THE WASTE LAND BY T. S.

ELIOT: A SITE FOR INERTIA IN

MOTION
Muhammad Saleem, Akhtar Ali & Shazia Kousar
Department of English, Government College Township Lahore

ABSTRACT
This study analyses T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land with reference to the
theme of stasis in the apparently mobile life of the twentieth century Europe. The
poetic sensibility of Eliot aestheticises the barrenness of the modern life in the
backdrop of spiritual bankruptcy. The horizontal motion is measured with the
yardstick of paradigmatic axis. Boredom, monotony and meaninglessness are the
various manifestations of stillness in the spiritually barren modern world. The
poet makes use of different artistic devices to foreground his concerns on this
modern dilemma. Self-critical text, suggestive alternative point of view, use of
grand-narrative in the modern context, inter-textual references, contrastive modes
of description and metaphoric images are some of them. This study is pursued in
the light of these poetic strategies to draw upon the stopped up life of the current
Europe. The variety of mechanical activities of the age makes face at the
theoretical framework of the modern existence.

Keywords: The Waste Land, alternative perspective, self-reflexive text, stasis

INTRODUCTION
T.S. Eliot is one of those twentieth century writers of who wrote in the
background of bloody World Wars which burnt all that was traditionally good.
The most dangerous damage caused by these wars was the loss of spirituality. In
this scenario, different artists took different positions to produce their art. Samuel
Beckett offered his thesis of absurd theatre that emphasises the existential
meaninglessness of man in this inhospitable and incomprehensible universe.
Hemingway was stripped of faith in God. He followed Plato, who says that if a
man has no God, he should himself create his God, by instigating the heroes of his
novels to create a high goal in life and then make use of all of the available
energies to achieve the destination. Bertolt Brecht, a German dramatist of the
previous century, reacted to the post-war scenario in his own way. He saw the
cause of the modern problems in the capitalist system that, according to him, was
dehumanising the entire world. T. S. Eliot has his distinctive filter in this regard.
He believes that the modern civilization that stands for pure worldliness and the

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sensate culture is a metaphor of hell for man. Detachedness from spirituality led
the modern man to the monotonous, soulless and dull existence that is just
unbearable. His world known poem The Waste Land is replete with this
phenomenon.

The present research is initiated to analyse the theme of stoppedness of the

modern man, presented by Eliot in his The Waste Land, which apparently sounds
prone to motion. For carrying out this investigation, two questions are devised:
Does the modern man live an immobile life? What devices are used by Eliot to
paint inertia in the movement of the modern era? These questions cover so many
aspects of the poem under discussion. Not only the form of the poem is analysed,
the hollow thoughts of the modern life that directly contribute to the hollow
culture and meaningless civilization of the previous century are also investigated.
This research is expected to add new dimensions to the criticism and
interpretation available on T.S. Eliot and his poem The Waste Land.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Critics and researchers across the world have made various successful attempts to
analyse different artistic dimensions of T. S. Eliot‟s poems and plays. Aurangzeb,
in 2002, completed his doctoral research entitled A Linguistic Analysis of T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land. This dissertation rejects the opinion of the critics that the
poem is, thematically, a patchwork and not a coherent whole. Aurangzeb moves
with the thesis that the poem under discussion is thematically, linguistically and
lexically a unified entity. He also argues that there is an intersectional unity
among five parts of the poem. It is a commendable study but it does not touch
upon the theme of standstillness in the rushed life of the modern era. The present
researcher completed his M.Phil thesis (2008) A Study of Regular and Irregular
Patterns in the Language of T.S. Eliot’s Poems A Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
and Ash-Wednesday. In this study deviations and parallelisms are explored to
discover the message of the poet. Deviations of register and semantic deviations
are analysed exclusively to shed light on the paralysed mind of Prufrock and the
sex-based mentality of the hero of Ash-Wednesday. The literariness of the poems
is interpreted in terms of their foregrounding which is a formalistic device to
estrange the message of the artist.

Abdul Baseer (2011) wrote a paper Foregrounded Irregularities in T. S. Eliot’s

The Hollow Men. He chose graphological and semantic deviations for the
analysis. Semantic deviation stands for the symbolic use of language and the

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graphological deviation accounts for unconventional use of punctuation marks.

The researcher quite exhaustively pursued the study and made a good contribution
to the knowledge about Eliot‟s art of poetry. The Still Point of the Turning World
(2012) is an M.Phil thesis by Primrose Young. In this research document, a
comparative study of Thomas Mann„s Der Zauberberg and T.S.Eliot‟s poem The
Waste Land is carried out. Both the texts are composed in the backdrop of the
First World War in Europe. The researcher systematically analyses this
comparative study to foreground the inertia, colorlessness stagnancy and decay
spread all around. Certainly it is a valuable piece of investigation with reference
to the destruction that this war caused at different levels of human life in the first
half of the previous century but it did not specifically focus on the institutional
and individual immobility that the present researcher aimed at.

Jamie Berlin (2012) conducted an important research entitled The Poet in

Transformation: Dantean Aesthetics in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The
researcher traces the echoes of Dantean aesthetics in T.S.Eliot‟s masterpiece The
Waste Land. Eliot both in form and content pursues the Dantean poetics; the
miserable condition of the social beings of the 20th century is just pitiable. What
the hellish souls in Dante‟s Inferno are doing is watched in Eliot‟s poem under
discussion. The poet is of the opinion that sacrifice on the personal level of
humans can change the barren land of modern civilization into a green land of
peace and happiness. There are so many other pieces of research conducted on
different aspects of Eliot‟s poetic art. There was a severe need to conduct a study
that takes up the theme of inertia in the apparently mobile life of the modern man
of the twentieth century. Hence the present study.

METHODOLOGY

The present study is carried out to find answers to the following questions.
1. Does the modern man live an immobile life?
2. What devices are used by Eliot to paint inertia in the movement of the
modern era?

T. S. Eliot is a conscious artist who diagnoses the catastrophic problem of the

modern man, inertia, in his poem The Watse Land. He makes use of various
devices like self-critical text, suggestive alternative point of view, use of grand-
narrative in the modern context, inter-textual references, contrastive modes of
description and metaphoric images.

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The present researcher takes up these devices as the unit of analysis to further his
research. With the help of these artistic techniques, the theme of stasis in process
is examined. For example, the use of traditionally grand narratives like love and
religion are placed in the context of the sensate culture of the modern man. The
conventional theme of regeneration and re-birth is ploughed by the poet in the
background of the mechanical life of the previous century. This study draws on
cries and sighs of the modern existence that has gone away from the spiritual
world.

Literature of Victorian era deals with the concept of gentility of man that is
defined in relation the mode of morality. Resultantly, adherence to traditions, also
called conformity, is the touchstone of the poetics of this artistic and cultural
epoch. When we cross the threshold of the 20th century, a new phase of human
existence i.e. modern life and modern literature comes to the fore. In this modern
era, art and literature define the isolated man in relation to love. The life of the
modern man in the modern literature of the previous century is presented in
fragmentary mode. The humans apparently are in the flow and rhythm of life that
is always aimed at but when we penetrate the surface of this lifestyle, we are
shocked to notice the disgusting deep structures of this brand of life. There is a
lot of movement and motion at every level of the modern souls but there is no
happiness involved there; a sense of mechanical and routinized edition of life is in
triumphs. Humans do exit in life, but they do not live the life. This is the
dialectics that invites the attention of the modern present researcher. This
dialectical aspect of modern life is very favourite to the poets like T.S. Eliot. The
present researcher has attempted to distance the inertia stricken core self from the
apparently dynamic looking façade of the civilization of the day. The questions
included in this research project are quite apt for the analysis of the barrenness of
the modern waste landers.

DATA ANALYSIS
The Burial of the Dead, the first section of the poem The Waste Land, begins with
spring and winter as the two static opposites of a binary. The opening lines of this
section enter into a contrastive relationship with the starting lines of The Prologue
to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. April rain, in the Chaucerian idiom, is the
sign and mechanism of revitalizing nature that sets out the cheerful and
meaningful life for man. This traditional concept of spring intoxicates the humans
and they move off as pilgrims to the Canterbury shrines. It is a rapturous state of

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mind in which they feel the every touch of natural life. Eliot juxtaposes this
energetic and cheerful Chaucerian motif with the mechanical existence of the
modern man. The showers of the rain in April are still synonymous with the
currents of blissful life, but the degenerate modern life remains nonreactive to it.
The patterns of the artificial life are so deeply imbedded in the modern existence
that the modern souls are alien to the real domain of a soul i.e. spirituality.

Certainly, there are a lot of activities that the modern Europeans are busy in
during the whole winter but they are limited to their physical movements and not
to the stirring of the soul. Winter is metaphoric of a wasteland where grows
nothing that is related to natural life. Summer is just to shock them as they are
reminded of their great grandfathers who drew upon dynamic and blissful life.
Their wintery and routinized life is rather disturbed by the arrival of April. To
forget this disturbing spring, they commence a journey that again aligns them
with the soulless new civilization where materiality has established its domination
on spirituality. The spring rain upsets the young girl and she takes refuge under a
tree and then goes with her boyfriend to take coffee at a restaurant. This
movement of the young girl is contrastive with the journey of the Chaucerian
pilgrims for spiritual quest. The girl is mechanically mobile but not a spiritually
realized person and here lies the problem that is the dilemma of the modern man.

T. S. Eliot is a critically conscious artist who makes a shrewd use of the chosen
images and carefully selected narratives to let the intended meanings well out
profusely. Williams (1988) argues that the Eliotique imagery is strategic and
richly figurative in orientation. To explain the worthlessness of the modern life in
a shocking way, he sporadically introduces the traditional grand narratives in the
current context. Love as a traditional narrative is one of the blissful zones
available to the humans. In this background, he introduces the modern aesthetics
of mechanical love that is recurrent in the 20th century existence. A young girl
remembers her „hyacinth‟, sex based love, that she enjoyed a year ago in the
„hyacinth garden‟ in the company of her sexual lover. As a parasite, he moved
across the body of the beloved, for sometimes, and then slipped away like a thief
never to be seen again. She is alive but as a frustrated, stopped up and broken up
self. The lover has left her forever and now she is in a state of bewilderment. This
love is the other name of mechanical and physical practices of the modern man
that lacks in spirituality and moral uplift. The grand narrative of traditional love is
contrasted with the guilty physical love of the hyacinth girl.

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City as a natural phenomenon remained “a maternal symbol to the ancients”

(Drew, p.98) but the modern city is „unreal‟ as it is utterly barren and far removed
from spiritual sources of life. Eliot explains this dilemma of the 20th century life
through the configuration of stasis in process in the London city. Eliot calls
London the „unreal city‟ and explains its character by recalling Dante‟s
description of the common people who move on a bridge in Inferno with their
downcast eyes and mechanical walk (Southam, 1977). They drag on the bridge as
the water flows under it; they do not utter anything, they just produce „infrequent‟
sighs. Having seen through these city dwellers, Eliot says: „I had not thought
death had undone so many‟. What lurks behind this critique? They work on a
machine that is why they have adopted its characteristics: they move like robots
and sigh like the gaping engine. Their eyes are fixed before their feet and they
measure distance in an unthinking way. Their feet are on the move but their self is
clogged up; there is motion in their time but their existence is fixed. Their
miserable condition in the unreal city reminds us of Coleridge‟s poem The Rime
of Ancient Mariner. The sailors, who sinfully kill an albatross that comes to their
ship, turn into the metaphor of life in death. Their bodies move like the corps in a
nightmarish dream. The sea and the environment appear as a barren land where
just death is imposing. The ship on the sea looks frozen like a boat on the map.

The substanceless unreal city of Eliot is like a non-realised self that certainly
exists in the world but remains removed from the currents of real life. This
phenomenon is found in the Beckettian world also. In response to Vladimir‟s
question “do you remember the Gospels?” Estragon says “I remember the maps of
the Holy Land” (Beckett, 2009, p.86). Here the Holy Land is stripped of its
religious and spiritual character; it has been substituted by the pretty maps that are
like the stagnant ship in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The question arises is it
possible for these degenerate characters to experience regeneration? The answer
is in negative. After selling her soul to the devil in exchange of twenty four years
of voluptuousness, Doctor Faustus is no more a human being. He is unable to
repent because both God and Satan have joined their forces against him. That is
why he only pretends to repent in the last scene but in reality he cannot do so; he
is just an evil spirit now. There is a concept in Christianity that for the
resurrection of Christ, the Crucification of Jesus is essential. It is called to die into
life. The problem of the waste landers is their inability to die into life.

They are, according to Hugh Kenner (1979), just the meaningless noise. Their
routine life is repulsive in disposition but they have grown habitual of it. Their

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routinised existence has deprived them of their critical sense and they are
propelled endlessly by the force of their mechanical existence. Sylvia Plath in her
poetry also reaches a stage where everything appears in utterly faded colours and
there is just standstillness that hangs heavily to her. But she does not remain in
this situation for a long time. She soon enters into the second phase where she is
using all her forces to complete the process of self-destruction. Her poem Arial
starts with complete dissatisfaction with life as there is stasis everywhere but soon
the poetess is moving swiftly on her way to self-killing; in this process she moves
in an electric manner to die into life (Rosenblatt, 1979). And ultimately she
achieves the re-birth. But this phenomenon is absent among the waste landers.
They are, in the material sense, constantly on the move but in fact their motion is
the other name of inertia because their souls are not mobilised. Spiritually they
remain a barren land. Tiresias, the protagonist of the poem, has to cry loudly to
attract the attention of his friend Stetson who moves like a robot on the London
Bridge. He asks Stetson about the regeneration of the corpse that he buried in his
garden last year. But no response is received. The answer to the question lies in
the images of the poem that suggest the argument of the poet. The twentieth
century is a site of a „heap of broken images‟, „dead trees‟, „no shelter‟, and „stony
rubbish‟. This is the configuration of a waste land where nothing grows that is
green and healthy for man. Every character in „The Burial of the Dead‟ is literally
moving horizontally but no one is able to move paradigmatically. Their thematic
horizons are overshadowed under their formalistic parameters. It is called stasis in
process.

William Blake‟s philosophical statement which reads thus “without contraries

there is no progression” (as cited in Cruz, 2006, p.2) is appropriated by Eliot in
his poem under discussion. He presents the reality of the modern life in
antagonistic modes. A Game of Chess, the second section of the poem offers a
good example of inertia in motion. Belladonna, an upper class lady, exists among
the outclass luxuries. The royal backdrop refers to the „matchless‟ aura of the
lady. The throne, she sits on, is reflected in the marble floor. The pillars,
decorated with fruit and grapes designs, support the looking glass of the lady. The
ivory bottles and colour glasses produce drafts of synthetic perfumes. Sometimes,
the air from the window disturbs the internal atmosphere of the place. The grace
and splendor of the drawing room is thoroughly eclipsed when the lover of the
lady arrives. The conversation of the lady with her lover exposes her dangerously
stopped up and frustrated self that desperately invites the pity of the reader. The
images that appear during the talk are quite befitting to the concept of the waste

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land. Sex is a loveless and mechanical exercise for the lovers therefore she is
bored to the death point; unable to join the sexual activity, she asks her lover to
talk to her and in this way relieve her of the deadly monotony.

The imperial setting and the superlative figure of the lady is contrasted with the
barrenness of life that she is habitual of. The lady is unable to keep the gnawing
noise under control that is raging within her. She releases a series of questions to
the lover to evade the torture that the mechanical life imparts to her: „Why do you
never speak?‟, „What do you think of?‟, and „What thinking?‟ The crisis of her
personality has risen to the alarming heights. Her „nerves‟ are badly shaken and
she is in need of some external support to breathe. That is why she requests the
lover thus: „Stay with me. Speak to me‟. The question arises what these miserable
souls can say to each other? Answer is simple: they have nothing to communicate.
They are not traditional lovers who spiritualise each other through their sincere
love. She says „I never know what you think‟. They have association with each
other but there is communication among them. Eliot, while explaining the
dilemma of modern men says, that they are „stuffed‟ and „hollow‟ souls who even
cannot exist/stand independent of others. They, like a straw, must seek the support
of someone to maintain its entity. There is a lot of inertia in their life and that is
why their existence is lusterless and meaningless. They are like a drowning man
who tries to get breathing space through sighs and cries; this is the total of their
human substance.

Eliot, on purpose, juxtaposes the theme of metamorphosis against the sterility of

the modern life. The mythological narrative of Philomela is inscribed on the walls
of the lady. Philomela was raped by the king Tereus. She, to avoid his murderous
design, turned into a nightingale (Southam, 1977). Today‟s world is unable to
understand the message of the nightingale and considers it but a noise. The irony
of the situation is that the modern man himself is the sign of noise that is the
enemy of voice. The response of the lover to the onslaught of her questions is
indicative of the root cause of the problem. He says that that they are in „rats‟
alley‟ where „the dead men lose their bones‟. Rat stands for the pollution of the
twentieth century culture and society where degeneration is up to the mark. The
emblem of regeneration is invisible. The bones of the dead persons stand for the
hollowness of life that we are confronted with. And no hope of salvation is
visible. The lady again asks a question: „what is that sound?‟ The reply is again
shocking for the reader. The wind is raging there and this implies the barrenness

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of the modern waste land where fertility of life is in absences. A modern

philosopher Austin (1962) says that speech performs actions.

Eliot makes use of speech in a befitting manner. The questions and answers of the
two lovers perform the actions of frustrations and ennui that further unnerve and
bewilder them. The language of the lovers reminds us of the language and
situation of life of the characters of Waiting for Godot. When the characters of
Harold Pinter and Beckett are faced with the severe crisis in life, they are short of
statements and recurrently productive in interrogative sentences. On the one hand,
it shows their inability to get proper words to express their agonizing feelings and
on the other hand, it exhibits their acute sense of bewilderment. The lover says
that the wind is doing „nothing again nothing‟. The wind is the socially and
culturally alienated man that again and again fails to strike roots in the waste land.
The refrain of Waiting for Godot „nothing to be done‟ is the order of the
disorderly life of the existing souls. The assertion of the upper class woman that
her lover sees nothing and knows nothing brings home the feeling of the life of
stasis that is inscribed in the mechanical movements of the modern humanity. The
lady announces that she would repeat her routine activities like playing the game
of chess, bathing with hot water and running into the street with disheveled hair.
Even then she asks the questions: „what shall I do?‟ and „what shall I ever do?‟
These questions of the lady are the cry in the wilderness. Nancy K. Gish (1981)
holds that the surroundings and activities of the „lady of rocks‟ “mask a sterility
and desperation” (p.56). It is very paradoxical of her to be in a dialectical
situation.

The Fire Sermon, the third section of the poem, is a site for materialistic lusts of
the men and women of the twentieth century. These lusts provide joys to their
body and keep their soul dry and exhausted. The mismatch between the relaxation
of the body and that of the soul creates a sense of fragmentation and paralysis in
the modern life. The flowing Thames stands for the purity of traditional life that
was mobile, satisfied and enviable. The modern Londoners enjoy their picnic on
the banks of the river and pollute it with „cigarette boxes‟, „empty bottles‟, and
„sandwich papers‟. These pollutants are the sign of the modern mechanical
activities that have distanced the mechanised humans from the naturalness of life.
The dirtied Thames produces but ill smell that is the integral part of the current
civilisation of the west. The mechanical routine works of the Londoners are
silhouetted against „a rat‟ that „crept softly through the vegetation/dragging its
slimy belly on the bank‟. The naked bodies of the modern girls that lie along the

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banks of the river in the afternoons are bracketed with the noise of the cars and
the pollution on the Thames. It is all programmatic on the part of the poet. He
wants the reader to see through the hollowness of the modern civilization, through
these images.

Sex is one of the most popular activities that the modern men are busy with. But,
unfortunately, like other mechanical tasks, it also proves disgusting and repulsive.
There is a typist girl who comes from the office in the evening for rest at her
room. The lover comes to explore the body of the typist. He engages her sexually
and she produces no resistance. After the finish of the activity, the lover gives a
soulless kiss and goes away. The girl smoothens her hair and puts a gramophone
to listen a song. There are apparently a lot of movements in the life of the girl but
reality is that she is in the real sense a clogged up figure. She is, in practice, a
suitable candidate for the waste land site. The poet reminds us the theme of
Goldsmith‟s writing The Vicar Wakefield where the woman repents over her
mistake when she becomes a victim to it. But the modern typist girl has no
feelings of regret over her illici relations. The title of the section The Fire Sermon
refers to the claim of Lord Buddha that the world is on fire for its lusts and for the
hellish worldliness that makes their life barren.

The fourth section of the poem under discussion, Death by Water, presents
another example of inertia in the modern life. Water is traditionally linked with
the regeneration of life but here it appears in its nasty role where the re-birth of
life is not its function. The poet explains the modern man‟s dilemma through the
story of Phlebas, a Greek sailor, who devotes his life for business pursuits and
ultimately is drowned in a whirlpool. His body is passed through various
manifestations of the whirlpool but his re-birth is not realised. The role of water
in this case is quite horrible as we know that traditionally water has been with a
role to contribute to the regeneration of man. The Tollund man in Heaney‟s poetry
sacrifices his life for the nation by embracing the goddess of fertility in the
moorland. Consequently, the area is blessed with fertility which produces grains
for the relevant population. This story of the Greek sailor again stresses the note
of sterility in the life of the modern man.

What the Thunder Said, the last section of the poem, encapsulates the argument
that he has been advocating in the course of the poem. Eliot renarrates the arrest
and crucification of Christ. This is an artistic strategy of the poet to stress the idea
that the modern man is constantly killing Christ by going away from his teachings

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and commands. Christ and Christianity is the name of forbearance, patience,

resignation and self-redemption and constant struggle for peace. Is the modern
man fit for the mission of Christianity? The modern souls live in the body and the
salvation is possible through the cleansing of the soul that involves the long chain
of sufferings and tortures. Eliot describes this helpless situation of the modern
man through various narratives from the traditions. Sir Parsifal, a dedicated
follower of Christ, goes on an expedition in search of the Holy Grail. In the
course of the adventure, he faces so many devilish traps of Satan and his crew to
frighten him from going ahead. He suffers from acute thirst like severe problems
but he does not lose heart. And ultimately, he succeeds in his holy mission to
explore the realm of spirituality. Eliot relates this narrative to stress his point that
the modern European civilization is unable to achieve self-redemption. As the
modern man has no desire for re-birth.

CONCLUSION
The above analysis proves that T.S. Eliot arranges different types of movements
of the modern man to stress his barren self, inertia based life and immobile
personality. The poet introduces traditional grand narratives in 20th century
context so that they may work as a contrast to the meaningless life of the modern
man. There is a strong feeling of mechanical concept of existence in the busy life
of the modern man. The feeling of futility in the western civilisation raises various
questions for the reader. Is the modern man alive? Can the modern man get
regeneration? Can we call the mechanical routine a life? Is it possible to live a
happy life without spirituality? The reader is instigated to muse over these
questions. It is a general belief today that the great writers, instead of answer
questions, raise questions. The reader is supposed to complete the text that was
initiated by the writer. T. S. Eliot is a successful writer in this regard as his
readers are charged intellectually to go for the solution of the problem of the
modern life. His philosophy that art should aestheticise the social consciousness
of the poet makes him the true guide of the world.

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