Author: Casey Morris

In 1922, Europe was reeling from the First World War. The conflict saw unprecedented levels of destruction, mechanized warfare, and death. Its over 8 million casualties nearly doubled the combined total of the previous century, including the Napleonic and Balkan Wars. When fighting ended in 1918, the Treaty of Versailles brought the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. An influx of new states and redrawn borders created a Europe not on the basis of imperialist conquest but ethnic, cultural, and national identity. The Bolshevist Revolution in October 1917 helped establish what became the interwar period’s leading geopolitical forces: communism and fascism. The influenza pandemic of 1918 claimed tens of millions of lives, while more than a century of industrialization transformed Europe’s, especially Britain’s, market economies from agrarian to the mass production, factories, and division of labour of capitalism. Overcrowded cities, particularly London, swelled with the era’s injustices of poverty, low-wage and child labor, class stratification, and appalling living conditions. The hellscape of industrialized London, famously polemicized by Marx, features heavily in another modern masterpiece. 

Thomas Stearns Eliot, born in St. Louis, Missouri and educated at Harvard, figured prominently in literary circles in London. After his move to England in 1914 to study at Oxford, Eliot soon met writers and artists including Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. He also married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, an experience that had a profound impact on his poetry. In a career spanning over fifty years, Eliot became renowned equally as a critic, editor, playwright, and poet. Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature and the British Order of Merit, Eliot is cherished as a major contributor to the English canon. In perhaps no other poem is this better illustrated than The Waste Land. The five-part poem, written after a time of both personal and collective trauma, first appeared in October 1922 in The Criterion. Sadly, Eliot’s marriage to Vivienne had broken down, brought on by physical and mental disorders both suffered for several years. More broadly, the Great War had radically changed Europe. For Eliot, the war’s devastation extended to Western culture and society. Its heritage, value-systems, and intellectual foundations were crumbling. 

Such a reality is expressed in the poem’s form and content. Eliot’s fragmentary and disorientating style moves unpredictably from image to image, from speaker to speaker, and from one narrative thread to another. Allusions and excerpts in foreign languages pepper the poem seemingly at random. However, as will become evident, these stylistic choices are very deliberate. They are meant to amplify the poem’s primary themes: disillusionment after the Great War, chaos and the striving for order, and, perhaps most powerfully, the vacuity of modern culture and society. In light of these, it’s natural to ask: does Eliot offer any resolution, any hint of a way forward? The answer is yes. But this is less a reassembling of truth, of cultural values and traditions, than a channeling of the storm. Less concerned with redemption or justification, Eliot forges a path through the mired roots of the present. In this sense, The Waste Land evokes the modern ethos and dilemma still relevant today. It should also be noted that Eliot’s close friend and mentor, Ezra Pound, significantly aided in the poem’s development and composition. Its epigraph is partially attributed to Pound, the final Italian phrase “il miglior fabbro” translating to “the better craftsman.” 

The Waste Land opens with an epigraph in Latin and Greek. For reference, this and the following two stanzas are excerpted in full: 

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεîν θέλω.’

  For Ezra Pound
      il miglior fabbro.

1. The Burial of the Dead

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
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, 
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. 
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, 
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, 
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, 
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
               Der Heimat zu
               Mein Irisch Kind, 
               Wo weiles du?

‘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.

Two allusions immediately set the tone. The epigraph quotes the Satyricon, a Latin fictional work by Petronius Arbiter. The quotation relates a scene from the villa of Trimalchio, specifically a recounting of the mythical Sibyl of Cumae who was granted eternal life, not eternal youth, by Apollo. As time passed, the Sibyl grew fainter and weaker, diminishing so obscenely she finally admits, in Greek, “I want to die.” Secondly, the poem’s first line is a parody of Chaucer. In the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer sings of the bounty and freshness of spring. Hundreds of years later, and in the shadow of Europe’s entropic spiraling, Eliot betrays this most “cruellest” of seasons. Images of the “Starnbergersee” and “Hofgarten” speak to Eliot’s time in Munich in 1911, the tranquility of pre-war Europe. But these are overcome by scars of war, by “dead land” and “dull roots” only alleviated by winter. It is winter that “kept us warm.” Its silences of “forgetful snow,” perversely, sustain whatever life is left. In these lines, Eliot undoubtedly imagined the horrors of Passchendaele or the Somme. He’s also describing the psychological state many Europeans were left in, one tormented by a sense of lost identity and upheaval. The line in German speaks to this fracturing, translating as “I’m not Russian at all, I’m from Lithuania, pure German.” Something so secure as national identity is defined not by birth or ancestry, but fear. Even family life, the purest domain of experience, arouses fear in Marie. In reality, Austrian Countess Marie Larisch von Moennich was acquainted with Eliot and represented for him the old, aristocratic order in Europe. War harms more than the land and the dead. Social order and identity smolder in ruins. Memory and desire defile the broken Earth. Their fruits are no less unsatisfying. 

Eliot asks: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ out of this stony rubbish?” The answer is fragmented. In the Old Testament book of Ezekiel chapter 33, God refers to the prophet as “Son of Man.” The phrase imbues power and humanity to Ezekiel, as God commands him to communicate His will to the Israelites; for Eliot, this epithet conveys the opposite: alienation, a “heap of broken images” is the poet’s bidding, one manifested in “dead trees” and “dry stone.” The “heap of broken images” is also a statement on the The Waste Land as a whole, one perceivable from here onwards. In the modern world, the awesome teleological import of prophecy and divine will have vanished. Modernity offers no shelter, no fertile ground to abide and prosper. We rather navigate an interplay of shadows amounting to “fear in a handful of dust.” Echoing the book of Ecclesiastes, the line foreshadows an excerpt from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Translated into English, the lines read: “Fresh blows the wind/ to the homeland/ My Irish child,/ where are you dwelling?” In the libretto, the lines are sung by a sailor during Isolde’s voyage from Ireland to Cornwall. They are widely interpreted as a lament for lost love. Adding to this, Eliot alludes to the myth of Hyancinthus, whose love for Apollo and untimely death moved the god to christen the flower of the same name. Unlike in the myth, modern romantic love is unsolicited, paralyzing. Sensuality and fertility are meaningless without sight or sound. There is literally nothing to grasp, nothing to fathom. In the alien motion of the cosmos, love is coincidental and void. Or, as Wagner wrote, “desolate and empty is the sea.”

From love, Eliot turns to spirituality. This is not the beauty and sanctity of Anglo-Catholicism, to which Eliot converted in his later years. We’re instead blessed with the charlatan Madame Sosostris, a “famous clairvoyante.” Eliot’s Sosostris alludes to a character in Aldous Huxley’s 1921 novel Crome Yellow. Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, is a cross-dressing man impersonating a seer at a local fair. The ambiguous sexuality here foreshadows later passages told by Tiresias in part 3, “The Fire Sermon.” Ironically described as “the wisest woman in Europe,” Sosostris deals several Tarot cards, beginning with “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” and “Belladona, the Lady of the Rocks.” Though not a standard Tarot card, the drowned sailor represents death by water and transformation. “Those are pearls that were his eyes” is from Shakespeare’s Tempest, where Ariel sings to Ferdinand about his father’s rebirth from the sea. Belladonna is a card alluding to da Vinci’s “Belladonna of the Rocks,” a painting of the Virgin Mary associated with the immaculate conception. As a Tarot card, the Belladonna symbolizes fertility. Yet Eliot’s diction, especially around drowning and rocks, sabotages both cards. The drowned sailor and Belladonna are undermined by countervailing forces of desolation and death. This connects with the “heap of broken images” of failed prophecy, as neither Biblical teaching or clairvoyance are sufficient in the modern age. Two other cards Eliot mentions are the “man with three staves” and the missing “Hanged Man.” The first is a reference to Arthurian legend, specifically how the Fisher King’s wounds directly impact his lands, which lie arid and fallow. The Fisher King mirrors Europe’s self-inflicted chaos, the physical and psychological wounds of the Great War. Potential lies in the final card, the “Hanged Man.” Representing sacrifice and its powers of purification and renewal, the card signals transcendence, possibly Christ. But it’s unattainable. Madame Sosotris closes shop. Her soothsaying, like the oracle of the Cumean Sibyl, is empty, transactional. Each of the Tarot cards is corrupted by forces of apostasy, decay, and loss. Modern spirituality contains almost none of the 2,000 year history of Judeo-Christianity in Europe. It’s a deck of cards, a circus sideshow that shuts at dusk: “one must be so careful these days.”

From the spiritual, Eliot observes the physical. Stark descriptions of crowds crossing the London Bridge echo both Baudelaire and Dante’s Inferno: 

Unreal City, 
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, 
A crowd flowed over London bridge, so many, 
I had not thought death had undone so many.

“Unreal City” is borrowed from Baudelaire’s poem “The Seven Old Men.” The phrase describes a city of swarming ghosts. Eliot goes farther, as London is populated by damned souls, a place where “death had undone so many.” Dante’s vision of hell, of corpses entangled and suffocating in their own filth, reflects the city’s interior. Hollow souls gaze from eyes fixed before their feet, flowing “up the hill and down King William Street.” Urban life, especially the bustling financial district where Eliot once worked as a bank clerk, is hellish and polluted. The rise of transportation technology, labor unrest, and persistent hardships for the working classes all influenced Eliot’s depiction of London as godless and mechanical. This leads to Part I’s disturbing final image. An anachronistic exchange between the speaker and a man named Stetson refers to the Battle of Mylae, which took place in 260 BC between Rome and Carthage. Discussion of a planted corpse, whether it’s sprouted or bloomed, heightens the tension and ironic macabre: Eliot blurs the past and present, life and death with war as the tapestry between. War as a determinant of history brings chaos to order. Instead of chronicling civilization or human flourishing, history is the evolution of entropy. Such a vision drains Europe’s spiritual and cultural inheritance of its meaning: don’t bother with rituals or tradition. Just keep the dogs away. Keeping the dogs “far hence” is a stay against destructive forces. It is also a reference to Jacobean writer John Webster’s play “The White Devil.” In Webster’s play, the phrase “keep the wolf far thence” refers to protecting a corpse denied a proper burial. This sense extends to Eliot’s image but not without the threat of desecration. Part I ends with another line from Baudelaire: “You, hypocrite reader! My likeness! My brother!” Baudelaire’s notorious cynicism on society, that when given a chance anyone would cheat or murder, concludes “The Burial of the Dead.” This is a burial without resolution of life’s reigning contradictions: life and death are indistinct. A broken culture pantomimes broken souls. Fortune’s wheel doesn’t discriminate. One wonders where the Grail actually went off to? The Fisher King bleeds on.

Born and raised in Texas, Casey Morris studied literature, philosophy, and ancient Greek at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. He loves reading and writing about literature, especially old and new poetry. He is also a fan of historical fiction, documentaries, and shoegaze. Casey is a Staff Writer at Decadent Serpent, often analysing and dissecting great poetry. You can read his work here.

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