Author: Casey Morris

From urban life in part I of The Waste Land, which I examined previously, Eliot’s poem turns inwards. In part II, “A Game Of Chess,” we read of the aimlessness of London society, its elite to working-classes. The spiritual crisis of part I becomes more intimate. It manifests in drawing-rooms and conversation. It taints pub songs drawn from the legacy of European culture. Eliot begins with an image of a woman’s vanity, part of which is reproduced below:

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.

The section’s title, “A Game Of Chess,” comes from a play of the same name by Thomas Middleton. In this play, relationships are likened to playing chess, a game of intrigue and calculation. Eliot’s vision of intimacy is likewise full of complexity. The first line is a reference to Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra, where Enobarbus describes the Queen’s barge as a “burnished throne.” The reference implies power and legendary beauty. Eliot’s scene is no less opulent with jewels, a mirror decorated with “fruited vines” and Grecian imagery, candelabra, and vials of expensive perfumes. Cupidon, or Cupid, represents love and sexual passion. The “sevenbranched candelabra” suggests a menora, a Jewish symbol of light and religious faith. But these expressions are not what they seem. The tone shifts from lush to bitter: the “strange synthetic perfumes” stifle sensuality. One’s senses are drowned in the vapors, confusing the whole display. Eliot is not only condemning the pretension of modern tastes; he is, sadly, revealing another way the past breaks from the present. Smoke flung “into the laquearia” refers to Virgil’s Aeneid, where Dido welcomes Aeneas and his shipwrecked crew to a feast. In Latin, “laquearia” describes the panelled ceiling in the Queen’s banquet hall in Carthage. The “coffered ceiling” speciously recalls this, as its pattern stirs with fumes and a “sad light” of burned copper. “Laquearia” also comments on the state of love, of relationships in Eliot’s time. The grief and humiliation that led to Dido’s suicide reappears as alienation in the modern age. Most importantly, Dido’s death was a humane repudiation of divine will and necessity. It was willed and fated. Yet the spoiling of love for Eliot stems from war and cultural decay. It is selfishly willed. Displacing truth and sacrifice for self-interest undermines tradition. This creates a reality many today call “being alone together.”

The corruption of love worsens. Eliot’s perspective moves to an “antique mantel,” where lies an image of Philomela. As told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela was a Greek woman who wa raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus. Mercilessly, Tereus cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling what happened. This brutal precedent rings hollow in modern ears. Though Philomela, turned into a nightingale by the gods, sings “with inviolable voice” the world “still pursues/ ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.” Conceit and vulgarity fill the streets, lighted houses, and pubs after dark. Eliot hints that Philomela’s inability to speak captures the emptiness of speech itself. Moving onwards to conversation, the following lines are nothing but impertinent:

‘My nerves are bad tonight. 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.
‘What is that noise?’
                        The wind under the door.
‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’
                        Nothing again nothing.

The tension rises to speech, to anxious and sputtering mania. The lines above are taken from conversations between poet and wife, with Vivienne requesting some be removed from earlier drafts for being too personal. Exposing the prison and paranoia of mental illness, they confirm one of the poem’s primary sources: Eliot’s marriage to Vivienne. In retrospect, it’s easy for us to see how incompatible they were together. But when they met, Eliot admired her background as the daughter of popular Victorian artist Charles Haigh Wood. Their marriage in 1915 followed only three months of courtship. Vivienne’s health disorders quickly took a toll on Eliot (and his salary at Lloyd’s bank). As his profile increased with work and lectureships abroad, Vivienne was still able to contribute articles and reviews to the Criterion. But by the late 1920s, the couple had separated. He initiated a legal separation in 1933, with Vivienne’s last years spent in an asylum. Eliot’s voice briefly returns with the image of “rat’s alley/ where the dead men lost their bones.” The heresy of denying corpses proper burials resurfaces. Yet the context speaks to the lack of closure Eliot faced as his ex-wife spiraled out of control before her death in 1947. Indeed, the final lines of this passage culminate in a total break from sanity. Delusions and hallucinations rake at the door: “‘What is that noise now?/ What is the wind doing?’/ Nothing again nothing.” Nothingness punctuates the body and mind. To see or hear, to speak and think nothing is the modern observance. From here, Eliot writes perhaps the most painful lines in “A Game Of Chess.”

A new thread arrives; we’re in a busy London pub. The hour is late. It’s last call. Ragtime samples Shakespeare, something Eliot sardonically calls “elegant “ and “so intelligent.” The barman periodically interrupts with a refrain: “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” The lines jump from topic to topic before settling on two young women. They’re near the end of a conversation about mutual friends, Lil and Albert. After four years of military service, Albert is due to come home. He’ll “. . . want to know what you done with that money he gave you/ to get yourself some teeth.” No warm reunion here. The priority upon reuniting with his wife will be her appearance followed by total submission: “he wants a good time,/ and if you don’t give it him, there’s others will.” Heroic love, such as that of Dido and Aeneas, is a far cry from this dynamic. Obedience to Albert erases the classical ideal as a union of two unique and betrothed souls. There’s no passion, no consent. Like the ruined battlefields of part I, love lies a shadow of its former self. They resume:

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.

Though still young, Lil’s wearied from having an abortion. The last line of this exchange cuts to the heart: “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” A few connotations here are: marriage no longer embodies the sanctity of love. Bearing children is no longer a gift of such love. It’s a paternalistic lie, a tool to smother and control. Lil’s suffering is a matter of banter, as she “. . . nearly died of young George.” The ladies are unbothered by the cruelty of their words, but the detail about Lil is telling. To “look so antique” reveals the burden of meaningless sex and relationships. Shaming Lil betrays a lack of dignity; it’s a defense of empty values. Undignified relationships, especially romantic ones, recall the sterile lands of part I. Like the Fisher King, Lil bleeds and visibly suffers without a clue to how it’s all self-inflicted. In another link to part I, “A Game Of Chess” ends with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.” After learning of her father’s death, Ophelia speaks these lines before drowning herself in a brook. As the conclusion to “A Game Of Chess,” Eliot relates modern love to death by water. Love is no longer a productive and life-affirming force. To love is abortive. To love is to speak nothing, to feel nothing. It’s to flail about and drown.

This twisted ethos continues in part III,“The Fire Sermon.” The title alludes to the Buddhist Fire Sermon, which teaches about self-liberation through denial of desire and the senses. The section contains some of the finest and most-quoted lines in The Waste Land. It begins with images of the River Thames:

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

A feature of classical literature is the presence of nymphs by bodies of water. The association links them to powers of nurturing and creativity (especially the sexual). Yet unlike the mythical past, where rivers flourished with song and deities, the waters are now stagnant. The Thames is disgusting. It lies motionless, only recently cleaned of “empty bottles” and “cigarette ends.” Those “summer nights” disfigured the river, ousting the living and dead. Eliot’s line “the nymphs have departed” also refers to prostitution rampant along the Thames during interwar summers. The “loitering heirs of City directors,” those nepots of London’s banks, had their fun and “left no addresses.” Their illegitimates, like their trust-funds, won’t suffer a rude awakening. Cheap sex somehow evolved from the rite of marriage, a ritual Eliot alludes to in Spenser’s poem the Prothalamion: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,/ Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.” Spenser’s song that consecrated a union of noblewomen and their husbands now mourns by the dirty river. Disturbed by a “cold blast” and “rattle of the bones,” Spenser’s voice morphs again into that of the Fisher King:

While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.

The lines evoke Shakespeare’s Tempest, where Prospero’s brother died in a shipwreck and Ferdinand’s belief (as told by Ariel) that his brother drowned. From the Fisher King’s perspective, the lines grieve more deaths by water and uncultivated land. The King sees naked bodies strewn among bones in a “. . . dry garret,/ rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.” The violation of corpses, particularly in rat-infested trenches from the Great War, turns to complete neglect. Alone by the “dull canal,” the King perceives no difference between wartime and peacetime. Impulsive and purulent savaging to the core, every bit of heritage that once moved men to bury a corpse, to love and respect each other now heralds Mr. Sweeney. The Neanderthal-like figure arrives in the “sound of horns and motors” at the house of Mrs. Porter, likely a brothel-owner. The “horns and motors” refers to a Greek myth in which Actaeon gazed at the naked Artemis as she bathed. Furious, she turned him into a stag and sent his own hounds to maul him. The modern man, like a caveman, saunters along to pay for sex and shout drinking songs: “They wash their feet in soda water.” Interestingly, Eliot ends this passage with a line from Paul Verlaine’s poem Parsifal, the French translating to: “And O the voice of the children, singing in the cupola!” Verlaine’s poem details how the knight Percival heals the Fisher King’swounds and helps restore his throne. Does this reference foreshadow something good, some kind of redemption?

It does not, unfortunately. A rush of onomatopoeia returns to the rape of Philomela and the silenced nightingale: “Twit twit twit/ jug jug jug jug jug jug/ so rudely forc’d. ” Eliot then seems to insert a reference to his time working in the Foreign and Colonial Department at Lloyd’s. The lines read of nonchalance, ennui even. Mr. Eugenides, a “Smyrna merchant” invites the poet in “demotic french” to lunch at a hotel “followed by a weekend at the Metropole.” The reference muddies past and present, as Smyrna was an ancient city in Greece. The conflation of business, travel, and (possibly) sex point again to the disconnected experience of London society. This theme is fully realized in the following stanza, narrated by the blind seer Tiresias. Renowned for his clairvoyance, Tiresias is notable for having been born male before becoming a woman (i.e. after killing a snake). Mysterious sexuality defines the encounter he relates. Eliot’s unpredictable rhythms and rhyme show a disjointed scene between a man and a young typist:

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Like brown fog over London or rubbish by the Thames, the act of lovemaking defies itself. The man caresses her before “he assaults at once.” The typist offers “no defense,” making a “welcome of indifference” Tiresias laments that he “foresuffered all,” not unlike the damned he remembers from Thebes or the underworld. One observation here is that it’s told plainly. The allusive, fragmented style abates for many lines. It is perhaps one of the only clear sequences in The Waste Land. The buildup to this scene, with references to Shakespeare, Virgil, Spenser, and the Fisher King, serve as stops before a fatal decision. Often, when people talk about a tragedy, they speak of signs and premonitions. They rationalize an outcome by clinging to the past: there must have been something going on. Eliot shows how this clinging to the past, to tradition and its prepared answers, doesn’t always pay off. More specifically, he writes of a deliberate and prodigal breaking from inheritance. The same ethos that saw the fall of European empires, the ruthless spread of industrialization and urbanization redefines individual behavior. What does it mean to be modern? Is it, as the typist thinks: “Well now that’s done: I’m glad it’s over[?]” Is it a choice of convenience, a trolley ride from work to home? Decadence, like the King’s warm blood, sticks and pools. The modern dispensation is an open wound. What remains is how unrecognizable pangs that are the stirrings of love could possibly be redeemed.

“The Fire Sermon” ends as it begins. We return to images of the Thames, starting with a line spoken by Ferdinand:

‘This music crept by me upon the waters’
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

Enchanting music of the Tempest isn’t quite the vibe on Lower Thames Street. The whine of a mandoline and chatter of merrymakers moves Eliot’s eye to Magnus Matyr. The interior of the Anglican church, its altar and chapels marks a preservation of beauty amid general decline. This is followed by a song of the Thames, its pollution of “oil” and “tar.” The river “sweats” with “drifting logs” and barges. The “red sails,” presumably during a sunset, foreshadow images of burning a few lines later. An allusion to Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen,” stands in contrast to the city’s filth and debauchery. The song’s two stanzas conclude with quotations from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, where the Rhinemaidens sing. Similar to the nymphs, they epitomize mythic beauty and also guard Rhinegold. The gold is only obtainable by forswearing love, something the frustrated dwarf Alberich does in spite of himself. Is Eliot arguing for such a sacrifice? “The Fire Sermon,” viewed through its eponymously Buddhist lens, may make such a case. But it doesn’t end on this note. Eliot veers back to the Thames, whose daughters callously share their exploits: “Richmond and Kew/ Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees/ Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.” No surprise there, as Eliot turns lastly to himself. While recovering from a nervous breakdown at Margate sands, he wrote the final lines of part III. In an allusion to St. Augustine’s Confessions, we read how he first went to Carthage. This occurred before renouncing all his desires and committing himself to God. In his conflicted pleading, he cries “O Lord Thou pluckest me out. O Lord Thou pluckest.” Pluckest what? Eliot answers: “burning.” Like the Fisher King’s lands, London’s streets, its brothels and pubs, and its beloved river burn. The city, like all of Europe, yearns for salvation. But how? Salvation by God, by money, or by drowning the senses? Eliot doesn’t know: “I can connect nothing with nothing ” The river burns. The King bleeds and stumbles 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.

Sources:

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“A Short Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Fire Sermon.’” Interesting Literature. URL: https://interestingliterature.com/2016/10/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-the-fire-sermon/

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Kapach, Avi. “Tiresias.” Mythopedia. 2023. URL: https://mythopedia.com/topics/tiresias/ “Magnus Matyr.” Windingway.org. URL: https://wasteland.windingway.org/264/magnus-martyr

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“Weialala.” 2018. URL: https://eliotwasteland.blogspot.com/2018/10/weialala.html