Today’s Poem: The Waste Land
Revisiting T.S. Eliot
(We’re taking a break, here at Poems Ancient and Modern: our first vacation since we started this newsletter a year and a half ago. But not to leave you in the lurch, we’re offering a week or so of some of our favorites from the archives of the newsletter.)
The Waste Land (Part I: The Burial of the Dead)
by T.S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee ◦ lake near Munich With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, ◦ park in Munich And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. ◦ [I am not Russian; I And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, come from Lithuania, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, a real German] And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, ◦ Eliot’s note You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind ◦ [Fresh blows the wind Der Heimat zu, For home, Mein Irisch Kind, My Irish child, Wo weilest du? Where do you tarry?] “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; “They called me the hyacinth girl.” — Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, 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. ◦ [Empty and desolate the sea] Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, ◦ Eliot’s note Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days. Unreal City, ◦ Eliot’s note Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, ◦ Eliot’s note I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, ◦ Eliot’s note And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson! “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! ◦ Punic War battle “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, ◦ Eliot’s note “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! “You! hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frère!” ◦ Eliot’s note ═════════════════════════
It’s hard to think of a more famous opening in 20th-century poetry than “April is the cruellest month” — which continues, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”
That’s The Waste Land, of course: the long 1922 poem by T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) that came to be taken as the fundamental work of modernism in English poetry.
Searching our postings, I was surprised to see that Eliot is among the poets we have mentioned most often in the fourteen months of Poems Ancient and Modern. Somehow, for us, Eliot remains a touchstone, and if his thought dwelt on a poet — John Webster, for example, or George Herbert — we tend to engage that thought.
A sign of age, perhaps? When Sally Thomas and I were young, Eliot’s poetry was the very horizon of ambitious verse, and high modernism was the chief claim of high seriousness, both intellectual and poetic. And that was particularly true among literary and intellectual readers with a religious sense, for whom such work as Eliot’s Four Quartets gave an obvious riposte to the oft-heard sneer that believers are undereducated idiots.
As it happens, when I was starting out as a writer, I took a long lance and charged at this use of Eliot, arguing that God in his poetry is more often a device for addressing the crisis of modernity than an object of faith. The essay was overwrought, as young critics’ work often is, although I think I do still hold that Eliot was doing something theologically dubious when he took the language of mysticism, which expresses the believer’s rising to the vision of God, and shifted it down the scale to describe the non-believer’s rising to belief.
As the years have gone by, I’ve grown less certain of the idea that Eliot’s poems are puzzles to be solved. In the presentation of Today’s Poem, I’ve placed side links to Eliot’s own notes. But I have gradually come to think that we might be best served by taking The Waste Land as a toboggan ride rather than, say, a step-by-step guide to forensic accounting. You just climb aboard and try to hang on as it shoots down a bumpy mountain run.
The first section, reproduced as Today’s Poem, is titled “The Burial of the Dead,” and it sleds from its famous opening to overheard conversations at a lake resort near Munich (Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch: “I am not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, I am a real German”) — and from there straight into a slalom that is biblical in its language and apocalyptic in its tone: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
With a quotation from Tristan und Isolde, Richard Wagner’s 1865 opera (Mein Irisch Kind / Wo weilest du?: “My Irish child, / Where do you tarry?”), we are suddenly tumbled into remembrance of “the hyacinth girl,” followed by bone-rattling irony in the description of the soi-disant socialites who attend tarot readings: “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, / Had a bad cold, nevertheless / Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe.”
And from there the poem ski-jumps into a description of a living city as populated by ghosts: “I had not thought death had undone so many” — as Eliot remembers from Dante, remembering from Virgil, remembering from Homer.
The speaker of the poem engages these ghosts first as the mysterious “Stetson” (which I take as an Eliot incarnation, if only because "Ariel Stetson" is an anagram of “Stearns Eliot”). Then as ancient soldiers (from the 260 B.C. Battle of Mylae). Then as backyard murderers (with a curious gesture toward Cornelia’s mad dirge in Webster’s 1612 revenge tragedy, The White Devil). And then, in a final slide through reference (this time to Baudelaire’s 1857 Fleurs du Mal), as “You! hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frère!”: You! Hypocrite reader! — my fellow, — my brother!
What can one do with such verse but ride it to its conclusion, experiencing the poem at least as much as understanding it? Eliot not just describes but recreates for us to discern, in the act of reading, a modern world that is broken, composed of fragments shored against our ruin.
I just came across this at Poetry Foundation about The Waste Land and find it helpful. "Cities are built out of the ruins of previous cities, as The Waste Land is built out of the remains of older poems.”
As a young poet, I wrote a series of "After" poems, using texts by various poets as a starting point. I remember saying at the time that working (reworking) Eliot's lines was like trying to build a wall with bricks of lead.
I think today, now that "The Waste Land" is no longer an unapproachable monument before which we must all kneel, that the poem really benefits from being approached as just another (great) poem than as the be-all and end-all of High Modernism. The Postmodern movement certainly made Eliot's use of a collage technique much more familiar.
I read the whole poem out loud to my wife a few months back, and she was struck mainly by how musical it was. It really needs to be heard out loud, with different accents and intonations for the different characters who inhabit the poem.