Theme, Form, Imagery and Symbolism in T.S.

Eliot’s The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land was published in 1922, a year that saw the publication of many

other masterpieces of Modernist literature as well. This long poem with a mass of references and

images jumps from one to another seemingly without a coherent narrative. Changes in the narrative

voice are instrumental in creating the poem's self are allowed to show through the relatively

irrelevant narrative structures, this poem captures the anxieties around Modern life and the interwar

period by being itself as chaotic as the whole of Europe was at that point in time. In his imagery

Eliot evokes an arid, unwelcoming landscape where he juxtaposes nature with technology, beauty

with destruction and a death-conscious “heap of broken images” (line 22). The painful awareness of

inevitable death mingles with the opposing despair over life having to continue.

The landscape of The Waste Land – a land full of waste, a land without a purpose where life has

gone to waste – illustrates London's pursuit of technological development, excessive financial

aspirations and pollution. From line 60 onwards there is a scene describing commuters “flo[wing]

over London Bridge” towards the city's economic centre and stopping to have arbitrary

conversations with acquaintances. Behind them the clock of a church they are strategically written

to be walking away from strikes “a dead sound on the final stroke of nine” –the nine-to-five

workday is a death sentence. Ford (2014) writes, “The commuters [...] are spiritually dead, [...] have

not yet been awakened to their limbo-like state, and therefore drift like unreal zombies in a

Dantescan hell […] like the poem’s Tiresias, [Eliot] had “foresuffered all” and “walked among the

lowest of the dead”; thus he was able to see through the illusions of modern life, and deliver this

withering verdict on his fellow commuters.” Eliot ends the stanza on a quotation from Baudelaire -

“hypocrite lecteur!” - to remind the readers that they are the same as the spiritually dead commuters

in his poem.

Smith (1983:97) describes The Waste Land as “a tale that seems already to have climaxed in

disaster but is never completed.” This is best illustrated in the last lines of section three: “Burning

burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out/ Oh Lord Thou pluckest / burning.” These
lines capture a post-war existentialist agony; the world is in torment and there seems to be no higher

power to end the suffering of the poor souls stuck in the wasteland. A promise of death runs through

the poem, culminating is the description of the Phoenician sailor's “Death by Water,” but

significantly there is no water in the last section of the poem, “only rock” and “Dead mountain

mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit.” The clairvoyante says to “fear death by water,” but once

the water has run out, the people are stuck in a state of constant fear without an end.

There is a recurring theme of prophecy, from Sybil of Cumae in the epigraph to Tiresias who has

“foresuffered all.” The prophets of The Waste Land are powerless; the famous clairvoyante has a

bad cold; foresight is faulty and diseased. Saunders (1988:32) says of the characters in the poem

that “as the inheritors of a Europe devastated by war they live entirely in the present, […] as heirs to

the scientific revolutions of the nineteenth century they are ignorant of any form of time which

transcends human measurement.” Aside from the occasional reference to old myths and individual

characters' pasts, most of the poem is so closely tied to the present that there is no space for a

coherent story told and explained from an outside perspective; the reader is forced to be in the scene

with the characters.

Although this poem is mostly in free verse, there are some parts where a certain symmetry of

narrative and flow of sound is achieved through end rhymes. In the last section What the Thunder

Said, occasional rhyming couplets speed up the text and create a sense of restlessness and urgency:

“If there were water we could stop and drink/ Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think.” The

poem's voice is most traditionally poetic in The Fire Sermon with end rhymed lines and allusions to

Marvell (l. 185) and Spenser (l. 176), both accredited in Eliot's notes at the end. When the scene

zooms in to the individual story of the typist and house agent's clerk's affair, the text is slowed down

with simple abab rhymes: “lives/ see/ strives/ sea.” These more traditionally lyrical sections are

broken up with lines of individual words or phrases; this shifts the pace and forces the reader to pay

attention to the frequent changes of tone and subject matter.

Line 185 “But at my back in a cold blast I hear” borrows the metric form of and thus alludes to

Andrew Marvell's To his Coy Mistress: “But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot

hurrying near.” The speaker in Marvell's poem advocates enjoying life because death is

approaching; Eliot's line is much more sinister. “A rattle of bones, and chuckle spread from ear to

ear” is more personified and malevolent than “time's winged chariot.” Later in the stanza Eliot

returns to Marvell's metric form in “But at my back from time to time I hear/ The sound of horns

and motors [...]” The modern world no longer has the luxury of waiting for time to bring death

about, as technology carries out masses of untimely deaths through war.

Magedanz (2006) suggests that allusion can be considered a poetic form in itself since such a

major part of The Waste Land is actually constructed of quotations. Eliot uses references to other

poems and even quotes in other languages to build his narrative. Whitworth (1998:48) argues

against paying too much attention to allusion as form or even content: “Since all language is

allusive, any given word in the poem alludes potentially to all its previous uses, to the total corpus

of utterances.” Most importantly, by changing the wording in lines such as the one borrowing from

Marvell's poem, and placing his borrowed lines in a new context, Eliot shows how the concerns of

his time period are different from those before and gives new meaning to well-known lines from the

previous eras' poetry.

Most of Eliot's visual imagery is unpleasant and grotesque, “A rat crept […]/ Dragging its slimy

belly on the bank / While I was fishing in the dull canal.” While sailors and fishers are recurring

characters, there is hardly any clean water in this poem. “The river sweats/ Oil and tar;” then there

is the water the sailor drowns in. There is illness – the clairvoyante with a bad cold, the carbuncular

young man – and a sense of intrusion in the lines “hooded hordes swarming/ Over endless plains.”

The theme of violation and intrusion is most clearly symbolised with the reference to the story of

Philomela from Metamorphoses. In this story the king Tereus brutally rapes Philomela and cuts off

her tongue with a sword when she tries to cry out for help (Ovid 1986:138-142). In A Game of

Chess a beautiful, homely and rather glamorous setting is introduced only to create a window to this
scene through a painting on a mantelpiece. Philomela is transformed to a nightingale and later in

the poem the aural imagery of “Twit twit twit/ Jug jug jug jug jug jug” is followed by “So rudely

for'c / Tereu” - even the beautiful sound of birdsong only reminds the poem's speaker of the story

of violation of innocence.

According to Butler (1994:xvii), “the nature of Modernism changes after the First World War,

when a traditionalist, allusive conservatism is countered in its turn by the irrationalist pretensions of

Surrealism.” Many of the events and images in The Waste Land can be seen to symbolise the

situation Europe was in after the First World War. The story of Philomela being raped by the king

could symbolically reflect the feelings in post-war Europe; citizens had been violated and led to

destruction by leaders who should protect and guide their countries, not march people to death by

millions. The innocence of nature and childhood from the poem's first section gradually shift

towards the resignation in the end. There is no more water, but the speaker still “[sits] upon the

shore/ Fishing” as there is nothing else that can be done. Eliot closes the poem with the words

“Shantih shantih shantih” which he explains in the notes to mean “Peace which passeth

understanding.” This is at the same time a comforting and a rather sad way to end the poem. The

world is in chaos and there is no way to know what is to come since the prophets are useless; peace

can only be found in not trying to know or understand too much, and accepting the chaotic nature of

life that this poem illustrates with its structure.

Bibliography

Butler, C. Early Modernism (1994). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10622378/TS-Eliot-Words-tongued-with-fire.html
Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962 (1963). London, UK: Faber and Faber.

Eliot's reading of The Waste Land [online] URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkQ3kxQURcI

and e-version of the text at http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html (accessed 24/01/2014)

Ford, M. 'TS Eliot: Words tongued with fire' (2014). The Telegraph [online] URL: (accessed
9/2/2014)

Magedanz, S. 'Allusion as Form' (2006). Orbis Litterarum Vol. 61 No. 2 [online via Academic
Search Complete] (accessed 13/3/2014)

Marvell, A. 'To his Coy Mistress' http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm (accessed

8/3/2014)

Ovid, Metamorphoses (AD 8/1986). Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics.

Saunders, J. 'The problem of time in The Waste Land' in Critical Essays on The Waste Land (1988).
Harlow, UK: Longman.

Smith, G. The Waste Land (1983). London, UK: George Allen & Unwin.

Whitworth, M. ' 'Sweet Thames' and The Waste Land's Allusions' (1998) in Essays in Criticism,
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