Last year, I did a blog series in which I did readings of various T.S. Eliot poems, in which I also provided brief explanations and analyses of those poems. For various reasons, even though I recorded my reading of perhaps T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem, The Wasteland, I never got around to making a video and explanation of the poem. Well, here we are, a year later, and it is now here for your listening and reading pleasure.
The Wasteland is a rather long and complicated poem. Therefore, my explanation of the various sections will be admittedly brief. It is a poem that is so layered and intricate, that you can read it 25 times, and on that 25th time find something new. And so, my goal is to just provide enough explanation to help you understand just what is going on in the poem. Then, as you (hopefully) journey through The Wasteland on your own, you can explore all of its various corridors and precincts. Enjoy!
A Brief Overview
In a nutshell, I would say that The Wasteland is ultimately about the fundamental issues of life and death. In particular, it is an illustration of human beings in the modern world longing for meaning and value. It is about that initial loss of innocence, the searching for ways to get back to that innocence, the inevitable failure to do so, the despair in realizing that in one’s attempts to do so, one has gotten further lost in the “wasteland” of modern life, and then finally finding the way back to the doorway back to that innocence, albeit in a most unsuspecting and surprising way.
Or, in more simple terms, it reflects the biblical story: Eden, expulsion from Eden, wandering in a broken world, and then finding the way back to a “New” Eden, but through death on the cross. Innocence, Fall, Wandering, Redemption through Death.
Throughout the poem, there is a host of symbols and imagery:
- Mountains: Very much an Eden and New Jerusalem kind of reference. In short, they initially represent the place of innocence, and eventually the place where salvation is again found.
- Water/River: This often represents death in the Wasteland, as well as the lusts of the Wasteland.
- Water/Rain: By contrast, rain brings cleansing and healing, and ultimately salvation.
- Dust/Rock: This represents the Wasteland itself. Hence, it is a place of dryness and death, with the only “water” in it that of lusts and desires.
- Gardens: This is Eden initially, the timeless eternal reality where we find our true selves, but from which we are now in exile in the Wasteland. Our lives are thus spent (to quote Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock”) trying to “get back to the garden.”
- Bones: This is easy. They represent humanity, and ultimately death, to which humanity is enslaved.
- Women: This is a big one. There are a lot of women in the poem. They are used to reflect the various stages in this journey through the wasteland.
Keep an eye of for those things as you go through the poem.
I. The Burial of the Dead
The first section of The Wasteland begins with a picture of April being the “cruellest” month precisely because it is the month that things start to bloom in the spring. Why is that cruel? Because winter (death) keeps us “warm” and in a state of forgetfulness. We don’t have to deal with the challenge of life. At the same time, though, winter is also a time of childlike innocence, as seen in the description of children sledding in the mountains. The poet, though, no longer is a child, and so he avoids the mountains in the winter.
The next section echoes Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones in Ezekiel 37. The imagery involves a dead tree whose roots clutch at the dry ground, and who can no longer give shade or shelter from the hot desert sun. There is no life-giving water in the wasteland—only desert and dry rock. And yet, “there is shadow under this red rock.” In the midst of such death, there is a strange invitation to find relief in the very thing that typifies the death in the desert. It is terrifying, though: it is “fear in a handful of dust.”
After that, we then see the hyacinth girl. She, with her wet hair in the hyacinth garden, represents that childlike innocent of new life. Of course now, coming back from the garden, things are different and barren, like the sea. The vision and remembrance of that original Eden-like innocence gives way to the reality of the wasteland.
From there, we meet Madame Sosostris, a clairvoyant who reads Tarot cards. Simply put, she represents our futile attempts to make sense of life. Each card represents different things in the poem (I’ll leave you to contemplate that), but the key ones to note are (a) she doesn’t find the hanged man—this is Christ; and (b) she says to fear death by water—the water of baptism represents dying to the dead reality of the wasteland; and (c) she sees crowds of people walking round in a ring—humanity, trudging along, going around in a circle.
The first section ends with a picture of crowds of people walking around London—an unreal city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn. This wasteland is not “real” reality. It is a place of fog and winter. In any case, the poet recognizes a man he knows named Stetson, and he asks him about a corpse he planted in his garden—has it begun to sprout? Is there a real hope of any kind of resurrection, or is Satan (the Dog), who is supposedly a friend to men, in the business of digging up the corpse to prevent a resurrection?
II. A Game of Chess
This section highlights the strained and damaging relationships between men and women. Despite the constant attraction and yearning, far too many relationships are characterized by madness, isolation, manipulation, and emotional and sexual degradation. The entire opening scene is one of an opulent room in which the man and woman are in, filled with the alluring smells of perfumes and incense, yet the scenes depicted on the walls are disturbing. Yes, there is a golden cupidon, and depictions of the sea, but there is also a pastoral scene that shows the story of Philomel, a woman who was raped by King Tereus, who then cuts out her tongue. She, though, is then transformed into a nightingale—therefore the nightingale’s song that fills the desert is a sad lament.
From there, we see an odd conversation between an overly emotional and hysterical woman berating her man (husband? lover?), who is worn down with life with her. When she asks him if he remembers nothing, he says he remembers “those are pearls that were his eyes.” This recalls the drowned Phoenician sailor in the Tarot card deck of Madame Sosostris, as well as the interaction between the hyacinth girl and her lover. In any case, the only thing to do is to go out on the town and try to forget the despair—but then what shall we do tomorrow?
The final scene in this section is of two women at a restaurant or bar at closing time. Lil’s husband Albert was coming home from the army, so this woman is telling Lil to make herself look good for him, or else he was going to go have his fun somewhere else. Yet Lil is worn down with life—she’s had five children and the “pills” she took were abortion pills, and they have further broken her down. Such is the reality of her run-down life.
III. The Fire Sermon
The title for this section comes from Buddha’s “Fire Sermon” in which he denounced the “fires” of passion, hatred, and infatuation. The opening scene is of the Thames River in London, flowing on after all the summer night activities by people in the city are over. The poet then makes a curious intertextual allusion to Psalm 132:1 (“By the waters of Babylon, we wept and remembered Zion”). Here, though, he says, “By the waters of Leman, I sat down and wept.” “Leman” is an archaic term for “mistress,” signifying lust. It also is the name of a lake where Eliot wrote much of The Wasteland. What’s the point? After a summer night of lust, there is still that sense of emptiness and despair.
The poet is then depicted as fishing, thinking about the king my brother’s wreck and the king my father’s death before him. This is an allusion to one of the most important images in the poem: The Fisher King. Essentially the story of the Fisher King is of a young king who was given a vision of the holy grail that would heal the hearts of men. But in his youthful pride, he reached into the fire of the vision and the grail vanished, and he received a horrible wound that wouldn’t heal. He spent the rest of his life searching for it. I’ll let Robin Williams’ character Perry tell the story in one of my favorite movies, The Fisher King:
The point is this: the Fisher King is the story of humanity’s sin and despairing search for healing and salvation. That is what we see here.
In any case, also by the river’s edge comes a car in which Sweeny and Mrs. Porter come to have a little tryst. The curious rhyme regarding Mrs. Porter and her daughter washing their feet in soda water shows an attempt to cleanse oneself after defiling oneself (the implication here is sexual impurity). Then, we are given two interesting pictures: (1) Children’s voices singing in the copula, an area in a chapel, and (2) Another allusion to the story of the rape of Philomel by Tereus. What’s the point? The innocence of childhood is found in Christian salvation…maybe…but it is also true that our childhood innocence is inevitably corrupted in some fashion or another.
The third section then moves on, once again, to a picture of the Unreal City under the brown fog of a winter noon again, where Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, invites the poet to the Cannon Street Hotel and then the Metropole for a weekend of lecherous escapades. Once again, in an attempt to recapture the blissfulness of childhood, we see people instead choosing to engage in sexual promiscuity and perversion.
The scene then shifts to the apartment of a young woman, who has come home from work and is waiting for her lover (a sailor home from sea). The person who tells us of this scene is Tiresias, who in Greek mythology was a blind prophet who for seven years was made into a woman, and who thus knows what it is like to be both a man and a woman. The irony should be obvious: he is blind, yet clairvoyant. In any case, the scene unfolds to show the man come to the woman’s apartment and force himself on her, even though she is not in the mood. In a word, he rapes her with indifference, gives her a patronizing kiss goodbye, then leaves. Alone again in her apartment, she says to herself she’s glad it’s over, then puts on a record to listen to music. The music wafts down into the streets and to the river—the waters of the wasteland—where we see a man playing a mandolin, and fishermen lounging around.
From there, the section ends with an ugly view of the river. The barges on the river are opulent, but the river is sweating oil and tar. What follows is the song of the three Thames Daughters, who were all seduced and betrayed. With that, the poet alludes to St. Augustine when he says, “To Carthage then I came.” Augustine was quite the playboy before he became a Christian, and he described Carthage as “A cauldron of unholy lives.” Then, the references to burning are not just references to the burning lusts of the people in the wasteland, it also brings us back to the Buddha’s fire sermon: “All things are on fire with the fire of passion…of hatred…and of infatuation, with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, despair—they are all on fire.” Thus, when the poet says, “O Lord, Thou pluckest me out,” we see a desire to be taken out of the wasteland.
Yet, it was Augustine himself who said, “O Lord, make me chaste…but not just yet!”
IV. Death by Water
This extremely short section is about Phlebas the Phoenician—the Phoenician sailor from Madame Sosostris Tarot card deck, the one who had pearls in his eyes, and the one to whom the beleaguered husband in “A Game of Chess” alludes. In short, Phlebas is humanity. He dies in the waters of the sea and gets his bones picked clean. Yet, this is also an allusion to baptism, emphasizing that one must succumb to death if one is to have any hope of resurrection. And so, the last lines that say, “You who turn the wheel and look to windward, consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you,” serve as a warning: You will die, so consider your life and turn from your old, lustful ways.IV. Death by WaterThis extremely short section is about Phlebas the Phoenician—the Phoenician sailor from Madame Sosostris Tarot card deck, the one who had pearls in his eyes, and the one to whom the beleaguered husband in “A Game of Chess” alludes. In short, Phlebas is humanity. He dies in the waters of the sea and gets his bones picked clean. Yet, this is also an allusion to baptism, emphasizing that one must succumb to death if one is to have any hope of resurrection. And so, the last lines that say, “You who turn the wheel and look to windward, consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you,” serve as a warning: You will die, so consider your life and turn from your old, lustful ways.
The irony is that water is what the wasteland needs, but Phlebas drowns. Water can be refreshing and life-giving, bringing salvation, but it can also mean death…or both.
V. What the Thunder Said
Although Eliot doesn’t elaborate on the meaning of the subtitle, I’m inclined to think it might be an allusion to Revelation 10:4, when the seven thunders speak, but the Apostle John is told not to write down what they said. The section opens with a brief description of Christ’s arrest in Gethsemane and his crucifixion the next morning. From there, the poet engages in a contemplation of journeying in the mountains, where there is only rock and no water. Normally, thunder is accompanied with rain, but here, there is no refreshing rain—only sterile thunder.
Yet after this seemingly hopeless conclusion, we are then introduced to the three main themes found in this final section: (1) the road to Emmaus, (2) the current state of modern Europe, and (3) the approach to the Chapel Perilous (in the Holy Grail legend).
First, the road to Emmaus, where two of Jesus’ disciples encounter the resurrected Jesus without initially realizing it was him. Here, in the journey on the road of the dead mountain, the poet sees a glimpse of Christ, but he doesn’t know for sure what he’s seeing. Hence, the question: Is salvation in Christ real, or is it a mirage?
Second, the current state of Europe (in 1922). The sound high in the air is the looming threat of Communism, and the vision of Europe is that of the dry and cracked wasteland. The cities of the wasteland, be they Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandrian, Vienna, or London, are all ringed by the flat horizon, and their towers are falling, for they all represent the unreal city of the wasteland. As the poet looks up to the mountains, he wonders about what the city over the mountains is like—the New Jerusalem, where salvation can be found.
Finally, there is the approach to the Chapel Perilous, where the quest for the Holy Grail is finally realized. Once again, we find a woman, who represents both the final temptation for the grail knight as he enters the Chapel Perilous, but also the hyacinth girl and the return to the garden. Once he enters, he sees the bell towers of the chapel are all upside down, sounding out the reminiscence…of Eden. And he hears the voices singing out of the empty cisterns and exhausted wells. Everything in the chapel is decayed and empty…it is only the wind’s home. And yet, when the Holy Spirit moves (like the wind), salvation comes. And that is what we see: The cock crows on the roof tree (the cross on top of the chapel), there is a flash of lighting…and then, finally, salvific rain. A realization of our own denial of Christ and our own sin is what brings salvation, and the resurrection of Christ in our lives.
The Wasteland ends with a picture of the Ganga River in India and some wisdom from Hinduism. In the waiting for rain, Eliot shares three words from Hinduism. Datta means “to give.” Men have given themselves to lusts and passions, but the way of salvation is to give oneself to God. Dayadhvam means “to sympathize.” Men hold the keys to their own prison cells and are thus isolated from each other and unable to sympathize with each other, for we fear to end up dead, like Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s play. Finally, Damyata means “control.” Simply put, we must give God control and allow our hearts (our boats) to respond to God’s invitation to salvation.
Thus, we end with, once again, the picture of the Fisher King. The poet sees the crumbing wasteland all around him and realizes he must “set my lands in order,” namely, start preparing for his death. Once again, we have an allusion to Philomel when the poet, identifying with Philomel, longs to be a swallow, so he can no longer be silent. The “kings of this world,” so to speak, are pictured as the prince of Aquitaine in his ruined tower. As for the line, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot is telling us that this poem is his attempt to come to terms with “the wasteland” that is this world.
In the end, he realizes there is the need to give oneself to God, to sympathize with the plight of others, and to let God take control, and respond in kind. Only then will there be Shantih, Shantih, Shantih: The peace that passes understanding.
