a profound and significant human love, but on the level of a divine love as well (for

Eliot, the two are closely connected; in his essay on Dante he wrote that 'the love of man and wo-
man is only explained and made reasonable by the higher love'). In this reading, the 'awful dáring
of a moment's surrender' is of course even more significant. This self-surrender, man's response
to the eternal, was not to be fully developed in Eliot's poetry until Four Quartets; yet even in The

Waste Land the speaker, Gerontion in the earlier poem, shows a wistful awareness of what
he has missed. It is only in this response to the eternal that can be said truly to exist, yet it is an ineffable and incommunicable communion between God and man, of which no record remains in
the world: neither in newspaper accounts of death, nor cobwebby material possessions left be-
hind, nor in wills lawyer reads, for in all these, communion is between man and man” (Grenan-
der & Rao)

405 a unique if negative experience – knowledge giving rise to a sense of horror and glimpse of
innate depravity - the instant in which he was plucked from the unquiet to the quiet desert comes
to represent life itself - two meanings to the line – 'this mere moment is all we have of signifi-
cance to show for our lives' and/or – 'our lives are significant only by virtue of this supreme mo-
ment' – the two meanings are held in tense relationship to each other – entrapment tangles with
release, enslavement with freedom (in religious terms damnation with redemption) – the charac-
ters of the poem dwell in desire, dread, lack and delusion, confined by the imaginary dimensions
of the self, or fleeing contact and relationship – grace with a sense of endurance – this a collec-
tive act that causes all participating to give up their selves to an Absolute, a selfless god - only by a genuine and profound encounter with the Other can one actually exist rather than succumb to
the death-in-life of the waste land – the instant in which he was plucked from the unquiet to the
quiet desert comes to represent life itself - a shared experience of mutual surrender, here defining
the speaker's being, a brief escape from his concerns which cannot be understood through so-
ciety's understanding of life and death - our momentary dares of self-surrender are that by which

‘we have existed’ rather than lived, even if they are wholly private in significance, beyond the
identity the world knows us by

406 some act that should never be mentioned - the disconnections, the futility of histories, the
powerlessness of individuals since creation to form lasting, final value from a limited experience

- a brief, unretractable act of surrender constitutes the sole evidence of our having taken up space
in the world

407 the saving but falsifying deceptions practised by time

407 ‘for E it is only through a surrender potent enough to mark the body that we exist. This “aw-
ful daring,” however, is illegible in an historical sense – it is written in the body, its memory in-
structs our desires, but its trace resides beyond a decipherable semiotic residue. Outside the writ-
ten, beyond the well-intentioned weaver ‘the beneficent spider’ (line 407), and inscrutable to
law, desire is ‘not to be
found in our obituaries’ (McIntire)

408 in spaces we have permanently vacated, lawyers unseal papers enumerating our assets and
bequests, but the true evidence of our existence, of our having given,
remains inaccessible to them - the solicitor made palpable by a single, irrefutable adjective – cri-
sis glows blindingly against a foil formed by the dun terminal stuff of biography with its expecta-
tion of eventual obituaries and the reading of a will in vacated rooms – stop gathering money to
be counted up by solicitors so that we no longer hold property and selves apart from others - the
context of DA is order and reason - if we are to know and control the impulses that come from
the deepest layers of the savage self we can only do so by situating them within the context of a
cultural or mythic memory equally capable of reaching the depths -'seals' – cf The Book of Reve-
lation

409 the preceding examples emphasize the perpetual displacement of textuality and the funda-
mental undecideability of the text – Logos constantly displaced and becomes undecipherable se-
mantically

410 DA Give (Sanskrit) the free and irrevocable giving of oneself – the only true validation of
life and love - the original act of creation – Logos appears as a phenomenon (thunder) then is dis-
seminated into babbling, multiplying words –
textual dissemination keeps tracing, retracing and effacing itself during a process of translation
and representation - fertilises the sterile land – cryptic, redeeming - Sanskrit is the textual master code, folding back the splintered vernaculars into a primal source of self-present meaning (the
story tells of the encounter of three orders of being - gods, men, and demons - with Prajapati,
often described as lord of the creatures. When they demand from him a statement of the nature of
truth, he responds only in the voice of the thunder, "DA." The three Sanskrit terms are those each group "hears" or interprets in the sound of the thunder, and when the groups, in turn, recite the lesson, Prajapati responds with Om, signifying that each has fully understood.)

410 ' the voices of The Waste Land agitate a Romantic darkness where crazed women drown,
ruined kings wait on their thrones, and questers for the Grail ride among perilous rocks. The
poem's philology rhymes with such occasions. A romantic quest for the primitive, for early man
giving tongue to impassioned communion with thunder and falling water, has united with roman-
tic Orientalism (Xanadu) to draw the philological imagination back through Sanskrit to Indo-Eur-
opean roots' (Kenner)

411 Dayadhvam - suggests a consciousness locked within itself, its confinement confirmed by
the thinking about it - Coriolanus’ isolation due to the sin of pride - we are imprisoned in self-absorption yet receptive still, not so much to human sympathy as to intimations and signs – the
speaker unable to communicate and he is isolated in his solipsistic world - we must break out of
the Bradleyan prisonhouse of self - to sympathize is to enter into the community of souls, and to
transcend the cult of "personality": it is release from solipsism, painful at first, but infinitely rewarding at last - positive force derives from the characters' ability to generate, from an unre-
duced residue of feeling, an archetypal identity which delivers them from the closed circle of the

Bradleyan self and the immediate historical moment - aetherial rumours are breaking through -
one of these small repetitive patterns seeking and in some sense finding liberations and achieve-
ments at a subliminal level - given the explicit form of nostalgia, regret and love lost - a surren-
der to something outside the self – the key the prison of the subjective self and the means of es-
caping it with sympathy – the 'key' of desire creates and confines the ego in the same act and the

'key' that would free the inmate can only aggravate his attachment and confinement until the very
terms of subjectivity and self identification are cast aside – an image of people trapped in them-
selves, as in a prison, unable to reach out to others, but life outside is worse than life inside - the phrase poses the question of how do we accommodate ourselves to our isolation, modernity demanding we constantly make ourselves anew - sympathy or fellow feeling is a task to be continu-
ally approached with trepidation and desperation, with a need to respond to a ‘beckoning’ from
beyond, to a phantasm of the future - the process a stirring of the soul, the inward turning from
self to others - he is in ( vide drafts of the poem) the company of some one else whose own sphere of experience, the whole world made private and peculiar, exists apart yet simultaneously forms
part of the awareness of the speaker - attention is turned not to a meaning beyond but inward to-
ward concentric circles of words where the activity and confusion and difficulty of experience
and language are united - there, words do not stand for something else; they are reality. In E’s
epistemology, there is only the world, not a fictional world. The poem derives its authority from
its holistic structure - the poem demands the imposition of the intelligent will over sensual grati-
fication - provokes without halt its unscrambled English implication 'I have heard the key...'

411 ' it is across virtual great reaches of time that he responds , across the spatial divide between

East and West, across fable and allegory, and across the seeming distinction between sacred
scripture and prompt human speech' (Bedient)

411 ' the key that can be used to get out of the tower is the Bradleian moment of precognitive im-
mediate experience, before the self comes into existence. Self-conscious reflection results in the
dualism of self and other. Coriolanus' conscious efforts to sympathize with the crowd result in his
destruction. Successful empathy is always unconscious. The mere intention to sympathize frus-
trates itself as we constantly are checking our intentions. To seek empathy is to feel its absence
and to feel its absence is to intensify the seeking' (Brooker & Bentley)

411 “the command dayadhvam makes him recognize his incapacity to transcend
the circle of his experience. He realizes how he has locked himself up in the prison of his own
self-conceit and pride. His awareness of his self-imposed stifling confinement forces him to re-
cognize the closed circle of his understanding and sympathies. It reminds him of the way out and
the ultimate release through the breaking of the citadel of pride” (Rao)

412 the intense conjunction of opposites enacts the difficulties of breaking out of solipsism – a
locked immobility - the key that locks up, isolates, is the same key that unlocks, that offers liberation and emotional contact (understanding offers an escape from isolation) – every moment is
a turning point, an intersection of past and present, of actuality and possibility – the only true in-
stance of spiritual life the speaker has experienced (O Lord thou pluckest...) - he must await the
grace of God - he apologizes to himself for not having responded to the key turning in the door-
during that awful daring of a moment’s surrender - the emotional tensions of turning back to and
away from memory and desire – the speaker, being locked within the prison of selfhood and
identity, as narrowly defined by the desire for action and agency - the key turns once, represent-
ing imprisonment, intensifying awareness of this - there is no exit by means of death in this pris-
on of damned souls - the self-sufficient blindness of individuals without belief - every moment a
turning point, as half lines, looking grammatically backwards and forwards, anticipate East Co-
ker 'the pattern is new in every moment' – cf.Ugolino in Dante – the key entombing him turned
and thrown away – a metaphor for solipsism - and F.H.Bradley's claim that for every soul the
world is a closed and private sphere, each of us confined to “a circle closed on the outside . . .

[and] . . . opaque to the others which surround it” – choice as a method of validating existence is
here presented, in a spirit of Panglossian optimism, as a rationalised process of turning cata-
strophe into victory – the auditory chance to act right away on a lock-opening impulse ( once
only) in the exit from the self's prison toward sympathetic relation, rather than letting the mind,
as the verse ponderingly slows down, turn the lock upon us ( each in his prison...)

412 “Even if we don’t have access to the experience of others, even if we’re each stuck alone in
airtight spheres, we can grasp that every other person is also stuck in an airtight sphere. Thinking
of the key—focusing on escape—only “confirms” the fact that we’re in prison.But at the same
time, realizing that we’re all thinking of the key makes possible the imaginative move from sin-
gular to plural: “I have heard the key . . . We think of the key” (WL 412, 414). There is at least
community in our isolation. We’re stuck, and alone, but the power of sympathetic intelligence at
least allows us to understand that everybody else is in the same boat” (Booth)

413 the fallen world a prison in which each, thinking of the key, confirms the prison - self-cen-
tered egotism - in imagining such a key, the prison of selfhood, isolated from desire from such
connection with other such 'prisoners' is 'confirmed' – as it is, knowledge or understanding is
simply a residue of impressions clouded by the imperfect sense - its existence is verified by de-
sire for an escape from it, the prison paradoxically can only be escaped by a renunciation of the
desire to escape - ‘we are shut up in our own personality as if in a perpetual prison’ (Anatole

France) - the impenetrability of others, the solipsism inherent in the view that every new interpre-
tation can devour or introject the whole previous series, reducing all others to the inclusive self -
the poem dramatizes a moment when the necessary belief that overcomes solipsism is absent, a
moment that cries out for, rather than realizes or preempts, the possibility of its own transcen-
dence - each is in his prison, a prison (as in the manuscript) “each has built.” - though we long
for that human or spiritual intermingling, for the soul-sharing that might come with the turn of
the key, it does not turn, and we remain alone - there is no ‘key’ to freedom from the oppressive
limits of sense experience - the profound chasm between individual souls – humans cannot es-
cape the prison of individuality by any type of transcendence - at the end we see pervasive steri-
lity as due to imprisoning attitudes and emotions - we are trapped in the circle of trivial, insignificant things which revolve around our own selves, a prison built by the ego – we must escape for
lack of sympathy leads to isolation and alienation – irony of the freedom claimed by those who
can afford to lead amoral lives - locked in his body like some Neo-platonist philosopher or ascetic trying to escape from it – the phrase 'each in his prison' can apply, with different inferences, to either the previous or subsequent phrases – the harder one tries to escape from this labyrinth of
language, the more locked in one becomes – but for one isolated individual to think of the isola-
tion of another momentarily breaks through the isolation of the other – to sympathize is to re-
member as well that even violent passion can offer the living spirit no escape from the contingen-
cies of flesh – in thinking of a way out of subjective experience we merely reinforce the mind's
inability to reach beyond itself, mind realising its own limits - at the back of E’s poetry is the no-
tion of being trapped in time

414 the inevitable failure of human communication – a prison of inviolate honor, self-suffi-
ciency, like that in which Coriolanus locked himself away - sympathy offers hope to each
trapped in the cell of selfhood – cf. the Sybil's lonely prison of immortality – the speaker think-
ing of the key that will liberate himself from the finite centre of his own experience - the desire
for the key, the clear answer, is what ironically 'confirms a prison' - the speaker offers a pre-exis-
tentialist vision of autotelic cycles of psychic self-imprisonment - the redemptive consequences
in the moment of one’s recognition of isolation - only a willed assumption of something outside
the closed circle of our own mind can make the old texts live again

414 “the essence of intellectual consciousness is this ‘thinking of the key’, confirming the prison
of the self and making it impregnable. As long as the intellect is dominant, as long as reality
must be filtered through mind, so long will abstractions such as self and not-self, subject and ob-
ject, reign in a kingdom of appearances. ‘Dayadhvam’ is the Buddha’s suggestion for breaking
the prison of the self” (Brooker)

415 yearning and possibility – 'aethereal rumours' – of others, beyond ourselves, or of another
spiritual world - the sheer indefiniteness of these intimations and signs - mumbles of the thunder

– thinking of the key lets the sound of singleness's only trail away to a darkening mereness in

Only at nightfall as archaic noise ( rumours) is heard at an historical distance - at "nightfall"

("evening") isolative introspection is greatest, and the soul "sees itself only" viz. "your shadow at evening rising to meet you" - attenuated echoes of the Sirens' nocturnal music; they revive a 'broken Coriolanus' who could not after all sustain his inhuman, clean and dignified repudiation of
his own mother - as the Hollow Men in Death’s dream kingdom hear voices “in the wind’s sing-
ing,” and discern sunlight on a broken column - rumors suggest a move away from reflexive
antagonisms and remind us that breaking is not just about damage. We can also break out, and
break free

416 the ability to sympathise with a tragic figure will lead to understanding and the ability to
face suffering, and hence to 'control' our own lives - symbol of the self-destruction wrought by
those who view their own honour so high that they forswear others - he has reached so far above
himself he is broken to pieces - because of his egoism he failed to sacrifice himself to the social
whole - he is a ruler larger than an individual and his revival involves such self-sacrifice - to be
broken is a way of moving forward, and Coriolanus might be the better for abandoning the logic
of us versus them - restoring ties of kinship breaks him, but also displays the strength of human
connection - to be broken might mean to be broken open freeing a man from his self-imposed
prison - this is the proud Coriolan self of western individualism - the historic splendour of the
great individual is now gone – yet pride cuts the individual off both from man and from God – a transcendence, however uncertain or momentary, of the physical and spiritual fragmentation the
poem describes - the inability of the speaker to escape from the tower of his loneliness and the
isolation of his ego – only sympathy would open the prison which has been shut by pride – only
the memory of some faint love can comfort him, and free him from his worst sin, pride – a sense
at last that all this brokenness is being repaired, a bridge erected – 'revive' triumphantly knows its function and its place – time itself surrenders quiveringly to the supernatural, a step toward a
threshold that is instantly withdrawn – an evocation of absolute loneliness and separation – even
the prison cell disintegrates in the evening light - Coriolanus, in a lifetime of pride and selfish-
ness, listens and yields once to his mother, although he dies because of it – so a possible surren-
der to others if only at great risk and only for moments – his fall was precipitated by an inability
to balance pride with a sense of proportion – aethereal, divine thunder healing the earth itself as
well as the broken mind of Coriolanus, who had succumbed to psychic disintegration - these ru-
mours akin to April’s promise i.e a revival that is not to be - all that remains of his actions are

'aethereal rumours' – his life and its memory are inconsistent, immaterial, verging on inexistence

– he may be compared with Ferdinand, who, with a happy combination of wisdom, humility and
unconditional love, managed to reach everlasting bliss – “a broken Coriolanus” in opposition to
the idea of isolated individuals stuck in their own minds and their own experience - he has been
awoken to the supernatural signs of the divine thunder, but he remains enclosed within a finite
circle, isolated from divine reality - the speaker is proffering a hope for redemption and sympa-
thy, extended even to “a broken Coriolanus,” who betrayed Rome - or it is only the memory of

Coriolanus that is revived, perhaps as a paradigmatic instance of the tragedy of fighting oneself -
only occasionally and perhaps transcendentally (or imaginatively) is his (or the poet’s, or our)

isolation dispelled - and then only momentarily, “aetherially.”

416 ' night brings on the temptation to dream oneself as an undefeated Coriolanus, but his stature
depended on self-possession, the inability or refusal to break out of the prison-house of self, on
lack of sympathy. This is a hollow revival. The lines are extraordinarily self-possessed in expres-
sing, in refusing to duck, the agony of equivocation ; they are patiently possessed by the intransi-
gence of their emotions” (Reeves)

416 “In a parable of how our thoughts constitute our worlds, these speakers, who feel confined
and isolated, “think of the key.” What they fail to understand, and what Eliot elegantly displays
in just two lines, is that to focus on the key is to “confir[m]” their confinement and isolation.

Dante’s Ugolino is shut up in a tower by his enemy, but that imprisonment is nothing compared
to the psychological lockdown he imposes on himself. His degrading hatred of Ruggieri balks
compassion and prevents him from observing that he and the archbishop are being punished for
the same sin. The Waste Land passage explains that the only relief from such imprisonment oc-
curs when aethereal rumours / Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus... a “broken Coriola-
nus” is a man who tries but finally fails to maintain detachment. He can submit to the demands
of human connection and die, or he can reject any and all relationships. It turns out that death
with connection is the only possible choice” (Booth)

417 the final DA revives the heart's larger daring, beyond the uniquely alone, in an outreach to
others - in Indic philosophy the sequence communicates the need for evolving a valid criterion of
self-evaluation that endows one with a capacity for a constant inspection of experience - each
ideal sets him to an uncompromising introspective self-scrutiny - the moral injunctions of the thunder suggest the presence of a benign paternal authority, but outside the sphere of human relationship - the movement away from the limitations and failure of human love, towards the possi-
bility of spiritual redemption - “give, sympathize, and control” the key to releasing the curse of
numbness and unconsciousness that blight the modern world,a means to the remembrance that
might revitalize it

417 “the primordial "DA," underlies the Latin infinitive 'dare,' and all its Romance derivatives; by a sound-change, the German 'geben,' the English 'give.' It is the root of 'datta,' 'dayadhvam,'

damyata': give, sympathize, control... three sorts of giving, an alternative to the western will to
power" (Kenner)

418 Damyata - a Sanskrit sense of peace evoked – sonic vibrations, dental and sibilant conso-
nants alternate with a long 'a' vowel, slowing down the verse...uniquely solemn even liturgical –
the sharp-edged t startles the seeming dead into life – a resonant strength - equal weight given
both to the sense of loss, anxiety and despair and the feeling of communion and silence – the the-
matic level expresses a cultural despair while the acoustic level offers something closer to hope –
a gesture of obedience toward a superior power which has directed a life to this moment - fol-
lows the logical condition for control, sympathy – equilibrium and poise are needed in order to
engage and exercise the other two, which alone can free the quester from the endless cycle of
selfishness and desire - sailing an erotic response cf.Tristan - art itself remaking the broken con-
nections of contemporary life – the willing heart now able to beat obediently by virtue of a heart-
felt invitation – he is like the buddhist who goes apart from others to save his purity - sympathy
with man does not save one, but sympathy with the divine can at least revive the soul – an

Orphic excursion from the body, a voyage in the other world– it is the thunder that has prompted
him to put the psychological waste behind – the three ejaculations prompted by DA are three dif-
ferent interpretations, each hearing the same thing in his particular way – they may be delusional,
arbitrary, private etc – they are to be repeated ritualistically in the hour of madness, over and
over until the final extinction of the self – keys to escaping the illusions of the world if only we
could master them - the Indic injunctions a reaction against the romantic exaltation of the self,
asserting as they do submission to the Absolute, recognition of other selves, and self-discipline
against self-love, self-pity and self-indulgence - asks how we are to control ourselves in the face
of our excessive knowledge of the controls exerted upon us - would we not have been better off
without the knowledge of the difference between good and evil, which has borne bitter fruit? - to
control is to govern one's soul, without which check we must submit to external force: humble
the appetites before the law that was made for us.

418 ‘Reason did not invite the heart to respond, and we are plunged back into Datta’s surrender
of reason to passion...total negation is the closest we can come to regeneration...the fragments of
consciousness constitute the single consciousness of nothingness - an ominous present and an un-
fulfilling future’ (Punter)

418 “We might summarize the section devoted to the “fable of the meaning of the Thunder”—
give, sympathize, control—thus: the poet-protagonist confesses that he has given himself in sur-
render in a moment whose meaning is beyond calculation; he asks for understanding and sympa-
thy in his impenetrable isolation, an imprisonment that is part of the common human predica-
ment; and he pledges an exchange of one kind of control (of another individual) into self-control, changing controlling hands into clasped hands. In arriving at this “supreme moment of complete
knowledge,” the poet presumably relived his life in every detail of “desire, temptation, and
surrender.” (Miller)

419 cf, Frisch weht....the figure of happy love in which the ship rushes on with a fair wind behind it - the pleasantly breathtaking experience that expert sailing can be when sea, man, boat,
and wind become one single and harmoniously blended action – control fulfills being, that condi-
tion where essence is fully realized - the calm sea of His will – the pair of masculine and femi-
nine cooperate – the expert sailor accepts the power of wind and water – otherwise we are
trapped within our own solitudes – order and control are linked to the continuation of desire in
the boat's movement across the water – an unhesitating submission to a conserving authority –
the joy that self-control brings to the Buddhist – the controlling hand characteristic of Vittoz’s
therapy as applied to E - a comma's pause for this exact joyousness, responding to the hand's
command rather than loose and wandering emotion – accurate zest, not turbulence the guide, one
belongs to a momentum greater than the self, or could so nearly have belonged to it, in the seized
instant

419 “Unlike the rider, who may dominate his horse, the sailor survives and moves by co-opera-
tion with a nature that cannot be forced; and this directing, sensitive hand, feeling in the sheet the pulsation of the wind and on the rudder the momentary thrust of waves, becomes the imagined
instrument of a comparably sensitive human relationship” (T.S.Eliot)

420 the sea as life under its spiritual aspect, and life as purely physical and sensual - those who
dwell in the wasteland have been living by impulse and sensation, unguided by reason and con-
trol. Control, as Aristotle argued, is an act of will controlled by reason - the calm, carefree re-
sponsiveness of intimacy as opposed to the prison of the isolated self – as with other ambiguities,

(surrender/prudence, given/retract, daring/obedient) a self unformed, afraid of the step that will
force the identity's precarious possibilities to closure, yet desperate to take it – a failure, from regret and guilt, to exercise the same kind of control in a human relationship – the poem poised in
endlessly oscillating anbivalence between hope and despair - an appeal to the atrophied soul for
an act of recognition and renewal – instead of guilt and terror, or evasive denunciation of the
world, he can plainly acknowledge and compassionately revalue his relationships with others -
the possibility of the heart's response exists but remains unfulfilled, perhaps broken off or aban-
doned, constituting one more lost glimpse of the possibility of union – an image of wished-for
erotic satisfaction - a tone of wistfulness and loss - a poignant sense of missed opportunity, of
something lost - the use of the subjunctive draws attention to what might have happened had
there been greater self-control, but our present state stands in contrast to the loveliness of the im-
age - points to the failure of any attempt at control – it needs practice and dedication - there is an obligation of self-discovery imposed upon the reader, the object being not to expose the speaker
but to create the reader – cf.124-126, the living dead can at best hold only a memory of regenera-
tion, but here we have the possibility of navigational skill exercised in calm waters – the comma
halts any excess onrush

420 ' the image evokes a sense of a possible happiness which accentuates the suffering of the pre-
sent moment . This glimpse of hope can be sustained by a personal askesis, a regaining of self-
control and inner peace by re-routing Ulysses' ship (Inf. XXVI) in the direction of beatitude'

(Manganiello)

420 ' as the boat responded so her heart would have responded if he had been able to offer an ef-
fective invitation....the speaker reproaches himself with failing to elicit something that his part-
ner would have been able to give, with failing to achieve what might have been if he had been
able to obey this third imperative' (Harding)

421 the line-break gives a feeling of giddiness to 'Gaily' – a rebuke to the fleet of unholy loves –

God is vastness says the image, but his love is the finest navigational skill – control means aban-
donment of any calculating prudence – here the heart with 'blood-shaking' is disciplined, though
not self-disciplined, into 'beating obedient' – a sweetness of generosity – envisages a more oppor-
tune response to God’s grace - all meanness of self-preoccupation has disappeared – the origin is
the poet's capacity for empathy – 'Gaily' is repeated, in the same enjambed form, with delibera-
tion – the lines hauntingly enact the control, and freedom within control, which is their subject:

the imaginative release within the restraint of remembered fact – in the perpetual present of the
imagination the regretful freedom of memories out of control transforms into a different free-
dom, of memories channelled, desire patiently controlled towards a new realisation – passivity
before divine power makes grace possible – such warmth of invitation that the 'heart' rather than

'you,' in this intimate-impersonal directness, seems already, with pleasurable order, to be beating
obedient/To controlling hands

422 the passage through the desert to self control and discipline of the heart - or, more clinically,
the process of breakdown and reintegration as it occurs in the individual psyche - the heart can
respond to controlling hands with an effortless ease, which is all we are given to hold on to - the
autonomy of custom, or following the spirit of modernism past despair to a new appreciation for
the givens in life, summed up by the word ‘tradition’ is another way of putting the same thought

- through sympathy, self-discipline and service, he may at last find the beginning of the springs
of an inner peace that will culminate in a genuine self-acceptance - to sympathize is to give one-
self; to control is to give governance - the distracted mind brought under control by an 'expert
hand' that will become the repetition of Sanskrit commands - passive attunement to whatever
spiritual forces one can locate within a world of suffering – the eternal cycle of the seasons has at
last brought renewal, the speaker finding that he does not choose but is chosen, the invasion of
the holy spirit itself the self-validating answer to the problem of choice – he sees the world
through new spectacles – the solution to the decadence of 20C Europe is provided by faith, sub-
mission to the divine word and embracement of a valid set of moral guidelines, be they presented
by Hinduism or Christianity – cross-cultures suggest the way out for a world whose main spiri-
tual coordinates are disjointed and blurred - as it is, knowledge or understanding is simply a resi-
due of impressions clouded by the imperfect senses - the "vital check, " by which an emotional and personal appropriation of the text is governed by a rational, disciplined, and disinterested
self-command

422 “Unlike the rider, who may dominate his horse, the sailor survives and moves by coopera-
tion with a nature that cannot be forced; and this directing, sensitive hand, feeling on the sheet
the pulsation of the wind and on the rudder the momentary thrust of waves, becomes the ima-
gined instrument of a comparably sensitive human relationship. If dominance compels response,
control invites it; and the response comes “gaily.” But—“would have”: the right relationship was never attempted” (Kenner)

423 the journey eastward across the desert is finished; though the king’s lands are waste, he has
arrived at the sea - the 'I' is a naked consciousness acted upon by events – it has become the de-
personalized witness of the world which has become it – no longer a quester he has reached a
point of stasis - the futile act of waiting - the poet becoming a seer through his disordered senses

– enjambed deliberation

423-431 disintegration and disorder, madness and desire – but still a world rich with possibility
as well as confusion, with salvation as well as loss – the power of desire as terribly disrupting

424 the speaker turns his back to the wasted land with its terrains of psychic distress, his condi-
tion now that of the impotent fisher-king concerned solely with his own condition, community
no longer exists and it is each for himself - he is fishing, waiting for revelation, having by now
seen the need for Christianity, though he still cannot believe - we leave the land as dry as ever,
with rain seemingly imminent but never quite arriving, just as we left Jesus on the road to Em-
maus, resurrected but yet unrecognized by his disciples - the horrible consequences of stasis – a
state of enjambed deliberation – the comma's slight hesitation – the arid plain desultory cover for
the final forward thrust - the loss, impotence and castration make him a figure of Lacanian trau-
ma - the fragments of poetry, virtually meaningless as they are torn out of context, now shore up
his ruins – fractured voices dispersing a traumatized experience of history that is not allowed to
inhere in any one figure - a situation of exhaustion which is 'after' the main action – after much
travail and learning he has finally earned the right to sit finally at the shore like the wounded

Fisher-king - post-meaning and post-coital - the fisher-king in the arid plain corresponds to

Adam, or human nature that cannot redeem itself – without myth a culture loses its healthy natur-
al creative power – it is only an horizon encompassed with myth which rounds off to unity a so-
ciety, the horizon as the only boundary brought about by the workings of abstract thought and ab-
stract morality, modern, abstract man proceeding independent of myth - if this is the visionary
journey which the speaker takes in search of the water of life, it leaves him, in the present mo-
ment, sitting upon the shore with the arid plain rather than the unreal city behind him – the alle-
viation of his suffering now permits this – eating the fish he will attain a state of absolution - the act of fishing places the aridity of secular perfectibility at his back – quietness fused with quest
leading to a slow expectancy – the suspension of the word 'Fishing' between the start of the line
and a caesura sounds like a determined irresolution – does he turn his back on this wasteland or
is it a backdrop to his continued fishing, as it were, for meanings? - both the fish and the fisher
are life symbols of immemorial antiquity - to be the Fisher King, then, is to be that one, whoever
he or she may be, who is adept at tapping the life-source, exactly as our speaker is now doing as
he sits on the shore fishing – the end of the quest is the realisation that time and space are not
man's home – history is exile from the divine and the poem a desperate journey through time and
space seeking home – a comma's slight hesitation - a being semi-divine, semi-human, standing
between his people and land, and the unseen forces which control their destiny (Weston)

424 ‘the Fisher-king is somehow the principle of life but ailing. He is the knight of purity and
metaphysical daring who, after a period of trial and quest, is able to cure the sick king. The
speaker seeks to lose himself in an unseen power through a transcendence of the sensualist
dream, an anti-sexual, anchoritic quest.' (Bedient)

424 ' his is, of course, a figurative, a spiritual, a transcendent kingship, just as the land that will now be set in order is the interior landscape of the mind and spirit of each individual, in this case, the speaker/poet of The Waste Land. Similarly, if the individual psyche can figuratively constitute a land laid waste by doubt and confusion but is now being delivered by the restored vigour
and vitality of its personal Fisher King, who is the chastened and instructed ego that commands
the individual being, so can it also be represented as a structure, a house or temple, for example,
against whose ruins, and ruin, the same commanding ego, who has learned to give, to sym-
pathize, and to control, has shored fragments like hewn posts to keep it from collapsing.' (Mur-
phy)

425 even if the modern age destroys civilisation, the speaker still has private obligations to fulfill

– hovers between a note of readying and a note of closure, unable to choose between them and
not really needing to – seems perfectly balanced between hope and despair - the necessary com-
posure has been wrestled from out of his suffering – one of E's patiently poker-faced and rhyth-
mically uncommitted lines – hope parries with disappointment – a longing for purification and
what has been lost – adult diffidence and unambitious musing - cf. The Grail Quest, which repre-
sents longing, seeking and the restoration of order

425 “the central dilemma of modernity is its desire for control or order and the poem represents
its crisis. Faced with the impossible task of formulating a totalizing order, the poem's speakers,
like the modern inhabitants of the everyday world they represent, fragment their world into in-
creasingly smaller segments in an attempt to achieve a local order (e.g., "If there were water /

And no rock / If there were rock / and also water"). Yet the more the world and the poem is cata-
logued, divided, fragmented, the more insistent becomes the pervasive sense of disorder. Read in
this way, the poem suggests the postmodern possibility that the individual's relation to the world,
and to him or herself, is fundamentally ambiguous and obscure. In this postmodern, poststructur-
alist reading, Eliot's poem is indeed what Edmund Wilson had early termed a cry de profundis, a
profound demonstration of the deconstruction not only of individual identity but also of the fun-
damental categories through which the individual in modernity has heretofore understood the
world” (Kaiser)

425 “Isaiah bade King Hezekiah set his lands in order because he was destined not to live; but

Candide resolved to cultivate his own garden as a way of living. We cannot set the whole world
in order; we can rectify ourselves. And we are destined to die, but such order as lies in our power
is nevertheless desirable” (Kenner)

426 the inevitable transitoriness and collapse of earthly things – an extreme retreat from desire
into hysteria - a mayhem of counterpoint, where the speaker multilingually and maniacally re-
ports ruins, fragments, abandonment, and madness - the cacophony of the wasteland beats upon
his ears - the jungle obscures the meaning of the words and their horrendous import – the cultural
collapse of the speaker's present – it is so great that all he is left with is personal matters - a pro-tonuclear simulacrum - a sublime hysteria - he is glad and vindictive at the same time – poetry as
regressive and irresponsible, a sensual rejoicing despite catastrophe - the sing-song presentness
heightens the feeling of instancy – echoes the Dantean ghosts flowing over London Bridge as
well as the 'falling towers' – a card in the Tarot pack is that of a tower struck by lightning, symbolising a lost tradition – nursery rhyme glee – and down we go in a childlike descent but also in
the fast patter of a different rule as the voice of English (and the potentially inhibited mind) finds freedom, pronunciation's metamorphoses and a new sequential meaning in the acoustic linkages
of non-English fragments - the world after the Great War is collapsing, when we reel, drunken
and hymnic, into the abyss - the endless temporality of the end, emphasized by the omission of
punctuation, the ongoing cyclical iterability by which London Bridge this time is defined; its
identity, time and time again, is that it just is falling down - the series of cities, with their falling towers, belong to the cycle of immanence and manifestation, building and unbuilding, in the
hope of the realization of the New Jerusalem cf. Blake - with these figures in the foreground, the
falling bridges and decaying towers of the background mirror the disintegration of form itself
against which the waste land poet moves to conclude his poem as it threatens to fragment

427 'then he dived back into the refining fire' (Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio) – a phrase expres-
sing surrender to pain and terror, seeking purity vide Purg.26.143 (Dante) - suffering is trans-
formed into music, just as Arnaut describes himself as one who goes along singing – Arnaut suf-
fers gladly, with the athletic grace of a swimmer eager to be rinsed of sin - the leap into the fire is after he has exhausted interpretation and the quest for meaning – glossolalia here is a Pentecostal
outpouring of the spirit – quotations seem to float like alien bodies cf.cubism - simultaneity and
juxtaposition, a bravura performance, masquerading an episode of dream psychology - images
burst upon the reader in short flashes as in graphic cinematic montages, illuminating the whole
poem however violently - by cultivating detachment he may conceal the proud Coriolan indivi-
dual - E celebrates the voices of the dead, but he comes to dread their verbal ambush - deepest
truth appears to the world like mere madness – upward leaps of intonation on s'accose, foco and
affina connect reader and speaker with longed for transformation in the Latin of the Pervigilium

Veneris that follows, Quando fiam... for if one's tongue picks up affina and transports it into
fiam, that is the same as winging the desire of the translated words across from chelidon (o as in
dome) to the cry of the lover in Tennyson's The Princess, who yearns to be the bird on his mis-
tress's lattice ' O swallow, swallow' - after such self-disclosure he hides himself in a garment of
flame in which the stirring of memory and desire is accepted as essential for redemption – cf. the

Augustinian fire of lust and expiation – perhaps the reader too, after his journey through the
waste land, is at the foot of Purgatory

427 “The literal call is, as it so often is in this poem, encoded in a metalepsis. The " Poi s'ascose"

passage that occurs in the middle of the babble, Arnaut hiding himself in the refining fire, is, as
with many of Eliot's allusions, not the most relevant part of the passage referred to. The words
just before it in Dante's text, Sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor, are far more important: "Bethink you in time of my pain." Amaut asks Dante directly for the grace of his prayers, which will mitigate the pain of Purgatory. His plea, which Eliot's text suppresses, is the one that in the Parsival
story the ailing king cannot himself make, the plea for the gesture of compassion implicit in the
saving question "What ails you; why are you suffering?" That gesture must, by the terms of the poem itself, come from the reader, whether from a studied response generated by the lost context
or from a spontaneous and naive one aroused simply by the obvious disorder and pain at the sur-
face of the text”(Kearns)

428 when shall I be like the swallow? - a quotation from the Pervigilium Veneris, a Latin lament
for the poet's inability to emulate the spring and break into song – that is when shall the Spring, the time of love, return? And when shall he be reborn from his sufferings and when shall time
flow away? - the speaker is another disinherited and desolate figure trying to use remnants as
building blocks of art - both swallow and nightingale are able to convert their pain into song but
can the poet do so? - a fear of poetic silence – he only can shore fragments against his ruins – or
is this just an antic disposition, the poet fitting us a work we can make of what we will – a ton-
gueless 'inviolable voice' uttering syllables beyond comprehension - the question about the swal-
low suggests all the potential ugliness of violence and lust but also suggests the return of one’s
voice and the possibility of poetry - April as youth, as song, as the birthday of the world - singing
with inviolable voice is rejoicing in love and the poet is being moved to effortless utterance by
love to sing of suffering – for the religious poet the voice purified by suffering is the highest as-
piration – the swallow, having suffered, rises once more to song – his own fervent longing to be
as the swallow - the phrase a desire for regeneration, a longing for freedom cf.the nightingale of
inviolable voice - a plea to be released from suffering into singing, from life into art, embedded
in the wish to be as the swallow, is surrounded by evidence from poets who long for transforma-
tion and the release from nature and its cycles - cf. Swinburne’s Itylus whose context is the endless repetition of the Great Wheel (to sing of Spring and repeat Nature’s cycles repeats its
wrongs, the protagonist will die to the life of Nature so that his heart may burn in the purging
fire) - cf.Whitman’s "death's outlet song of life"

428 ' E is torn between the probable bad faith and the possible good faith of his art, and his world
of formal perfection, a world that lacks the dimension of human error...an attempt to achieve the
dubious, the infinitely to be desired, goal of a christened poetry, in which the poet's heart beats
obedient to controlling hands' (Bedient)

429 royalty diminished, a prince associated with poetry and music but surrounded by destruction

- the inevitability of both individual and cultural decay – the one precious thing that remains
after this catastrophe is the soul - the tower of self and the ruined chapel, both suggestive of the
speaker's predicament – cf. The ' vieux parapets de l'Europe' (Rimbaud) - an image of voluntary
suffering for purgation, cf. the purgative burning at the end of III - another persona for the poet
enclosed in his own dreamlike construction - a phrase expressing total destitution, and a hint of
the gaiety that can be found in total ruin - the privacy, uniqueness and incommunicability of ex-
perience - abolie in Gerard de Nerval's poem means 'ruined' but seems analogous to the aboulie
or incapacity to act that E charged himself with at the time – a descent from the open vowels of

O swallow swallow to the shut-in nasalized despondency of de Nerval's inconsolable lover - he
now feels fallen and desolate, condemned by cosmic fate to ultimate melancholy – the prince la-
ments his lot as the last in the rich lineage of troubadours and turning his pain into art, suffering
becomes music through a process of catharsis – the boundaries of his identity becoming blurred,
he strives to create a new one from the fragments of various cultures such as Amour, Phoebus ,

Lusignan, Biron - a coherent cry of the speaker for his misfortune, which is suffering and loss of
inspiration due to entanglements of love - a sense of self-imprisonment, opposing the command
to sympathize - ‘the tower’ the privacy, uniqueness and incommunicability of experience - in the
circle of one’s existence a confrontation with nothingness - he is passing through all his assum-
able poses to the silence and the light – the poem assumes the audience is conversant with all the
tongues that filled the world after the destruction of the Tower of Babel - Nerval's prince was tra-
velling back in time to recover a lost world – his escape from time a quest for a lost paradise -
like Nerval E is trying to assemble the identity of 20C man from scraps of past cultures - in tarot cards the lightning struck tower signifies the fall of the angels or a fall from physical and spiritual grace – modern identity a babel-like creation in which pieces of language, cut off from their
rooted meanings, gather together in an attempt at founding a common ground of understanding -
poetic self-destruction as the lines spiral into Babylonish babble, as if the poet is hiding behind a
heap of broken images – lines struggling with themselves to obtain form - the text a plurality that
cannot resolve itself - the quotations in the poem close to the madness of hearing inner voices, of
being “impersonalized”, but the voices, or ghosts, are kept within the locus of the poem, shut up
there as in a daemonic wood (in their asylum is our peace) - the poem and the world disintegrate
into fragments - the “tour abolie” suggests both a trump card in the Tarot deck and Count Ugoli-
no, locked in a tower and left to starve

429 “the speaker of The Waste Land also stages his own death when he conjures up the writings
of the dead, sacrificing voice and face to their ventriloquy. In this sense he resembles the child in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, who stages his extinction in the mirror. Freud compares his
grandchild to the victims of shell-shock, who relive their terrors in their dreams, repeating death
as if it were desire. This is the game The Waste Land plays, and the nightmare that it cannot lay
to rest, as it stages the ritual of its own destruction” (Ellman)

430 the poem crystallizes, both formally and thematically, around the line - the culmination of
these tongue raving imprecations and this anarchic muddle of persons and voices, objects and
place - a terrible vanity in its utterance - fragmentation is literally carried to the end and made to serve an ironic end (‘shantih’) - the speaker resolves to claim this tradition and rehabilitate it –
waste and exhaustion comprehend both society and literature - our human sense of ruination - art
an artefact of ‘lateness’, here pressed into service to shore up life - the text an attempt by the subject to reassemble itself, to write itself into being - the effort to put things in order - a note of
calm completion – the multivocal speaker has finally pulled himself together and now will speak
in his own voice - the poem becomes conscious of itself - what had been a series of fragments of
consciousness has become a consciousness of fragmentation: that may not be salvation, but it is a
difference - and to recognize fragments as fragments, to name them as fragments, is already to have transcended them not to an harmonious or final unity but to a somewhat higher, somewhat
more inclusive, somewhat more conscious point of view - modern culture is becoming simply a
jumble of quotations, language dissolving into an axis of association, form not imposed from
without - a schizoid discourse of displacement - the regression to babble a slide into the abyss -
individual pain becomes trauma, not intrinsically, but because of its power to isolate, to reduce to
mere subjectivity - it is not unspeakable because it is horrible, it is horrible because it is unspeakable - at the critical point, the voices of the mind are very likely to recur with redoubled power to
distract and confuse - he is called to regenerate his own lands with wisdom, by means of the frag-
ments of revealed truth that have helped him throughout his quest - a sort of hopeless salvage op-
eration - the speaker aware of his own feeble limitations - the speaker’s consciousness the over-
heard scraps of conversation, miscellaneous literary tags, and incoherent cultural recollections
that would stock a modern cultivated cosmopolitan mind of the 1920s - memories and meanings
will no longer decay into meaningless rubbish – in effect these are talismans, which he has defen-
sively but righteously surrounded himself with, all the better for being drawn from the abjection
eschewing writing of others – ‘fragments’ the inarticulate growlings of the thunder, which only
the speaker perceive as words - but give, sympathize and control form the Aristotelian ideals that
provide transformation for the reality of fragmentary dissolution - no experience is proper or exclusive to the subject. Moreover, the speaker is possessed by the writings of the dead, and seized
in a cacophony beyond control - the problem is to choose the right stony rubbish in which its
roots may stir - touchstones of fear and longing - these align him with his deepest knowledge -
the poem's balance between the cultural disjecta membra of 'these fragments' and the personal in-
tensity of 'my ruins' – the fragments address a longing that the Sanskrit has helped show him how
to satisfy – the notion of the divine as purely spiritual, of the spiritual as non-human as well as
nonnatural, has straitened his Christian sensibility – the poet’s post-Romantic, post-Christian
state of abandonment, and also wryly describes, metapoetically, the textual nature of the poem he
has shaped - a residual, stoical hanging-on - the poem ends still waiting upon the event, still gath-
ering itself, still 'humped in silence' – imagination's boat is equally beached here, 'against the
gloom of 'Aquitaine' - a resolution not to reach conclusion, realising uncertainty, patiently ar-
rived at and patiently endured - writing, in the poem is the "wake" of voice - at once the after-image of the author and his obsequies - personal identity dissolves into the babble of miscegenated
tongues – the poem stammers its orisons in Babel, as if the speaking subject had been "ruined"

by the very fragments he had shored – glossolalia and a polyglot pastiche as an outpouring of the
spirit – childlike innocence of mind and the gift of tongues as a sign of conversion - writing's
catharsis expresses itself in more writing, catching the infection it tries to purge, and imploding
like an obsessive ceremonial under the pressure of its own contradictions – the self made up of
social, cultural, existential forces while the world exists for us as the meaningful arrangement of
human interpretations – from beginning to end a play of voices within the speaker’s mind, at the
end giving him peace from madness - an anguished effort to find his way out, rearranging the
heap of broken images filling his mind to discover the truth behind them - to play these roles
risks fragmenting the self, but to select appropriate and act them out healthfully harmonizes con-
flicting claims within the self - the poem a ruin and does not seek to become a monument - the
poem reasserts the value of artifice by acknowledging its persistent play in all human activity -

E's anxiety about shoring up ruins is both naked honesty and ironic self-deprecation, an an-
guished declaration of failure and the justified final handstand - a cinematic montage using syn-
copation and synchronization that dismembers events into a series of ‘shots’, and, by a combina-
tion of monstrous incongruities resolves them into a whole - a dialogic engagement with the de-
stroyed texts of the tradition - to the point where he is on the verge of dis-covering the possibi-
lity of a non-rational or non-logocentric continuity in the rationally meaningless traces of time
which appear as the surface of the poem - The text moves toward an emptiness on the page, that
stands both for the breakdown of the self into a multiplicity of voices and for the silence of medi-
tation through which that breakdown is contained and transcended - the shameful silence that
marks our refusal to ask, whether from inhibition or pride, the saving question that will heal the
king and free the waters of inspiration once again

430 “The bundle of quotations with which the poem ends has a very definite relation to the gen-
eral theme of the poem and to several of the major symbols used in the poem. Before Arnaut
leaps back into the refining fire of Purgatory with joy he says: "I am Arnaut who weep and go
singing; contrite I see my past folly, and joyful I see before me the day I hope for. Now I pray
you by that virtue which guides you to the summit of the stair, at times be mindful of my pain."

This theme is carried forward by the quotation from Pervigilium Veneris: "When shall I be like the swallow." The allusion is also connected with the Philomela symbol. (Eliot's note on the passage indicates this clearly.) The sister of Philomela was changed into a swallow as Philomela
was changed into a nightingale. The protagonist is asking therefore when shall the spring, the time of love, return, but also when will he be reborn out of his sufferings, and--with the special
meaning which the symbol takes on from the preceding Dante quotation and from the earlier con-
texts already discussed--he is asking what is asked at the end of one of the minor poems: "When
will Time flow away." The quotation from "El Desdichado," as Edmund Wilson has pointed out, indicates that the protagonist of the poem has been disinherited, robbed of his tradition. The
ruined tower is perhaps also the Perilous Chapel, "only the wind's home," and it is also the whole tradition in decay. The protagonist resolves to claim his tradition and rehabilitate it. The quotation from The Spanish Tragedy--"Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe"--is perhaps the most puzzling of all these quotations. It means, I believe, this: The protagonist's acceptance of
what is in reality the deepest truth will seem to the present world mere madness. ("And still she cried . . . 'Jug jug' to dirty ears.") Hieronymo in the play, like Hamlet, was "mad" for a purpose.

The protagonist is conscious of the interpretation which will be placed on the words which fol-
low--words which will seem to many apparently meaningless babble, but which contain the old-
est and most permanent truth of the race:Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Quotation of the whole
context from which the line is taken confirms this interpretation. Hieronymo, asked to write a
play for the court's entertainment, replies:

Why then, I'll fit you; say no more.

When I was young, I gave my mind

And plied myself to fruitless poetry;

Which though it profit the professor naught

Yet it is passing pleasing to the world.” (Brooks)

430 ' the passage is on the margin between order and madness. Art may be taken as an answer to
collapse, pain, depression and the dissolution of a tradition of order and art, but Hieronymo's
mocking words intrude and destroy any notion that salvation is available through art. As with

Philomela he is deprived of his tongue (at the climax of the play he bites off his tongue and spits
it at his captors) At the end poetry is in the service of madness and silence and all solutions gen-
erate their formal opposites' (Brooker & Bentley)

430 “In the Cubist painting, the laws of space are suppressed, so that all parts of the model, even
those that are normally out of sight, can be brought actively into the design; similarly, in The

Waste Land, the laws of time are suppressed so that all of history and literature can be made
available to the poem. In short, The Waste Land reconstitutes time in much the same way as the

Cubist painting reconstitutes space” (Korg)

430 “quotations and allusions are the fleeting, fragmentary memories which well up freely in the
historical mind which is the poem. It is left to the reader to search for, or to create, feasible pat-
terns of association among these fragments. To do so is to elaborate the content of the historical
consciousness, to subjectify history. Just as the Cubist vision violates classical, or Newtonian
space by fracturing the continuity of classical perspective, this techique violates chronological
time by fracturing grammatical syntax. For the presence of these literary fragments creates, in
syntax, breaches of expectation which force thinking, symbolically, beyond the ordered progres-
sion of linear time. If language, the structure of lan- guage, does somehow determine the way in
which we «see» or understand the world, then the necessity to redefine the world in the post-clas-
sical age must engender, to some degree, the de-structuring, or destruction, of our traditional lin-
guistic system. This is, of course, on one level, exactly what The Waste Land does; by opening gaps, or voids, in its own syntactical structure, it opens up spaces, or silences, in which thinking
can encounter reality direct, outside of the scaffolding of language. No wonder that the poem's
first readers found it so difficult to apprehend. The old linguistic expectations which they
brought to it were exactly what the poem intended to destroy. The intimate relationship between
language and reality has been eloquently described by George Steiner: ‘the classic and the Chris-
tian sense of the world strive to order reality within the governance of language. Literature, phi-
losophy, theology, law, the arts of history, are endeavors to enclose within the bounds of rational
discourse the sum of human experience, its recorded past, its present condition and future expec-
tations... they bear solemn witness to the belief that all truth and realness, with the exception of a small, queer margin at the very top, can be housed inside the walls of language. This belief is no
longer universal’ «Truth and realness» have become undefined concepts in the twentieth cen-
tury. The classical orientation is no longer sufficient to contain them...E has created a structure
of consciousness which encompasses the gaps of knowledge inherent in the old, empirical orien-
tation. The violation of syntactical expectation jolts the mind outside of linear time. It forces
thinking to practice the creation of meaning from beyond the security of the traditional context.

The collapse of the old world-view is not a cue for the abdication of responsibility, but rather for
the assumption of responsibility for a new definition of reality. Like some archaeological discov-
ery, the poem is an arrangement of historical remnants which invite reconstruction, interpreta-
tion. Thinking itself must provide the context, the milieu, for these remnants. The reader, the par-
ticipator in the poem, becomes his own Tiresias, elaborating his own historical consciousness
which redeems the void by structuring it with a framework of meaning, a sense of value that
autonomously arises out of the necessary union of thinking and its environment...the world is un-
avoidably subjectivized by the processes of perception and thought. It therefore follows that rea-
lity, which is only that which we are capable of knowing, arises from the interaction of man and
nature through thought. Thus, secondly, to understand, to comprehend reality necessarily means
to contemplate thinking as the context in which reality occurs. What this orientative shift seems
to be saying is that what is real ineluctably arises out of the fusion of those opposite poles of the
classical framework, «subject» and «object». In its essence, at its genesis, reality is a synergy of
contrasting categories which we can no longer afford to think of as mutually exclusive” (Der-
rick)

430 ' the poem a quest without knowledge of the goal of the quest. The random and fragmentary
movement of the poem, is never resolved, and reaches a culmination in these allusive and disper-
sive fragments. But the movement towards an ending or explanation is not rejected. Only the ex-
pectation of reaching that goal, an expectation that leads to despair, is rejected' (Davidson)

430 ' the poem surreptitiously repeats the horror that it tries to expiate. In particular, it desecrates tradition. The poem may be seen as an extended "blasphemy", in Eliot's conception of the term, an affirmation masked as a denial. For the text dismantles Western culture as if destruction were
the final mode of veneration.The poem uses its nostalgia to conceal its vandalism, its pastiche of
the tradition that it mourns. Indeed, a double consciousness pervades the text, as if it had been
written by a vicar and an infidel. The speaker is divided from himself, unable to resist the imp
within who cynically subverts his pieties. Thus, Cleopatra's burnished throne becomes a dressing
table, time's winged chariot a grinning skull' (Ellmann)

430 “In the design of the whole poem, especially in its use of contemporary anthropology, the broken textual surface must be read as the sign of the eruptive power of subrational forces reasserting, seismically, the element totalities at the origins of culture and mind. The poem's finale is
an orgy of social and elemental violence. The "Falling towers," lightning and thunder, unveil what Eliot, at that time, took to be the base where individual mind and culture are united in the
redemptive ethical imperatives spoken by the thunder. What the poem attempts here, by ascrib-
ing these ethical principles to the voice of nature and by drawing on the epistemological autono-
my posited by symbolisme, is the construction of an elaborated code in which an authoritative universalizing vision can be achieved using a "notional" (mythic) idiom uncontaminated by Enlightenment forms of rationalism” (Cooper)

430 “The Waste Land is a landmark in English literature as it emphasises the nature of knowl-
edge as language, and that our culture and our own personal identity are linked to and constituted
by a series of discourses which overlap and underlie each other. The poem relies on and is an ex-
pression of the heteroglot nature of language and literature and that our knowledge and under-
standing of experience, if we are to make them meaningful, must always manifest themselves as
text. It also shows how attitudes change with regard to what the poet expresses, which is no long-
er himself but the voices of the heteroglot culture of which he is a part. This is related to the blurring of the boundaries between genres at this time and, in the poem, there are multiple dis-
courses, voices, and sources of intertextuality which foreground the way in which Eliot's attitude
towards tradition is actually an expression of that heteroglossia. While the meaning of the poem
relies on a belief in the existence of correspondence, the curious thing is that these relations be-
tween past and present, which provide significance, are actually imposed or put there by the
author, although the suggestion is that they are real correspondences” (Crews)

430 “The very familiarity of this line makes it easy to overlook its implied paradox: Ordinarily
ruins result in fragments, instead of fragments protecting against ruin. “Fragments,” on one hand,
refer to the poem’s discrete parts, and perhaps to its allusive cultural diversity. On the other, it
suggests that “give, sympathize, control” are fragments of a larger—presumably Christian and
orthodox—system, an ethic without the glue of faith, Incarnation, and dogma that will incorpo-
rate them into a complete, spiritually reconstituting system. Even though they fall short of that
completion, these ethical imperatives nonetheless refer and aspire to it. Indeed, inasmuch as they
do argue against disillusion, they perform that positive function, despite remaining necessarily
negative because, as yet, incomplete. They do not simply call a solution impossible. If anything,
they—indeed the entire poem—point toward the solution’s ultimate necessity. That a solution is
postponed does not subtract from the necessity of persisting to seek one”

(Sigg)

431 Hieronymo literally 'holy name' or 'bearing the holy name' - as touchstone for unspeakable
horror, betrayal, revenge, madness, murder and mutilation - revenge snaps into place - he pro-
mises to fit the murderers in the play into his strategy of revenge - gestures toward an appetite
for brutality, an insistence on evening the score, and a world presided over by an allegorical fig-
ure lazily amused by violence - the moment when motive has been reinforced not only by oppor-
tunity
but also by a precise scheme that Hieronimo unfolds on the spot to his unwit-
ting victims - the babble of languages mimics the confused voices in the play that enact his revenge (and the play of voices in the speaker’s mind) - not only is he sitting on the shore but he
has deployed these ruins to hold himself together - he has yet to restore his wholeness - the
speaker slips behind the mask of the mad Hieronymo, mad for mystery and rage but consenting
himself to 'plie himself to fruitless poesy' and write that cryptic tragedy in many tongues by
which he will 'make mad the guilty and appal the free' – you’ve shored up these fragments? Why
then Ile fit you! - he is the bloody sign of human speech, having spat out his own tongue – a hit
back at despair by crazily erupting against restraint - the overwrought effusion of repressed sex-
ual and social confusion and dismay - the outpourings of a dabbler in irrational metaphysics -
only through such violence is the human element subordinated to the meaningful and valuable -
the fragments of history are to be made coherent - but purpose is questioned by the tense - the de-
mands for a comprehension of the universe is a form of intellectual madness - in context his ago-
nized and pitiless irony epitomizes the psychic effect of revenge central to the tragedy, saying
not only ‘I’ll supply your desire for entertainment, but also ‘I’ll fit you into my intentions’ - the
irony of the play is that Hieronymo, consumed by thoughts of revenge, has fitted himself for the
tortures of Hell promised in the play’s epilogue - the reader is being promised help in the
achievement of his own quest, but must focus on his own dark lusts and dive eagerly into the re-
fining flames - a false closure, the voice called for but remaining outside the poem - something
of Hieronymo's own mischievousness, his deliberate web-spinning, if nothing of his mad malice,
lies behind this last display of heteroglossia - madness here inseparable from art, permitting the
poet to 'fit' or satisfy the reader – madness liberating, freeing its victims from conformity and
hence from the social sterility that is at the cancerous heart of the Waste Land - fragmented
memory is what the poem challenges us to complete and make whole again - a rationale for a de-
liberately constructed maze – finitude must be accepted along with our attempts to protect our-
selves from it – the interplay between mental fragments and the ruins of this world - the speaker
has been acting the voices of others as if he has little choice in the matter, and even his own
voice has been 'theatre' to him – archaic spelling swells the grieving father's rage and madness,
as if surviving time and resisting forgiveness - now, in the crash of Babel itself, he can find the
anguish and strength to leave the medley of voices and attend to this charged and remote silence

- Ile – the ' I ' no longer stands outside the other voices in detachment but itself is disintegrating, reduced to the status of complete internality and absorbed in participation – the speaker is turning on the reader, saying he will supply him with what is suitable, i.e, the 'show' he promised
made up of 'sundry languages' - as for his readers, he has other ‘fragments’with which to ‘fit’

them, the Hindu fragments, by which the poet/quester rather obscurely intends, like Hieronimo,
to both reveal the truth and punish the guilty - Hieronymo is mad for a purpose, like Hamlet – the
acceptance of what is in reality the deepest truth will seem to the world mere madness cf. 'and
still she cried, and still the world pursues...' - E's mockery of conversion, painful and sardonic,
part of a ruse, like Hieronymo's play, to conceal his true feelings - his madness will only be
hushed by 'shantih' – the fragments of song and poetry the metamorphosis of human catastrophe
into innocent and mindless art

431 ' Since the breakdown of outer bulwarks drives him only to more direct communion with his
own heart, and which he can no more disbelieve than he can his own existence. Since life wins
the victory at the harrowing of Hell and a great light shines upon the people who sat in darkness,
the triumph of Anti-Christ in the world cannot be final. At the centre is a revelation of power,
wisdom and love in union redeeming the world. The poem contains no such revelation. It dis-
covers in its visions man's incapacity to achieve satisfaction, the boredom of his quotidian existences, and the horror of his ignobility. At the centre of its spiral movement there is simply 'the
abyss', 'the void', or 'the overwhelming question', the terror of the unknown which cannot be
evaded. For all this, its ending is not despair. Stripped of his illusions, his pride broken, man is
left to face the final possibility. The poem ends with the truth of the human situation as the reli-
gious mind conceives it : the beginning of wisdom is fear' (Gardner)

431 ' What he will not say out directly and betrayingly is that he believes – more, that his God is
the unnamable, and that he would forsake the whole earth for a single drop from the clouds hud-
dling near the Absolute...the poem is an elaborate maze for those inimical to his purpose, to put
him in a safe and cunning position of mastery...how laugh at his medieval metaphysicalness if it
can scarcely be made out in the din of diverse voices and the harlequinade of generic
kinds?...their doom is sealed by their own deductions of despair - yes, life is a heap of broken
images etc...better this bitter ignominy than that his faith should be vulgarized by common dis-
course, its originality obscured by the frayed curtains of tradition, its deferrals to silence lost in the small talk of connections and transitions and its terms like the last bled bits of coughdrop on
tired tongues' (Bedient)

431 “the voices he hears suggest roles ; to play them all risks fragmenting the self, but to select
appropriate ones and act them out healthfully harmonizes the conflicting claims within the
self...the mind has been purified” (Mayer)

431 ' the very idea of the single, commanding voice is what is being mocked in Dickens’ line “

He do the Police in different voices”, with the political authority of the monumental, unwavering
sovereign self dismantled from within itself through acts of mimicry and ventriloquism, and
through the gesture of those acts being generated by a reader of the press. Communicated and
disseminated through the media translation of logocentric utterance, an internal dehiscence is sig-
nalled. Satire, burlesque and carnival are the order of the day. To gain entrance to the polis, to be-
come a citizen of this modern, haunted site, is to give oneself over to its voices, as Eliot does in
the final stanzas of the poem. There is a structural trajectory from beginning to ending of the
poem, in its having traced not a connection but a structural trajectory from the beginning to the
end of the poem in its various forms and drafts. An admittedly meagre filament threads its way
through the babble, carrying in phantom oscillations the burden of Eliot’s urban vision, and in
that the city’s cryptographic alethiology' (Wolfreys)

432 the thunder's ancient wisdom can never be fully grasped – once more the thunder reiterates
its impossible commands – an utter foreignness, at once alienating and compelling - the Sanskrit
injunctions in effect embody the continuance of the human quest – expressions of a practical ac-
commodation of feeling to life - superficially, this is the mad talk of Hieronymo, and the end re-
sult of hallucinative visions - the world will take it as such – chill as the wind from off the Hima-
layas, coming in as the very consummation of wisdom – the clear closural function of a reprise –
the sequence of Sanskrit, telescoped out of a single syllable and assonantly and alliteratively akin

- and from the same fount of wisdom, the abundance of the One as well as a seeming parody of
wild, earthly proliferations – languages have been scattered but are gathered in the final words –
an original Adamic language encompasses all the fragments of post-babel communication and
may bring peace to the wasteland, and a return to the state of innocence and purity that preceded
the fragmentation of languages/civilisations - Sanskrit the metaphor of a primitive, wise and single speech, reaching back to its pre-lapsarian condition - the white space of utter holiness effec-
tively in between

432 “Hieronymo’s madness, in the context provided by Eliot, is that of the Platonic bard. If we
are to take the last two lines of The Waste Land as the substance of what the bard in his sibylline
trance has to say, then the old man’s macaronic tragedy appears transmuted into the thunder’s
three injunctions, Give, Sympathize, Control, and a triple “Peace,” “repeated as here,” says the
note, “a formal ending to an Upanishad.” (Kenner)

433 resolves the medley of half-heard echoes from a variety of literatures by mimicking a for-
mal ending to an Upanishad - petition to the East for solace and recovery - sends us off into the
world with a benediction, the assertion of and wish for peace - simultaneously a mantra, a clos-
ing prayer in a rite and the goal of meditative truth – a submission, consolation, calm and above
all, freedom from troubling passion - the poem is seeking the point of view, the resolution that
will subdue the distractions of its multiple voices and harmonize them to allow at least a mo-
ment's hearing of the note of peace - a remedy to the insane clarity of a too-speculative con-
sciousness - the quiet that may arrive when the intolerable wrestle with words finishes and we
give ourselves up to the peace of acceptance and transcendence – a formal gesture of blessing , a
sign of the peace that the long struggle enacted in the poem bestows - the phrase performatively
declares a spiritual resolution, proposing that even amidst destruction and abjection, the language
of peace exists - the gesture marks an end point, or at least a stalling, of the relentless repetition of desire unmet - not a redemptive exercise but something springing from the deep human desire
to expiate through trial and privation - the percussion of voices and onomatopoeia of thunder has
finally resolved into the dominant voice's onomatopoeia of falling rain and the auditory correla-
tive for deep, meaningful peace - all passion spent, suffering and loss are now resolved in sad
harmony – the achievement of a negative capability, the acceptance of de-centered being - let it
be - the selfless attitude allows the speaker to be an instrument rather than the controlling doer -
the speaker has achieved negative capability or an Heideggerian Gelassenheit, a generosity to-
wards existence, that "releasement" or better, that letting be, which lets being be - he is the self-absorbed actor in the world of illusion whose pride is punished by disaster - the fundamental
emotion from which all others spring, encompassing all and 'passing understanding' – peace not
achieved but longed for, a peace sought out of anguish – finding at least the full significance of
silence - the irony in matching "shantih" with the mind shoring fragments and the tongue raving imprecations is hard to miss: "shantih" here is not so much wished as wished for - it says Peace, peace; when there is no peace - the sea's permanent sounds – the subtle onomatopoeia of a gentle
downpour – soft susurrus of a life-giving rain shower – rain and sea imagery converge - the
subtle bromatopoeia of a gentle downpour - the permanent sounds of the sea - the water-speech
which patience has struggled toward in desert and deadlock, in retreat and advance, as the river
leads from city to sea, Europe to Asia, past to present - the insomniac speaker finally falls asleep

- the imperative of every human desire to be stilled except the desire for self-surrender, restraint,
peace – an assuaging ritual of sound, yearning perhaps for what it does not possess, the meaning
which is beyond it – the long result of time will come out like a sum at a particular moment in
history - linguistic alienation realising a divorce from significant meaning and a movement to-
wards it – even as the words enact frustration with their unintelligibility, they placate frustration
with their sound – implicates E and the reader in another cycle of sickness - the absolute deadend
of history – cf. that Christian peace of understanding that passeth all understanding – in Eastern terms there is only peace (or emptiness, in a paradoxical and austere fullness) – already silence
seems to invade the intervals of this thrice repeated word (as in Hindu practice) – swallowed up
by the Eternal Silence all discourse is shut down in simple, discontinuous recurrence, sealed by
the repeat of the dominant vowel sound (a), as if in a redundancy of the same – a verbal surro-
gate for the reality he now hopes eventually to live. Man cannot construct a tower which will
reach Heaven but depends entirely on God’s grace - a poem of radical doubt and negation, urging
that every human desire be stilled except the desire for self-surrender, for restraint, and for peace

- the emphasis of the poem is not on the decay and death of civilisation but on the progress of the
soul - a heavily willed and fragile sense of peace - an intimation of divine peace, but is it fading
or approaching? Perhaps we are left between collapse and recovery - its redundancy would free
the mind from the virulence of thought, or free the soul from the mind – neither grace nor self-re-
liance is invoked, only endurance - the turning of language almost against itself in order to evoke
the Unnameable – the expression baffles the ear even as through its reiteration it seems to insist
on its own finality - Babel has dwindled to a trace – the word that is used when words are no
longer available or, better yet, required - it is only because peace is out of the question on this
precarious margin that peace must be stated – ironically, a peace of unknowing, a cloud of ignor-
ance - the poem, as a specimen of modern ephemera, may itself self-destruct - the affirmation
minimal and the calamity maximal – the speaker is shattered into language itself until nothing re-
mains of him, and the body of the poem becomes his corpse - the poem the process of breakdown
and reintegration as it occurs in the individual psyche - the poem ends at the very point of com-
posure and madness - personal identity dissolves in the miscegenated mix of tongues - the text
stammers its orisons in Babel - E’s splurge of allusions, citing violence, horror, murderous ven-
geance, purgatorial pain, self-mutilation and ultimate voicelessness, is left in open confrontation
with the voice of order, self-control and peace as expressed in the Upanishad - a putting of one-
self in the hands of God, and then waiting - the sacrificial death of secular babble in eternal si-
lence – a reminder not only of the path we did not take but that the peace attainable by that path
indeed passes understanding - in the conditions of modernity the only ground is pre-reflective
immediacy - the poet quibbles with "shantih" which at once becomes immediate experience and meditated knowledge

433 “As mantra, shantih conveys . . . the peace inherent in its inner sound. . . . As a
closing prayer, s hantih makes of what comes before it a communal as well as a private utter-
ance. . . . And as the “formal ending of an Upanishad” it revises the whole poem from a state-
ment of modern malaise into a sacred and prophetic
discourse” (Kearns)

433 “The past exists in fragments precisely because nobody cares what it meant; it will unite it-
self and come alive in the mind of anyone who succeeds in caring…”

(Kenner)

433 ' the aim of the poem is to establish the word that is true because it is not our invention,
against the reduction of Logos to Lexis that has been effected upon the sole authority of the hu-
man will' (Donaghue)

433 ' the thunder and the imprecation of shantih do not sum up the poem from some outside per-
spective, but merely coexist with all the other fragments...there is no outside...neither shoring up nor tearing down will achieve closure and the positive and negative values in the last section
simply add up to a zero...The Waste Land evokes a perfect, wordless love that existed before all
language and all meaning, its seeming incoherence of immediate experience similar to that of in-
fantile
consciousness. It is this that provides the perspective from which it has organic unity' (Brooker

& Bentley)

433 ' For E afflictions once perceived were to be cultivated as a way of passing through death to
a new life. Not satisfied with the touchstones of peace and consolation as a 19C poet would be,
he takes seriously those feelings whose sadness romanticism had only soothed. The consolations
of sad patience are near to despair. To dissolve the burden of existence lucidly face life and see it
whole' (Moody)

433 “the text surreptitiously repeats the horror it tries to expiate, not a protection against but ac-
tually a repetition of the prohibited act, here a dismantling of the culture of the West - nostalgia
conceals vandalism, its pastiche of the tradition it mourns” (Ellmann)

433 “...what I have been describing is what I see as the implicit schema of the poem, which is
less a narrative or plot than an impulsion, an emotional purposiveness, a quest, starting out from
a living death and its attendant horrors, moving on by way of a commemoration of death in the
figure of Phlebas, and ending up by soliciting a spiritual explanation, perhaps even transcen-
dence, but assuredly not attaining it. Eliot’s strategy is not just to juxtapose voices through ven-
triloquism and allusiveness, nor to synthesize anything, but to engage us in a process of interplay
and cross-play:a play of interconnection and interpenetration” (Haffenden)

433 ' ...the brink of silence, a silence too full to need the prison-wall scratchings of language, a silence that has never heard anything but itself, in a tautology that stops the tongue...cessative not
only for the poem but for language and consciousness themselves, a self-transcendence attained
by both a self-forgetting hero and a self-forgetting art... self-aware yet so eager to wing off others words to the one true sphere...shantih appears to vanish immediately into the ethereal reaches of
connotation – all words are nothing compared to the silence of the One' (Bedient)

433 “Eliot readily admitted he did not know the meaning of the poem. Meaning is simply a sop
thrown to the reader to distract him while the words go stealthily to work in various unconscious
and physical ways. The poet's job is to cultivate a sensory language which would make 'direct
communication with the nerves'. He must select words with 'a network of tentacular roots reach-
ing down to the deepest terrors and desires', suggestively enigmatic images which would pene-
trate to those 'primitive' levels which all men and women can experience alike. Below the epi-
phenomena of commercial civilisation there were potent mythological images of birth, death and
resurrection in which humans might discover a common identity. Routine consciousness is to be
wrenched apart so as to revive in the reader a visceral sense of common identity.' (Eagleton)

433 “the poem is meaningful only as a commentary on the severe limitations upon our ability to
arrive at meaning...E continually denies the possibility of meaning just as he continually affirms
its possibility by echoing its myriad formulations in the past...it is not the substance of the
poem’s literary fragments, or their sources that matter; the poem’s meaning is instead the unavoidable fact that that apparent substance, like all verbalised human reality, is always only frag-
mentary, and therefore, by definition, useless if intended for the purposes of any coherent mean-
ing or vision” (Murphy)

433 “If we listen attentively to the negations of The Waste Land, they tell us much about the poem that was missed when it was read from the affirmative point of view brought to it by its
early defenders and admirers. Ironically, it was only its detractors - among them Eliot's friend

Conrad Aiken - who acknowledged its deliberate vacuity and incoherence and the life-question-
ing theme of this first venture into "philosophical" poetry on Eliot's part. Aiken considered its incoherence a virtue because its subject was incoherence, but this was cool comfort either to him-
self or to Eliot, who was outraged by Aiken's opinion that the poem was "melancholy." It was far from being a sad poem--like the nineteenth-century poems that Eliot had criticized precisely because of their wan melancholias, based as he said on their excesses of desire over the possibili-
ties that life can afford. Neither Aiken, who found the poem disappointing, nor I. A. Richards,
who was exhilarated by its rejection of all "belief", spotted the poem's focus on negation as a philosophically meditated position” (Hay)

433 “the unity the poem aims at is that of an inclusive consciousness. It pleases by the fidelity
with which it follows a form of thought through the poet’s mind, but without defining that
thought. The organisation it achieves as a work of art is of a kind that has been illustrated, an or-
ganisation that may, by analogy be called musical...the concentration, the depth of orchestration

E achieves, the way in which the themes move in and out of one another, and the predominance
shifts from level...themes and motifs are picked up, transformed, muted and dissolved...the poem
exhibits no progression...it ends where it began” (Leavis)

433 “recollected, Eliot is a poet-critic of provoking decisiveness; reread, he becomes again so
full of intelligent nuance that we are forced to see why frailer minds like our own have wanted
to impose decisiveness upon him. It's as if he can be remembered adequately only by memoriz-
ing him; short of that the best we can do is simplify and systematize. But a more important rea-
son for our reductive readings, and one which credits Eliot's power rather than our weakness, is
that his procedural hesitancies have the total effect of enormous stamina. His reluctance of self-
assertion, by acknowledging all the possibilities open to it, emerges as a frighteningly controlled
strength. [This, of course, is Negative Capability.] Faced with such tensed authority, commenta-
tors have anxiously pacified it by translation: what is essentially power of performance in the ex-
ercise of mind and spirit is made into a series of Big Ideas or Feelings or Images, into precisely
the forms Eliot tries to evade” (Poirier)

433 “the state of consciousness and self-awareness of Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness may be taken as a paradigm for a similar state of consciousness lying behind and unifying The Waste

Land. It announces (or suggests) that The Waste Land is focused not on the world but on an individual’s consciousness as he is perceiving himself and the world—in a state of emotional-spiri-
tual crisis... it is a dramatization of an individual consciousness in a precarious state of balance
living “his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender” as he works his way to
that “supreme moment of complete knowledge” out of the Thunder’s voice” (Miller)

433 “the many voices of the poem united by a nameless protagonist who disguises his faith with an ironic expression of disorder” (Bedient)

433 "Then out of the blue The Dial brought out The Waste Land and all our hilarity ended. It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the
unknown were turned to dust. To me especially it struck like a sardonic bullet. I felt at once that
it had set me back twenty years, and I'm sure it did. Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom
just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to
the essence of a new art form itself -- rooted in the locality which should give it fruit. I knew at
once that in certain ways I was most defeated. Eliot had turned his back on the possibility of re-
viving my world. And being an accomplished craftsman, better skilled in some ways than I could
ever hope to be, I had to watch him carry my world off with him, the fool, to the enemy."

(W.C.Williams)

433 “the meaning of a poem may be something larger than its author’s conscious purpose, and
something remote from its origins...a poem may appear to mean very different things to different
readers, and all of these meanings may be different from what the author thought he meant... the
reader’s interpretation may differ from the author’s and be equally valid - it may even be bet-
ter...it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, and
thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity,
stillness and reconciliation' (T.S.Eliot)

(to be continued)

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