Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Young
R.V. Young
more than a sly accumulation of the shards associations. The title of the section is the
and slivers of Western civilization—“a heap rubric of the Anglican funeral service from
of broken images” (l. 22)1—emerges as the Book of Common Prayer, which rein-
something like the ruins of a monument, forces the theme of death evoked by the
still noble and still radiating significance. epigraph, but also puts it in a Christian
The “disillusionment” of modern man is framework. This first part of the poem works
juxtaposed with the foundational myths of by juxtaposing a series of scenes of modern
Western, and occasionally Eastern, civili- life, characterized by frivolity, distraction,
zation. The shallow, fashionable cynicism and despair, with stern admonitions from
of the “flapper” generation, of the “bright the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures. The first
young things,” is truly disabused of the enigmatic line, “April is the cruelest
illusions engendered by its pride, lust, and month,” begins to unfold if we will only
sloth. remember the great medieval poem that
To be sure, Eliot handles myth—that is, begins with April in the first line, The Can-
“plot” or “story”—very curiously in The terbury Tales:
Waste Land. The poem’s stories are not so Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
much told as suggested. Much as a jazz The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
musician takes a well-known song and And bathed every veyne I swich licour
works bits of it into a series of variations and Of which vertu engendred is the flour...
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages....2
changes without ever playing the entire
melody straight through, so the poet of The
Waste Land evokes shadowy images of many Chaucer’s characters are pilgrims on their
of the great works of world literature with- way to the shrine of a saint, and if many of
out ever actually narrating a complete ver- them have something besides holiness on
sion of any story. This feat is managed by their minds, their sexual sinning is at least
combining a novel and relentless deploy- vigorous and earthy.
ment of the old device of allusion with a Eliot’s characters prefer the subterra-
stream-of-consciousness point of view. nean “warmth” of winter; the “stirring” of
Evocations of the literary monuments of spring seems threatening, an end to dull
the Western tradition provide points of comfort. Eliot apparently put together the
reference in the welter of experience repre- first of these “characters,” the first distinct
sented through the thoughts and emotions consciousness that swims into view, out of
of the shadowy “characters” who people the reminiscences of Countess Marie
the fragmentary “scenes” of the poem. Eliot’s Larisch, a relative and confidante of the
vision of the modern cultural waste land Austrian imperial family, in her book, My
emerges out of these oblique, stream-of- Past (1916).3 We are in the world of a deca-
consciousness dramas anchored in the pat- dent central European aristocracy in the
tern of allusions. years just before World War I. These are
bored, distracted men and women who,
The first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims on the road to
Canterbury, are going nowhere in particu-
provides a good example of how meaning is
generated out of allusions that should be lar. Instead, they wander aimlessly in pur-
recognizable, or at least recoverable, by an suit of pleasure, comfort, or excitement:
alert reader combined with other material And when we were children, staying at the arch-
that has simply been appropriated by the duke’s,
poet from his own random experiences and My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, neously hints at hope and fear:
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free. Only
I read, much of the night, and go south in the There is shadow under this red rock,
winter. (13-18) (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from
either
The recollection of a thrilling, if fearful,
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
childhood experience is “mixing / Memory Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
and desire” (2-3): an older but not wiser I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (24-30)
Marie flees the freedom of the mountains
for a warm winter in the South. Although it is not cited in Eliot’s own notes,
Marie’s disjointed, self-absorbed remi- commentators generally recognize an allu-
niscences and reflections are immediately sion to a Messianic passage in Isaiah: “And
followed by a series of allusions to some of a man shall be like an hiding place from the
the gravest prophetic writings in the Bible. wind, and a covert from the tempest; like
The poet’s own notes cite Ezekiel 2.1 and rivers of water in a dry place, like the shadow
Ecclesiastes 12.5, but it is hard not to see also of a great rock in a weary land” (32.2). The
a reference to the valley of the dry bones in speaking voice proffers fear in a handful of
Ezekiel 37. The consciousness at this point dust, because both the burial service (“The
in The Waste Land, presumably Tiresias, Burial of the Dead”) and the Ash Wednes-
sees a similarly catastrophic, lifeless land- day service in the Book of Common prayer
scape: remind us that we are made of dust and shall
What are the roots that clutch, what branches return to dust in death. Adam’s name of
grow course means “red earth” or “red dust.”
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, Christ is the second Adam, however, and
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only also a rock or stone; hence the “red rock”
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
suggests Christ as the bringer of salvation,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no
relief, but of a salvation fearful to those who pre-
And the dry stone no sound of water. (19-24) fer winter to April.4
Immediately following the “handful of
The phrase “roots that clutch” recalls the dust” is a lyrical reminiscence of youthful
“dull roots” in the opening lines and joins love, framed by two passages from Tristan
the two sections of the poem. It is as if the und Isolde, Richard Wagner’s music drama
presiding consciousness of the poem has of doomed, illicit passion. The final line
peeled back the façade of Marie’s world of quoted from Wagner, Oed’ und leer das
empty wandering and revealed its spiritual Meer (“Empty and blank the sea”), suggests
interior. The “dead tree” and “cricket” come a watery counterpart to the drought-
directly out of Ecclesiastes: “and the almond stricken waste “where the sun beats, / And
tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper the dead tree gives no shelter.” In the two
shall be a burden, and desire shall fail” following passages that close out “The
(12.5). The failure of desire is not explicitly Burial of the Dead,” we are reminded that
mentioned here, but it becomes a central the waste land is the spiritual terrain of
theme, and it is linked to the notion that urban dwellers, as well as the literal wilder-
relentless pursuit of pleasure destroys the ness suggested by the imagery. Modern men
capacity for it. and women who fear the red rock are drawn
The “dry stone” is a final note of despair, instead to the slick superstitions of a for-
but it opens on to a passage that simulta- tune-teller with “a wicked pack of cards.”
“Superstition recurs in a rationalist age,” the past failed to attain, but which the
Chesterton quips, “because it rests on some- present has simply abandoned. Tristan und
thing which, if not identical with rational- Isolde, for example, represent an immoral
ism, is not unconnected with scepticism.”5 passion that ends in violence and death, but
Of course the Tarot cards have significances the young man whose memory is bracketed
of which Madame Sosostris is unaware. She between the Tristan references cannot speak
does not find “The Hanged Man,” because or see; he is “neither / Living nor dead.”
Christ, who was “hanged on a tree” (Acts Madame Sosostris sees “crowds of people,
5.30, 10.39) is invisible to her venality and walking around in a ring” (56), and they
unbelief. In the final passage of this section, reappear a few lines further in the brown
the streets of London are assimilated to the fog on London Bridge. Like the crowds, she
antechamber of Dante’s Inferno, where is aimless, only careful about her horo-
those who were neither good nor evil spend scope.
eternity going around in a futile circle.6 Like Like J. Alfred Prufrock, most of the char-
Madame Sosostris and her client, the crowd acters in The Waste Land are beset by a
that “flowed over London Bridge” is alien- withering self-consciousness. “After such
ated both from the grace of God, repre- knowledge, what forgiveness?” the speaker
sented by the Messianic scriptural refer- of Gerontion asks; and The Waste Land is in
ences, and even from the intense if sinful some ways an elaboration of this terrible
passion embodied by Tristan and Isolde. question. The allusions are both menacing
Like the “Unreal City,” the dwellers in the and hopeful. The scriptural passages are
modern spiritual waste land are shrouded sternly threatening, but they mysteriously
in a “brown fog” that blinds the sight and proffer a veiled salvation. Still, it must be
stifles the lungs. Almost twenty years later seized with courage.
Eliot himself provided what may be re- Or consider the parenthetic comment
garded as a retrospective comment on this on “the drowned Phoenician Sailor,”
“crowd” in Notes Toward a Christian Society “(Those are pearls that were his eyes.
(1940): “Britain has been highly industrial- Look!).” This is the first of several allusions
ized longer than any other country. And to The Tempest, a magical play of loss and
the tendency of unlimited industrialism is restoration, injury and forgiveness. In the
to create bodies of men and women – of all immediate context, Ariel’s song to
classes – detached from tradition, alien- Ferdinand, confirming the death of his fa-
ated from religion and susceptible to mass ther, Alonso, the line is forbidding. But if
suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a the larger context of the play is invoked, the
mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well reference proffers redemption. The diffi-
housed, and well disciplined.”7 culty is in deciding whether to take this
allusion as negative irony or a promise.
This opening section of The Waste Land And this is precisely the difficulty faced by
provides a fair sample of how the poem as the characters in the poem as well as the
a whole works. Scenes of ordinary modern reader. The estrangement of modern man
life, marked by banality, vulgarity, and both from nature and traditional sources
overall emptiness are juxtaposed with allu- of wisdom leaves him in perpetual uncer-
sions to important works, literary and re- tainty.
ligious, of Western civilization. This is not In the preface to Notes Towards the Defi-
to say that the past is simply better than the nition of Culture (1949), Eliot mentions his
present. The allusions suggest ideals that debt to Christopher Dawson. Reflecting on
flashes of lightning. Most striking, how- —But who is that on the other side of you? (360-
ever, is the sense of terror, of a desperate 66)
struggle against overwhelming odds, of
what is noble and dignified betrayed and Finally, the affirmations at the end of the
defeated by what is brutal and crass. While poem are uttered in Sanskrit: Datta,
Wagner dramatizes inevitable tragic catas- Dayadhvam, Damyata (“Give Sympathize,
trophe, however, Eliot introduces an ele- Control”); Shantih, Shantih, Shantih (“The
ment of hope. Indeed, insofar as he invokes Peace that passeth all understanding”). The
the search for the Chapel Perilous, he seems invocation of a foreign language and reli-
to be glancing at Wagner’s last opera, gious tradition at this point leaves the re-
Parsifal. Moreover, “What the Thunder sult in doubt. Is there a Grail in the chapel,
Said” begins with an unmistakable refer- or is it “the empty chapel, only the wind’s
ence to Christ’s Passion, starting with His home” (389), surrounded by “tumbled
arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, and graves” (388)?
Eliot’s own note explicitly mentions the In this poem Eliot does not answer the
journey to Emmaus. His “twilight of the question. Poems, in any case, usually ask
gods” thus allows the possibility of God— more questions than they answer. The
incarnate as man—overthrowing the pow- Wagnerian description of apocalyptic de-
ers of darkness and rising again. struction, however, can be taken as a Chris-
It would be an error, nevertheless, to see tian critique of an avaricious society preoc-
more than a shred of hope in The Waste cupied with power and possessions:
Land itself. The depiction of the Passion, What is that sound high in the air
which in a fashion typical of Eliot’s poetic Murmur of maternal lamentation
procedure rests on suggestive synecdoches, Who are those hooded hordes swarming
is exceedingly grim and offers no hint of Over the endless plains, stumbling in cracked
earth
resurrection:
Ringed by the flat horizon only
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces What is the city over the mountains
After the frosty silence in the gardens Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
After the agony in stony places Falling towers
The shouting and the crying Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Prison and palace and reverberation Vienna London
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains Unreal (367-77)
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying These lines may bring to mind any num-
With a little patience (322-30) ber of minatory passages from the pro-
phetic books of the Old Testament, from
Similarly, the passage that suggests the Christ’s discourses on the Last Things, or
meeting of two disciples with the risen Christ from the Book of Revelation; but they also
on the road to Emmaus breaks off without seem to anticipate by means of imagery
revealing the identity of the mysterious Eliot’s somber assessment of the impiety of
third person: modern culture in The Idea of a Christian
Who is the third who walks always beside you? Society:
When I count, there are only you and I together I would not have it thought that I condemn a
But when I look ahead up the white road society because of its material ruin, for that
There is always another one walking beside you would be to make its material success a suffi-
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded cient test of its excellence; I mean only that a
I do not know whether a man or a woman wrong attitude towards nature implies, some-
where, a wrong attitude toward God, and that sufficiency. The radical poetic techniques
the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a of The Waste Land are an integral part of its
long enough time we have believed in nothing
significance. The dislocations of stream-of-
but the values arising in a mechanised,
commercialised, urbanised way of life: it would consciousness narrative and the ironic jux-
be as well for us to face the permanent condi- tapositions of multiple allusions embody
tions upon which God allows us to live on this Eliot’s vision of the human condition in
planet.14 which we enjoy only brief, fragmentary
glimpses of beauty and meaning among the
Insofar as there is a poetic answer to the “withered stumps of time.”
question posed by The Waste Land, it comes
several years afterwards in The Journey of 1. All quotations from Eliot’s poetry are taken from
the Magi. It is not aimless wandering, not T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950
even a journey to the Chapel Perilous “In (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971). Line
this decayed hole among the mountains” numbers are given in parentheses for The Waste Land.
(386) that finds renewal of life and purpose. 2. The Canterbury Tales I.A.1-4, 12, The Works of
It is rather following a star to an infant lying Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, (2nd ed., Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
in a manger in the inauspicious village of
3. This connection was first made by George L. K.
Bethlehem. But the reminiscence of the aged
Morris (Partisan Review 1954).
astrologer is not sentimental or nostalgic,
4. See Romans 9.33: “Behold, I lay in Sion a stumbling-
and it suggests that Eliot, in accepting the
stone and a rock of scandal; and whosoever believeth
Christian Gospel as the only way out of the in him shall not be confounded”; and Corinthians
modern desert of the spirit still acknowl- 10.4: “And they drank of the spiritual rock that
edged that life may often only be found by followed them; and the rock was Christ.”
way of death: 5. G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (New York:
Dodd, Mead & Company, 1925), 130.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down 6. See the Inferno III. 34-69.
This set down 7. Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt,
This: were we led all that way for Brace & World, 1949), 17.
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth 8. Christopher Dawson, “Progress and Decay in An-
and death, cient and Modern Civilizations,” Dynamics of World
But had thought they were different; this Birth History, ed. John J. Mulloy (LaSalle, IL: Sherwood
was Sugden & Co., 1976), 66. For Eliot’s acknowledgment
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our of his debt to Dawson, see Christianity and Culture, 83.
death. 9. Virgil, Aeneid I. 723-27, ed. R.D. Williams, 2 vols.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, (London: MacMillan, 1972).
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensa- 10. Confessions III.1, Patrologia Latina 32.683.
tion,
With an alien people clutching their gods. 11. Ibid. II.10, Patrologia Latina 32.682.
I should be glad of another death. 12. Ibid. I.13, Patrologia Latina 32.670: “illae quibus
tenere cogebar Æneæ nescio cujus errores, oblitus
errorum meorum; et plorare Didonem mortuam, quia
Even if one finds the baby in the manger, the se occidit ob amorem, cum interea meipsum in his a
grail in the chapel, one still lives on in the te morientem, Deus vita mea, siccis oculis ferrem
waste land, only “no longer at ease.” To miserrimus.”
escape the waste land means learning how 13. Confessions I.1, Patrologia Latina 32.661.
to live in it without being its subject or 14. Christianity and Culture, 49.
citizen: it is to shed one’s illusions in the
myth of the City of Man and human self-