Poems you should read before you die: The Waste Land — T. S. Eliot
Scintillating, prophetic, chaotic and mesmerising, The Waste Land was published one hundred years ago this year. In some ways the world had relatable similarities, the Spanish flu had swept through a Europe recovering from the turmoil of war, while for us war in the East of Europe looms over the recovery from coronavirus. Some things sadly don’t change. But in other ways it was a world incomprehensibly different, our modern lives are shaped by technologies barely dreamed of even such a relatively short time ago, the mediums through which we relate to each other, receive information about events, conduct our politics, are in another world.
Yet The Waste Land cannot help but strike you as a poem both prophetic and visionary of the listless condition of postmodernity. While we are in many ways more comfortable and surrounded by conveniences it’s hard not to see our time as a kind of dystopia.
For T. S. Eliot (who was born and educated in the US, but spent his adult life living in England), part of the situation of modern Europe was defined by the decline of meaning concomitant with the decline of religion:
“Much has been said everywhere about the decline of religious belief; not so much about the decline of religious sensibility. The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless.”
For Eliot this was a decline that can be mirrored by poetry, itself driven by it’s sentiment and the ability of us to “express, and consequently to be able to feel, the emotions of civilised human beings.” And that if the decline of such sentiment occurs, language itself for wider society becomes stripped of meaning. One of the conditions that follows this decline is a moral one, not a decline into evil necessarily, Eliot himself said “So far as we are human, what we do must be evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.”
This moral absence is an important theme for understanding The Waste Land, because of the collapse in serious moral consciousness what is produced is the listless non-existence that recurs in the poem, a living death. In the note at the start of the poem the Sybil says “What do you wish? I wish to die.”
This apathy and disillusion was also mirrored in Eliot’s own life, suffering from depression and the breakdown of his marriage of which Eliot would say “To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.”
The Waste Land is a work both of it’s time, and prophetic of what will follow. Seamus Heaney described Eliot’s writing as “visionary strangeness”, which perhaps gets to the heart of why the work is so striking. The contents itself, it’s style, are so vividly reflective of the world it describes and predicts. Scattered, chaotic references pieced together, threads of traditions, religions and literature are patch-worked into a whole that does not directly say anything, it’s meaning in a direct sense is elusive, difficult; it provokes a mood, a spirit of a time of fragmentation and meaninglessness:
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images”
The most significant thematic influence, and the overarching structure to the poem is a work called ‘From Ritual to Romance’ by Jessie Weston. The work is an examination of the King Arthur legends, in particular the grail myth. From these myths Eliot takes the recurring theme of the Fisher King, a narrative of Arthurian literature in which an injured and impotent King sits over his land which has become desolate waste, awaiting the heroic knight that will recover the grail and restore the Kingdom. The title of the poem itself sets the entire work to this theme.
Dante also looms over as a theme, the line “I had not thought death had undone so many” is directly quoted from Dante’s arrival in Inferno, and alludes to Eliot’s comparison of modern Europe with Dante’s hell, as he put it: “Certainly I have borrowed lines from Dante, in the attempt to reproduce, or rather arouse in the reader’s mind the memory, of some Dantesque scene, and this establish a relationship between the medieval inferno and modern life.”
Many other works recur, the text itself is dense with reference. Almost every line can be analysed as an allusion or reference to a work of literature, a style almost uniquely Eliot’s. The constant change in speaker, voice, situation and narrative means the poem teeters on the edge of being incoherent, yet somehow never does. It is a work in which Eliot walks the line between visionary and lunatic, the sheer authority of Eliot’s poetic mastery somehow weaving through the kaleidoscope of dizzying images. The poem’s opening lines that reflect on the sad awakening of a spring in a dead land “April is the cruelest month”, are suddenly broken by another voice “Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade”, this nostalgic sequence broken again by “What are the roots that clutch.”
The tool here takes metaphor to its extreme edges, images are put side by side without warning or reference like a kind of collage, refusing your desire to connect one voice or narrative. This constant breaking of image is part of what creates it’s scintillating effect, like stomach lurching veers in the road that change the landscape in front of you, and by painting one image over another a single image is created, one of fragmentation and misdirection.
Eliot asks a lot of his readers, it’s literary depth is what makes it enduring but also alienating and esoteric. As mentioned references to Dante, for example, are not inserted merely because the line sounds good but expect the reader to sense the “Dantesque” theme. The scope is so broad almost no one can sense the array of references, from Shakespeare to the bible to the upanishads, most modern readers would simply find the content inaccessible. Maybe this is part of Eliot’s vision, the absence of poetry in culture also makes these references a set of empty words, harking to a tradition less and less relevant to a time without meaning where literature no longer defines us in the same way it has. Who outside of the church in the twenty first century would hear “son of man” and immediately sense the strangeness of the visions in Ezekiel where God refers to the prophet by that term?
Redemption in the text is hard to find. The closing stanzas of “What the Thunder Said” draw on the upanishads with the recurring words “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” Meaning something like ‘give’, ‘sympathise’ and ‘control’, and after a flutter of final references including the line “Hieronymo’s mad again”, a line from Kyd’s Elizabethan ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, the final line resolves into “Shantih Shantih Shantih”. In Eliot’s own references: “Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. ‘The peace which passeth understanding’ is our equivalent word.”
These words are spoken, it seems, by the Fisher King himself, they follow the line “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my land in order?”. The final chaotic lines that draw a flurry of lines together “London Bridge is falling down”, “Hieronymo’s mad again”, show the figure veering on the edge of madness. The final words reflect a momentary glimpse of a beyondness, peace, written in a strange language, but there none the less.
So why should you read The Waste Land before you die? In a way T. S. Eliot marks the end of a tradition of significant poetic voices in the Western world. Maybe only Seamus Heaney has had any significance in the latter parts of the twentieth century, certainly in our moment no one does. In many ways his apprehension became true, both religion and poetry have become insignificant and with them a world of language and coherence. The Waste Land is a scintillating vision of a world disparate, listless, broken and longing for meaning. His sharp cynicism and searing fragmentation of imagery seems to take the cliched symbols of religion and literature and attempt to give them life, reminding us that there is meaning in the meaninglessness, the “heap of broken images” remains itself an image. Whether his vision is one we can awake from collectively, whether the grail can be found, or if the only salvation is for the individual, alone, remains to be seen.
References:
Eliot, T.S, On Poetry and Poets, FSG, 1943
North, Michael, The Waste Land, A Norton Critical edition, Norton, 2001
