The Waste Land Summary and Analysis

"The Waste Land" has long been considered T. S. Eliot's masterpiece. In its five sections, he
delves into themes of war, trauma, disillusionment, and death, illuminating the devastating
aftereffects of World War I. The poem's final line, however, calls for peace with the repetition
of "shantih" (the Sanskrit word for "peace").

Part I opens with the famous line, "April is the cruellest month." The speaker, Marie, is a young
woman who bears witness to the physical and emotional devastation caused by the war.

Parts II and III describe the inside of a wealthy woman's bedroom and the garbage-filled waters
of the Thames, respectively. Part IV eulogizes a drowned man named Phlebas.

In the fifth and final part of the poem, the speaker "translates" the thunderclaps cracking over
an Indian jungle. The poem ends with the repetition of the Sanskrit word for peace: "Shantih
shantih shantih."

In order to understand The Waste Land—one of the most difficult poems in a difficult literary
period—the reader might do well to envision the work as a much-spliced film or videotape, a
montage of images and sounds. This imaginary film is, in a sense, a real-life documentary: There
are no heroes or heroines, and there is no narrator telling readers what to think or how to feel.
Instead, Eliot allows multiple voices to tell their individual stories. Many of the stories are
contemporary and portray a sordid society without values; other stories are drawn from world
culture and include, among other motifs, Elizabethan England, ancient Greek mythology, and
Buddhist scriptures.

The poem is divided into five sections. In the first, “The Burial of the Dead,” the speaker is an
old Austro-Hungarian noblewoman reminiscing about the golden days of her youth before the
disasters of World War I. The second section, “A Game of Chess,” is set in the boudoir of a
fashionable contemporary Englishwoman. The third, “The Fire Sermon,” mixes images of
Elizabeth’s England, the Thames and Rhine rivers, and the legend of the Greek seer Tiresias. The
fourth, “Death by Water,” is a brief portrait of a drowned Phoenician sea-trader. The fifth,
“What the Thunder Said,” combines the above themes with that of religious peace. These parts
combine in the poem’s overall montage to create a meaning that encompasses all of them.
Because the poem is so complex, that meaning must be left to the individual reader; however,
many students of the poem have suggested that, generally, Eliot shows his readers the collapse
of Western culture in the aftermath of the war.

Part 1 is a natural beginning for Eliot’s overall panorama because the speaker, Marie, describes
her memories of a key period in modern history. Clearly, her life has been materially and
culturally rich. Now in old age, thoughts of the past seem to embitter her, and she spends much
of her time reading. The following stanzas describe the visions of the Sibyl, a prophetess in
Greek mythology, and compare these to the bogus fortune-telling of a modern Sibyl, Madame
Sosostris. The section’s final stanza imagines a fog-shrouded London Bridge as a pathway in the
Underworld, where souls fleetingly recognize one another.

In part 2, a narrator describes the sensual surroundings of a wealthy woman’s bedroom—the

ornate chair in which the woman sits, the room’s marble floor and carved fireplace, her
glittering jewels and heavy perfumes. She is bickering with a man, her husband or her lover, and
complains that her “nerves are bad to-night.” Then a contrasting setting appears: a London pub.
Two women are gossiping in Cockney English about a friend’s marriage gone bad.

A description of the River Thames begins part 3. The narrator juxtaposes the pretty stream that
Renaissance poets saw with the garbage-filled canal of the twentieth century. Most of the
section tells the story of an uninspired seduction. The speaker, ironically, is the Greek sage
Tiresias, who, in legend, was changed from a man into a woman. In this androgynous mode,
Tiresias can reflect on both the male and the female aspects of the modern-day affair between
a seedy clerk and a tired typist. This section ends with snippets of past songs about the Thames
and the Rhine.

The brief stanzas in part 4 picture Phlebas, a Middle Eastern merchant from the late classical
period. The tone is elegiac: The speaker imagines the bones of the young trader washed by the
seas and advises the reader to consider the brevity of life.
The final section, part 5, is set in a barren landscape, perhaps the Waste Land itself, where heat
lays its heavy hand on a group of anonymous speakers. They seem to be apostles of some
sacrificed god, perhaps Christ himself. The opening stanza’s description of confused “torchlight
on sweaty faces” in a garden and an “agony in stony places” tends to suggest this Christian
interpretation. Hope, however, has fled the holy man’s followers, who wander through the
desert listening to thunder that is never followed by rain. Nevertheless, the thunder holds some
small promise. The poem shifts setting again. Now the thunder crashes over an Indian jungle
while the speaker listens and “translates” the thunderclaps. The thunder speaks three words in
Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, which is also the language of Buddhist and Hindu
scriptures. The first word is “Datta” (“given”), the second is “Dayadhvam” (“compassion”), and
the third is “Damyata” (“control”). In this three-part message from the natural world, which
tells of God’s gifts of compassion and self-control, the speaker finally finds cause for “peace”—
the “shantih” of the closing line.