"The Waste Land" and the "Aeneid"

Author(s): Gareth Reeves

Source: The Modern Language Review , Jul., 1987, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 555-572
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3730416

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 THE WASTE LAND AND THE AENEID

The title of this article may seem surprising, for it was not until compar
his career, in the essays 'What is a Classic?' (I944) and 'Virgil and t
World' (I95I), that Eliot fully acknowledged an interest in Virgil.
evidence to suggest that Virgil was an important presence in Eliot's po
early on. There are hints in the Virgilian epigraph to 'La Figlia Che Pia
The Waste Land's word 'laquearia', which, as Eliot's note shows, wa
borrowed from the Aeneid. That borrowing is part of a much stronger
connexion than has been recognized even by Hugh Kenner in his articl
Apocalypse', who nevertheless remarks persuasively if only in passing
between the The Waste Land and the Aeneid (and my indebtedness to his
at several points will become apparent).1
Furthermore, it is arguable that Virgil's influence is at least as perva
Waste Land as the other influence which is commonly described, the Dan
connexion it is important to avoid the temptation to account for the Vir
in The Waste Land by reference to the two late essays. In them Eliot f
view of Virgil as adventist Christian: Virgil 'was denied the vision of t
could say: "Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one v
scattered leaves of all the universe." Legato con amor in un volume'.2 That w
Eliot's convinced later view of Virgil. He came to place Virgil in
tradition, fulfilled in Dante, as the great pre-Christian precursor of C
greatest poet. This, however, was a position it took Eliot many years t
could be a falsification to assume that his awareness of Virgil was alwa
that even though Virgil appears alongside Dante in The Waste La
necessarily and invariably filtering Virgil through Dante. The temptatio
to the Virgilian echoes with an ear trained by a too-close attention
familiar (made more familiar by the commentators) Dantean echoes.
It is, indeed, probable that in the course of his career Eliot came more
see Virgil through Dante's eyes; the essay of 1929 on Dante, for instan
adventist Virgil. The evidence is strong enough, however, to sug
1919-2 , in The Waste Land, Eliot was not mediating the Aeneid throug
Commedia, but drew on them both directly. Virgil and Dante rub shou
speak, in the poetry as equal presences. To locate so early in Eliot's poe
triangular relationship between Eliot, Dante, and Virgil is to imp
retrospective reading, in which ideas from Eliot's later writing are use
unlock the earlier. The result is to give a misleading unity to Eli
Moreover, to find that sort of fixed relationship in The Waste Land risk
nature of its poetry, which is exploratory, indeterminate, and open-en

If we have Eliot's later image of Virgil as adventist Christian uppe

minds we are perhaps unlikely to recognize the pervasiveness of Virgil
The Waste Land. Eric A. Havelock, in a remarkably stimulating essay, i

1 Hugh Kenner, 'The Urban Apocalypse', read at the thirty-first session of the E
Harvard University, 2-5 September 1972, and published in Eliot in His Time: Essays on the
Fiftieth Anniversary of 'The Waste Land' edited by A. Walton Litz (Princeton, New Jer
I973), pp. 23-49.
2 'Virgil and the Christian World', reprinted in On Poetry and Poets (London, 1957), pp.

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556 'The Waste Land' and the 'Aeneid'

anxious to erase that image as an impediment to a true understanding of the Aeneid.3

Moreover, he makes an important, if passing, gesture towards an affinity between
The Waste Land and the Aeneid that has far-reaching implications for this discussion
Havelock contends, through an examination of old and new translations, that the
Aeneid 'has been confined in a rhetorical strait-jacket'; that it is 'a work of divided
genius'; that the 'image of the text of Virgil projected by neo-classicism' is false,
whether it be the image of'a proto-Christian poem' or of'a justification for Roman
imperialism'; that the translations of the poem, from Surrey's on, have misdirected
the judgements of Virgil's critics. One of the chief offenders amongst the critics o
modern times, Havelock argues, is Eliot: 'The role that he assigns to Virgil's poem in
the history of our culture is that of a classic which "has a critical sense of the past, a
confidence in the present, and no conscious doubt of the future" ['What is a
Classic?']. This reflects a determination to ignore much that the poem actually says
in contradiction of its professed theme.' Havelock also refers disparagingly to the
phrase 'dignity, reason and order' used by Eliot in 'Virgil and the Christian World'
to describe Virgil's 'world'.4
Admittedly Havelock oversimplifies Eliot's view of Virgil in the two essays. The
remark quoted from 'What is a Classic?' is about what makes for 'maturity of
language' in general, and is applied to Virgil in a very qualified fashion; the phrase
taken from 'Virgil and the Christian World' is part of a complicated argument in
which Eliot, very much like Havelock, wants to establish Virgil as a poet with
'divided' vision. But whereas Havelock emphasizes the dark side of that visio
without paying much attention to the other side, Eliot's view is more comprehen-
sive. Eliot does indeed see one aspect of Virgil's temperament as 'proto-Christian
and imperialist; but he reveals a sure awareness of the dark aspect also. He develops
an argument that distinguishes the reality and the ideal of empire, and which
culminates in one of the several occasions in his prose where he gestures towards the
emblematic figure of Virgil as Dante's guide. That argument gives great weight to
the statement that 'the Rome of the imperial era was coarse and beastly enough';
and when he writes that Virgil's 'sensibility is more nearly Christian than that of any
other Roman or Greek poet' the phrase 'more nearly' has its full force, so tha
Havelock's 'proto-Christian' is an oversimplification.5 Eliot does not emphasize the
neo-classical side of Virgil's 'divided genius' at the expense of the dark side,
although that is what Havelock's passing references to Eliot's criticism suggest
Eliot's final assessment of Virgil is similar to the complex view of Wendell Clausen,
one of the few critics, according to Havelock, to have come to terms with the depths o
the Aeneid: 'Virgil's vision of Roman history is not propaganda . .. for he does not
simply proclaim what Rome achieved; nor is it sentimental: for he does not simply
dwell on what the achievement cost. Virgil values the Roman achievement ... and yet
he remains aware of the inevitable suffering and loss.'6 But whatever Eliot's views
thirty years after The Waste Land, and however Havelock may have misrepresented

3 'The Aeneid and Its Translators', Hudson Review, 27 (1974), 338-70.

4 Havelock, pp. 349, 363, 367, 364, 363-64, 345. For the phrases by Eliot which Havelock quotes, see
'What is a Classic?', reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, pp. 53-7I (p. 57), and 'Virgil and the Christian
World', p. 124.
5 'Virgil and the Christian World', pp. 124-25.
6 'An Interpretation of the Aeneid', in Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Steele Commager
Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1966), pp. 75-88 (p. 86). This paper is
essentially a revision of one published in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 68 ( 964), 139-47.

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 GARETH REEVES 557

them, they should not blind us to the image E

is invaluable in helping us to see that image m
The 'professed theme' of the Aeneid, argues H
of Augustus but 'the possibility of a fresh civi
Augustan pacification' (p. 36I). The Punic W
testimony of Rome's empire and glory; they r
emphasize that Rome was founded in blood a
blood could flow again. Here Havelock's detail
The reader had initially been told there [in Book
'till he should found a city.' He never does. The city t
the poem is Carthage - urbs antiquafuit (I, 12) - w
the Dido episode, is prefigured as a city overwhelm
v, 3-5). The second is Troy which collapses in ashes-
the formula varies, the theme is constant, and wh
world,' he could be talking of Rome herself. He car
into Italy. As the last battle ofthe epic rises to its clim
the capital of the Latins. The city is set on fire (xII, 5
left unresolved. Yet these are the people with wh
peaceful union in order to achieve a common dest
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria
Vienna, London
Unreal.
The Wasteland [sic] can furnish better comment on the Aeneid than is found in Mr. Eliot's essays
on the same subject. (p. 363)7

Whatever one makes of Havelock's assessment of the essays, that glancing reference
to 'What the Thunder said' provocatively hints at a temperamental affinity between
the author of The Waste Land and the dark side of Virgil's 'divided genius', although it
does no more than hint, for to do so would be outside the scope of Havelock's essay.
It is, however, very much within my scope to take him up on the hint. It is highly
significant, too, that Eliot's scene of exploding cities does not merely 'furnish ...
comment' on the Aeneid; it also directly recalls similar scenes in the Aeneid.
I need first to examine more closely some of the destructions and 'prefigurements' of
destruction mentioned by Havelock. Prophecy of the Punic Wars, the conflict which
marked the beginning of Rome's territorial expansion, re-echoes through the Aeneid:
progeniem sed enim Troiano a sanguine duci
audierat, Tyrias olim quae verteret arces.
(I. I9)8
(Yet in truth she [Juno] had heard that a race was springing from Trojan blood, to overthrow
some day the Tyrian towers.)

Thus, after only nineteen lines of Virgil's epic, he firmly fixes the vision of Carthage's
downfall. The most famous and forthright prophecy of the Punic Wars is Dido's

7 In his quotation from The Waste Land Havelock inserts punctuation where Eliot has none. Quotations
in the present essay are from The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London and Boston, Massa-
chusetts, 1969; reprinted I978).
8 All citations of Virgil, with accompanying translations, are from the Loeb Classical Library edition,
translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, revised edition, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1934-35).

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558 'The Waste Land' and the 'Aeneid'

calling from her suicidal pyre for eternal enmity between Carthage and the
colonizers of Italy (iv. 622-29): 'exoriare, aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor'.
As Havelock implies, however, forthright prophecy such as this is not Virgil's only
or most persuasive way of keeping war persistently in our minds. Words and
formulae recalling or anticipating the destruction and burning of Carthage, and of
other cities too, of Tyre, of Troy, of the capital of the Latins, echo from one scene of
the Aeneid to another. The spectacle of Dido's pyre not only prefigures the future
destruction of Carthage; it also re-enacts the past destruction of Tyre, the city of
Dido's forebears:
lamentis gemituque et femineo ululatu
tecta fremunt, resonat magnis plangoribus aether,
non aliter, quam si immissis ruat hostibus omnis
Karthago aut antiqua Tyros, flammaeque furentes
culmina perque hominum volvantur perque deorum.
(Iv. 667)
(The palace rings with lamentation, with sobbing and women's shrieks, and heaven echoes
with loud wails - even as though all Carthage or ancient Tyre were falling before the
inrushing foe, and fierce flames were rolling on over the roofs of men, over the roofs of gods.)

At In. 338, in the description of Troy's last days, appears the line: 'quo fremitus vocat
et sublatus ad aethera clamor' (where the roar and the shouts rising to heaven call),
where 'fremitus' and 'ad aethera' are to be echoed by 'fremunt' and 'aether' in the
passagejust quoted from Dido's pyre-scene. Later in the battle of Troy, where Virgil
describes the destruction of Priam's palace (II. 487), occurs the phrase 'cavae
plangoribus aedes | femineis ululant' (the vaulted halls ring with women's wails),
which looks forward to 'plangoribus aether' and 'femineo ululatu' from the lines
about Dido's pyre. When Aeneas returns to Troy to look for his lost wife, Creusa, he
sees his own home on fire:
ilicet ignis edax summa ad fastigia vento
volvitur; exsuperant flammae, furit aestus ad auras.
(11. 758)
(At once the devouring fire rolls before the wind to the very roof; the flames tower above, the
hot blast roars skyward.)

Those three words 'volvitur', 'flammae', and 'furit', coming together in one line, will
be recalled by the phrase 'flammaeque furentes ... volvantur', again from the lines
about Dido's pyre.
In Book xni, during the battle for the Latin capital, words and phrases from earlier
destructions echo in the poetry. We read, in a passage which compares citizens
trapped by fire to bees swarming in a hive,
volvitur ater odor tectis, tum murmure caeco
intus saxa sonant, vacuas it fumus ad auras.
(X. 59 1)
(The black reek rolls through their dwelling, the rocks within hum with hidden murmur, and
smoke issues to the empty air.)

The proximity of the familiar word 'volvitur' to 'ad auras' recalls the linejust quoted
from Book ii. A few lines later we read how the crowd of Latin women 'madly rave'
and 'the wide halls ring with lamentations', 'turba furit; resonant latae plangoribus
aedes' (xni. 607), where again there is female wailing, that by now familiar compo-
nent of battle scenes, and again that familiar formulation, 'plangoribus aedes' (see
II. 487, quoted above). Such verbal echoing is a hallmark of Virgil's style, and not

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 GARETH REEVES
559

just of his style, of course, but of his temperament and outlook: hist
down the years, repeating themselves as in a symphony, not in ex
verbatim, but with variations, the formulae always present and
Verbal echoing and formulaic variation create a web to weave the t
together.
The theme one hears re-echoing through the Aeneid is that Rome's glorious empire
rests on the destruction and burning ofa long line of cities: Carthage, Troy, Tyre, the
capital of the Latins. 'What the Thunder said' has its long line of destroyed cities,
too: Carthage, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London.
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal.

Eliot's passage about the horror of warfare, with its racket-filled sky, its wailing
women, its shifting masses of people, its exploding cities and falling towers, is a
concentrated reminiscence of those recurring Virgilian battle motifs. The Aeneid is
full of destroyed cities rolling heavenward in smoke and flames. 'What is that sound
high in the air', writes Eliot, and one remembers Virgil's many instances of
clamorous aether. 'Murmur of maternal lamentation', and Virgil's battles invariably
resound with feminine wailing. Moreover, Eliot's 'Falling towers' may recall the
prophecy at the start of the first book of the Aeneid that a race had arisen which would
overthrow the Carthaginian towers, 'verteret arces'. It is possible, too, that the
Virgilian resonance has carried over into Eliot's next verse-paragraph with its
inverted towers: 'upside down in air were towers'. F. W. Dupee, quoted approvingly
by Havelock (p. 344), writes that 'what chiefly comes through to a modern reader' of
the Aeneid is Virgil's 'unconscious life ... images of panic and destruction: storms,
shipwrecks, meteors, people shrieking and sweating and swooning, Troy burning,
women running mad'. Eliot appears to have been one of those readers to hear very
clearly the ominous tones reverberating beneath the surface of the Aeneid.
How far, and in what way, does Eliot's concentrated reminiscence of the Aeneid
illuminate this passage in The Waste Land and the poem as a whole? It would, of
course, be misleading to suggest a close parallel between Virgil's palimpsest of
burning cities (Troy, Tyre, Carthage, Rome) and Eliot's list (Jerusalem, Athens,
Alexandria, Vienna, London). The immediate occasion of Eliot's passage, as his
note makes clear, is 'the present decay of eastern Europe' in war and revolution, and
he supports this statement with a quotation from Herman Hesse's Blick ins Chaos
(1920) about the Russian Revolution and other European upheavals. But his list of
cities not only conjures up present-day Europe; it is also a resounding roll-call of
cities famous in the history of Western civilization from Greece to the present day.
By concluding the list, London becomes the culmination of a vatic declaration about
the disintegration and destruction of the West, rather as Rome is the culmination of
Virgil's line of destroyed cities. London as a doomed prophetic presence hovers

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560 'The Waste Land' and the 'Aeneid'

behind other passages in The Waste Land: there is London Bridge, over which '
crowd flowed'; 'I had not thought death had undone so many', where the Dantean
echo turns London into a hellish city; the bridge reappears briefly but prominently
at the end of the poem in the 'fragment' 'London Bridge is falling down falling down
falling down', although the nursery-rhyme recollection may qualify any vatic tone
heard in the poem.
Hugh Kenner, in the essay already alluded to, has much to say about The Waste
Land as a prophetic poem about London. He claims that the poem was originally
intended to follow a poetic tradition of city prophecy. It began life as 'an urba
poem, a London poem', inspired by Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, which is a poem
prophetic of'London's illimitable future'. Kenner argues that in 'The Fire Sermon',
which in the drafts originally contained an apostrophe to London in the stanza
pattern of Dryden's poem, Eliot at one time intended a travesty of Dryden's 'vatic
prediction' for London; many of the London details and scenes remain in the final
poem (most memorably the episode of the typist and 'the young man carbuncular'),
although the 'tacit allusion to Dryden' disappeared. Dryden, 'Vergil's major
English translator', had appealed in Annus Mirabilis to the example of Rome, in an
expansive, optimistic vein; so, speculates Kenner, 'were Eliot's readers meant t
bridge an ellipse by thinking of Dryden as a British Anchises, and the finale to Annus
Mirabilis as analogous to the famous evocation of Rome's future ... that Aenea
heard from his dead father's lips in the Underworld?'. The implication is that The
Waste Land, with Dryden as intermediary, is (or was originally intended to be) a
gloomy vision of London in contrast to Anchises's vision of Rome.9
While acknowledging the persuasiveness of Kenner's thesis, however, one needs to
modify it: The Waste Land's vision is not in contrast to the Aeneid's but, rather,
complementary, for Eliot's concentrated reminiscence ofVirgilian urban destruction
shows that he was more attuned to the darkly prophetic strain which he heard in th
Aeneid than to the aspiration of'the famous evocation of Rome's future'. Furthermore
some have heard an equivocal, even despairing, note in Anchises's prophecy itself:
Wendell Clausen, for instance, stresses the fact that the vision of Roman history, in
which Aeneas's posterity passes before him and his prophesying father, ends not wit
the praise of the Emperor Augustus but with 'a somber and pathetic laudation' of his
destined successor, the younger Marcellus, who had died young (p. 87).
Eliot's modern inclination to hear an ominous strain in Virgilian prophecy is
telling example of what Claude Rawson calls 'the scrambling of parallel and
contrast'. When, in his article 'Pope's Waste Land: Reflections on Mock-Heroic', he
comes to relate The Waste Land to English epic tradition he bases his comments on
comparison of Eliot's passage of urban conflagration and its depiction of 'all th
crumbling civilizations of the past' with The Dunciad's famous account of barbarian
invasions (III. 85ff.): 'Eliot proposed something like the same decline [as Pope ha
proposed] from high to low, but he could only sustain the comparison by extending
his scepticism to the past.' The Waste Land does not propose a simple contrast
between the decline of contemporary Europe and a past Virgilian and Augustan
glory; it extends its scepticism back to the Aeneid to make us aware of the dar
undertones to the Virgilian vision which find their counterpart in modern times.
Indeed, it may be that The Waste Land, with its 'insecure' relation to 'ancient

9 See Kenner, pp. 27-29, 40, 31, 47, 40.

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 GARETH REEVES 56I

grandeurs', sees past imperial aspirations 'as containing the

sickness'.10
Eliot's vatic passage of urban destruction and conflagration, the
heightens an awareness of, the dark side of Virgil's vision. More
however, about Eliot's method of drawing on the Aeneid in the passa
of poetic technique his way of reading Virgil appears to have been
read Virgil and creatively 'misread' him. In both the Aeneid and t
one may see a principle of fusion at work, but the method of ach
poem is markedly different: The Waste Land collapses many urba
one destruction, whereas the Aeneid repeats again and again certain
out its passages of destruction. In the Aeneid the principle of fusio
the practice by which verbal formulae recall and predict one
pages of the epic. Virgil works by extension, by making each bat
and prefigurement of other battles, by playing extended vari
theme; Eliot works not by extension but by compression, by c
destructions into one destruction. The difference is characteristic
natures of their poetic techniques: Virgil's images are succes
typologically ordered; Eliot's are simultaneous, condensed, and mu
Nevertheless, the effect of the fusion is remarkably similar in bo
everyday notions of linear time. By collapsing many cities famou
Western civilization into one apocalyptic city Eliot achieves an effe
so that one does indeed feel that the horrific display is 'unreal'. B
means Virgil achieves a similar result: his repetition of phrases an
out the Aeneid's urban destructions has the effect of projecting the
world of historical change onto an 'unreal' plane, where human ev
by a sense of fatality.
A revealing example of the 'unreality' of Eliot's urban visi
apostrophe to London which was excised from a draft of 'The
which Kenner cites as evidence for his case:
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,
Knowing neither how to think, nor how to feel,
But lives in the awareness of the observing eye.
Phantasmal gnomes, burrowing in brick and stone and steel!
Some minds, aberrant from the normal equipoise
(London, your people is bound upon the wheel!)
Record the motions of these pavement toys
And trace the cryptogram that may be curled
Within the faint perceptions of the noise
Of the movement, and the lights!
Not here, O Glaucon, but in another world.1

10 Claude Rawson, 'Pope's Waste Land: Reflections on Mock-Heroic', in The Poet's Power, edited by
Suheil Bushrui, Essays & Studies (London, 1982), pp. 45-65 (pp. 56-62 passim).
'1 Kenner, p. 28; quoted from T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts,
edited by Valerie Eliot (New York, I971), p. 43. Kenner has taken one variant from a different version of
this passage (Drafts, p. 31): 'Glaucon' for 'Ademantus' (= Adeimantus), both brothers of Plato. As
Kenner's discussion of the passage implies, Glaucon seems the more appropriate brother here, since he is
the one who mentions the city 'in another world' (in Plato the ideal city 'found nowhere on earth': see
V. Eliot's note, Drafts, pp. 127-28). Kenner reads 'movements' for 'motions' in line Io, but I can find no
authority for this in either version of the passage in the Drafts.

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562 'The Waste Land' and the 'Aeneid'

Kenner's commentary throws light not only this passage but on much else in The
Waste Land: the passage, he writes,
specifies in what respect the City is Unreal: unreal the way sensate accretions are unreal for
Plato, to whose Republic the line about Glaucon directs us .... Its whole life has been levelled
down to the plane of sensation. To this, to the likes of Mr. Eugenides, to a life of'phantasmal
gnomes' and 'pavement toys,' has the London of Dryden's magniloquent prophecy come.
(p. 30)

'Unreal sensate accretions' is an apt gloss on the epistemology of the whole of The
Waste Land, which gives the impression of existing primarily 'in the awareness of the
observing eye': an apt gloss also on Eliot's quoting from Bradley to explain the lines
at the end of the poem about locked-in sensibility where 'We think of the key, each in
his prison I Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison': 'My external sensations are
no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings.'
More particularly, 'unreal sensate accretions' helps to explain the nature of The
Waste Land's Baudelairean urban vision, not just in the excised vatic apostrophe but
throughout the poem. The apostrophe to the 'Unreal City' at the end of'The Burial
of the Dead' blends images and eras in a way which is peculiar to the sensations of
the experiencing consciousness. Again we enter a timeless, placeless, 'surreal' zone
of city images: the crowd that flows over London Bridge blends with allusions to
Dante's Inferno, to the First Punic War (about which I shall have more to say later),
to the unburied dead of The White Devil ('Oh keep the Dog far hence'), to Fleurs du
Mal. This amalgam leaves the impression that the only location for this cityscape,
associated with London, to be sure, is the consciousness of the unspecified observer.
Even the urban encounter between the typist and 'the young man carbuncular' is
framed by the unreal and phantasmal (to borrow Eliot's word from the excised
passage). The scene is supposed to be filtered through Tiresias's consciousness, and,
with the evocation of dusk as 'the violet hour' (a phrase which is repeated), the whole
incident is veiled in a crepuscular penumbra.
One way of regarding The Waste Land's urban visions, therefore, including the
vision of urban conflagration, is as private and nightmarish illusion. Vatic preten-
sion becomes private phantasmagoria. What is more, this phantasmagoric quality
may also owe something to the Aeneid, may at least have found confirmation there. It
is possible that Eliot found in the Aeneid a counterpart to his sense of the imagination
locked in its own circle of experience, possessed and harrowed, haunted by
phantasms. Havelock's phrase about Aeneas carrying 'both these cities of destruc-
tion with him' gives some idea of how the Aeneid can be read as a work of nightmarish
and obsessive despair, the protagonist unable to break out of his private realm of
experience. The doom-laden formulae which echo and reverberate through the
Aeneid signify an obsessed consciousness.
Havelock has some further and important things to say about that consciousness
in connexion with how to translate the opening of Aeneid n, where Aeneas is about to
begin the relation of his experiences up to his arrival at Carthage:
'Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem,
Troianas ut opes et lamentabile regnum
eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima vidi
et quorum pars magna fui.'
(II. 3)
('Beyond all words, 0 Queen, is the grief thou bidst me revive, how the Greeks overthrew
Troy's wealth and woeful realm - the sights most piteous that I myself saw and whereof I was
no small part.')

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 GARETH REEVES 563

Havelock stresses the importance of giving full justice in translation to the words
'quorum pars magna fui':
The tale to be told, so Aeneas hasjust said, is not a mere act of recollection, but a reawakening
of pain ['renovare dolorem']. The device of using him as a narrator is Homeric, but what
Aeneas is going to do is not repeat a narrative so much as relive an inner experience. Nor in
that experience is he able to revive or realize his own performance as an agent in the external
world. His role is to expose a vision of events of which he has been a spectator. Where have
these taken place? Where are they now taking place? Four Latin words supply the answer. 'I
have become a great part of them.' Aeneas does not say, as his translators would have him say,
I 'played,' or 'took,' or 'performed,' a great part: he does not even say, 'I shared in them.' He
says in effect, 'I am them,' or at least 'many of them.' The verb to be is in the completed perfect.
The phrase could be reversed: if he has become partly identical with what has happened, so
what has happened has become part of him. 'I am a part of all that I have met.' On the lips of
Tennyson's Ulysses, this declaration of self-involvement was assured and purposeful. For
Aeneas it revives a nightmare which he would put away from him if he could. (pp. 342-43)

Putting aside the question of whether Tennyson's Ulysses is as assured and

purposeful as Havelock declares (and some critics, notably Robert Langbaum and
Christopher Ricks, argue that he is not), this account of a particularly Virgilian
despair is very close to the locked-in consciousness that projects The Waste Land.12
The poem's voices and scenes are 'a reawakening of pain', a re-enactment of
memories which have become a living part of the psyche: so much so that we are
interested as much in the state of the experiencing consciousness as in what is being
experienced, as much in the fact that this is a nightmare vision as in any implicit
judgement of the world experienced. Both the Aeneid and The Waste Land convey, in
Havelock's words, 'the upthrust of an experience which is psychological' (p. 344).
'Quaeque ipse miserrima vidi | et quorum pars magna fui': as discussed by
Havelock those words from the Aeneid imply an epistemology of agonizing implica-
tions with distinctly Eliotesque overtones, where the self, being part of what it has
seen, is locked in an agony of self-consciousness. That epistemology is implicit in the
lines 'And I Tiresias have foresuffered all | Enacted on this same divan or bed', where
the prophet becomes the living embodiment of accumulated pain. Tiresias's words
imply a terror arising, like Aeneas's, from an incapacity to be relieved of the burden of
experience. That epistemology is implicit, too, in Prufrock's 'magic lantern' which
'threw the nerves in patterns on a screen', where the self becomes part of the reality it
apprehends. It is one of the hallmarks of the post-symbolist poem, and yet in this
respect Eliot's poetic method seems to have a notably Virgilian affinity. One might
even echo Havelock's words about Aeneas, and remark of Eliot that he is not 'able to
revive or realize his own performance as an agent in the external world'.
To propose this affinity is not to imply that Eliot derived his method from Virgil:
indeed, as I have argued, in at least one important respect their poetic practices are
opposed. But it is possible that Eliot responded to an aspect of the Aeneid which
confirmed his sense of the relationship of personality to experience. The way Eliot
seems to have read the Aeneid, and for that matter the way Havelock reads it, may not
be the only way, but, to repeat that phrase of F. W. Dupee's, if we are interested in
'what chiefly comes through to a modern reader', Eliot seems to have been one of
those modern readers who sensed what Havelock calls the 'psychic dimension' to the

12 See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modem Literary Tradition
(London, 1957; reprinted Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 83-86, and Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, Masters
of World Literature (London and New York, 1972; reprinted London, 1978), pp. 122-28.

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564 'The Waste Land' and the 'Aeneid'

Aeneid, its 'plunge downward below the surface of the conscious life' (p. 344). Eliot's
private poetic hells seem to have a distinctly Virgilian resonance.
It is likely that Eliot wanted to see beyond his nightmarish phantasmagoria,
beyond the unreality of private vision to a higher reality, beyond personal temporal
displacement to an other-worldly timelessness, beyond the 'Unreal City' to Plato's
ideal city, which, as Valerie Eliot points out in her note to the excised allusion to
Glaucon and The Republic, 'inspired the idea of the City of God among Stoics and
Christians, and found its finest exponent in St. Augustine' (Drafts, p. I28). But the
phantasmagoric world of The Waste Land resists such a desire. That is perhaps why
the excised vatic apostrophe to London rings false. There is an attempt to find and
decipher a hidden and higher meaning in the cityscape, to 'trace the cryptogram
that may be curled I Within the faint perceptions of the noise I Of the movement, and
the lights'; but that 'may be' shows that Eliot's heart is not in it, just as the phrase
'Not here, O Glaucon, but in another world' sounds hollowly assertive in its appeal
to another order.

Eliot's concentrated reminiscence, in 'What the Thunder said', of a Virgilian urban

conflagration appears to be the culmination of a sustained allusion to the Aeneid.
Certainly the allusion is more sustained than Kenner allows, and there seems no
need to argue with him that only vestiges remain in the final Waste Land of an early
intention to write a latter-day Aeneid. In response to Kenner's remarks that 'as we
brood on the first parts of the poem in theirfirstform, points of contact with the Aeneid
multiply', and that 'Eliot, much impressed by Joyce's use of Homer, may well have
had in mind at one time a kind of modern Aeneid' (pp. 39-40; my emphases), it is
arguable that the influence of the Aeneid remains strong enough to be demonstrated
by an examination of the final Waste Land.
To be sure, several recollections of the Aeneid in the drafts did not appear in the
final poem. Most notable is a reference to Aeneas's mother, who is identified with
Eliot's original 'heroine' of the poem, Fresca, about whom there was a long passage
in couplets at the start of 'The Fire Sermon':
To Aeneas, in an unfamiliar place,
Appeared his mother, with an altered face,
He knew the goddess by her smooth celestial pace.
So the close rabble in the cinema
Identify a goddess or a star.
In silent rapture worship from afar.

Valerie Eliot usefully refers to Aeneid I. 405: 'et vera incessu patuit dea. ille ubi
matrem I adgnovit' (and in her step she was revealed, a very goddess. He knew her
as his mother). Although all this was cut, it is highly significant that Aeneas's
recognition of his mother comes at the end of a long monologue in which she tells him
about the woman whose palace he is about to enter: about Dido, about her
Phoenician past, about her new city of Carthage. Another allusion excised from the
drafts echoes, briefly but loudly, the Aeneid: the human engine that throbs like a taxi
in 'The Fire Sermon' originally waited 'To spring to pleasure through the horn or
ivory gates'. This allusion to the end of Aeneid VI hints that at the back of Eliot's mind
was Aeneas's descent into Hades.13

13 Drafts, pp. 29 (the lines about Aeneas's mother (11. Io-15) are accompanied by a host of deletions),
127, 31, 43 (for 'the horn or ivory gates', see Aeneid v. 893-96).

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 GARETH REEVES 565

Such allusions bear witness to a preoccupation with the Aeneid at the time Eliot
was writing The Waste Land. Moreover, their excision does not mean that mere relics
of a Virgilian schema are, as Kenner implies, all that remain. The schema is as
visible in the final poem as in the drafts, for it is possible to trace in The Waste Land an
Aeneas-like journey in which the hero is, in Kenner's words, like Aeneas 'detained
by one woman and prophesied to by another' (p. 40) and in which he visits some sort
of underworld. The schema runs something like this: the woman on the burnished
throne in 'A Game of Chess' is a fiery Dido distracting the protagonist from his
appointed destiny, which is pronounced to him in 'The Burial of the Dead' by a
latter-day version of a Virgilian Sibyl, Madame Sosostris. This schema is backed up
by a kaleidoscope of allusions clustering round Dido's city of Carthage and the Punic
Wars.
With the prompting of Eliot's note, the allusion to Dido in 'A Game of Chess' has
long been recognized. What has not been recognized is that the allusion is part of a
collapsed version of the Dido and Aeneas story hovering in the background to 'A
Game of Chess'. This version takes in several phases of their relationship: their first
meeting, Aeneas's enforced departure from Carthage, and their encounter in the
underworld. It would, of course, be misleading to find in 'A Game of Chess' a linear
narrative or story-line, and indeed it is difficult to refer even to a situation between
the protagonists, for they exist, typically in The Waste Land, only as indeterminate
voices. As in the passage of urban conflagration, Eliot condenses Virgilian allusions,
so that one phase of the Dido-Aeneas relationship is projected onto another; the
shades of Hades flicker across the Carthaginian courtship.
For the unusual word 'laquearia' in the description of the luxurious room at the
start of 'A Game of Chess', Eliot in his note refers to Virgil's description of Dido's
palace and her enraptured reception of Aeneas at the end of Book I: 'dependent
lychni laquearibus aureis I incensi et noctem flammis funalia vincunt' (I. 726). Eliot
appears to have been preoccupied with the word 'laquearia', no doubt because of its
musicality, its feeling of languorous suavity, for by the strictest standards the word is
redundant: 'her strange synthetic perfumes . . . Flung their smoke into the
laquearia, I Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling'. 'Laquearia' is redundant
because it means a coffered, or panelled, ceiling. For Eliot to gloss the word even as
he is using it indicates the powerful hold which it must have had on his literary
imagination. This being so, other parallels between 'A Game of Chess' and the
ending of Aeneid I cannot be mere coincidence. The artificial light of Dido's palace,
the lighted lamps and the gold and the flaming torches already quoted, gleams and
glimmers in the atmosphere of the room occupied by the woman on her 'burnished
throne': 'doubled the flames', 'reflecting light', 'the glitter of her jewels', 'the
prolonged candle-flames', and further down the page 'the firelight' and the hair
'spread out in fiery points'.l4
Picking up Eliot's reference to Virgil in the notes to The Waste Land, Grover Smith
comments: 'Afflicted with boredom, she thinks, ... with unconscious irony, of

14 Although William N. Rogers, In (in "'Laquearia" in The Waste Land', American Notes & Queries, 13
(March I975), 105-06) convincingly discusses the presence in 'A Game of Chess' of Dido and Carthage
hinted at by 'laquearia', he goes on to elaborate some unlikely implications of the word, based on its
etymology and precise architectural significance (and on similar significances in the related word
'lacunar').

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566 'The Waste Land' and the 'Aeneid'

rushing out and walking the street, much like the frenzied Dido in her palace at
Carthage when Aeneas abandoned her.'15 He refers to Aeneid Iv. 589, where Dido
watches Aeneas's fleet depart:
terque quaterque manu pectus percussa decorum
flaventisque abscissa comas ...
(thrice and four times she struck her comely breast with her hand, and tearing her golden
hair ...)

In fact these lines seem more pertinent to the phrase 'with my hair down, so' than to
rushing out and walking the street:
'What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?'

Even more relevant to this part of'A Game of Chess' are the words at IV. 300, which
describe Dido, when she first learns of Aeneas's impending departure, wandering
the streets ofCarthage, 'saevit inops animi totamque incensa per urbem I bacchatur'
(helpless in mind she rages, and all aflame raves through the city); or these words at
v. 68, in the early stages of their love, where this time unconsummated passion
brings on Dido's frenzy, 'uritur infelix Dido totaque vagatur | urbe furens' (unhappy
Dido burns, and through the city wanders in frenzy). 'Totaque vagatur I urbe
furens'; 'totamque incensa per urbem I bacchatur': Virgil echoes himself, not
directly, not repeating verbatim, but shifting and altering the formula, much as he
does with the imagery of urban destruction. The beginning of Dido's infatuation
forecasts its end, its end echoes its beginning; the formula for disaster is present
throughout. In one sentence, 'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street', Eliot
characteristically echoes in summary fashion the whole Virgilian theme.
Once more, though, the relation between the ancient and the modern poem is not
straightforward. The Virgilian echo here signifies another instance of'scrambling of
parallel and contrast'. Dido's frenzy results from love thwarted and a union
sundered, and there is passion in her tantrum, whereas with Eliot's disembodied
voices there seems to be no love to thwart, no union to sunder: the frenzy stems from
an opposite cause, not from embattled wills but from wills that have never come into
contact, from a sense of dislocation. In the Aeneid there is contact, violently made and
violently broken off; in The Waste Land there is none.
That sense of dislocation is strongly marked in the internalized responses of
Aeneas's modern equivalent in 'A Game of Chess'. He, too, suffers from a locked-in
sensibility, unable to participate in a relationship of which he has become a detached
observer. Preoccupied with the dead, he cannot reciprocate: 'I think we are in
rats' alley I Where the dead men lost their bones.' The dead here take on a
particularly Virgilian resonance; for when in one of his internalized responses he
'remember[s] | Those are pearls that were his eyes' his thoughts appear to be
concentrated, by way of Ariel's song in The Tempest, on a (supposedly) dead father,
and in the Aeneid the Cumaean Sibyl instructs Aeneas that before he can found his

15 Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, second edition (Chicago,
1956; reprinted 1974), pp. 82, 327n.

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 GARETH REEVES 567

new colony he must first visit Hades to see his dead fathe
asks the woman's voice, and it seems that the thoughts o
already wandering the realms of some sort of contempor
meets Anchises in Hades, Aeneas must first meet Dido: t
its distance and lack of contact - although the analogy
far, for in Aeneid vi it is Aeneas who speaks and Dido w
Game of Chess' the roles are reversed. The principle at wo
that operating elsewhere in The Waste Land: a concentrate
posing of one Virgilian episode upon another. Where
shadow and recall one another (so that, as I have argued,
of the Dido and Aeneas story are continually and unsettlin
Eliot calls up in a single passage the whole progress
Carthage to Hades. Moreover, as in the passages of citysc
the effect is phantasmagoric and nightmarish, and i
enacted is a state of mind. 'A Game of Chess' is a mod
typically Eliotesque living hell, whose chief characteristi
The advice by Virgil's Sibyl to visit the underworld sho
Waste Land's equivalent of Aeneas has visited a modern sib
'The Burial of the Dead' and shortly before he enters the
Chess'. Though the closer source for Madame Sosost
Sesostris in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow (see Grov
considerable evidence to suggest that there are Virg
Cumaean Sibyl says to Aeneas:
causa mali tanti coniunx iterum hospita Teucris
externique iterum thalami.
(vi. 93)
(The cause of all this Trojan woe is again an alien bride, again a foreign marriage.)

Helen of Troy is the first coniunx hospita, Phoenician Dido the second, and Latin
Lavinia, betrothed to Aeneas and beloved by Turnus, is to be the third; the motif
runs through the Aeneid from beginning to end. Is not at least a portion of Eliot's woe
his marriage to Vivien, an Englishwoman, a coniunx hospita? (For the dislocated
conversation of'A Game of Chess' appears to be a disguised version of the relations
between Eliot and his wife.)
Biographical testimony aside, Kenner goes to the drafts to argue the connexion
between Madame Sosostris and Virgil's Sibyl, although the final text also offers
ample evidence. He notes that the original version of the fourth line from the end of
The Waste Land ('These fragments I have spelt into my ruins') implies that 'the
protagonist has visited the Sibyl of Vergil, whose oracles, like those of Mme. Sosos-
tris, were fragmentary and shuffled by the winds'.17 This highly plausible suggestion

16 Eliot's indirect reference to a dead father could well have something to do with the fact that his own
father died at the beginning of the year (1919) in which he started working concentratedly on The Waste
Land. The death must have been for Eliot especially harrowing, since he had not seen his parents, whom
he was at the time planning to visit in America, for at least four and a half years (see 'Introduction' to the
Drafts, p. xvi).
17 Drafts, p. 8I, and Kenner, p. 42. It is true that in the epigraph to The Waste Land Eliot refers not to
Virgil's Sibyl but to the Sibyl as Petronius presents her in the Satyricon, ancient and longing to die; but, as
Kenner has convincingly demonstrated, that epigraph 'was added later than anything recorded in the
manuscripts' (pp. 43-45); and, as a substitute for Eliot's original epigraph from Heart of Darkness ('The
horror, the horror'), the words of Petronius's Sibyl seem to refer more to the general mood of The Waste
Land than to any particular passage in it.

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568 'The Waste Land' and the 'Aeneid'

alerts us to the fact that Madame Sosostris's oracles are notably fragmented, her
cards taking the place of the Cumaean Sibyl's disordered leaves. Among them are
several glancing allusions to the Aeneid. 'Fear death by water': bearing in mind that
this injunction comes in a section entitled 'The Burial of the Dead' one remembers,
with Kenner's prompting (p. 39), the Cumaean Sibyl's injunction to Aeneas that
before he can enter the Underworld he must first bury the body of his friend,
drowned at sea (vI. I49-55). When Aeneas returns to his companions, at vI. 175,
they are gathered round the dead Misenus: 'ergo omnes magno circum clamore
fremebant' (So, with loud lament, all were mourning round him). Virgil's words
could well have triggered off Eliot's line 'I see crowds of people, walking round in a
ring'. I have already remarked that the line 'Those are pearls that were his eyes',
implying as it does a dead father, could also in the Virgilian context be reminiscent
of Aeneas's duty to visit Hades.
In the wider context of The Waste Land the Phoenician Sailor recalls Dido,
Carthage, and the Punic Wars. Phoenicia is a name frequently invoked in the phrase
Phoenissa Dido throughout the first six books of the Aeneid. It was famous for
seafaring, and for trade. In 'Death by Water' the Phoenician Sailor, 'Phlebas the
Phoenician', is concerned with trade, 'the profit and loss'. The Punic Wars, which
appear at the end of 'The Burial of the Dead' in the line 'You who were with me in
the ships at Mylae!', were about trade, and there are other references to trade in The
Waste Land: 'the one-eyed merchant' and 'Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant'.
Although the acknowledged source for the Carthage at the end of 'The Fire
Sermon' is St Augustine, in the light of the other Virgilian echoes in The Waste Land it
is impossible not to be reminded of Dido's Carthage also: the Carthage that is the
scene of her burning and thwarted passion for Aeneas, and the Carthage whose
conflagration in the Punic Wars is foreshadowed by her suicidal pyre. Eliot's
Carthage is insistently associated with burning:
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning

These lines, the apocalyptic centre of the poem, are highly condensed and multi-
valent. Eliot's notes point to 'the collocation of... two representatives of eastern
and western asceticism', St Augustine in the Confessions ('to Carthage then I came,
where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears' (I. 3)), from which he
quotes, and the Buddha in the Fire Sermon, which was preached against the
consuming fires of passion, and which provided Eliot with his line of repeated
'burnings'. To this collocation can be added the great pagan hero Aeneas, who came
to Carthage and burnt with passion there for Dido. Moreover, as Harry Blamires
points out, the conjunction of Virgil with St Augustine is not fortuitous, for the
Confessions 'includes reference to Virgil .... For St Augustine himself Virgil's
powerful account of the love of Aeneas for Dido is representative of earthly interests
and passions which distract the cultured mind from full surrender to God'.18

18 Harry Blamires, Word Unheard: A Guide through Eliot's 'Four Quartets' (London, 1969), p. I88. See also
St Augustine, Confessions, I. 12.

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 GARETH REEVES 569

Such an attitude towards 'earthly passions' seems to be behind the word

'burning'; but in the context of that other phrase from the Confessions, 'O Lord Thou
pluckest me out', a more redemptive implication is also present. At this juncture we
need to consider the fact that in 'The Fire Sermon' Dante significantly coincides
with Virgil. The two poets come together right at the start. As Eliot's note says, the
words 'The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf I Clutch and sink into the wet
bank' echo these lines at Inferno III. I 2, where Dante describes the wicked souls
crowding the bank of Acheron:
Come d'autunno si levan le foglie
l'una appresso dell'altra, infin che il ramo
vede alla terra tutte le sue spoglie:
similemente il mal seme d'Adamo
gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una.
(As the leaves of autumn fall off one after the other, till the branch sees all its spoils upon th
ground: so one by one the evil seed of Adam cast themselves from that shore.)19

Canto III of the Inferno has been called 'the most Virgilian in the whole poem',20 and
these lines are a direct borrowing from Aeneid VI. 309, where Virgil also describes the
dead thronging the bank of Acheron:
quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo
lapsa cadunt folia ...
(thick as the leaves of the forest that at autumn's first frost dropping fall ....)

In their eagerness to reach the farther shore the dead stretch out their hands
imploringly to Charon, 'tendebant manus' (vI. 314), which may have inspired
Eliot's 'fingers' and 'clutch'. Kenner (p. 40), bypassing Dante, thinks that Virgil'
account could have directly prompted the lines beginning 'The Fire Sermon'. If
however, we are aware of a conjunction of the two poets here, we can see that Dante'
version of the lines from the Aeneid has added a moral dimension to Virgil'
descriptive simile.
It is possible to see a similar principle at work in 'The Fire Sermon' as a whole, the
Virgilian underworld of The Waste Land blending with, and possibly modified by,
Dantean eschatology. Purgatorial features merge with infernal, rather as in the 'terza
rima' passage of 'Little Gidding'. In his note to the words 'Highbury bore me.
Richmond and Kew I Undid me', spoken by the first Thames maiden, the woman of
the 'narrow canoe', Eliot refers to Purgatorio v. I33:
'ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma.'
('Remember me, who am La Pia: Siena made me, Maremma unmade me.')

As Eliot writes in his essay on Dante, La Pia was among those in Purgatory 'whose
souls were saved from Hell only at the last moment', those who, in J. D. Sinclair's
words, 'appeal to Dante for the help of his prayers ... for their admission to active
purgation', which hints at the possibility that the woman of the narrow canoe has
had a glimpse of redemption through purgatorial suffering.21 It may be significan

19 Citations of the Divina Commedia and of accompanying translations are from the Temple Classic
edition, edited by Hermann Oelsner and others, 3 vols (London, I899-190I).
20 See The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by John D. Sinclair, 3 vols (New York, I939
reprinted 1972-74), I, 56 (Inferno, note to Canto in).
2 'Dantc' (1929), reprinted in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, third edition (London, 1951), pp. 237-77
(p. 253), and Sinclair, II, 79 (Purgatorio, note to Canto v).

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570 'The Waste Land' and the 'Aeneid'

that her words 'Highbury bore me' echo not only La Pia but also the start of a sonnet
by Surrey:
Norfolk sprang thee, Lambeth holds thee dead,
Clere of the County of Cleremont though hight.

Surrey's sonnet echoes the epitaph which is inscribed on Virgil's supposed tomb:
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.

Eliot's Virgilianism takes on added resonance when we realize that he is here,

whether he knows it or not, echoing Virgil through Surrey, the Aeneid's first English
translator.22 Again the voices of Dante and Virgil can be heard merging, however
indirectly and faintly, in the echo chamber of Eliot's poem.
In 'The Fire Sermon"s Dantean perspective, then, passion itself opens the way for
purification. Such a moral and spiritual order, where the 'cauldron of unholy loves'
becomes the occasion for the expiation of passion, is present perhaps in that repeated
'burning': burning both with the passion that consumes and with the searing
expiation of that passion. It is thus possible to read into The Waste Land the sort of
'organization of sensibility' which Eliot was to find in the Vita Nuova: 'the contrast
between higher and lower carnal love, the transition from Beatrice living to Beatrice
dead' ('Dante', p. 275).
If such a moral and spiritual order, of purification through passion, of transition
from lower to higher, is indeed present in 'The Fire Sermon', its relation to the
contemporary context of the poem is complex. If London, as a trading city, is
another Carthage, then those who come to it and burn there would include the 'heirs
of city directors', Sweeney, 'Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant', and the 'small
house agent's clerk'. As modern exemplars of Aeneas, however, they are a sorry
diminution. Their casual encounters, rather like the one in 'A Game of Chess', are
marked not by passionate contact but, on the contrary, by distance and discon-
nexion. The 'heirs' are 'loitering'; they, 'departed, have left no addresses' (which
sounds like a deliberately dead-pan cliche, as if to emphasize the unremarkable
nature of the encounters); the affair between the house agent's clerk and the typist is
notably distant and anaesthetized, for although 'flushed and decided', he 'makes a
welcome of indifference', and the encounter and separation are emphatically
'automatic'; the Smyrna merchant's offer of 'a weekend at the Metropole' is
decidedly casual. If the voices of these male visitors to London merge with those of
St Augustine and Aeneas in the line 'To Carthage then I came', then once more
parallel and contrast coincide. Aeneas's passionate affair with Dido provides a
contrast to these modern versions of sexual passion: the modern instances are not
'burning', not consuming. The implication, therefore, is that a Dantean trans-
formation is not possible today: Carthage may have been the city of purgation
through passion, but London, its modern equivalent, offers no such hope, because it
holds no passion, no real desire. One is reminded of Eliot's argument that
'Baudelaire was man enough for damnation'.23

22 See Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, edited by Emrys Jones (Oxford, 1964), p. I29n. These
echoes of Surrey and of Virgil's epitaph were pointed out in my article on Eliot's drafts: 'The Obstetrics of
The Waste Land', CQ, 17 (Spring 1975), 33-53 (pp. 41-42).
23 'Baudelaire' (1930), Selected Essays, pp. 381-92 (p. 391).

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 GARETH REEVES 57I

Thus 'The Fire Sermon"s Dantean perspective is extremely tentativ

to redemption on a higher plane are only glimpsed possibilities. Signi
with the word 'burning', unpunctuated, suspended, independent, an
paradigm for the open-ended quality of the whole poem. Even when
Waste Land the allusion to a Dantean purgation is overt, it comes in fr
quotation shored against the protagonist's ruins, along with a
fragments: 'Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina' (Then he committed hi
that refined him). These words about Arnaut Daniel, one of the lus
active purgation in the cleansing fires ofPurgatory, end his address to
guide Virgil (Purgatorio xxvi). It is questionable whether in their fra
of'What the Thunder said' they express more than a hint that some
rescued from the world of The Waste Land. By I929 Eliot was able t
Daniel's words in the light ofthe Dantean view ofVirgil as pagan adv
guide to the threshold, but no further, of the Christian vision:
The souls in purgatory suffer because they wish to suffer, for purgation. An
suffer more actively and keenly, being souls preparing for blessedness, than
eternal limbo. In their suffering is hope, in the anaesthesia of Virgil is hope
difference. The canto ends with the superb verses of Arnaut Daniel in his
'leu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;
consiros vei la passadafolor,
e veijausen lojorn, qu' esper, denan.
Ara vos prec, per aquella valor
que vos guida al som de I'escalina,
sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.'
POI S'ASCOSE NEL FOCO CHE GLI AFFINA.
('Dante', p. 256)

As with many of the allusions in Eliot's poetry, it is difficult to know how

spread the net. The Waste Land quotes the line about plunging back into th
does not quote the earlier line about hopefully and joyfully anticipating a be
Perhaps the hope can be read into The Waste Land; or we can register
omission its not being quoted. The uncertainty is an index of the indeterm
open-ended quality of The Waste Land.

A word that might shed new light on this quality, on the problem of the
unprecedented method and principle of construction, is sibylline - i
implications of that word: oracular and prophetic, vexingly mysterious, ri
it is true that one source for Madame Sosostris and her fragmentary and i
oracles is the story of the Cumaean Sibyl's fragmentary and disordered lea
arguable that the sibylline method of prophecy has a wider relevance to T
Land. Here it is significant that, contrary to the Sibyl's usual practice, in th
she gives her advice to Aeneas whole and unfragmented. Aeneas is able to e
information unfragmented from her because the prophet Helenus has
warned him of the Sibyl's teasing habit of entrusting her prophecies to le
then letting them be blown higgledy-piggledy about her cave so that they
unintelligible (Im. 443-52). Thus forewarned, Aeneas takes the precaution o
the Sibyl to utter her prophecies directly (vi. 74-76). Here, in the story of t
coherent and incoherent ways of prophecy, it is possible to see epitomized T
Land's divergent motives, on the one hand towards fragmentariness and di
tion, on the other towards coherent patterning. Madame Sosostris as a fak

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572 'The Waste Land' and the 'Aeneid'

shuffling her cards conjures up the irresponsible and incoherent sibylline behaviour.
She is sibylline only in charade, Huxley's charlatan fortune-teller in drag, a sham
counterpart to the bisexual prophet Tiresias. In this guise is she not a safety valve for
the reader's, and perhaps even the writer's, possible sense of disbeliefin the poem, of
vexed puzzlement at it? Is not a good part of the poem's import (and, no doubt,
fascination, even today) its apparent lack of structure, its riddling quality, its
implicit invitation to the reader to tease meaning out of it? A similar reaction may
well have overwhelmed the author at times. The manuscript from which The Waste
Land was assembled must have appeared to Eliot more than once in the process of
composition as something of a riddle, a sheaf of disordered sibylline leaves.
The Waste Land thus questions its own status as anything approaching an oracular,
prophetic utterance, or even a coherent structure of meaning. Madame Sosostris
and the story she calls up of the windblown sibylline leaves alert us to the possibility
of a portentously vatic mysteriousness in the poem, the possibility that the prophetic
strain may not ring true, that it contains self-doubt and self-parody - as when the
ominously oracular 'The rattle of the bones' descends in the space of sixteen lines to
the flippant Mrs Porter's and her daughter's soda water. Moreover, the story of the
sibylline leaves may put us on our guard when we find in the poem a coherence
which its form will not adequately sustain. To be sure, there are plenty of coherences
to be found; that is part of the difficulty, not that there are none but that they are
countless. It would be an oversimplification to suggest that Eliot found in the
windblown sibylline leaves a paradigm for the dislocation and fragmentariness of
The Waste Land. He could equally well have found a paradigm for coherence
underlying apparent incoherence. Just as Aeneas contrived to get clear sense out of
the Sibyl, so we contrive to locate patterns in The Waste Land. One of these, indeed,
might be the Aeneas-like journey I have traced (a visit to the prophetess, detention
by Dido, descent to the underworld, return to the upper world) in a version
emphasizing the dark side of Virgil's 'divided genius': the search for a dead father,
the disorientations and distractions of passion, the ravage of cities. Another might
bring into prominence the convergence of Virgil with Dante and the possible
Dantean glimpse of a higher order. But the poem does not fix any one pattern; it
resists formal or conceptual unity. The presence of the irresponsibly sibylline
Madame Sosostris signifies how the poem constantly undermines its own, and the
reader's, pretensions.
UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM GARETH REEVES

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