Summary of T S Eliot the Waste Land
INTRODUCTION
Though Eliot is unquestionably a central figure in the development of modern poetry, his achievement cannot be isolated from that of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries: in codifying the aims of the twentieth-century poet and clarifying his intentions, he pointed the way ahead, but his direction had already been determined by those who preceded him. John Munro (MUNRO, 1968, p. 34) The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Jorges Luis Borges (IRBY & YATES, 2000, p. 236)When a work of literature appears which transforms the landscape of imaginative writing, a shadow is cast over existing works which can suddenly find themselves exposed as naïve or out-of-date. We might think of Sterne’s 18thcentury novel Tristram Shandy, which, amongst other things, radically challenged the concept of temporal representation in fiction.
We may also cite Joyce’s Ulysses, which, in a sense, advanced the issue of representation by revealing an inner world of random thought processes hitherto ignored by the purveyors of realism. The publication of The Waste Land, however, (subsequently referred to as TWL) revolutionized not only the reading and writing of poetry, it also played a major role in establishing English Literature as a legitimate academic subject.
Before TWL, the close reading of poetry, what we understand today as the exegesis of the literary text, had been considered neither appropriate nor necessary. At a stroke, Eliot’s 1922 poem symbolises the emergence of Modernism after the Great War and ushers in a new era of critical analysis. The attention received by TWL in academia has hardly diminished in the century since its publication.
In stark contrast, the lack of attention now given to Eliot’s English contemporaries, who were writing and publishing poetry before, during and after the war, is lamentable. One of the unfortunate consequences of TWL is that its striking originality intoxicated critics and scholars to such an extent (as it does to this day) that they began to reject Eliot’s immediate predecessors as irrelevant.
SYNOPSIS OF T S ELIOT’S “THE WASTE LAND”
The Burial Of The Dead
The Waste Land’s first section consists of four stanzas. In the first stanza, Marie, the speaker, reminisces about the carefree, innocent time before World War I. Here, Eliot includes references to Germany, such as a lake called the Starnbergerse, and uses German speech excerpts, such as the following (which means “I’m not Russian at all, I’m from Lithuania, really German”): Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
Marie speaks of the changes from winter (on which she looks back) to spring, as represented by April, which she calls “the cruellest month.” It seems that barely has spring taken hold, however, when summer arrives (“Summer surprised us”). Winter, as Marie looks back on in memory, is connected to sledding with her cousin and overcoming her fears.
The mood turns darker, however, in the second stanza. The speaker no longer seems to be Marie, exactly, though it is not immediately clear who is speaking (or if it is simply Marie in a much different mood); this pattern of vocal instability persists for the length of the poem. The speaker comments on the desolation of the “stony rubbish” and “dry stone,” referencing death in the image of the “dead tree.” Their mood is pessimistic, fixating on “fear in a handful of dust.” These images initially seem to be in contrast to the images in the quoted material of the innocent “hyacinth girl”; however, despite the sensual imagery of the hyacinths and the line “Your arms full, and your hair wet,” the overall scene sets up a similar failure of flourishing and nature, and ends with the German for “Dull and empty is the sea”:
I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
The subject and ultimate speaker of the third stanza is Madame Sosostris, a fortune-teller who uses tarot cards. Eliot includes references to both the traditional cards in the deck and some innovations. Establishing one of the poem’s central conceits, a focus on water and its lack, Eliot introduces the card called the “drowned Phoenician sailor”; Phoenicia also calls to mind the phoenix, symbolizing rebirth from flame (in contrast to water). Later in the stanza, Madame Sosostris commands,
Summary of T S Eliot the Waste Land
Fear Death By Water.
(This command recurs as the title for the poem’s fourth section, “Death by Water.”)
Madame Sosostris also draws a blank, unreadable card (“Which I am forbidden to see”), symbolizing the unknowable future. Seeing plays an important role: this is illustrated by the pearls that are the sailor’s eyes (a quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest), the one-eyed merchant card, and the clairvoyant seeing a crowded ring of people. She urges caution in speaking about horoscopes.
The fourth stanza is set in London, called “Unreal City,” where a wintry “brown fog” has enveloped London Bridge. The multitudes seem to be Madame Sosistris’s predicted crowd. The speaker marvels at the crowd’s size and uneasy state:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Death is addressed throughout, and the stanza echoes the winter–spring connection established at the poem’s beginning. The people walk uphill toward a church, Saint Mary Woolnoth, that is chiming with a “dead sound.” Given the poem’s concern with the inaccessibility of traditional religion and belief, it is significant that the clock strikes “on the final stroke of nine,” given that the Bible states that Jesus was crucified at the same time of morning—after which an unnatural darkness fell.
The last few lines include reference to a corpse. The speaker meets an acquaintance, Stetson, whom he knew from Mylae, the site of a third-century BCE battle between Rome and Carthage. He asks about a buried corpse in a garden, wondering if it will bloom. The theme of caution appears here as well, as the speaker warns Stetson to keep the dog from digging it up. The stanza and the section end with lines in French, from a poem in Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, translated as: “hypocrite reader!—my fellow,—my brother!”
A Game of Chess
This section’s title is an explicit reference to a play of the same title by Thomas Middleton; both this play and another of his, Women Beware Women, use chess as a metaphor for the steps in the process of seduction. The section consists of two dialogues focusing on two female characters, hailing from radically different social situations and expressing very different modes of sexuality—yet they share the experience of related suffering. The woman in the first part of the section wears the clothes and ornaments of wealth and privilege.
The abundance of fiery colors that pervade this setting (e.g., “the glitter of her jewels,” “vials of ivory and coloured glass,” and “the flames of seven branched candelabra”) suggest that a particular kind of erotic energy is simultaneously socially forbidden and culturally acknowledged as one of few available versions of female sexuality, which this woman embodies. In these ornaments, however, her unhappiness and uncertainties are reflected, as in the personification of her perfumes:
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused . . .
The trappings of her social class and the ideal of femininity, which she is determined to embody, press claustrophobically close, seeming to act on her body independently of her will. An example of this is the brush that appears to brush her hair of its own accord upon the approach of her lover:
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, and then would be savagely still.
Her unhappiness and loneliness are evident in the one-sided dialogue she pursues with her lover, as she demands again and again that he respond and express himself in ways she can relate to:
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
In contrast to the woman of the first dialogue, Lil (the woman in the second) has performed society’s requirements of her in marrying, supporting a husband while he was away fighting in the war, and having five children. However, where the woman from the first dialogue is the center of the scene, Lil’s presence in this conversation seemingly held in a pub due to the repeated “hurry up please its time” command, indicative of closing time and last call is less central. Like the first woman, she seeks cosmetic assistance in maintaining her beauty, but the implication is that the false teeth she buys are not sufficient to keep her husband’s interest. Since Lil took pills to induce an abortion, she notes that she’s looked older (or, as the speaker says, “You ought to be ashamed . . . to look so antique”):
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face . . .
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.
The speaker criticizes Lil for her pregnancy, ascribing none of the blame to Lil’s husband, Albert:
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children.
The culminating line of the section—”Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night”—has ominous undertones in being reminiscent of Ophelia’s monologue in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, given shortly before she drowns herself. The clear implication is that, in assuming any sexual identity in the society in which Eliot writes, a woman voluntarily poisons herself and sets off on a downward spiral from which she can never recover. It dissipates the distinctions of class and context to view the two women of this section as living in a world where no form of feminine sexuality can be recognized, where any form of feminine sexual expression—whether socially acceptable or not—leads to a destruction of body, mind, and soul.
Summary of T S Eliot the Waste Land
The Fire Sermon
An indeterminate speaker begins by describing the Thames River in the present and the way it used to look. At the moment the speaker describes it, which seems to be late fall or winter,
the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard.
The speaker describes multiple absences from the Thames in the poem’s postwar setting of infertility and absence. The river holds not only no evidence of modern romance no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights but also no remnants of a primal, ancient eroticism: “The nymphs are departed,” as the speaker repeats twice.
The speaker says that he wept by the “waters of Leman”; this is an apparent reference to Psalm 137, in which the captive Israelites weep near the rivers of Babylon over the home from which they were exiled (as well as a reference to Lake Geneva—Leman in French—at which Eliot received psychiatric treatment while working on The Waste Land). Perhaps, then, the speaker grieves the loss of the beauty of his home near the Thames.
The speaker also refers to “the king my brother’s wreck,” an allusion to when Prospero of The Tempest calls up a storm to wreck his brother’s boat in revenge for his having abandoned Prospero on an island many years before. The speaker, then, seems also to feel abandoned and alone. He describes naked bodies on the ground and bones lying where the rats live, the death and decay adding to the sense of how terrible London has become. He goes on, referencing popular song lyrics of the era to show how much culture has decayed, how far humanity has fallen. Then, in the next stanza, he recalls the myth of Philomela (who came up earlier in the poem), a Greek princess who was raped and imprisoned by Tereus:
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu
The “rude forc[ing]” seems to refer to the rape itself, and the portions of birdsong to Philomela’s transformation into a nightingale. The speaker again describes the foul city full of “brown fog” and names two places associated with lurid sexual encounters during Eliot’s time: the Cannon Street Hotel and the Metropole. Again, the allusions to rape and locations of sordid liaisons serve to show how much London has changed. It is a place, now, characterized by the loss of natural rhythms and cycles particularly, here, those relating to sex and reproduction.
In the next stanza, the mythological Greek prophet Tiresias is identified as the speaker (“I Tiresias”); whether he has been speaking since the section’s beginning or has just begun to is unclear. Tiresias describes himself as “throbbing between two lives” because he has experienced life as both a man and a woman (this is why he is an “Old man with wrinkled female breasts”), and he can “see” something he wishes he did not: a young female typist living alone, with her undergarments—her “Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays” vulnerably placed out to dry. He says,
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest
I too awaited the expected guest.
This lends a sense of fated prophecy to the painful scene to come. A young, pimpled man walks through her door—feeling very self-confident and full of “assurance,” though he is apparently not anything special—and he “Endeavours to engage her in caresses” that do not appear to interest her at all. He assaults her, and he is so wrapped up in himself and his urges that he doesn’t care about her “indifference” to him. The woman is just “glad it’s over”—a horrifying indictment of ethics and love in the modern era in which the poem was published.
Eliot begins to wrap up this section by rewriting the lyrics to a Wagnerian opera. Rather than sing about the beauty of the Rhine, as Wagner’s characters did, the speaker here sings of the disgusting Thames, returning to motifs of pollution and isolation in order to emphasize the moral pollution and degradation of humanity in the modern, postwar era. He also alludes to the infamous sexual relationship between Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester and refers to various religious texts that ask for aid against the pull of lust (e.g., Saint Augustine’s Confessions and the Buddha’s Fire Sermon), as in the section’s end:
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest burning
By this cascade of allusions, Eliot draws further attention to how those in the modern era are sexually tempted in ways that are, ultimately, empty and unconnected and which lead to moral ruin.
Summary of T S Eliot the Waste Land
Death by Water
In this section, the poem’s shortest, the speaker comments on the death of a Phoenician man named Phlebas, a death foretold by Madame Sosostris in the poem’s first section. He seems to have seen his life flash before his eyes—”the stages of his age and youth”—as he drowned. The speaker encourages the reader to consider this drowned man:
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Death, the end of this section knows, is inevitable no matter how vibrant a person was in life.
What the Thunder Said
The speaker begins by referring to the time after the death of Christ but before his resurrection. We are, he implies, living in a similar state of spiritual darkness. We seem to be in a desert with “no water but only rock,” and we are extremely uncomfortable in this wasteland; there can be no relief from it either. Here, there is “thunder without rain”; we might hope for water, but rain will never come. There is, however, a third person who “walks always beside” us—seemingly Christ himself.
The next lines seem to reference the soldiers of the Great War, “hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth,” and how their movements destroyed Europe. There are “Falling towers” all over the world, and the violence and destruction seem “Unreal.” The speaker describes a woman with “long black hair” who plays violin-like music on it; she is surrounded by baby-faced bats who crawl all over her, and everything is upside-down and frightening. The speaker also describes a cemetery and a chapel, empty and decayed: more physical manifestations of our spiritual corruption. There is still no water.
However, in the end, the speaker draws on a story from the Hindu Upanishads: men, demons, and gods ask the Creator how to live well. He only answers “DA,” the sound of the thunder. When He says “DA,” the men hear the word for give, the demons hear the word for compassion, and the gods hear the word for self-control. We don’t actually seem to possess any of these qualities anymore, according to Eliot. Ultimately, Western culture is collapsing, just like the London Bridge of the children’s song, quoted in the final stanza. The speaker alludes to Dante’s Inferno and the hellfire meant to purify. The poem concludes with the three words heard when the thunder spoke—”Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata”—and then:
Shantih shantih shantih
If we can manage to cultivate giving, compassion, and self-control, then perhaps Western culture can be salvaged and we can find shantih—another term from the Upanishads, defined in Eliot’s footnotes to the poem as the “Peace which passeth understanding.”
Themes in T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot reflects on Europe, especially England, after World War I. Bringing in many classical and non-Western literary and cultural allusions while writing in a modernist style, Eliot offers an emotional and intellectual critique of the endangered state of contemporary civilization.
Postwar Social Disintegration
While Eliot’s work has universal appeal on many levels, it is closely tied to the situation of the “lost generation” of adults who came of age in the 1910s. Those who survived the Great War, both military and civilians, remained affected by their experiences. London is encased in a “brown fog.”
In the poem’s first section, Eliot writes, “I had not thought death had undone so many” and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In the second section, similar ideas are expressed regarding Albert, one soldier returning home after leaving the service who “wants a good time.” The poem’s speaker often seems near despair, concentrating on the destructive forces that have laid waste to civilization, such as the massive killings that left countless dead to be buried.
Modern Disillusionment
Along with broad social issues, Eliot’s multiple speakers bring in numerous personal reflections and memories. These emphasize the individual effects of the larger situation and convey the difficulty of maintaining individual hope while surrounded by greater devastation. Eliot often exposes this disconnect by the juxtaposition of images and myths traditionally associated with life and rebirth spring, flowers, birds, rivers, and so forth with their unfortunate counterparts in modernity. For example, the poem begins,
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land . . .
This opening is generally understood to refer to Chaucer’s prologue to The Canterbury Tales, which presents April in a different (and more familiar) light: as the beginning of spring, growth, blossoming, and sweetness. Eliot’s incarnation, however, has shifted the vision; it has become “cruel” to grow live things from dead ground—as in a land marred by the Great War and all its futile and horrifying death.
Throughout the poem, such images and allusions serve to reveal the disillusioned state of the world in modernity, particularly the failure of religion (or faith in any such higher order) to console after such a cataclysmic event as World War I.
The Potential for Regeneration
Intermingled with the dark tone of much of the poem are a few possible references to rebirth and hope. Eliot commonly uses water images, including those of the River Thames, the Fisher King, and sea voyages; he also describes many contrasts between moist, fertile surfaces and arid, stony ones. Often, however, Eliot favors aridity as more truthfully describing the spiritual depletion he sees in the modern age, and he often undermines his references to water, associating them with pollution, death by drowning, and—most often—simple absence.
The poem’s fifth section, however, allows some of these perpetually bleak images to become the smallest bit hopeful, or at least indicative of potential rebirth. Though it is not yet fulfilled, the resurrection motif recurrent throughout the section allows a redemptive possibility. The speaker hears the “thunder of spring over distant mountains” and views the image of a third shadow among two people, commonly interpreted as the presence of Christ:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you . . .
As the section progresses, the speaker notes “a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust / Bringing rain.” The poem ends in recurrent thunder; the rain has not yet come, but it seems closer than before.
THE CENTRALITY OF T.S ELIOT’S “THE WASTE LAND” IN THE LIGHT OF MODERNIST POEM
“The Waste Land” is a modern poem and also a Modernist one. While Modernism was a distinct literary movement, of which T.S. Eliot was one of the leading figures, the word “modern” appears at first sight to refer to nothing but the date of composition. It is possible to describe “The Waste Land” as a modern poem simply because it was written in the twentieth century. It has, however, other attributes of modernity which overlap with Modernism but may, at any rate, be described as “modern” as well as being “Modernist.”
“The Waste Land” is written, like the majority of modern poetry, in free verse. Although it is a long poem, and has some points in common with epic, it is clearly not an epic poem in the same sense as Paradise Lost or even the Idylls of the King. It has no hero and no linear narrative. The poem is also highly allusive, and its allusions cover a very wide range, from classical and medieval literature to nursery rhymes.
The above stylistic points are common to modernity and literary Modernism, but Modernism has a conflicted relationship with modernity, nowhere more so than in “The Waste Land.” There are glancing references to aristocrats and heroes in the poem, but there are just as many allusions to more modern figures, “Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant,” and the silk-hatted “Bradford millionaire.” Most of all there are the crowds swarming over London Bridge. Eliot regards modernity as the age of the common man but, being an elitist, he does not much like this. He therefore uses a highly obscure and allusive Modernist style as a form of resistance to modernity; he writes about the rise of the common man in a way that no common man could understand.
“The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot is one of the touchstones of modern poetry; it may even be the most widely-known modern poem. Its style and content both reflect the literary movement of modernism. A few features that I will focus on in my answer are fragmented style, allusions, and tone.
First of all, modernist literature is known for its fragmented forms. The modernists tended to break from traditional forms of writing and invent new forms or, at the very least, break or fragment more common forms. “The Waste Land” is a long poem made of five titled sections. Within these sections, there is no consistent rhyme scheme or meter, so we can refer to this style as free verse. The sections are not consistent in terms of length, either. In other words, there is not a set form. Many modernist works focus on psychology or the inner world of characters or speakers rather than traditional narrative. We could not call “The Waste Land” a narrative or story in the traditional sense.
Allusions are an interesting feature of modernist literary works because the modernists believed in Ezra Pound’s motto “make it new.” So, you might ask how referring to older works of literature or to the Bible or mythology could be in any way new. Eliot is probably the modernist poet who most references classical texts in his work, and many readers need either a very experienced background in literature or some detailed footnotes to get through his works, especially “The Waste Land.
” One way to look at this conundrum is to think that in order for writers to break with the old and “make it new,” they have to first know their literary history. Eliot certainly knows his. We can see in his varied and numerous references to classical Greek myth and tragedy (Tiresias in Part III), to Shakespeare, to Carthage and Phoenicia, and so on, that Eliot is well-versed in the classics. He does, however, put a modern spin on these texts through his allusions. Take the allusion to Tiresias, for example: Tiresias, the blind prophet from the ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, is described as an androgynous figure that can “see” into the dissatisfied and dingy lives of modern Londoners. It almost seems like a “waste” of the prophet’s powers: what is there to observe here?
Finally, the tone of the poem is consistent with the mood of the modernist era. After World War I, Europeans certainly lost faith in some of the more solid and reliable facts of their world. It felt as though their world fell apart in a sense. How does one go on after that kind of loss and trauma? Eliot begins the poem with the famous line, “April is the cruellest month . . .” and that is our first clue, along with the title, that the poem will be dark and dour. We normally associate springtime with rebirth, happiness, fresh starts, and beautiful scenery. Here, Eliot subverts that expectation in a way that reflects the modernists’ perspective on the post-World War I world.
Although Eliot is known as an outstanding modernist poet, some critics argued that he uses some traditional medieval techniques in his works. Those critics argued that “While T. S. Eliot might be called a medieval modernist because of his admiration for the organic and spiritual community of the Middle Ages together with his “impersonal” conception of art, his elitist and formalist views isolate him from several of the central terms of the tradition as I have defined it.” In other words, some characteristics of Eliot’s work exhibit medieval themes and style; at the same time, these works are also rooted in the modern orientation of literature. That is why some critics called him a “medieval modernist.”
The point is that Eliot seems to have nostalgia for the medieval tradition linked with his interest in modern life. In his poetry, Eliot combines both, concern with religious issues (medieval theme) and a trend towards contemporary issues (modern theme). So as critics observed, Eliot seeks some sort of “integration” between the two aspects. This is actually clear in “The Waste Land” where Eliot shows his discomfort for modern life by contrasting it with medieval traits.
He shows the difference between the divinely religious medieval life which modern life lacks and the fall in spiritual matters in modern life. In fact, “The Waste Land,” can be considered as a fundamental modernist text. The major modernist element found in the poem is the clear reliance on images, which is a basic characteristic of modern texts. The poem shows many fragmented images that reflect the feeling of loss in modern man. Although the reader understands nothing of these images, the narrator promises to show the reader how to make meaning from fragmentation. This construction of meaning from fragmentation is one of the essential features of modernism.
The poem clearly describes the modern world, or what the narrator terms as “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” The frequent images of falling and decay are representative of modern life. Life is represented as trivial, suffering from the problems of war. This all happens on both the real physical level and the inner psychological level of the modern man.
The fragmented images, the stream-of-consciousness and all the other strange stylistic features in the poem are used to help convey the message of the poet. For Eliot, modern life is fragmented and illogical; so he conveys this through his style. That is why in “The Waste Land” he tends to break the logic and conventions. So the poem may be clearly viewed as a representation of the modern life and modern man psychology both in terms of its content and style.
Conclusion
In conclusion, “The Waste Land” are considered as critical texts representing the modern thought. In more specific terms, they are examples of modernist poetry. The poems’ content and style reflect the modern life, especially in its influence on the individual.
Eliot is skillful in showing this through his style in both poems. He use stream-of- consciousness to show the chaos in of the modern man’s thinking. In addition, he uses many techniques such as imagism, repetition, fragmentation and other modernist techniques. All these techniques help depict the modern life for the reader and reflect its status in real manner. That is why one can easily say that Eliot is considered as one of the most influential modernist poets in English literature.
References
ELIOT, T. S. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1980.ELIOT, T. S. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1999.
HALE, Keith (Ed.). Georgian Poetry: A Compilation of Georgian Poetry, 1911-22. London: Create Space, 2016.
HAMBURGER, Michael. The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modernist Poetry Since Baudelaire. London: Anvil Press, 1996
HIBBERD, Dominic & ONIONS, John. Poetry of the Great War: An Anthology. London: Macmillan Press, 1986.
