http://genius.

com/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land-annotated

The waste land

--------------------------

Read on, and you’ll understand the sense of cultural barrenness and sterility that prompted Eliot to
choose this title. The poem is loosely structured around the myth of the Fisher King, whose wounding
causes his lands to become sterile.

Notice that Eliot wrote “waste land” as two words rather than one, as if to emphasize the expanse and
extent of the devastation. The entire land is being wasted. The title is, above all, a moral judgment.

It might also be a pun on the word “waist,” given all the sexual imagery that will follow. Finally, it could
be a slight ripoff of a poem called “Waste Land,” by Madison Cawein, published in 1913 (nine years
before Eliot’s poem) and containing similar themes. Good artists copy, great artists steal…

FUN FACT

Eliot’s original title was He Do the Police in Different Voices, an allusion to Our Mutual Friend by Charles
Dickens. The line is said about the character Sloppy, who likes to read aloud court cases from the
newspaper. The idea is that Eliot’s poem is a collage of “voices,” yet has a unitary consciousness (the
poet’s?) behind it.

The first section in Eliot’s He Do the Police in Different Voices was also entitled “The Burial of the Dead.”
However, the second section—which came to be called “A Game of Chess” in the finished version—was
originally entitled “In the Cage.” This tentative title alluded both to the short story of the same name by
Henry James and to the imprisonment of the Cumaean Sibyl. The Sibyl’s plight is described in detail by
Trimalchio in Petronius' Satyricon: the work from which T. S. Eliot draws The Waste Land’s multi-lingual
epigraph.

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Nam sibyllam quidem cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere et cum illi pueri dicerent
respondebat illa

--------------------------

The lines are from the Satyricon of Petronius. Eliot translates:

Indeed, I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a cage, and when the boys were saying to
her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”

The Sibyl’s famed immortality is a point of scholarly contention. Her immortal status is advocated by
Richard A. Parker, who elaborates:

Deiphobe, the Sibyl of Cumae, was an oracle. She was granted long life by Apollo, as many years as
grains of sand she held in her hand, but she had forgotten to ask to retain her youth. With her aging she
withered away and she was suspended in a bottle in the temple of Hercules at Cumae (near Naples).

However, the above analysis disregards and contradicts the content of the three primary mythic
accounts of the Sibyl at Cumae (Ovid’s Book XIV of Metamorphoses, Livy 5.1.16,* Virgil’s, Aeneid*: book
VI) and conflates the Sibyl’s (albeit similar) mythic dilemma with that of Tythonis.

As she tells Aeneas in Book XIV of Metamorphoses:

Three centuries of sand remain my burden—eroding this body to nothingness. Already reduced, my
trembling limbs suffer beneath the weight of long days. An age will come when Apollo, turning his back,
will renounce me entirely. For it will seem impossible that I, growing faint and faded as the Fates
foretold, could ever have caused passion to burn in a god’s chest. Then, fleeting from view, only my
voice will be known."

She has already endured 700 years and has but 300 remaining in her sentence.

Parker also errs on the deity to which the temple at Cumae was devoted (the Sibyl resided in the temple
of Phoebus Apollo at Cumae, the Greek colony that was both the reported location of the entrance to
the underworld and the location of the labyrinth and its Minotaur), as well as in his claim that “she had
forgotten to ask to retain her youth.” This is not quite right. The Sibyl was favored by Apollo and was
offered years of non-aging life equal to the number of grains in a handful of sand she cast at Apollo’s
feet—in exchange for her virginity.

When Apollo went to make good on the exchange, the Sibyl backed out and wouldn’t yield her virtue to
him. Apollo punished her, making her live out the years agreed upon while aging as normal flesh. So the
myth here is close to but not quite the same as Thithonis, who does forget to ask for eternal youth.

Another interpretation holds that the sibyl, being a prophet, wants to die because she knows the future.
Eliot’s poem predicts an awful collapse of civilization and, terrified by this, the sibyl seeks suicide.

###################################################################################

For ezra pound

--------------------------

Ezra Pound, friend and editor of Eliot, suggested that Eliot change the epigraph, which was originally
from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (in which London is also depicted as a “sepulchral city”):

The horror! The horror!

(Bet you remember the quote from Apocalypse Now.)

In general, Pound took a strong hand in critiquing and editing “The Waste Land” prior to its publication.
He wrote of his work as “midwife” to the poem:

If you must needs enquire

Know diligent Reader

That on each Occasion

Ezra performed the caesarian Operation.

More on Pound’s contributions can be found here and in the notes below.

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Il miglior fabbro

--------------------------

Italian, the better craftsman. Dante Alighieri said this of Arnaut Daniel, who was an expert in trobar clus;
hermetic poetry. So it’s a very appropriate homage to Ezra!

In the edition pictured to the right, novelist David Markson has given an alternative, possibly joking
translation of the phrase: “that greater magician.”

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I the burial of the dead

_______________________________
/web/20141110124045/http://lit.genius.com/83150/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land/I-the-burial-of-the-dead

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April is the cruellest month breeding

--------------------------

One of the most famous opening lines in poetic history. It’s an allusion to the opening of Geoffrey
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, in which Chaucer expresses the hope, sensuality, and spiritual renewal
associated with April:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur,

Of which vertú engendred is the flour…

(When April with his showers sweet

The drought of March has pierced unto the root

And bathed every vein with such liquor

Of which virtue engendered is the flower…)

Eliot chops and screws the Chaucer quote, setting a dark, elegiac tone that persists throughout the
poem.

April serves as a good way to open the poem, as it comes from the Latin aperire, which means to open.
The line has also been noted as a reference to WWI, with spring (April) being a popular time among
military commanders to launch new offensives — this meant making men charge into no-man’s land to
be mowed down by machine gun fire. A month of new life becomes a time of death. Finally, April is
most often the month when Christians celebrate Easter, which ties into Eliot’s themes of rebirth through
sacrifice, i.e. with the Fisher King later in the poem.

The cruelty in April lies not only in its showers (raining all the time!) but also in its generative capacity:
the living dead in the Waste Land don’t like to be reminded of hope, life, sensuality, etc.

The last words of the first three lines (and lines 5-6)— “breeding,” “mixing,” “stirring,” etc.—lend a sort
of driving narrative rhythm to the start of the poem.

Why does Eliot’s poem begin with a reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Possibly so as to
acknowledge the latter as the beginning of a tradition of English poetry, as well as an accomplished
innovation in its time. Also, April in the Tales is the month of pilgrimage to a sacred shrine. It can be
called the cruellest not only because it “pierces” the drought of March, but because the tales the
pilgrims tell are full of cruelty and violence. They’re also related to “breeding,” as all revolve around the
themes of marriage, infidelity, desire or adultery.

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Lilacs out of the dead land

--------------------------

The lilac appears in many spring poems, perhaps most famously in “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard
Bloom’d,” which Walt Whitman wrote as a eulogy to president Lincoln (murdered in April 1865). “The
dead land” refers to the barren winter, but also to the cultural wasteland that Eliot will go on to evoke.

Bob Dylan seems to endorse the lilacs-Whitman connection in a riff on the opening of The Waste Land
from his “Theme Time Radio Hour”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3rdpr8kSqQ
The former WWI battlefields of France had a gorgeous bloom in 1919-20 and farms had very prosperous
harvests. The land had been “fertilized” with the men who died there during the war. Hence, lilacs out of
the dead land.

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Mixing memory and desire

--------------------------

Of the living dead: remembering and longing for the time in which they were still alive.

“Memory and desire” is possibly from Weddah an Om-el-Bonain (II, xix) by Scottish poet James
Thomson, whom Eliot is known to have been a fan of. Thomson’s masterpiece The City of Dreadful Night
deals with a degenerate city, and may have served as an inspiration for The Waste Land.

Seymour Glass quotes this line whimsically—but with a tinge of real sadness—in J. D. Salinger’s short
story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

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Stirring dull roots with spring rain

--------------------------

The first several lines are meant to echo another celebrated, and very different, description of April in
English poetry: the prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (see note on line 1 above).
Spring stereotypically rekindles a lover’s flame, so you can read “stirring dull roots” as having sexual
undertones, whether phallic (“stimulating limp penises”) or gender-neutral (“making people horny”).

###################################################################################

Winter kept us warm

--------------------------

The second striking paradoxical assertion in the poem, spoken by a “Universal” narrative voice of
“Modernity” —the voice of a Hollow Modern Society.

Both paradoxical assertions are meant to make us realize how backwards modern life is. Society likes the
inactivity of winter, when one can sit by the fireplace their sterile acquaintances.

Although it may seem paradoxical that winter makes one warm, it isn’t actually so because winter
provides us with the excuse to stay indoors. This was especially so for the soldiers during WWI, who did
not have as many battles (and hence deaths) in the winter time due to bad weather making attacks futile
for both sides of the conflict.

During the winter it was not unusual for little groups of men to gather in the front trench, and there hold
impromptu concerts, singing patriotic and sentimental songs. The Germans did much the same, and on
calm evenings the songs from one line floated to the trenches on the other side, and were there
received with applause and sometimes calls for an encore. ( “Christmas Truce at the World War I
Front” )

As a total coincidence, one Jay Winter is a prominent modern historian of WWI (who keeps the memory
of it warm, one may say).

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Covering earth in forgetful snow

--------------------------

The snow kills and fossilizes anything that is on earth. Forgetting and being forgotten, ultimate
redemption, is something the living dead long for.

The snow has another metaphorical level: a covering of snow can keep frost from reaching and killing
plants; it is a little bit warmer under the snow, sheltered from the cold air.

###################################################################################

Feeding a little life with dried tubers

--------------------------

Tubers are plant structures used to store nutrients for the winter and as a means of asexual
reproduction. Here they’re a metaphor for modern people’s lust for life/sex, which according to Eliot has
diminished and gone underground.

Also recalls To Our Ladies of Death, another poem by James Thomson:

Our Mother feedeth thus our little life

That we in turn may feed her with our death

Also, a paradoxical play and continuation of the allusion of life in death, as Tuberculosis constituted the
second biggest killer of the early 20th century.
###################################################################################

Summer surprised us

--------------------------

It’s not clear at this point whether “us” refers to humanity or the two people below: probably both.

The scene that follows recalls the French poem “Nevermore” by Valery Larbaud, in which he says: “I
prefer the evening wind over the pasture, like in Bavaria one night after a shower over the
Starnbergersee.” (Interestingly, that poem features lilacs, as well.)

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Coming over the starnbergersee

--------------------------

A fashionable lake-resort near Munich, which Eliot visited in August 1911.

This is the lake in which the Bavarian king Ludwig II mysteriously drowned, together with his psychiatrist.
Thus Ludwig may be linked symbolically with the drowned vegetation deity in this poem.

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With a shower of rain we stopped in the colonnade

--------------------------

A colonnade is a sequence of phallic objects like this.

Taking shelter from the fertilizing rain symbolizes the characters turning their back on fertility.

###################################################################################

And went on in sunlight into the hofgarten

--------------------------

The Hofgarten is a famous garden in Munich.

You can see the colonnade in the back

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And drank coffee

--------------------------

And drank coffee

The casual drinking of coffee and idle chatter are shorthand for the banality that Modern Western
Society had come to embrace. Even the most privileged of modern lives, the aristocracy’s “Old Guard,”
are sterile and meaningless for they consist of nothing more than drinking coffee and gossiping.

This line also predicts female interlocutor’s exasperated inquiry in to the banal during the Dialogue of
the Nerves in “A Game of Chess”:

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”…

What shall we do to-morrow?

“What shall we ever do?"

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

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And talked for an hour

--------------------------

A synecdoche for the banality of even a life among the aristocracy. Paired with drinking coffee, this
critique is aimed Modern Western Society’s embrace of such a hollow existence.

###################################################################################

Bin gar keine russin stamm aus litauen echt deutsch

--------------------------

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

Eliot suggests that modern people in 1922 (the living dead) don’t have a sense of life or identity, or at
least a fragmented, conflicting one. This is keeping with the fragmentation and recombination which
drives the tropes of identity throughout.

Eliot produced his own translation of this line:

I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German.

But this does not include the gaping ellipsis. The German ‘ich’, I, has not been included in this sentence,
fortifying the sense of identitylessness. (As does the anonymity of this sentence: the person saying this is
probably not Marie Larisch, as she was born in Augsburg, making her a “real German” in the most literal
sense.)

More importantly, this line is a critique of the principles of the Germanic Unification Movement that
eventually escalated into WWII. It is obviously satirical in achieving this effect. The idea is that of course
the speaker is not a German, or any manner of Germanic/Teutonic ethnic group either.

Eliot met with Marie-Louise in 1911, so at the time in which this line was set Lithuania still belonged to
the Russian Empire. It would not gain its independence until the end of WWI. (Lithuana demographics
did have a minority of German Jews, though.)

Remember, this is the age when a runaway sort of nationalism began in continental Europe. It was time
to pick a team and stay on it, so there were a number of people in bordering countries who would
frequently change “nationalities” to either aid their positions or stave off potential violence.

Marie-Louise was involved in one of the tragic events that the Germanic Unification deemed a
“necessary evil” to achieve national unity: the assassination of her her cousin, Ludwig Otto Friedrich
Wilhelm II of Bavaria.

In terms of the vegetation myth/fertility symbolism, this line connects with the Biblical sowing of seeds
(scattering of people from the homeland).

###################################################################################
And when we were children staying at the archdukes

--------------------------

This anecdote may seem out of place at first, but it’s Eliot’s way of juxtaposing the past with the present.
The line in German is meant to remind the reader not only of WWI, but of the state of Europe just after
the war. By placing this idyllic childhood memory right afterward, Eliot accentuates the sentiment of
dissatisfaction with the present and the motif of nostalgia that runs throughout the poem.

###################################################################################

My cousins

--------------------------

Refers again to the countess Marie Louise Elizabeth Mendel, whose cousin was Ludwig II of Bavaria—
Ludwig Otto Friedrich Wilhelm—also known as “The Swan King” or “The Fairytale King.” Ludwig was
staunchly opposed to the Germanic Unification Movement and aided in stalling unification temporarily.
Ludwig II is also connected with line 7 of “The Burial of the Dead”:

…coming over the Starnbergersee

One of the numerous Fairytale Castles he commissioned and oversaw the construction of overlooked
Lake Starnberg (in German: Starnbergersee). It was at this castle that Ludwig was imprisoned after being
deposed by his (pro-Germanic Unification) Cabinet and where, that same evening, he was assassinated.
His body and that of his personal physician were found in the lake the next morning: both were dead in
the shin-depth water. Again Ludwig II shows up in “The Burial of the Dead” lines 28-31:

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu

Mein Irisch Kind

Wo weilest du?
As well as in line 38: “Oed' und leer das Meer.”

Both of these allusions come from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde—a masterpiece that without Ludwig II.
Wagner would have never written. Wagner met with the Archduke, having been granted an audience
because Ludwig much admired his work, Wagner was at this time utterly destitute, had been renounced
by all of his patrons, and could find no one generous enough provide him with so much as a meal or
shelter. Ludwig’s heart was touched and because of his love for the man’s art, he insisted Wagner reside
at the castle and partake of his hospitalities until “Tristan” was finished. Wagner also partook of the
remote beauty created by the Fairytale Castle, mountains, forests, and lakes in the surrounding area as
they appear—some by name others by allusion—in Wagner’s finished opera.

Ludwig II was the cousin of Countess Larisch, though a distant one, because of her being the niece of
Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who was wife to the Emperor Franz Joseph and was of the same house
(Wittelsbach) as Ludwig II.

Marie had other cousins who were Archdukes: Rudolf and Franz Ferdinand. Marie Larisch was
supposedly a go-between for Rudolf and his mistress (also named Marie), whose tragic love affair ended
in the two of them having been found dead in what is deemed a suicide pact. It is therefore ambiguous
who is meant by the archduke cousin.

###################################################################################

He took me out on a sled and i was frightened he said marie marie hold on tight and down we went

--------------------------

The speaker here is female: one of many different “voices” that break into the text. The Waste Land
does not have a single speaker, but is instead a collage of voices (Eliot’s original title for the poem was
He Do the Police in Different Voices, an allusion to a character in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend
who acts out newspaper crime reports). It’s unclear how much of this first stanza, or first section,
“Marie” speaks.

In these lines Eliot evokes the mixed feelings of a child who enjoys riding fast on a sled but is also
frightened by the experience. Her cousin encourages her to overcome her fear. The “rush” of sledding
downhill may have quasi-sexual overtones; compare the climactic sledding scene in Edith Wharton’s
Ethan Frome (which definitely has sexual overtones).

###################################################################################

In the mountains there you feel free i read much of the night and go south in the winter

--------------------------

Countess Marie Larisch had a difficult marriage and enjoyed her time away from the Count. In her
memoirs My Past she wrote of spending time reading and writing away from her husband in their
Bavarian mountain home Villa Valerie (in the town of Rottach-Egern, 54 km south of Munich).

Nice digs, ja?

“In the mountains, there you feel free” is a German cliche, related to Goethe’s Wander’s Night Song II:
there is perhaps an overtone of irony.

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What are the roots that clutch what branches grow out of this stony rubbish

--------------------------

Compare “rubbish” to “fragments” in the final section of Section V. Eliot is referring to the apparent
disorderliness of his poem, as well as the rubbish heap of Western/world history, and asking what can
be salvaged from it. The tone here is prophetic and recurs throughout the poem. Eliot identified the
sexless prophet Tiresias (see Section III) as the central voice of The Waste Land: this is most likely his/her
voice breaking in.
###################################################################################

Son of man

--------------------------

Son of man,

Eliot, in his own notes, referred to Ezekiel 2:1:

He said to me, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.”

Christ also uses the moniker “Son of man” to refer to Himself.

i.e.Matthew 9:6

Yet, in this line of the poem,“Son” is a proper noun and refers not implicitly to the second person of
Christianity’s triune-God, but rather to the reader, the audience, or whomever shall hear the warnings
of Ezekiel.

While in line 20 of The Waste Land, the “Son” may seem ambiguous due to the syntactical coincidence
that “Son” begins the sentence.

However, the distinction between Eliot’s usage of “Son of man” in line 20 as opposed to Christ’s
referring to Himself as the “Son of man” in the gospels, must be drawn.

Here, It signals the reader to prepare Eliot’s allusion to Ezekiel’s prophecies in lines 21-2 and remains
relevant through the end of the section.

It connects Modernity’s decrepitude not with Christ’s ministry and teleological triumph by the end of
the Gospel, but rather with
Ezekiel,

Isaiah,

and their call to the sons of men: repentance or annihilation…

The basic meaning of “son of man” in Hebrew is “human being” (ben-adam, or son-of-Adam, who was
the Biblical first man). This can be one sense it has in Ezekiel: God addresses Ezekiel as a representative
and spokesperson for the human race. However, this phrase is not common in the Bible — in the Old
Testament it can be found predominantly in the book of Ezekiel; while in the New Testament, it is
almost exclusively used by Jesus.

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You cannot say or guess for you know only a heap of broken images

--------------------------

Modern life is fragmented and incoherent. People are out of touch with the natural passions of life in
this concrete jungle: what grows out of concrete?

“Broken images” may allude to the idols broken by God in Ezekiel 6:4 and Ezekiel 6:6:

Ezekiel 6:4: And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your
slain men before your idols.
Ezekiel 6:6: In all your dwellingplaces the cities shall be laid waste, and the high places shall be desolate;
that your altars may be laid waste and made desolate, and your idols may be broken and cease, and
your images may be cut down, and your works may be abolished.

###################################################################################

Where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter the cricket no relief and the dry stone no sound
of water

--------------------------

Eliot’s Notes point us toward Ecclesiastes 12:5:

Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree
shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long
home, and the mourners go about the streets…

Eccl 12:5 forms part of an allegory of old age, with the uncertainties and physical feebleness that attend
aging and the approach of death. It concludes in Eccl 12:7 :

the dust [shall] return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

It can also be seen as an extended apocalyptic vision. Apocalyptic overtones resonate throughout The
Waste Land as well.

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Only there is shadow under this red rock

--------------------------
Biblical allusion to Isaiah 32:2.

And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water
in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

Eliot may be saying that the world is filled with death and pain akin to a desert that yields no sweet relief
from its hardships. We might connect this to Tantalus of Roman mythology, who was sentenced to
spend eternity in the underworld sitting in a pool of water that would dry up whenever he would
attempt to drink from it, with a fruit tree above him that would retreat every time he’d try to eat.

###################################################################################

Come in under the shadow of this red rock and i will show you something different from either

--------------------------

Eliot frequently re-used/morphed parts of his other poems; in this case, these lines from the opening of
“The Death of Saint Narcissus”:

Come under the shadow of this gray rock -

Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or

Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock:

I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs

And the gray shadow on his lips.

The parentheses are probably an experiment in iconicity, and denote shelter and isolation. The tree has
grown impotent and died. What’s left for shelter is a lifeless rock.
###################################################################################

Your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

--------------------------

Your shadow standing towards the sun (sunrise) and your shadow standing with your back to the sun
(sunset).

‘Your shadow’ might be a metaphor for death, or the passage of time.

In the morning of life the shadow of nothing follows behind—the memory of nothing. In the evening of
life the shadow of nothing looms before—the presage of nothing. Each is a reflection of the other. Each
reflects a handful of dust, which is all that memory came from and all that memory will return to—
nothing.

“Morning” could be a pun on “mourning,” bringing connotations of death and despair to a contrasting
new day.

###################################################################################

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

--------------------------

One of the most famous lines of the poem, later alluded to (along with the Tennyson quotation: see
below) in the title of Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust.
The line evokes the fear of dying: “dust to dust,” as in the Book of Common Prayer. The specific line in
the The Order for the Burial of the Dead section of the Book of Common Prayer reads:

Then, while the earth shall be cast upon the body by some standing by, the Priest shall say,

FORASMUCH as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our
dear brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to
ashes, dust to dust;(…)

An alternative order even immediately follows the above with the line:

And we beseech thine infinite goodness to give us grace to live in thy fear (…).

An interesting sidenote is that the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches use a similar quote in their
burial services, Genesis 3:19 :

For dust you are,

And to dust you shall return.

All these mentions of dust refer to the Biblical meaning of Adam’s — the first man’s — name, which is
“made of adamah (earth)” or “red” (as the earth).

Eliot probably also has in mind these lines from Tennyson’s Maud: A Monodrama:

Dead, long dead,

Long dead!

And my heart is a handful of dust,

And the wheels go over my head…

In the context of the poem, Eliot may be getting at a more metaphorical kind of death, the “death in life”
that is profound grief or burnt-out sexual passion.

It could also be an allusion to the Cumaean Sybil. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Sybil is awarded as many
years of life as she has corns of sands in her hand, but only the years, not the youth, causing her to fade
and shrink into frailty.

###################################################################################

Frisch weht der wind der heimat zu mein irisch kind wo weilest du

--------------------------

Fresh blows the wind

To the homeland

My Irish child

Where do you linger?

As Eliot says in his own note, this alludes to Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.. These are almost the
first words of the opera, which sound like this and begin with these lines:

“Westwards

The gaze wanders;

eastwards

skims the ship.

Fresh the wind blows

towards home:

my Irish child,

where are you now?

Is it your wafting sighs

that swell my sails?

Blow, blow, you wind!

Ah, alas, my child!

Irish girl,

you wild, adorable girl!”

Perhaps the first words are relevant for the poem about the decline of the West.

Also, they are sung by an unknown “VOICE OF A YOUNG SAILOR”, possibly connecting to the Phoenician
sailor too.

Maybe it’s a stretch but after Act I of the opera begins with the above line, “Isolde construes [the song
of the young sailor] to be a mocking reference to herself. In a furious outburst, she wishes the seas to
rise up and sink the ship” — so she wishes a ‘Death by Water’.

The fresh wind contrasts the scorching heat of the previous scene. This scene is filled with love instead
of despair.

###################################################################################

Hyacinths

--------------------------
The hyacinth flower traditionally symbolizes masculinity and resurrection, as well as sincerity in love.

An ancient Greek legend describing the origin of the hyacinth: two gods, Apollo and Zephyr, adored a
handsome young Greek man called Hyakinthos. Apollo was teaching Hyakinthos the art of throwing a
discus. Zephyr, the god of the west wind, was overcome with jealousy and blew the discus back. It struck
Hyakinthos on the head and killed him. From his blood grew a flower, which the sun god Apollo named
after him. The word ‘hyacinth’ has also surfaced in an ancient language (called ‘Thracopelasgian’), which
was spoken 4,000 years ago.

Hyacinths are flowers dedicated to Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, who is also considered the patron
of the arts. They are associated with “games and sports” as well as “rashness,” as well as the love that
Apollo had for Hyakinthos.

###################################################################################

A year ago

--------------------------

“The Waste Land” was published in 1922, so ‘a year ago’ at that time would be 1921. If we look at
notable events of 1921, there are several interesting links to the poem’s themes:

the United States ends its state of war with Germany, Austria and Hungary, formally ending the First
World War .

Soviet Union is recognized and Adolf Hitler becomes Führer of the Nazi Party, sowing the seeds of the
second World War and a second “waste land”.

Ludwig III of Bavaria, the last king of Bavaria, whose father was instrumental in deposing Ludwig II (a
cousin to Ludwig III) dies.

Particularly interesting and relevant are the events in Britain of that year:
Dr Marie Stopes opens the United Kingdom’s first birth control clinic in London.

An exceptionally dry year over England and Wales, with a 100-day drought ending on June 25th, makes
for reportedly the driest year since 1788 and not approached since.

perhaps of no significance at all, but a funny coincidence: an Anti-Waste League is founded as a political
party, announcing itself in the Sunday Pictorial and even winning two by-elections.

###################################################################################

They called me the hyacinth girl

--------------------------

The hyacinth is associated with male homosexuality, which makes the combination of hyacinth and girl
intriguing. In Greek mythology, Hyacinth was beautiful young boy and Apollo’s beloved. One day while
they were playing discuss, Hyacinthus was accidentally struck by the disc (there are different accounts of
why) and died. However, to keep his beloved from fully dying, Apollo turned him into the flowers that
now bear his name. The flowers are also just associated with death and mourning.

In drafts of The Waste Land, the hyacinth garden is linked with the drowned Phoenician sailor (see
section IV):

“Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

Nothing?”

I rememberThe hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes! [Boldfaced words omitted in
final version]
The sailor, in turn, has been linked by some critics/biographers (first by John Peter in a controversial
1952 essay) with Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal, who died in World War I. Eliot had dedicated his first
volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, to Verdenal and added a Dante quotation beneath
the dedication in the 1925 edition:

Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity,
and treat the shadows like the solid thing.

In other words, there’s a line of criticism that views The Waste Land as in part an elegy for the poet’s
dead male friend, and reads a homoerotic charge into the “hyacinth girl” passage.

###################################################################################

Yet when we came back late

--------------------------

Everything in this line seems to signal the end of a relationship. “Yet,” “back from the garden” (an image
of exile from Eden?),“ "late”…

###################################################################################

From the hyacinth garden

--------------------------

Hyacinths, like lilacs, are spring flowers and serve to symbolize the same.
###################################################################################

Your arms full

--------------------------

Your arms full,

May allude to Canto XXX of Purgatorio Line 21.

“Oh, offer lilies with full hands!”

There is also an echo of Line 20 from Eliot’s 1917 poem La Figlia Che Piange:

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

###################################################################################

And your hair wet

--------------------------

The sensual counterpoint to the fiery hair of the second chapter.

Wet hair is analolgous to wet soil: it is a symbol of fertility. Also remember the lines in which the couple
took shelter from the rain:

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.

###################################################################################

I could not speak

--------------------------

This enjambment emphasizes the inability to speak: it’s as if there’s a stutter or hesitation built into the
sentence. Note the trinity of negative words hereunder: not, neither, nothing.

This may also be an allusion to the Song of Songs — “I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had
withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him.”

###################################################################################

And my eyes failed

--------------------------

Because love is blind…or maybe because love debilitates. You can also read this as a wider comment on
the impossibility of human connection, rather than specifically as a reference to love.

The image foreshadows Tiresias’s blindness, to be discussed in detail later in the poem.

###################################################################################

I was neither living nor dead

--------------------------
Does Eliot have The Odyssey in mind in this passage? At the end of book 5, Odysseus, nearly dead, is
washed up on the shore of Scheria. He gathers wood (arms full), then falls asleep (his eyes fail).

In his epic journey, he has travelled from the realm of the dead (book 10, but in the past) on his way
back to the land of living (real, domestic life, with Penelope and Ithaca). Scheria is halfway between
these two: it’s populated by mortals, but has divine characteristics (a garden that bears fruit all year
round, as in the Golden Age; ships steered by thought). When Odysseus awakes and meets Nausicaa,
Athena “from his head made the locks to flow in curls like unto the hyacinth flower.”

###################################################################################

And i knew nothing

--------------------------

and I knew nothing

This line Echoes the Dialogue of the Nerves in “A Game of Chess”

“Is there nothing in your head?"

"Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?”

As well as “The Fire Sermon”

“My people humble people who expect

Nothing.”

These instances of mental acts the result of which is, or which posit, nothing may reflect a state of
Aboulia, a disorder of diminished motivation.
Eliot underwent treatment for this condition at Lausanne, where he completed drafts of “A Game of
Chess” and “The Fire Sermon” as well as potentially portions of “The Burial of the Dead.”

Eliot wrote in his letters that he believed firmly in this diagnosis and had never thought his ill-mental-
health was related to a “condition of the nerves.”

###################################################################################

Looking into the heart of light

--------------------------

There is a well established line of criticism that reads this as an allusion in opposition to Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness. In the draft of The Waste Land Eliot used a passage from Conrad’s story as the
epigraph.

In Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men published in 1925, three years after “The Waste Land,” he used The
Heart of Darkness to craft the epigraph:

“Mistah Kurtz — he dead”

###################################################################################

The silence

--------------------------

Silence has a long history with Eliot of being representative of the presence of the “infinite”. Here,
combined with “Heart of Light”, which are variously substituted throughout Dante’s Paradiso when
referring to any member of the tripartite God or any manifestations, revelations, or visions emanating
from his being.
Also in force of the reading is Eliot’s use of the definite article “THE” in both cases: “THE heart of light”
“THE silence”

Also consider the unpublished 1910 poem that Eliot finished while at Harvard, entitled Silence.

The seas of experience

That were so broad and deep,

So immediate and steep,

Are suddenly still.

You may say what you will,

At such peace I am terrified.

There is nothing else beside.

Alternately, there is an established line of thinking that “the heart of light” is in opposition to Joseph
Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness”.

This theory alternate theory still maintains the Beatific quality of “Heart of Light in opposition to the
Demonic Kurtz in Conrad and functions through this diametric tension.

###################################################################################

Oed und leer das meer

--------------------------

Another line from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, translated as “Desolate and empty the sea.”

In this opera, these words are spoken by the SHEPHERD character. They come, similarly to the previous
passage from this opera used in this poem, almost at the beginning of an act, this time from Act III. They
are preceded by some lines that are very reminiscent of the themes in the poem: “Is he still not
awake?”, “Have you seen nothing yet?”, “what ails our lord?”, “Do not ask. You can never know”.
The situation in the opera at this point is this: the SHEPHERD is asked to watch the sea for a ship that
would rescue the lifeless TRISTAN. The former then delivers the line quoted here by the poem and
departs, playing his reed-pipe. Immediately, TRISTAN awakens.

###################################################################################

Madame sosostris famous clairvoyante

--------------------------

Sosestris was an Egyptian Pharoah (it’s actually the Greek version of the Pharaoh Senwosret). Why did
Eliot choose that name for his vacuous fortune teller?

The name echoes that of a character from Crome Yellow, a novel by Eliot’s acquaintance Aldous Huxley
(of Brave New World fame) which satirizes writers of that generation. It was published in 1921, a few
months after Eliot drafted The Waste Land for the first time (according to “The Design of The Waste
Land” by Burton Blistein). Eliot could well have seen Huxley’s book before it was published.

In Huxley’s book, Sesostris (slightly differently spelling), a man, dresses up as a female fortune-teller at a
fair. So Sosostris has connotations of sexual ambiguity which foreshadow Tiresias, the sexually
ambivalent “old man with wrinkled dugs” who appears in part II.

Huxley’s character (Scogan, the guy dressed up as the gypsy) is a portrait of Bertrand Russell, an English
philosopher who couldn’t keep it in his pants when it came to married women — including Eliot’s wife,
Vivien. In the book, Scogan/Russell has lots of gloomy, foreboding, Waste Land-type things to say about
the modern world.

Madame Sosostris could also be a reference to Madame Blavatsky, a Russian-born scholar of esoteric
wisdom (proto New Age stuff) who was fashionable at this time — so much so that some people
probably thought her “the wisest woman in Europe.”
###################################################################################

Had a bad cold nevertheless is known to be the wisest woman in europe

--------------------------

An interesting juxtaposition…having a cold is a temporary state, wisdom is not.

Also is a bit suspicious — couldn’t she, so wise and clairvoyant, foresee that she will get a bad cold and
prevent it? Or maybe the cold is just a cover for the fact that her voice has changed because it’s really
someone else (say, Huxley’s Scogan) in disguise?

###################################################################################

With a wicked pack of cards

--------------------------

A pack of Tarot cards, used for reading the future. Wicked has the double meaning of “evil, bewitched”
and “terrific.”

###################################################################################

Here said she is your card

--------------------------

As Eliot himself said in his original notes:

I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously
departed to suit my own convenience. (…)

Continues at relevant lines.

###################################################################################

The drowned phoenician sailor

--------------------------

Eliot himself has said the following, regarding his use of Tarot cards and following an explanation on the
Hanged Man:

(…) The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the “crowds of people,” and Death by
Water is executed in Part IV. (…)

Since there is no tarot card by this name, this might refer to the King of Cups. (See next line.) This might
give us a clue to the meaning of the poem.

Phoenicia was an ancient trading and seafaring nation on the coast of present day Israel, Lebanon and
Syria. In North Africa Phoenicians founded Carthage as a colony.

Phoenicia was also the location of the annual ceremonies to commemorate the death and resurrection
of the God Thammuz). In regard to the theme of death and resurrection, it is an interesting (and subtle)
device.

It may also be a harkening back to the line about Mylae. Mylae was an engagement in the 1st Punic War
C. 260 BC where the Phoenicians aided Rome’s implementation of an idea designed to overcome their
naval inexperience. Based on their seafaring expertise the Phoenicians trained the Romans in the
necessary protocols for initiating boarding actions.

In effect, they turned naval warfare into hand-to-hand combat at close quarters using the corvus.

The [corvus] “crow” in Latin

was a raised gangplank in the bow of the ship.

The plank was dropped onto one of the more maneuverable Carthaginian ships, then the Romans could
board and take the ship. See Pliny for the full account of the defeat of Carthage in that battle.

###################################################################################

Those are pearls that were his eyes look

--------------------------

This line is from Shakespeare, the Tempest, Act II sc. 2.

ARIEL (sings)

Full fathom five thy father lies.

Of his bones are coral made.

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

(Burthen Ding-dong)

Hark! now I hear them,—Ding-dong, bell.

The line refers to the drowning (!) death of the king of Naples, a trading city/kingdom like Phoenicia.

(1 fathom = 6 feet)

The Tempest could be read as a vegetation myth as well, because the king of Naples did not actually
drown as the characters are lead to believe, and ‘resurrects’ in a way when it becomes clear that he
hadn’t.

###################################################################################

Here is belladonna

--------------------------

Dealing another card, the femme fatale.

Belladonna is Latin for “beautiful lady”. It is also a poisonous flower. The name of the plant comes from
the practice of women using small doses of the poison as a cosmetic to dilate their pupils.

###################################################################################

The lady of the rocks

--------------------------
A likely allusion to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, Virgin of the Rocks.

And, of course, to the sea rocks on the tarot card.

###################################################################################

The lady of situations

--------------------------

Reference to prostitution on the part of the aforementioned Lady of the Rocks.

While the sexual failure in the poem is customarily associated with an emasculating wound suffered by
an archetypal male, the Fisher King it should be pointed out that Eliot counterpoints the legend of the
castrated male witha less often recognized archetype:the sexually violated yet sterile female.

The specific embodiment of this woman in Eliot’s poetry is the prostitute who, despite innumerable
fornications, never conceives nor gives birth.

Whether she is an actual prostitute or merelya victimized and promiscuous female,

she is characterized by acute neurasthenia, nervous chatter, hysterical laughter, and general physical
and psychological debilitation.

###################################################################################
Here is the man with three staves

--------------------------

Eliot has said:

The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with
the Fisher King himself.

The Three of Staves or Three of Wands symbolizes ‘established strength, enterprise, effort, trade,
commerce, discovery; those are his ships, bearing his merchandise, which are sailing over the sea’.

So this is the same person as the drowned Phoenician.

Some commentators have taken this to be The Hierophant (pope): symbol of chastity, supposedly.

###################################################################################

And here the wheel

--------------------------

…of Fortune

This card symbolises rapid change, cycles and invertion of the status quo. (Summer-winter, alive-dead.)
###################################################################################

And here is the one eyed merchant

--------------------------

And here is the one-eyed merchant

This tarot card predicts the appearance in “The Fire Sermon” of

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight

###################################################################################

And this card which is blank is something he carries on his back which i am forbidden to see i do not find

--------------------------

The blank card is “The Fool”; he carries a purse over his back (he doesn’t see it) at the end of a stick. The
Fool card in Tarot is un-numbered (blank).

Alternately, the connotation here may be that since Madame Sosostris cannot read the blank card, or
find The Hanged Man, s/he is a fraud and a phony. Keep in mind that Eliot’s model here, Madame
Sesostris in Crome Yellow, was a man pretending to be a woman.

###################################################################################
The hanged man

--------------------------

The Hanged Man in the tarot is shown hanging by one foot from a T-shaped cross. He symbolizes the
self-sacrifice of the fertility god, who is killed in order that his resurrection may bring fertility once again
to land and people. Thus he is ordinarily considered a sign of rebirth and renewal, signifying the end of
things, which, in their ending, precipitate new beginnings. Not finding him here ties in with the poem’s
implication that there is no rebirth in this culture. April is the cruellest month because it suggests that
renewal may be possible, when it is not.

On this, Eliot wrote:

The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is
associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded
figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. (…)

Not finding the hanged man might also be a reference to Petronius (the epigraph’s author). In the
Satyricon, a character tells a story about a widower who lost her husband and was prepared to mourn at
his tomb until she starved to death. However, a soldier who was supposed to be keeping watch on the
corpse of a criminal who was hung near by, came in and seduced her. While they we’re getting it on, the
criminals' family came by and stole the corpse, so they could give it a proper burial. The guard would
have been executed for such negligence, but the widower found a way out. She took her husband’s
body from the fancy tomb he had spent much money on and placed it in the noose, a huge insult in the
ancient world. She justified herself thus:

Better to hang a dead husband than lose a living lover.

Thus the absence of the hanged man may be a comment on what Eliot considered the decaying morals
of his time.
###################################################################################

Fear death by water

--------------------------

The name of the 4th section of The Waste Land.

“Fear death by water” is also an allusion to The great flood. The Waste Land is a fallen world in need of
redemption. Yet, the Fisher King’s impotent, infertile condition seems to signify the fundamental
problem of Modernity—namely, the restoration or resurrection of (the fallen) world. Think here of
Beckett’s Endgame which also depicts a fallen, sunken world.

Furthermore, the title is particularly ominous as God promised (following Noah’s Flood) that he would
never again destroy the world by water.

###################################################################################

I see crowds of people walking round in a ring

_______________________________

/web/20141110124045/http://lit.genius.com/601575/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land/I-see-crowds-of-people-
walking-round-in-a-ring

###################################################################################

If you see dear mrs equitone

--------------------------

“Equi-tone” or equal tone suggests that Mrs. Equitone says everything with an unchanging voice: what
she says does not matter to her, as the forces of destiny spin our fates without caring too much about
us.

And, of course, she has that bad cold.

From another angle, Christopher Ricks sees the equi-tone as a way of hiding Mrs Equitone’s deft little
put-downs: “So gloved.” (T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, Faber, p. 186)

###################################################################################

Tell her i bring the horoscope myself one must be so careful these days

--------------------------

As in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, Madame Sosostris/Sosestris disguises him/herself as a clairvoyant

in order to seduce a married person. Mrs. Equitone is a married woman, and it has been speculated that
she may in fact be Mrs. Eliot. The final line makes more sense if such an extramarital affair is transpiring.

###################################################################################

Unreal city

_______________________________

/web/20141110124045/http://lit.genius.com/601578/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land/Unreal-city
###################################################################################

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn

--------------------------

That wonderful London smog in the winter, blocking the sunlight. Note that machines are largely to
blame for this barrier that shields London city from real life (where you have blue skies and green
plants).

This may also be an allusion to Dickens’s “Bleak House,” whose haunting first pages describe the
pervasive fog of London in similar terms to those Eliot evokes (and reworks) here.

The famous fog/smog of London was caused by domestic heating using coal, and is quite different (both
aesthetically and scientifically) from haze caused by diesel emissions. As cold winters made people burn
more coal, the London smog was the thickest then and has earned the nickname ‘pea-soup fog’, as the
consistency and sometimes the color seemed similar.

###################################################################################

A crowd flowed over london bridge so many

--------------------------

In a way, London Bridge was ‘overflowing’. Not with water, but with people. All on their way to London,
crossing the river Styx. Uh… I mean Thames.
FOOTPATH TO HELL

A possible allusion to Revelation 22:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of
God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the
tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for
the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse.

The “water of life” is inverted, becoming the damned crowds walking across the bridge. With the
reference to “cursed nations”, this allusion also means this passage can be seen in the context of fertility
myth/Arthurin which a curse has made the land arid.

###################################################################################

I had not thought death had undone so many

--------------------------

As noted by the author, this is an allusion to Dante Alighieri’s poem Inferno, Canto III, verses 55-57, in
which Dante describes a near-endless procession of people filing into Hell:

Si lunga tratta

Di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto

Che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta

The lines from Dante quoted by Eliot in his note for this line can be translated as:

Such a long train of spirits

I should ne'er Have thought

that death so many had despoil’d

###################################################################################

Sighs short and infrequent were exhaled

--------------------------

Another allusion to Dante Alighieri’s poem Inferno, Canto IV, verses 25-27, which describes a layer of
hell where people reside that will never find redemption.

The lines from Dante quoted by Eliot in his note for this line can be translated as:

Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare

Non avea pianto, ma' che di sospiri

Che l'aura eterna facevan tremare

Here, as mine ear could note

No plaint was heard, except of sighs

That made th' eternal air tremble

###################################################################################

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet

--------------------------
The crowd of the dead has no interpersonal contact: they are isolated, alienated, from one another.

###################################################################################

Flowed up the hill and down

--------------------------

A paradox that ties in with the previous line about flowing (bridges are designed so that stuff can flow
under them, not over). Also, this makes the crowd seem more like a force of nature than a group of
organisms, as in: their actions are automatic and undeliberate.

‘The hill’ refers to the bridge itself: most bridges are slightly arched for structural integrity.

###################################################################################

King william street

--------------------------

A road in London that directly follows the London bridge, crossing it southside to north.

###################################################################################
To where saint mary woolnoth kept the hours

--------------------------

St. Mary Woolnoth is an Anglican church in the City of London, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. It is
located on the corner of Lombard Street and King William Street, and yeah: it has a clock.

Fun fact

Eliot used to work across the street at the Lloyds Bank.

###################################################################################

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine

--------------------------

Here we are on King William Street, approaching the intersection with Lower Thames Street where it
diverges from Upper Thames (and later becomes London Bridge) and passing in front of Saint Mary
Woolnoth Church. This church happens to have a prominent clock face, which protrudes into the
intersection about 30 feet above street level. This architectural feat makes the clock visible from a great
distance.

The bell-tower of St Mary’s Church played the traditional intervals on the striking of every hour.

Also note the ominous, sepulchral imagery: “dead sound,” “final stroke.”
The author himself noted in the first American edition of the poem that the unusual sound of this
church’s bell at nine o'clock was:

A phenomenon which I have often noticed.

There are 9 circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno (OK, actually 8 circles and the vestibule limbo). This is also
the 9th line of the stanza, though it is not the “final” line. Read whatever symbolism into these things
you will.

But simply, it could also signify that the crowd of office workers have started their “9-to-5” working day,
at what could have seemed to most of them a “dead-end” job.

###################################################################################

There i saw one i knew and stopped him crying stetson

--------------------------

There have been several suggestions to the significance of the name Stetson. Stetson was the name of a
co-worker at the bank at which Eliot worked. However, Eliot’s friends saw this as a reference to Eliot’s
American friend, Ezra Pound.

###################################################################################

You who were with me in the ships at mylae

--------------------------

A Sicilian seaport, now called Milazzo. Near here, in 260 BC, Rome won a major naval battle with
Carthage.
According to Polybius, the battle of Mylae was ancient Rome’s first-ever naval battle and first naval
victory. Rome had no fleet before, having constructed it first solely for the purpose of the (ongoing, at
this time) First Punic War with Carthage, a major naval power. We might draw a slight parallel with the
United States becoming a new global power after WWI.

Because the Romans had no experience of fighting on water, they invented a device known as the raven
—a boarding bridge to hook an enemy ship and perform an abordage.

Mylae was an atypical naval battle; as Polybius describes it in book 1 23:6, although it took place on the
sea, it was:

just like a fight on land.

The Carthaginians were descendants of the Phoenician settlers in North Africa. Hence the term Punic
War, after the Roman name for them: “punici.” This connects to the drowned Phoenician sailor later in
the poem, who might be in parallel with a soldier of WWI.

###################################################################################

That corpse you planted last year in your garden has it begun to sprout will it bloom this year

--------------------------

Ohh, snap!

Check out our explanation of the title of this chapter to get some more background, but basically the
idea of burying a corpse in your back yard refers to:
The dead soldiers of WWI

Giving up on life

Ancient vegetation myths in Egypt and elsewhere.

Eliot might be saying here: “Has the war paid off? Did the sacrifice of all those lives truly make our
country better?”

###################################################################################

Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed

--------------------------

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

"Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”

In Webster’s The White Devil the dirge is

But keep the wolf far hence, that’s foe to men,

For with his nails, he’ll dig them up again,”

The Frost here is equated to the action of Eliot’s dog and Webster’s wolf—it disrupts the rite of the
buried god necessary to rejuvenate the wasteland encountered by the questing knight in the traditional
Grail Romance. Especially relevant to Parsifal and Gawain.

Could also refer to the lessening of combat in the winter in WWI (mentioned in line 5). One would
suspect that politicians used this as an excuse for the lack of results of the war and Eliot is mocking this.

###################################################################################
Oh keep the dog far hence thats friend to men

--------------------------

Eliot’s note to line 74 tells us to compare his line to the dirge song by Cornelia in The White Devil, Act 5,
Scene 4, the play by John Webster (published 1612.)

###################################################################################

Or with his nails hell dig it up again

--------------------------

Still citing from The White Devil.

You don’t want a dog screwing up your chance for fertility by digging up your offering to the vegetation
deity.

###################################################################################

You hypocrite lecteur mon semblable mon frere

--------------------------

From the preface, “To The Reader,” to Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857):

It’s BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together.

You know it well, my Reader. This obscene

beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine —

you — hypocrite Reader — my double — my brother!

The speaker is breaking the fourth wall and speaking to us, the reader, directly. By quoting this famous
poem, Eliot places himself in line with Baudelaire’s poetics—and, like Baudelaire, implicates us in the
sordid society his poem depicts.

###################################################################################

Ii a game of chess

--------------------------

This echoes the title of a play by Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (1624). The game of chess is likely
a surrogate for the game of loooove.

In Eliot’s own notes (verse 138), he references a chess playing scene in another of Thomas Middleton’s
works, Women Beware Women (1657), which is descriptive of a love triangle. Love triangles are a motif
in this section.

But, as usual, Eliot is probably choosing not to mention one of the major allusions he has in mind. There
is a famous chess-playing scene between Ferdinand and Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the
work that provides perhaps more of The Waste Land’s allusions than any other. (Shakespeare was a
direct influence on Middleton as well.) In The Tempest the chess players are blissful young lovers; here
they are a terribly unhappy married couple.

###################################################################################

The chair she sat in like a burnished throne

--------------------------
An allusion (verified by Eliot) to William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, scene ii line
190 where Enobarbus begins his description of Antony and Cleopatra’s first meeting:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne

Burned on the water.

###################################################################################

Standards wrought with fruited vines

--------------------------

Be on the lookout for sexual imagery here.

Like the Bible tells us:

Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine

The standards probably serve as phallic symbols, then.

There can also be an allusion to the Lord’s supper here:

“but I say to you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new
with you in My Father’s kingdom” (Matthew 26:29).

###################################################################################

From which a golden

--------------------------
Alludes to Exodus 25: 8-35

I will dwell among them and make two cherubim out of hammered gold at the ends of the cover.… make
the cherubim of one piece with the cover, at the two ends.… The cherubim are to have their wings
spread upward, overshadowing the cover with them…. The cherubim are to face each other, looking
toward the cover.

Eliot alters the position of the Cherubim—i.e. Cupidon to reflect the voyeuristic curiosity of one
heavenly creature and the shame, revulsion, or horror of the other. Rather than being positioned so as
to always view the Tabernacle of Moses, they have the perfect vantage point to view the sexual antics
enacted on Cleopatra’s bed or divan. And so one watches eagerly while the other has

hid his eyes

###################################################################################

Cupidon

--------------------------

A naked infantile figure looking like the Roman god of love. Cupid was the Roman counterpart to Eros.
He is commonly portrayed with a bow and arrow and wings.

###################################################################################

Another hid his eyes behind his wing

--------------------------
These two forms of Cupid suggest two forms of love. One is more bold, outgoing, while the other is shy
(hiding his eyes).

We should too. We’re voyeurs in a love scene.

In Roman mythology, Cupid is the god of erotic love and beauty. He is in Virgil’s Aeneid changed into the
shape of Ascanius inspiring Dido’s love, which leads to Dido eventually killing herself. Thus disguised,
Cupidon leads Aeneas in the Aeneid to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. Later Roman emperors
associated Cupidon also with the lust for glory or for power.

In one version of his myth, Cupidon is also the son of Aries and Mercury and portrayed as asexual,
further emphasizing universal love.

###################################################################################

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

--------------------------

Wade through this labyrinth of subordinate clauses and you find that what doubles the flames of the
menorah is the glass (mirror) held up by the Cupidon standards. The menorah is symbolic of universal
enlightenment and also a decorative item in the Temple of Jerusalem.

The number seven is prominent in Alice Bailey’s Letters on Occult Meditation, 1922, which discusses the
seven Rays and the seven Chakras (in Hinduism, the 7 wheels of energy in the human body). In medieval
Biblical numerology, seven means perfection or completeness — there are the 7 days in a week, the 7
sacraments, 7 deadly sins (and 7 virtues), 7 churches and 7 seals in the Apocalypse, etc. In Revelation I,
John talks about the seven churches (seven faiths) in the Roman province of Asia.
###################################################################################

Reflecting light upon the table as

--------------------------

The opening to “A Game of Chess” is a disconcerting combination of Domitius’s description of Cleopatra,

the Egyptian queen, in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra

With the description of The Tabernacle of Moses given in Exodus 25:8-35

The section in Shakespeare begins

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them…>

While Exodus,

make two cherubim out of hammered gold at the ends of the cover…

The cherubim are to have their wings spread upward…looking toward the cover.…

Place the table on the north side…and the candelabra opposite it>

Enters the description in Eliot’s lines:

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…>

This recombination of fragmented allusions produces an uncanny affect—combining the Earthly desires
and sexual passion signified by Cleopatra’s boudoir, with The Holiest of Hollies—a sacred locus of
cosmogony…

###################################################################################

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it

--------------------------

Referring to the reflected light of the candelabra, this line juxtaposes the symbolic freedom, knowledge,
and divine promise represented by the seven branched candlestick, with the temporal materiality and
transient value of Cleopatra’s lavish accoutrements.

As usual, Eliot leaves the resolution of this implied conflict suspended in his poem and offers no
resolution to the apparent standoff between the light reflecting the doubled image of the menorah and
that glinting off the emblems of royal decadence and privileged excess.

###################################################################################

From satin cases poured in rich profusion

--------------------------

In 166 B.C. the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid monarchy was successful. Judah took his place as
leader following Mattathias’s death and ending the prohibition on judaic religious practices in the region
. By 165 BC The Temple was liberated and rededicated.
The festival of Hanukkah was instituted to celebrate this event. Judah ordered the Temple to be
cleansed, a new altar to be built in place of the polluted one, and new holy vessels to be made.
According to the Talmud, olive oil was needed for the menorah in the Temple, which was required to
burn throughout the night every night. The story goes that there was only enough oil to burn for one
day, yet it burned for eight days, the time needed to prepare a fresh supply of oil for the menorah. An
eight-day festival was declared by the Jewish sages to commemorate this miracle. Similarly, this section
of the poem details a struggle between the forces of religious orthodoxy is symbolized by candelabra
and those of materialist artifice. The description of Cleopatra’s barge mirrors that of the holiest of holies
including the placement of the candelabra, cupids, table, standards, the gilding of the ornamentation,
and the materials used to assemble the structure.

A further parallel between the holy vessels which needed to be discarded and cleanse to re-consecrate
the temple in Jerusalem appears in the description of Cleopatra’s vessels which contain strange,
synthetic perfumes which are meant to heighten the passions, cloud judgment, and lend a profound
sense of impurity to the austere religious tone these lines also project.

###################################################################################

In vials of ivory and coloured glass unstoppered lurked her strange synthetic perfumes

--------------------------

She has her perfume bottles opened. ‘Strange and synthetic’ is characteristic of this whole scene and
perhaps even the modern world that Eliot is bashing on.

Also note the following, tying in with the blasphemous placement of the sevenbranched Temple
candleholder in a boudoir. Exodus 30:9 tells us the following about building an incense altar:

Ye shall offer no strange incense thereon, nor burnt-offering, nor meal-offering; and ye shall pour no
drink-offering thereon.

To set the mood, this scene is reminiscent of a line in a work by Jules Barbey D'aurevilly called La
veangeance d'une femme (the Vengeance of a Woman):
On the mantelpiece, the bottles that we had not thought to recap, before returning to the countryside
at night, let their fragrance meet in the warm atmosphere

###################################################################################

Unguent powdered or liquid

--------------------------

Unguent, powdered, or liquid

Unguent means with the consistency or viscosity of an ointment so these are pretty much the 3 states of
“cosmetic, and perfumeal” matter: Ointment or cream, powder, or liquid. and together they work to
confuse the senses of Cleopatra’s amorous male suiters for:

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety”

###################################################################################

Troubled confused

--------------------------

Again Eliot’s imagery speaks to the impurity of the air caused by the synthetic, artificial fragrances,
which turn a potentially sacred space into a problematic and desecrated place of infidelity. He brings the
opposing forces (material artifice, decadence, and lascivious impurity) in close proximity with imagery of
a location that could otherwise be read as indicating a holy site: a respite from the mechanical sterility
of human progress that dominates the poem as a whole.

One of the primary functions of the sacral items in the Temple in Jerusalem is providing environment
with which the presence of the divine will not be enabled to dwell due to the transient human
imperfections which separate the Divine from the Temporal—a distinction drawn throughout canonical
rabbinical thought.

The fact that Eliot describes these strange synthetic perfumes as troubling and confusing senses places
them in direct opposition to the purity and authenticity required of all materials present in the Hebrew
Temple. Thus the effects of these impurities—“drowning the senses in odors”—necessitating the same
manner of purification provided by the ceremonial lighting of pure olive oil and the menorah for a
period of eight days.

###################################################################################

And drowned the sense in odours

--------------------------

Remember the drowned Phoenician Sailor of the tarot cards.

And be on the lookout for a shipwreck in the next couple of lines.

###################################################################################

Stirred by the air that freshened from the window

--------------------------

The outside air, fresh and natural, collides with the tainted and synthetic inside air.

###################################################################################

These ascended in fattening the prolonged candle flames

--------------------------

In a literal sense, the perfumes are highly flammable. Metaphorically, they serve to ‘heighten the fire’.
You could take the candles to serve as phallic symbols, and there you go.

###################################################################################

Flung their smoke into the laquearia stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling

--------------------------

To explain this word Eliot refers to a line in Aeneid, translated:

Blazing torches hang from the gold-panelled ceiling (laquearibus aureis), and torches conquer the night
with flames.

(Virgil is describing the banquet given by Dido, queen of Carthage, for Aeneas, with whom she fell in
love.)

The fumes go to the “laquearia,” or coffered (paneled) ceiling.

###################################################################################

Huge sea wood fed with copper

--------------------------

A description of the coffered ceiling and another reference to Aeneas, in which Dido ordered a funeral
pyre (copper-colored fire) to burn all of Aeneas' possessions after he left Carthage, and her, by ship.
###################################################################################

Burned green and orange framed by the coloured stone in which sad light a carved dolphin swam

--------------------------

Further description of the scene carved on the roof in coloured stone:

The burning copper plus salts absorbed by the driftwood make the fire multi-coloured, like the jewels
and perfume bottles; the multiplicity is even reminiscent of the variegated perfumes.

Note that a fire fueled by “sea-wood” casts light in which a dolphin swims.

The light is particularly sad if, as the previous line suggests, the fire is a reference to Dido’s funeral pyre.

###################################################################################

Above the antique mantel was displayed

--------------------------

Above the antique mantel was displayed

This entire opening passage operates on multiple axises of parallelism.

-While the prima fascia description is of an ornate

“throne” room, the room is also the structure of

the poem itself:

-Encasing and displaying mythic images like a

gallery of fragmented artworks that were once

prized for their beauty.

-Thus, as the speaker focuses on the

fireplace,attention drifts to the mantle above it.

-As consciousness touches the painting of Philomela,

her image comes to life—evoking trough aural and

visual tropes the rape of Philomel.

###################################################################################

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

--------------------------

Eliot alludes to John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost, Book IV, verse 140 where Satan sees the garden of
Eden as a ‘Sylvan scene’ while he tries to seduce Eve (love triangle).

The precise wording of that verse is this:

A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend

Shade above shade, a woody theatre

Of stateliest view.
There are other images in that fragment of Milton’s poem that mirror The Waste Land and the opening
of this section :

When God hath showered the earth; so lovely seemed

that landscape (…)

Fanning their odiferous wings dispense

Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole

Those balmy spoils.

(…) Asmodeus with the fishy fume,

that drove him,though enamoured, from the spouse

Of Tobit’s son, and with a vengeance sent

From Media post to Egypt, there fast bound.

The last image refers to the Book of Tobit. It is a story about Tobias, Tobit’s son, travelling through
Media in Persia and marrying Sara, whose previous seven husbands had been murdered by her incubus
Asmodeus. The angel Raphael helps Tobias to repel Asmodeus — by burning fish organs — to Egypt,
where the angel binds the demon. The Book of Tobit is seen as a praise of the purity of marriage.

###################################################################################

The change of philomel by the barbarous king so rudely forced yet there the nightingale

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by-the-barbarous-king-so-rudely-forced-yet-there-the-nightingale
###################################################################################

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

--------------------------

Philomela fills the sterile land with her singing, even after being raped and having her tongue cut out.

###################################################################################

And still she cried

--------------------------

A reference to John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe:

“Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu,” she cries,

And still her woes at midnight rise.

Brave prick-song! who is’t now we hear?

None but the lark so shrill and clear;

‘Tereu’ is the Latin vocative of Tereus.

Alexander and Campaspe is about a love triangle between king Alexander, his slave Campaspe and the
painter Apelles.

###################################################################################
And still the world pursues

--------------------------

and still the world pursues,

This recalls the conclusion of the Philomela myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Tereus pursues
Philomel and Prochne across the parapat of the Palace at Thebes. As they reach the edge of the wall
Philomel is transformed in to a Nightingale and

Still she cries “Jug-Jug”

As the world pursues her. Philomel functions as a synecdote for sexual desire in this line.

###################################################################################

Jug jug to dirty ears

--------------------------

Elizabethan poets often used the sound “Jug Jug” to represent the sound of the nightingale. The myth of
Philomela was a popular theme at the times. William Shakespeare, for example, employed it in four of
his tragedies.

“Jug” also had a crude sexual connotation, as in “jiggly jugs.” If Eliot had this meaning in mind, it lends
additional meaning to “dirty ears.”

(The slang existed at the time: Jugs for “woman’s breasts” is first recorded 1920 in Australian slang,
short for milk jugs.)
The actual sound a nightingale makes can be heard on this video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=EPQz1IShfxQ

###################################################################################

And other withered stumps of time

--------------------------

A quote from the poem “Conversation,” by William Cowper:

So wither’d stumps disgrace the sylvan scene,

No longer fruitful, and no longer green;

This recalls the vegetation myths again.

In the essay “Withered Stumps of Time: The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion,” R. V. Young concludes:

The radical poetic techniques of The Waste Land are an integral part of its significance. The dislocations
of stream-ofconsciousness narrative and the ironic juxtapositions of multiple allusions embody Eliot’s
vision of the human condition in which we enjoy only brief, fragmentary glimpses of beauty and
meaning among the “withered stumps of time."

###################################################################################

Were told upon the walls staring forms leaned out leaning

--------------------------

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed

Alludes Virgil’s Book VI of Aeneid, this is Dryden’s Translation:

Then o'er the lofty gate his art emboss'd

Androgeos' death, and off'rings to his ghost;

Sev'n youths from Athens yearly sent, to meet

The fate appointed by revengeful Crete.

And next to those the dreadful urn was plac’d,

In which the destin’d names by lots were cast:

The mournful parents stand around in tears,

And rising Crete against their shore appears.

There too, in living sculpture, might be seen

The mad affection of the Cretan queen;

Then how she cheats her bellowing lover’s eye;

The rushing leap, the doubtful progeny,

The lower part a beast, a man above,

The monument of their polluted love.

The Lines:

There too, in living sculpture, might be seen

The mad affection of the Cretan queen

Are particularly relevant to the sense of scene Eliot has created up to this point in “A Game of Chess."

Remember, we’ve just been given a catalogue of the material objects in this "Throne Room"

Eliot has made damn sure that each and every one of these material objects, alludes to a greater
historic and literary context to flesh-out the meaning of the section.
We have been shown the burnished throne, high ceiling of crafted timber, dias propped up by golden
flagpoles with golden cupids, mantle, fireplace, Dolpin fresco/painting/pottery/whatever, painting of
Philomel’s rape, and now:

Other Withered Stumps of time

Which are ALSO told upon the walls.

The syntax of this line indicates each of the objects previously mentioned,

each ornament adorning the throne room is a

Withered Stump of Time

That is to say each of these objects is withered, diminished and only a signifier pointing to those tragic
events they describe.

The “Living sculptures” in Virgil, are the same as Eliot’s “withered stumps.” They are reliefs carved into
the Sibyl’s Cave at Cumae to tell the narratives of Greek and Roman mythology—Pictographic allusions
to the mythic past.

In the same manner as Eliot uses literary allusion to

Maintain a continuous parallel between past and present Ulysses, Order and Myth

The section in Virgil concludes:

All this with wond'ring eyes Aeneas view’d;

Each varying object his delight renew’d:

Eager to read the rest- Achates came,

And by his side the mad divining dame,

The priestess of the god, Deiphobe her name.

“Time suffers not,” she said, “to feed your eyesWith empty pleasures; haste the sacrifice.

So—gawking at the beautiful imagery, detailed allusion,—Aeneas gets so carried away by looking at
these carvings and these re-presentations of past history and tradition. Finally, the Sibyl snaps him out
of it—reminding him,

Time suffers not, to feed your eyes

With empty pleasures.

###################################################################################

Hushing the room enclosed

--------------------------

Remember Philomela had her tongue cut out after the rape.

###################################################################################

Footsteps shuffled on the stair

--------------------------

This line, among many of the opening lines is adapted from an earlier and unfinished auto-biographical
poem by Eliot named Death of the Duchess.

There will be no footsteps up and down the stairs

Could be the wife’s lover that is sneaking out. In Eliot’s case, this would be the philosophy superstar
Bertrand Russell.
###################################################################################

The firelight

--------------------------

The firelight may be the one from Plato’s allegory of the cave, especially in connection to the line “Were
told upon the walls; staring forms” above it.

Plato’s Cave allegory (‘The Republic’ 514a-517b) serves to illustrate his theory of forms : our reality is
like that of prisoners in a cave, where a firelight behind their cell casts — upon the wall they see —
shadows of real things. The prisoners of the cave, who in Plato’s allegory would have been there since
their birth, would naturally confuse the shadows on the wall for the real things that stand between the
wall and the firelight. The movie ‘The Matrix’ is in a way a version of Plato’s cave story.

The lines 72,73 and 76 from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) form another possible reference to it:

Between the idea

And the reality

(…)

Falls the Shadow

The Sybil of Cumae, as described by Virgil in ‘The Aeneid’ (one of Eliot’s early favourites), is encountered
by Aeneas in a cave on the side of a cliff at Cumae. Virgil’s description of Hades is also supposedly based
on the writings of Plato.

###################################################################################

Her hair spread out in fiery points glowed into words

--------------------------
Her hair becomes words. The surrealism of the image suggests the collapse of the apparent realism with
which the scene begun.

Note the contrast with the line in the first section: “your arms full, and your hair wet.”

###################################################################################

Then would be savagely still

--------------------------

She can’t speak, so expresses her distress through her hair in a dramatic fit, and then becomes quiet
again. Did anyone hear her?

###################################################################################

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

--------------------------

This passage — from here till the Lil starts talking in the next section — is a conversation, or one side of
a conversation, between a couple, usually taken to be Eliot and his wife Vivienne.

Tom and Viv:

They weren’t a good match. He couldn’t get it up, she disgusted him. She slept with Bertrand Russell,
the ladykilling philosopher who rented them a flat (and turns up in several Eliot poems — see the note
on “Madame Sosostris”). Eliot may have had affairs with men

She had lots of probably psychosomatic mental problems and eventually Eliot had her committed to an
asylum. He said of the distress caused by the marriage: “to me it brought the state of mind out of which
came The Waste Land”

Remember the hyacinth girl in the beginning, who couldn’t speak or see and knew nothing, and was
alive nor dead.

###################################################################################

I think we are in rats alley where the dead men lost their bones

--------------------------

This image is usually explained as the WWI trenches. In Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with
a Cigar” rats are also, however, disturbingly associated with Jews:

The rats are underneath the piles.

The jew is underneath the lot.

The “alley of bones” is probably a play on the valley of bones in Ezekiel 37. In a vision of the prophet, a
wind revives the dead skeletons. Hmm… What is that noise?

###################################################################################

What is that noise the wind under the door

--------------------------
Eliot’s note:

Cf. Webster: ‘Is the wind in that door still?’

Eliot is alluding to a line from Act 3, Scene 2 of The Devil’s-Law Case, a play by Jacobean-era English
dramatist John Webster.

It’s possible that he also has in mind a quotation from Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d'Arthur:

And there the king asked his nephew, Sir Gareth, whether he would have that lady as paramour, or to
have her to his wife. My lord, wit you well that I love her above all ladies living. Now, fair lady, said King
Arthur, what say ye? Most noble King, said Dame Lionesse, wit you well that my lord, Sir Gareth, is to me
more liefer to have and wield as my husband, than any king or prince that is christened; and if I may not
have him I promise you I will never have none. For, my lord Arthur, said Dame Lionesse, wit ye well he is
my first love, and he shall be the last; and if ye will suffer him to have his will and free choice I dare say
he will have me. That is truth, said Sir Gareth; an I have not you and wield not you as my wife, there shall
never lady nor gentlewoman rejoice me. What, nephew, said the king, is the wind in that door? for wit
ye well I would not for the stint of my crown to be causer to withdraw your hearts; and wit ye well ye
cannot love so well but I shall rather increase it than distress it.

It’s not exactly a famous quotation, although that never stopped Eliot before (and it’s since become
better known as the epigraph to Madeleine L'Engle’s A Wind in the Door). Still, it would be fitting as a
source, given the importance of Arthurian legend to The Waste Land and the irony of the context. In
Malory’s tale, the phrase is used as an expression meaning something like “What does that matter?” In
Eliot’s poem the speaker and his wife are dwelling precisely on things that don’t matter, the “nothings”
and banalities of everyday life. In the Malory, too, the context is a marriage agreement between a happy
couple (though Sir Gareth will face many trials before their wedding). In The Waste Land, the context is a
marriage gone terribly stale.

###################################################################################

What is that noise now what is the wind doing

--------------------------
What, what, what? Nothing, nothing.

The noise and the wind are typically things that bring da ruckus, but this marriage still is incredibly
boring.

###################################################################################

Nothing again nothing do you know nothing

--------------------------

Remember the not, neither, nothing of verse 40. The ‘life winds’ are ignored, and impotence remains.

The isolated “Do” might suggest a direct call to action (don’t ignore the winds, do something, etc.) which
is not picked up on.

###################################################################################

Do you see nothing

--------------------------

These frantic questions allude to one of the prophecies of Isaiah 44:18

“They know nothing, they understand nothing; their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see, and
their minds closed so they cannot understand.”

Eliot alludes to the prophecy of a time when the minds of the sons of men minds become so closed to
the world. Isaiah concludes:
“such a person sees on ashes of the heart misleads him he cannot even save himself”

###################################################################################

Do you remember nothing

--------------------------

Again echoing Isaiah 44, Eliot recalls the prophets' warning to remember the necessity of faith in the
Divine and service to His will provides the access to redemption/rebirth/new life.

Remember these things, Jacob,

For you, Israel, are my servant.

I have made you, you are my servant;

Israel, I will not forget you.

I have swept away your offenses like a cloud,

your sins like the morning mist.

###################################################################################

I remember

--------------------------

Here, the stray, singular, memory flashes back to the room with Mme. Sosostris' Tarot prophecies, and
the protagonist’s card: The Drowned Phoenician Sailor. This drowned sailor is at once, the protagonist,
Odysseus, Phlebas, Stetson, Ferdinand, and Job —victim and beneficiary, dead and alive, erased, and
reborn.
These symbolic connotations rekindle the redemptive possibility as in Isaiah’s prophecy. However, the
redemptive tone is coded again in a further allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ariel’s song: Full
Fathom Five

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.

As the song falsely describes, the King reported dead, is said to have undergone “A sea change into
something rich and strange."

While the image remains unnerving, the underlying theme of redemption after death, of a change which
human consciousness cannot comprehend but which is none the less beautiful and rich despite leaving
behind all semblance of "human” experience.

This notion of death being a metamorphosis of sorts through which redemption may be possible but is
still an utter uncertainty becomes the subject of “Death by Water”, when these same symbolic referents
and images are brought back in a more striking argument for what Isaiah foretold.

###################################################################################

Those are pearls that were his eyes

--------------------------

This quotation from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is taken from Ariel’s Song to Ferdinand, in
Scene ii, Act I of the play. The song is called “Full Fathom Five”:
Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

This line,

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

appeared earlier in the poem and pops up again here. These kinds of recurring phrases suggest a
thought or quotation that the speaker can’t get out of his head.

###################################################################################

Are you alive or not

--------------------------

This question sets up the Shakespeare parody of the popular tune of That Mysterious Rag, two lines
down.

Triggered by its association, of course, of the famous line from Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1.

To be or not to be? That is the question.

###################################################################################

Oooo

--------------------------

In the first folio release of Hamlet (line 3847), this is Hamlet’s parting sigh.

3846: So tell him with the occurrents more and lesse,

3847: Which haue solicited. The rest is silence. O, o, o, o.

[Dyes]

###################################################################################

That shakespeherian rag its so elegant so intelligent

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###################################################################################

What shall i do now what shall i do i shall rush out as i am and walk the street with my hair down so
what shall we do to morrow

--------------------------
With her hair down, as opposed to lines 108-110:

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

These lines are echoed in Chapters 1 and 7 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a novel that makes
a number of Waste Land allusions:

“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?” (Ch. 1)

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty
years?” (Ch. 7)

###################################################################################

What shall we ever do the hot water at ten and if it rains a closed car at four

--------------------------

The answer to this existential lament is, in another massive anticlimax, a suggestion of routine.`

Tea at ten is a suggestion that the couple likes to sleep a lot.

Driving in a closed car is yet again an example of turning your back to nature and fertility.

###################################################################################
And we shall play a game of chess

--------------------------

The “Game of Chess” is an allusion to two plays by Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Middleton: Women
Beware Women (1657) and A Game at Chesse (1624). Both plays contain a rape (in keeping with the
allusive motif of this section of Eliot’s poem).

In Women Beware Women Liva, the henchwoman of the Duke, engages the stepmother of Bianca—the
Duke’s sexual target—in a game of chess. While she is distracted the Duke enters Bianca’s chambers and
plays a game of his own. Middleton brilliantly uses the moves in the chess game and the dialogue of the
two chess players to describe the rape occurring upstairs and the moves in the chess match
simultaneously.

###################################################################################

Pressing lidless eyes and

--------------------------

Pressing lidless eyes

In this line, Eliot alludes to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1881 poem Inclusiveness

The changing guests, each in a different mood,

Sit at the roadside table and arise:

And every life among them in likewise

Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.

What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood

How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—

Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,

Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

May not this ancient room thou sit’st in dwell

In separate living souls for joy or pain?

Nay, all its corners may be painted plain

Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;

And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,

Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.

###################################################################################

Waiting for a knock upon the door

--------------------------

waiting for a knock upon the door.

alludes the account in John’s Gospel of the period of time Christ’s burial and before the resurrection
when the Apostles were held up and feared they would be the next targets. So they waited for the
knock upon the door—equally in faith that Christ, resurrected would be return as was foretold and
dreading it the knock would be the Roman authorities.

###################################################################################

When lils husband got demobbed

--------------------------
“Demobbed” is British slang abbreviation for “demobilised”, which means released from military service
back into civilian life (civvies). Over 2 million British were demobbed after WW1 from a population of 35
million — a huge proportion of the population. After WW2, demobbed men were given a free suit when
they shed their uniforms. When men knew they were leaving the service, they were spoken of as being
“demob- happy” (i.e. a bit careless of their duties!).

Ezra Pound suggested the term in favor of Eliot’s “was coming back out of the Transport Corps,” seen in
the drafts and manuscripts.

“Demobbed” also carries a derogatory connotation, arising from the manner in which it aligns military
actions (e.g. enlistment/conscription, deployment) with actions of “the mob.” Thus, getting home from a
deployment suggests leaving the herd.

The phrase was used regularly through the 1930s in British anti-war and pacifist campaigns—equating
soldiers with mindless “mob members" who are the objects and victims of group-think, and who have
renounced their subjectivity. It has been used as recently as 2012 in American mainstream media.

###################################################################################

I said i didnt mince my words i said to her myself

--------------------------

I said -

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,

The speaker gives the impression of authenticity and straightforwardness in her attempt to warn poor,
destitute, toothless, antique-looking Lil that her husband is going to return from the war only to
abandon her for someone who would offer to be a more attractive sexual object for “poor Albert.”

###################################################################################
Hurry up please its time

--------------------------

When British pubs had to close at 11 pm (10:30 pm on Sundays) the traditional announcement by the
publican (pub owner/ tender) would be “Time, Gentlemen, Please!”.

“Hurry up please, it’s time!” is what a pub owner might say to get his customers who are hanging
around all night and chatting—cough cough Lil and her friend— to drink up and vamoose so he can close
the pub.

Its a colloquialism similar to “Last Call!” in the US.

Also this stresses the importance of time—a deep concern for the modernists—and echoes the allusion
to Marvel’s To His Coy Mistress which appears in “The Fire Sermon”

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

###################################################################################

Now alberts coming back make yourself a bit smart

--------------------------
The speaker is ushering Lil to prepare herself for her husband’s return home from the war. She tells her
get “smart” in other words prepare the proper mindset for sex. According to the speaker of the stanza
she is nothing more than a pawn- an object used solely for sexual desire and nothing more.

“make yourself a bit smart” also is in terms of beauty NOT intelligence so in other words Eliot utilizes
irony to contrast true intelligence with the speaker’s image of beauty replacing intelligence.

###################################################################################

Hell want to know what you done with that money he gave you

--------------------------

As we’ll find out, she bought abortion pills.

This may also be a reference to Matthew 25:14-30, the Parable of the Three Servants.

###################################################################################

To get yourself some teeth

--------------------------

Being from a poorer class and before there was and welfare infrastructure to ensure good dental health,
she doesn’t have very nice teeth. Albert, as it becomes apparent, cares more about Lil’s appearance that
Lil. He gave Lil money to literally get a new set of teeth so she’ll look nicer for him.

###################################################################################
He did i was there

--------------------------

Eliot is skillfully recreating some female gossip, and this particularly gossipy female asserts that she
heard the woman’s husband with her own ears.

###################################################################################

I cant bear to look at you

--------------------------

Suggests that women’s worth as wives is based on their physical attractiveness, something that Eliot
derides.

###################################################################################

And no more cant i i said and think of poor albert

--------------------------

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

Here, the speaker and “friend” of Lil degrades her for her physical appearance and brings her military
husband into the picture by stressing how “poor albert” will be disappointed because of his wife’s
shabby appearance.
This continues the trope of sexual vagrancy in the poem. Here, the sterility and nearly mechanistic
portrayal of sexual acts is described even with in a previously fruitful marriage.

It is important that Lil’s “friend” views Lil’s role in the household as purely sexual and her utility to
husband and society only as a sexual object.

The fact that she is a mother to 4 children and has raised them on her own for the past four years while
poor Albert has been in the trenches is utterly worthless to the speaker.

In this mode of social configuration the only valuable good is sexual object-hood and Lil, not wanting to
play that game and having moved on to more developed social roles—mother, provider, caregiver, etc.
—is configured as the abject.

###################################################################################

Hes been in the army four years he wants a good time

--------------------------

World War I lasted from 1914 — 1918, that’s a long time without a lay!

###################################################################################

And if you dont give it him theres others will i said

--------------------------

Lil’s husband, Albert, is going to leave her for another woman if she doesn’t get a new set of teeth.

The ‘others’ refers to the speaking lady as well.

###################################################################################

Oh is there she said something o that i said then ill know who to thank she said and give me a straight
look

--------------------------

Lil doesn’t even want sex, and her friend would be doing Lil a favor if she had sex with Albert.

###################################################################################

Hurry up please its time

--------------------------

This line that keeps on being repeated could also be a reference to Revelation 1:

3: Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things
which are written therein: for the time is at hand.

Eliot seems to be making a judgment call. It’s time to better your life. It’s time to get with it.

###################################################################################

Others can pick and choose if you cant

--------------------------
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

Others will be happy to take Albert away from Lil, so she better decide if she’s going to put out to keep
her man when he gets back. Lil is being demeaned for “looking so antique,” for needing a set of false
teeth, and for her lack of vivacity—all of which are sexual failings or shortcomings in the mind of her
“friend.” The nasty implication is that the value of Lil as a person is equal to her performance of sexual
acts, or even that sex is the only arena in which the female body retains utility.

###################################################################################

But if albert makes off it wont be for lack of telling you ought to be ashamed i said to look so antique
and her only thirty one

--------------------------

Lil apparently looks and acts like an old woman, needing new teeth and not desiring sex at 31 years old.
(The second of these is due, of course, to her experiences with abortion and probably her unhappiness
in marriage.) According to her “friend,” it’ll be no surprise if Albert decides to leave her.

###################################################################################

I cant help it she said pulling a long face

_______________________________

/web/20141110124045/http://lit.genius.com/1701690/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land/I-cant-help-it-she-said-
pulling-a-long-face

###################################################################################

Its them pills i took to bring it off she said shes had five already and nearly died of young george

--------------------------
Back in the 1920s, any pill you could take to abort a fetus would seriously affect your body. This is
probably why Lil isn’t looking so good.

The unborn George was probably named after George V, king of the UK at the time.

Ironically, the etymological root of this name, Greek word georgos, means agrarian. This brings us back
to the vegetation myth. This defiance life of life near-killed Lil to a state of being a living dead woman.

###################################################################################

The chemist said it would be alright

--------------------------

The chemist said it would be alright

The “Chemist” would be the Pharmacist where Lil got the abortion pills.

Likely the pills were diachylon, which was often used by middle- and lower-class British women in the
early 1900s up through 1925, as indicated by numerous case studies.

###################################################################################

You are a proper fool i said

--------------------------

Besides being a withering put down, this line conjures up an earlier Eliot reference to ‘Hamlet’:
That begins,

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be

and ends:

[I am]

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the fool

Note, too, that this passage ends with a quotation from Ophelia in the same play.

###################################################################################

What you get married for if you dont want children

--------------------------

This line was reportedly added by Vivienne, Eliot’s wife, to replace Eliot’s line:

You want to keep him here at home, I suppose.

###################################################################################

Hurry up please its time

--------------------------

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

The repetition of the publican’s closing-time-call lends a sense of urgency to the passage and builds the
feeling that the segment is quickly approaching some brink or other terminus. A promise which is
fulfilled in Ophelia’s pre-suicidal, mad, ramblings seven lines later.

###################################################################################

Well that sunday albert was home

--------------------------

Albert is back from the war after four years and he and his family have a Sunday brunch including a hot,
roasted ham (gammon). They even invite Lil’s drinking buddy, the shrewish rabble rouser from the pub.

###################################################################################

They had a hot gammon

--------------------------

Gammon (from the French word jambe, which refers to the hind leg of a pig) is the traditional British
term for ham.

###################################################################################

And they asked me in to dinner to get the beauty of it hot

--------------------------
This suggests either the possibility of a threesome or the possibility of sex being sabotaged by inviting a
friend over.

###################################################################################

Hurry up please its time hurry up please its time

--------------------------

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

The further repetition of the publican’s call in rapid succession and without any intervening lines of
monologue from the cockney woman ratchets up the tension in the scene and increases the speed at
which the section moves towards its telos.

###################################################################################

Goonight bill goonight lou goonight may goonight ta ta goonight goonight

--------------------------

The speaker says goodbye to all her pub friends.

Bill might be a reference to William Shakespeare.

May is a reference to the spring, like April was before. (‘Goodbye fertility.’)
###################################################################################

Good night ladies good night sweet ladies good night good night

--------------------------

See Hamlet: Act 4, Scene 5. Working class London speech ends with the words of mad Ophelia. O, that
Shakespeherian rag.

###################################################################################

Iii

--------------------------

Cf. the conclusion of “The Fire Sermon” {Aditta-pariyaya-sutta}:

“Bhikkhus, when a noble follower who has heard (the truth) sees thus, he finds estrangement in the eye,
finds estrangement in forms, finds estrangement in eye-consciousness, finds estrangement in eye-
contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful- nor-pleasant that arises with eye-
contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.

“He finds estrangement in the ear… in sounds…

“He finds estrangement in the nose… in odors…

“He finds estrangement in the tongue… in flavors…

“He finds estrangement in the body… in tangibles…

“He finds estrangement in the mind, finds estrangement

“When he finds estrangement, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, he is liberated. When
liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. He understands:

‘Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more
beyond.’"

###################################################################################

The fire sermon

--------------------------

“The Fire Sermon” is a reference to Buddha’s “Fire Sermon”. Buddha’s sermon detailed how to achieve
liberation from eternal suffering of the recurring circle of life (Samsara). Thus, Buddha laid down the
principles of detachment from the temporal, material world as accomplished by detaching one’s self
form the 5 senses.

In the sermon, 1000 white robed acolytes from all castes gathered and were told that the flesh,
existence, connection, and love, are all burning and even the ascetics burn with attachment.

Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?

The eye is burning, forms are burning,

eye-consciousness is burning,

eye-contact is burning,

also whatever is felt as

pleasant or painful or neither-painful

-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact

for its indispensable condition,

that too is burning.

Burning with what? Burning with

the fire of lust, with the fire of hate,

with the fire of delusion.

I say it is burning with birth,

aging and death, with sorrows,

with lamentations, with pains,

with griefs, with despairs.

“The ear is burning, sounds are burning…

“The nose is burning, odors are burning…

“The tongue is burning, flavors are burning…

“The body is burning, tangibles are burning…

Also, the title of this section alludes to a “Fire Sermon,” which was held annually in the Church of St.
Magnus Martyr in London (referenced later in this section of the poem) to commemorate the fact that
the Church survived the 1633 fire on London Bridge, where it was situated. Incidentally, it was later
destroyed during the 1666 Great Fire of London, the monument to which is located near the rebuilt
church.

###################################################################################

The rivers tent is broken the last fingers of leaf clutch and sink into the wet bank
--------------------------

During the summer, a canopy of leaves would have concealed the river from the sky; in autumn, this is
gradually disintegrating.

Eliot’s metaphor of the finger-leaves suggests that summer, life, growth are struggling to hang on, only
to drown in the river (of time?)

###################################################################################

The wind crosses the brown land unheard

--------------------------

These lines recall the wasting of the land encountered by the questing knight in the medieval grail
romances.

In Chrétien’ de Troyes' Perceval, written between 1181 and 1191, the questing knight-Perceval- fails to
inquire into the mystery sourounding the King’s ailment. By remaining silent concerning the state of the
king, his wounding, and the wasting of the realm, as well as refusing to speak when confronted with the
sacral artifacts he beholds at the pinnacle of his quest: a bleeding lance and candelabra; Perceval fails to
reverse the wasting of the land which was brought about by the wounding of the king. Likewise,
Perceval is unable to aid/heal the King and for this failure he is admonished by a mysterious female
figure who appears in the court shortly after he returns.

Her appearance is specifically to chastise Perceval. She notes, in her trouncing of the knight, that by
failing to ask his host

“whom the grail served and why the lance he beheld bled.”
Perceval failed his king. Whereas, the appropriate question would have healed The Fisher King who’s
wounds to his vital areas (genitals/groin) deprive him of his ability to act as the literal head of his realm
as outlined by the feudal principle:

“regis corpus qua est vita regnum"

Literally:

“The king’s body which is the vitality of his domain”

Thus, the wasting of the land is a direct corollary of the progenitive deficiency of its sovereign and the
failure of Perceval in his quest.

###################################################################################

The nymphs are departed

--------------------------

Nymphs are mythical river spirits from Greek mythology. Continuing the theme of drought at death, the
metaphorical river is so dead that even the spirits that inhabit it have left. Nymphs are also a symbol of
sex, partying, etc. This could be connecting to the previous chapter about the departure of sex and
youth.

###################################################################################

Sweet thames run softly till i end my song

--------------------------

The refrain of Prothalamion, a poem written by the influential Tudor poet Edmund Spencer.
Prothalamion is written in the form of a marriage song.

###################################################################################

Silk handkerchiefs

--------------------------

Possibly used as makeshift condoms. These were the days before mass-produced, widely available
prophylactics. John Baxter’s 2009 dictionary of sexual slang, Carnal Knowledge, repeats an old joke:

“He’s a fine boy.” “He should be. He was strained through a silk handkerchief.”

This along with the other litter gives a highly unromantic spin to the line below — “testimony of summer
nights.”

###################################################################################

Cigarette ends or other testimony of summer nights

--------------------------

Fragmented rubbish from drunken summer nights, spent coursing with nymphs.

Interestingly enough, Eliot’s catalogue of the debris drifting down the Thames does not explicitly contain
what one would expect to spy floating on the currents..
One can certainly imagine spotting the occasional used and discarded condom floating along with the

“other testimonies of summer nights”

nights spent with “the nymphs.”

###################################################################################

The nymphs are departed

--------------------------

Eliot is invoking the roman goddess of childbirth Diana, often celebrated with her nymphs departing the
hunt by painters such as Rubens. Here solitude correlates with a loss of purpose, and the nymphs do not
protect the goddess who allows for their sustenance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_(mythology)

###################################################################################

And their friends the loitering heirs of city directors

--------------------------

Something degrading for the nymphs to be associated with loiterers and materialists. Mythology has lost
its backbone, thanks to those bastards at Barclays.

This line might allude to the first stanza of John Keats' famous poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci:
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has wither’d from the lake,

And no birds sing."

###################################################################################

Departed have left no addresses

--------------------------

Departed, have left no addresses.

The loitering heirs of the city directors have left London. The nymphs of ancient myth have departed
London in the poem’s previous line. In the modern world they have lost their mystery and credibility,
and have become faintly embarrassing. Even the modern-day stand-ins for nymphs (beautiful young
women) have departed this scene. Presumably after coupling with the wealthy “heirs”. Now, it is the
heirs turn to get the hell out of dodge.

While the heirs of city directors lingered in the Unreal City longer than did the nymphs- “loitering” in the
phantasmagoria of modern London. But now, they have gone.

Moreover, their departure maintains a sense of mystery and obscurity. They vanish without giving any
indication of where they are going. Like the Cumaean Sibyl whose presence and physical body is literally
elided, they “have left no [forwarding] addresses” and similarly vanish from memory.

There is a similarity between these

“loitering heirs”

and
“the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire”

In many ways the heirs of city directors, who represent the decadence of a wealthy and morally
depraved upper-class engaging in debaucheries with the nymphs on summer London nights, prefigures
the character of The Young Man Carbuncular and his mechanical, sterile, and loveless coupling with The
Typist.

Compare Les Miserables, in which the young louts leave their ladies in the lurch after an extended idyll.
This was how Cosette was conceived, and then born to Fantine without benefit of a father.

###################################################################################

By the waters of leman i sat down and wept

--------------------------

Lac Léman is French for Lake Geneva. Moreover, Léman’s Middle-English ancestor “leofmon” is an
archaic term for “mistress”.

BUT what’s really going on here is that the waters in question belong to RG founder Lemon, placing us
somewhere in Miami…

In reality, this reference to Lac Léman has the tone of both biography and Eulogy. Eliot stayed at
Lausanne on the banks of Lake Geneva (Lac Leman) for a large portion of his convalescent leave from
Lloyd’s Bank. There he underwent treatment for his “psychological problems”. By the Waters of Leman
was where much of The Waste Land was written.
Notably: the remainder of the poem was composed at Margate, where Eliot underwent psychological
treatment durring his convalescence. This locus also appears in the poem:

“On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing”

This line also alludes to the opening lines of Psalm 137

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.

Moreover, the remainder of Psalm 137 prefigures the structure and symbolic content of the remainder
of Eliot’s stanza.

On the willows there we hung up our lyres.

For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs
of Zion!”

The singing of the captive Hebrews has echoes in Eliot’s “Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.”
The constant reminder of their abandoned Jerusalem and the sacrifices left behind in the sacred ground
of Zion, is recalled in Eliot’s Memori Mort which is itself a grotesque parody of Marvel’s To His Coy
Mistress

The theme of loss of identity and centrality fits in well here.

###################################################################################

Sweet thames run softly till i end my song

--------------------------

Alludes to the Prothalamion (1875) by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), line 18 of which reads:
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.

This line becomes a refrain, repeating as the 18th line of each subsequent stanza.

###################################################################################

Sweet thames run softly for i speak not loud or long

--------------------------

This line illustrates how freely Eliot uses his sources throughout The Waste Land. After lifting the
previous line from Edmund Spenser, he adds an original line to turn it into a rhymed couplet. Bold!

“Not loud or long” adds to the many intimations of mortality in the poem. The Waste Land’s speaker (or
speakers) is just a brief, quiet voice in the ongoing spectacle of nature.

###################################################################################

But at my back in a cold blast i hear the rattle of the bones and chuckle spread from ear to ear

--------------------------

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

The first time in the poem Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress is referenced, but not the last. Here,
Eliot alludes to lines 21-22 specifically.
But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;

###################################################################################

A rat

--------------------------

Rats are a recurring image in the Waste Land; see above:

I think we are in rats' alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

As aforementioned, in one notorious poem Eliot used rats as a symbol of Jews. In The Waste Land,
however, this association is not made and the rats appear to be a generalized symbol of decay.

###################################################################################

The vegetation

--------------------------

Of the changes which the seasons bring with them, the most striking within the temperate zone are
those which affect vegetation. The influence of the seasons on animals, though great, is not nearly so
manifest. Hence it is natural that in the magical dramas designed to dispel winter and bring back spring
the emphasis should be laid on vegetation, and that trees and plants should figure in them more
prominently than beasts and birds.
Yet the two sides of life, the vegetable and the animal, were not dissociated in the minds of those who
observed the ceremonies. Indeed they commonly believed that the tie between the animal and the
vegetable world was even closer than it really is; hence they often combined the dramatic
representation of reviving plants with a real or a dramatic union of the sexes for the purpose of
furthering at the same time and by the same act the multiplication of fruits, of animals, and of men. To
them the principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was one and indivisible.

To live and to cause to live, to eat food and to beget children, these were the primary wants of men in
the past, and they will be the primary wants of men in the future so long as the world lasts. Other things
may be added to enrich and beautify human life, but unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity
itself must cease to exist.

(an excerpt from the chapter Adonis in James George Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’)

Eliot opens his notes on ‘The Waste Land’ with the mention of Frazer’s work as the source of his
references to ancient vegetation ceremonies. The paragraph (which I broke into three parts) quoted
here sums up pretty clearly the reasons for these ceremonies, their content, the reason they are
connected to sex and the possible inspiration for Eliot’s themes of sex, barrenness and civilization.

###################################################################################

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

--------------------------

Although Eliot is notorious for having symbolically linked Jews with rats in “Burbank with a Baedeker:
Bleistein with a Cigar,” in the context of this poem the rats can be seen as simply a symbol of decay.

###################################################################################

While i was fishing in the dull canal

--------------------------
It turns out a few stanzas down that “I” = Tiresias, the androgynous figure from Greek myth. Tiresias is
not exactly half-man, half-woman, but alternately a man and then a woman, and then a man again.
When Zeus and Hera argue about whether men or women get the most pleasure out of sex (each
claiming the opposite sex has the advantage), they turn to Tiresias to settle the argument. Tiresias says
women get more pleasure from sex; Hera is so angry that she blinds Tiresias, and Zeus tries to even
things out by giving Tiresias the gift of prophesy.

The fact that Tiresias is fishing aligns him with the Fisher King, the cursed king from the Grail Legend
who doesn’t die but can’t procreate either, and sits by the river fishing as his estate becomes a
wasteland.

###################################################################################

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

--------------------------

From “a rat crept softly…” to “…behind the gashouse”, there seem to be allusions to the Hades episode
of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’; on the way to a funeral, Mr. Bloom recalls a jingle;

Rattle his bones/Over the stones/Only a pauper/Nobody owns."

A rat is crawling through the cemetery and the funeral processions stops by gasworks near the canal.

###################################################################################

Musing upon the king my brothers wreck and on the king my fathers death before him

--------------------------
The Tempest, Act 1 Scene II:

Sitting on a bank,

Weeping again the king my father’s wreck,

This music crept by me upon the waters…

Eliot does his trick of substituting a single word to bring in another allusion, here: these lines can also be
linked to the Percival legend, since various of Percival’s brothers were killed in various ways, much to
Percival’s annoyance. But this is only a fair link if we agree with Eliot that this poem is actually about the
Fisher King.

###################################################################################

And bones cast in a little low dry garret rattled by the rats foot only year to year

--------------------------

And bones cast in a little low dry garret

Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year

This line recalls the male interlocutor’s response in the *Dialogue of the Nerves* from “A Game of
Chess”.

I think we are in rats' alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

-The most tenable reading of these lines is, however, as an allusion to Northern France and the
everlasting-trench-warfare of World War I.

As in “A Game of Chess” this allusion recalls “Rats' Alley”—the trench-lines in France. Stories of the rats
that inhabited the tranches were somewhat of a quite peculiar obsession of Eliot’s.
In a Nov. 1915 letter to his mother, informs her:

Maurice was home for five days leave this week…It seems so very strange that a boy of nineteen should
have such experiences—often twelve hours alone in his"dug-out" in the trenches, and at night, when he
cannot sleep, occupying himself by shooting rats with a revolver. What he tells about rats and vermin is
incredible—Northern France is swarming, and the rats are as big as cats. His “dug-out,” where he sleeps,
is underground and gets no sunlight. (CLI 121)

In the previous line the:

White bodies lying naked on the low damp ground

are in No-Mans'Land, where during the nights the fallen solders would be stripped of any equipment,
clothing, and ammunition deemed plausibly recoverable. To this end the officers would send one “lucky”
private out to do the salvaging.

-The bodies were left in No-Mans-Land across the wire-line.

-Early attempts to recover combat casualties from above trench-line consistently resulted a 0% KIA-
recovery rate and only a 17'% survivor rate for the “grabbers.”

-Additionally, the trusty OED provides that Garret -definition 2.1- is

“A Guard Tower”

Thus, the image of the “garret,” as a guard tower, pill-box, or “dug-out” in the trench system becomes
likely in considering Eliot’s letter about Morris’s trench experiences.

-The rat issues Eliot paid such keen attention to were compounded by less than ideal weather conditions
and heavy, accurate artillery support from the German fire lines.
-These factors often kept certain groups of Allied forces in the same positions for over a month and a
half.

-During this time they stopped disposing of the casualties which just piled up in the trenches along with,
next to, and on top of the living.

-The flooding, structural collapses, inaccessibility due to debris from the ever-present shelling often
closed parts of the trench system for months.

-When repair crews of engineers would clear wreckage they often found some well-fed rats and a bunch
of bones gnawed almost to the point they couldn’t be identified as human. However, the boots, rings, ID
tags, and belts lying amidst the bones gave the species of their owner away.

###################################################################################

But at my back from time to time i hear the sound of horns and motors which shall bring

_______________________________

/web/20141110124045/http://lit.genius.com/1645273/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land/But-at-my-back-from-
time-to-time-i-hear-the-sound-of-horns-and-motors-which-shall-bring

###################################################################################

Sweeney

--------------------------

Sweeney is the name of a character that Eliot used in a number of previous poems, including “Sweeney
Among the Nightingales” and “Sweeney Erect.” He is portrayed as a kind of cheerfully horny lout.
Sweeney is also a negative Irish stereotype, and possibly a criminal. In Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, written
after The Waste Land in the form of a play, Sweeney says: “Every man wants to, has to, kill a woman
sometime.” (QFM) One possible subtext is that of an educated, cultured man struggling with the impulse
to kill his wife. If this is true of Eliot, he may have conveniently sublimated the impulse by burying his
wife Vivienne in a mental hospital.

###################################################################################

To mrs porter in the spring

--------------------------

to Mrs. Porter in the spring

Mrs. Porter is a prostitute or the proprietor of a house of prostitution as the lines following indicate by
the washing of “Feet” with soda water.

Additionally, Sweeney is modern mythic character Eliot created in 1915-17 and there are a series of
poems in which he is the protagonist. Sweeney Erectis foremost among these as well as the most
relevant to these lines in the The Waste Land in it Sweeney, awaking in a brothel, in a prostitute’s bed,
has an adventure of sorts

Morning stirs the feet and hands

(Nausicaa and Polypheme),

Gesture of orang-outang

Rises from the sheets in steam.

This withered root of knots of hair

Slitted below and gashed with eyes,

This oval O cropped out with teeth:

The sickle motion from the thighs

Jackknifes upward at the knees

Then straightens out from heel to hip

Pushing the framework of the bed

And clawing at the pillow slip.

Sweeney addressed full length to shave

Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,

Knows the female temperament

And wipes the suds around his face.

(The lengthened shadow of a man

Is history, said Emerson

Who had not seen the silhouette

Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).

Also Sweeney Agonistes Eliot’s first attempt at a verse drama contains a passage where Sweeney
describes how he has kept a woman he murdered in his bathtub “fresh” for three months by soaking her
in Lysol.

Carol Smith describes the play as:

Sweeney’s story of violence and horror, sexual love leads to spiritual purgation, and yet this theme is by
defintion incommunicable to a world terrified of death and unaware of anything beyond it.

###################################################################################
O the moon shone bright on mrs porter and on her daughter they wash their feet in soda water

--------------------------

This passage is a derivation of an Australian military cadence in vogue during WWI. The original version
Eliot cites in his correspondence with Pound reads:

Oh, the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

And on her daughter

They washed their cunts with soda water

###################################################################################

Et o ces voix denfants chantant dans la coupole

--------------------------

Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

‘And, O those children’s voices, singing in the cupola!’

Eliot alludes to Paul Verlaine’s short poem Parsifal by quoting its last line.

In the poem, Parsifal, hero of the Wagner opera, has

overcome the gently babbling daughters

Who’d distract him to desire.

He is returning to the company of the Grail, only to be distracted by the sound of the children singing.

-In From Ritual to Romance Weston notes that this entrance may be either into The Chapel Perilous or
The Grail Castle and that later adaptations of Arthurian Myth used this ambiguity to essentially add a
plot twist in what was an otherwise formulaic narrative.

###################################################################################

Twit twit twit jug jug jug jug jug jug

--------------------------

An oblique allusion to rape. The specific words are drawn from the Ovidian story of the Rape of
Philomel, after which all of the participants are turned into birds. The “jug jug” and “twit twit” sounds of
sexual perversion contrast with the final “DA” of the divine thunder in Canto V.

Notice how this passage echoes the “sound of horns and motors” above—a twitting and jugging that
brings Sweeney to Mrs. Porter.

###################################################################################

So rudely forcd

--------------------------

Refers back to:

“The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced"-A Game of Chess

So again Eliot here evokes the rape of Philomela by King Tereus and her transformation into a
nightingale as described in Book VI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

###################################################################################

Tereu

--------------------------

Latin vocative for “Tereus”: Prochne’s husband, Philomel’s rapist, and King of Thebes.

In Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” After Philomela is transformed into a nightingale, she makes the sound,
“Tereu, Tereu,” to continually accuse her rapist.

The Elizabethan era comedy “Campaspe” by the playwright John Lyly supports this notion in the song:

What Bird so sings, yet so dos wayle ?

O t'is the rauish’d Nightingale.

Iug, Iug, Iug, Iug, tereu, shee cryes,

And still her woes at Midnight rise.

###################################################################################

Unreal city

--------------------------

Unreal City
Again Eliot uses the subheading “Unreal City” to break away form a scene which took place elsewhere—
out in the wasteland proper—and return the reader to the banality and despair amidst the
phantasmagoric modern metropolis.

###################################################################################

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn

--------------------------

Compare these lines from Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on
the window-panes…”

###################################################################################

Mr eugenides

--------------------------

Eliot chooses this name for ironic purposes. Mr. Eugenides' name could be taken to mean “well-bred” or
“of good stock” in Greek. Of course, Eugenides' behavior shows that he is anything but that.

###################################################################################

Smyrna

--------------------------
A port city in Turkey.

At the time the poem was written, Smyrna had a large Greek population, driven out or killed by the
Turkish Army at about the time the poem was published. Cf. Hemingway, “Natural History of the Dead.”

###################################################################################

Currants

--------------------------

This could be a pun on a good sailor knowing the sea currents so well, he ‘has them in his pocket’.

But most probably it refers to currants/Zante currants, otherwise known as ‘Corinthian raisins’, of which
Greece was historically a major cultivator.

The fruit itself has a mild relevance to the poem’s theme of sexual imbalance: although it is of dioecious
species, with two sexes of the same plant growing male and female flowers on separate vines, the
currant has relatively underdeveloped female organs.

The English word ‘currants’ comes from the fruit being sold from the Greek city of Corinth. The ancient
Corinth, a hub for merchants and sailors, was also famous for its Temple prostitutes, numbering about
1'000 and contributing to the city’s opinion of being extremely expensive.

###################################################################################

Cif london documents at sight

--------------------------
C.i.f. London: documents at sight

C.i.f. London is an acronym uses inn reference to the shipping or transportation of goods. It stands for:
Cost, Insurance, and Freight and generally often pertained to goods delivered by sea.

-This continues the thematic use of water-related tropes prominent in this section of the poem.

Additionally, the idea of importing goods, especially ubiquitous ones fulfills Mme. Sosostris' Tarot card
predication in “The Burial of the Dead” relating to Mr. Eugenides:

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.

###################################################################################

Asked me in demotic french to luncheon at the cannon street hotel followed by a weekend at the
metropole

--------------------------

“Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?” Creepy Mr. Eugenides has just propositioned the speaker.

“Demotic” refers to the language of the people; in this context, it probably means colloquial or vulgar.
As the Waste Land manuscripts indicate, Eliot had initially chosen the phrase “abominable French”; the
adjective “demotic” was suggested to him by Ezra Pound.
Also, the Cannon Street Hotel was known to be a meeting place for homosexuals: an homosexual affair
having neither purpose nor possibility of creating life, it becomes one of the many correlatives of
sterility, opposed to lost fertility, which is one of the main themes of the poem.

###################################################################################

At the violet hour

--------------------------

“The violet hour”: dusk. The hour to hour-and-a-half period during which the sun can reflect against
clouds, water, or even smog, making the color of the setting sun appear to be orange, purple, or even
violet.

The construction of the lines following “the violet hour” directly alludes to Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto
VIII: 1-6:

‘Twas now the hour that turneth back desire

In those who sail the sea, and melts the heart,

The day they’ve said to their sweet friends farewell,

And the new pilgrim penetrates with love,

If he doth hear from far away a bell

That seemeth to deplore the dying day,

Prior to Eliot, Lord Byron used this same section of the Purgatorio as the basis for a section of his own
“epic,” Don Juan:

Soft hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart

Of those who sail the seas, on the first day

When they from their sweet friends are torn apart;

Or fills with love the pilgrim on his way

As the far bell of vesper makes him start,

Seeming to weep the dying day’s decay…

-Canto 3, CVIII, 1–6

###################################################################################

When the eyes and back turn upward from the desk

--------------------------

In a wage-labor society, the time when people get off work. (The “violet hour” is twilight.) The longing
implied by the upward turning suggests that structuring your life around productive labor is a distortion
of what could be considered “natural.”

For Eliot, this “turning upwards” was literal, as his office at Lloyds Bank was underground.

This passage may have helped inspire a passage from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book sprinkled
with allusions to The Waste Land:

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others —
poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant
dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

###################################################################################

When the human engine waits

--------------------------
Eliot is characterising further the idea of the human as mechanical, or an automaton. By making the
subject an “engine,” Eliot is suggesting the dehumanisation that industrial and capitalist society causes.
The line also reflects the fascination with technology that became explicit in Eliot’s contemporaries, the
members of the Futurist movement.

###################################################################################

Like a taxi throbbing waiting

--------------------------

The human is compared to a machine, and this shows the disappointment with modern life.

This line was alluded to by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his masterpiece ‘The Great Gatsby’:

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxi-cabs, bound
for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart."

###################################################################################

I tiresias though blind

--------------------------

The blind soothsayer and prophet of ancient Greek literature.

###################################################################################

Throbbing between two lives old man with wrinkled female breasts

--------------------------

Tiresias was both a man and a woman throughout his life. When deciding which gender was more
sexually fulfilled, he chose women.

The repetition of ‘throbbing’ also shows Tiresias’s ability to access the modern world as well as the
classical world, just like how he able to access both sexes.

###################################################################################

At the violet hour

--------------------------

The colour violet is repeated throughout the poem. It depicts the melancholic degradation of modern
life, and it is the sky above a falling & “unreal” city.

###################################################################################

Homeward

--------------------------

This line alludes to “Requiem,” by R. L. Stevenson:

Home is the sailor, home from sea.

###################################################################################

Brings the sailor home from sea

--------------------------

Modernism was all about breaking away from the past, it was about taking the myths and symbols that
had characterised art for centuries, and reinventing them for the modern human condition. In this way,
Eliot compares the notion of nostalgia (the force that brings home Odysseus back to Ithaca) and, more
domestically, the force that brings the humble typist home at teatime. Eliot explicitly marries these two
seemingly opposing ideas together.

###################################################################################

Drying

--------------------------

There are images of dry heat and arid conditions throughout the poem; the typist’s drying sexual desire
is compared to the dried-up lands of the Fisher King elsewhere in the poem. Thus, the following sexual
encounter is sure to be futile and meaningless.

###################################################################################

Combinations

--------------------------
Underwear; specifically a type of one-piece long underwear also known as a union suit.

###################################################################################

Camisoles

--------------------------

Camisoles are a women’s undergarment for the upper body.

###################################################################################

And stays

--------------------------

“Stays” were corsets—still worn by many women in the 1920s, though falling out of fashion.

Illustrations from an article on correct corset lacing from the April 1917 issue of Modern Priscilla
magazine:

###################################################################################
I tiresias old man with wrinkled dugs perceived the scene and foretold the rest

--------------------------

Interestingly, it is Tiresias who drops the hint to Oedipus about his true parentage, after a plague has
come over Thebes.

Recall that Oedipus Rex details the diseased and wasted realm of Thebes, including not only all its
citizenry, but also all livestock and vegetation within the borders of the Theban kingdom. Moreover, the
appearance of The Sphinx—following the abdication and iniquity of Oedipus' father, Laius—indicates the
link between the fate of the temporal head of the state’s body politic and its existential welfare.

Once Oedipus has successfully defeated the Sphinx, and is crowned king (and husband of his mother,
Joacasta), he unwittingly brings the Fates' prediction to fruition. Thebes is then ravaged again by a
wasting disease, drought, plague, and disease. Only then does the blind seer Tiersias drop the hammer
concerning the new king’s origins. However, Oedipus can still restore the land through his self-imposed
exile, which detaches his corporeal being’s fate from that of Thebes.

He does so by removing himself from the throne and traveling to Colonus as a penitent. Meeting
Theseus, Oedipus delivers one of the finest speeches

in Greek Tragic theater:

“Oh Theseus, dear friend, only the gods can never age, the gods can never die. All else in the world
almighty Time obliterates, crushes all to nothing…”

Compare this story with the Fisher King legend. The fisher king is often the uncle, father, or lord of the
questing knight, Perceval who seeks to find the grail as a last ditch effort to heal some malady of the
king.

While sometimes old age is part of the picture in the fisher king’s condition, it is typically a non-factor.
Rather the ruler has been wounded in the groin and the wound refuses to heal—leaving him bed ridden,
unable to enter armed combat, and sire legitimate heirs to his domain. Sometimes—depending on the
version of grail romance one encounters, the King may be ambulatory but is still sterile.
Thus, the wasting of the land, which follows from the king’s ailment, reflects his loss of procreative
power. As the lack of a successor to his domain lays barren the King’s lineage, so the wasting of his
lands, people, animals, etc. comes to pass as an occult manifestation of his procreative shortcoming.

This plays off an older myth that the body of the king literally IS the physical head of the body politic
which is his realm: “regis vitale Determinat fata dominatio eius” or “the king’s vitality determines the
fate of his domain.”

Thus, any malady he possesses becomes endemic in his subjects and across his domain. This is a
continuation of an ancient mythic trope first explored in The Oedipus Cycle’s mythos.

This elucidates the intricate paralleling of the Fisher King, Questing, and Grail myths; the wasting of the
lands, mythos of Oedipus and Tiresias; and the wounding and redemption of the ruler/realm which
constitute the narratological progression of Eliot’s poem.

###################################################################################

Carbuncular

--------------------------

Pimply.

###################################################################################

A small house agents clerk with one bold stare one of the low on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a
bradford millionaire

--------------------------

This is a pimply kid who thinks he’s some new-money capitalist hero, who’d wear this sort of hat:
ACCEPTED COMMENT: Bradford was a booming industrial town in the 19th century. The line possibly
refers the upstart class of nouveau riche who made their fortunes there. In keeping with Eliot’s style,
this may be yet another cryptically antisemitic line.

Also note the adjective “low,” here, as Tiresias later complains that he “walked among the lowest of the
dead.”

###################################################################################

The time is now propitious as he guesses

--------------------------

This line begins an embedded Shakespearean sonnet. The use of the form is ironic, since traditionally
sonnets are the form of beautiful expressions of love, but in this case, the sonnet relates a dispassionate
and disturbing sexual encounter.

###################################################################################

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

--------------------------

The young man “endeavors to engage her” in sex and evidently is a sweet talker and tries caressing her
and bending her to his will of his sexual desires.

###################################################################################

Which still are unreproved if undesired

--------------------------
She does not want to have sex but does not reproach him or refuse to go farther with him.

###################################################################################

Flushed and decided he assaults at once exploring hands encounter no defence his vanity requires no
response and makes a welcome of indifference

--------------------------

Exploring hands encounter no defense

His vanity requires no response

And makes a welcome of indifference.

Contrary to some lines of criticism, this is not the description of a rape. Once again see the line

“Exploring hands encounter no defence”.

This is a depiction of base sexual desire in modernity and expression of lust that is ultimately just as
infertile, mechanical, and barren as The Waste Land itself.

A phrase worth noting is:

“The young man Carbuncular”

A carbuncle is a subcutaneous abscess more pronounced than a boil in both the inflammation and depth
of the abscess. However in World War I, “Carbuncular” came to denote soldiers, who would patronize
that “oldest trade” on their R&R time and apropos said R&R contracted syphilis.
“Carbuncular” specifically refers to the advanced-stages of skin lesions accompanying the secondary
syphilis infection. Meaning—that the infection has deliberately gone untreated for over three months.

By the time Eliot is writing “The Fire Sermon” at Margate, the turn of phrase “Carbuncular” had been
widely assimilated into popular vernacular.

Still, this paints an even more grim (and certainly more revolting) picture of the “love" that our typist is
“making” with the impetuous young man who’s body is covered in oozing syphilitic lesions.

So not only is the sex infertile, unwelcome, and uninteresting to those parties involved. It is also
emblematic of the uncleanness, infection, and death which, in Eliot’s Unreal City, have replaced what
was once once “procreative” “restorative” and “vital.”

###################################################################################

And i tiresias have foresuffered all enacted on this same divan or bed

--------------------------

The hermaphrodite prophet Tiresias, the unifying voice of the poem, claims to have “been there
before,” to have experienced all the awful realities of sex as a kind of martyrdom. Here he seems to
watch and comment on this modern act of loveless sex (which implicitly parallels the rape of Philomela
alluded to earlier) with stoic detachment.

None other than the young Barack Obama commented on The Waste Land:

Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, [Eliot]
accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical
face before this.
Tiresias is also an important character in Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus the King. The offensive and
perverse sexual encounter Tiresias “foresuffered” could also alludes to the incest or murder, the darker
sides of sex.

###################################################################################

I who have sat by thebes below the wall and walked among the lowest of the dead

--------------------------

Tiresias, during his life, lived as a beggar in Thebes, Greece, where he met, among other people,
Oedipus. After his death, he met Odysseus in the underworld.

###################################################################################

Bestows one final patronising kiss and gropes his way finding the stairs unlit

--------------------------

Traditionally, Shakespearean sonnets end with a rhymed couplet, but here Eliot purposefully left out the
rhyme to give you the sense of uneasiness that pervaded this entire scene.

The couplet always sounds conclusive at the end of a sonnet, but without the rhyme, it feels somewhat
incomplete or incoherent, which is exactly how Eliot wants readers to feel about this sexual encounter.

###################################################################################

Hardly aware of her departed lover

--------------------------

She cares so little about him, and sex.

###################################################################################

Her brain allows one half formed thought to pass well now thats done and im glad its over

--------------------------

Any excitement or passion is completely absent in this woman’s life, which augments the major theme
of disappointment with modern times.

###################################################################################

When lovely woman stoops to folly

--------------------------

Oliver Goldsmith’s poem, “When lovely woman stoops to folly” (1875), intones that when a woman
stoops to folly and is deceived by a man, “The only art her guilt to cover…Is — to die.” In Eliot’s poem,
the woman’s reaction is more modern and completely undramatic — she puts on a record and
immediately forgets about the man.

In Chapter 24 of Oliver Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield”(1766) the Vicar’s daughter (who has been
seduced by the villain into a sham marriage), visits the site of her seduction with her family and, at her
mother’s request, sings in order to comfort her father :

“When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can sooth her melancholy,

What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye,

To give repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom — is to die"

Her song foreshadows reports of her death, which prove false, and the discovery that the sham
marriage used to entrap her turns out to be valid after all.

Eliot juxtaposes the bathos of kitchen-sink realism against the bathos of melodrama in the original.

###################################################################################

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand

--------------------------

Could be simple: smoothing her hair is a rote movement, suggesting her mind is preoccupied. But at the
same time, Eliot could once again be likening the human body to a machine. This woman is a typist, so
her hands are almost automatic pieces of machinery. The encroachment of the mechanistic on the
human is a concern very close to Modernism’s heart.

“Automatic hand” could also suggest a parallel between the woman’s action and the action of the tone
arm of the gramophone, mechanistically soothing melancholy as it moves over the record.

###################################################################################
And puts a record on the gramophone

--------------------------

Suggests that popular culture may be in some way responsible for, or reflective of, the horrific parody of
“love” that just happened. At the very least, the woman is using the record as a way of distracting
herself and forgetting about the incident.

###################################################################################

This music crept by me upon the waters

--------------------------

From Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, this is another suggestion that living in the modern
world is, actually, quite a lot like being shipwrecked.

Eliot’s also taking the opportunity to say that his poetry is like music.

###################################################################################

And along the strand

--------------------------

Via Wikipedia:
Strand, often called the Strand, is a major thoroughfare in the City of Westminster in central London
that forms part of the A4 road. It is just over three-quarters of a mile in length from its western origin at
Trafalgar Square to its eastern end at Temple Bar, where it continues into Fleet Street, marking
Westminster’s boundary with the City of London.

Image via

This could also be an allusion to Spenser (Amoretti 75, for instance), especially since it’s right near “the
river sweats” and “crept by me upon the waters.” Maybe this is Eliot taking the archaic poet who used
language that was archaic for his own time and modernizing the Spenserian stanza, shoving it into the
London of Eliot’s time.

###################################################################################

Up queen victoria street

--------------------------

A street in the heart of the City of London which leads into Cornhill, where Eliot was then working.

###################################################################################

O city city

--------------------------

An allusion to either, or likely both, of the following:

“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” by Wordsworth

“London”

By William Blake

###################################################################################

Beside a public bar in lower thames street

--------------------------

Upper and Lower Thames. There was indeed a public house round the corner from the fishmongers'
chambers.

###################################################################################

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

--------------------------

A private joke; when he was working on this part of the poem, Eliot took breaks by practising scales on
the mandoline.
###################################################################################

And a clatter and a chatter from within

--------------------------

The Fishmonger’s Guild and chambers was typically a site of significant activity during the workweek

Hundereds of"fishmen" met for their noonday meal in these chambers

and merchants pushed their carts through the hall to get from the wharf (accessed via Lower Thames
Street)

To reach markets on Upper Thames Street.

The origional facing of the fishmen’s chambers can still be seen today behind the new entrance’s
woodwork.

###################################################################################

Where fishmen lounge at noon

--------------------------

This is Fishmonger’s Hall and where Guild Hall would have been in 1914-22 London, and where a
mandolin could whine pleasantly at noon on Lower Thames.

###################################################################################

Magnus

--------------------------

Inside of St. Magnus the Martyr off Lower Thames St. in London.

###################################################################################

Martyr

--------------------------
Here is St. Magnus himself, inside of the Church of the same name. Eliot was a rector at this parish for a
few years before the crown redistricted churches after the Great Fire (and to provide freedom of
religion), so Magnus Martyr became a Catholic parish again.

###################################################################################

The river sweats oil and tar

--------------------------

The Thames river was once so horribly polluted it was declared biologically dead. As this article explains,
it has since undergone a massive transformation.

###################################################################################

Red sails

--------------------------

Literarily, this may refer to the opening paragraphs of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’:

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. (…)
[I]n the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in
red clusters of canvas sharply peaked (…).

The setting of Conrad’s novel is a sailing boat (a ‘yawl’) approaching the threshold where the river
Thames enters the English Channel.
Literally, the red sails could easily be associated in Eliot’s day with the Thames sailing barge.

These small trading boats were very common at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, until after
WWII. Their sails had a rusty-red colour, due to the significant amount of red ochre used to make them
water-resistant. Their small size allowed them to float in the narrow creeks of the Thames and navigate
under London bridges, to trade all sorts of materials — mainly bricks, mud, hay, rubbish, sand, coal and
grain — needed at the time when the city was rapidly expanding.

###################################################################################

Down greenwich reach

--------------------------

Greenwich Reach is a peninsula on the Thames, in Central London. It has a large Waitrose shopping
centre on it.

###################################################################################

Past the isle of dogs

--------------------------

The Isle of Dogs is a peninsula in Central London, jutting out into the Thames. If you look carefully, you
can see it in the opening credits of Eastenders.
It’s directly opposite Greenwich Reach.

###################################################################################

Weialala leia wallala leialala

--------------------------

From Wagner’s opera, ‘Götterdämmerung’, the final part in his ‘Ring’ cycle. Act 3, Scene 1. Also occurs in
the first scene of “Das Rheingold,” which is the first part of that cycle.

It’s the siren song of the Rhinemaidens, water spirits from whom the eponymous gold of the first opera
was stolen.

Eliot suggests that the Thames has some guardian nymphs of its own…

http://youtu.be/SEsy1Ooc5bM?t=4m20s

###################################################################################

Elizabeth and leicester

--------------------------

Queen Elizabeth I, and her suitor, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, supposedly took a boat ride
together on the Thames.
###################################################################################

White towers

--------------------------

In The Dial, of August 1921, Eliot writes of “towers and steeples of an uncontaminated white”, visible
due to the combination of good weather and a coal strike.

###################################################################################

Weialala leia wallala leialala

--------------------------

Onomatopoeia: Eliot is literally attempting to make the sound of the bells through language, an
impossible task for many, but Eliot’s efforts are admirable.

From Wagner’s opera, “Götterdämmerung,” the final part in his Ring cycle. Act 3, Scene 1. Also occurs in
the first scene of “Das Rheingold,” which is the first part of that cycle.

It’s the siren song of the Rhinemaidens, water spirits from whom the eponymous gold of the first opera
was stolen.

Eliot suggests that the Thames has some guardian nymphs of its own

###################################################################################

Highbury bore me richmond and kew undid me

--------------------------
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me.

Eliot alludes to Canto V Purgatorio to La Pia’s recollections:

“Siena made me, Maremma unmade me”

La Pia was married to her Noble husband at Siena and later imprisoned, tortured, and poisoned by him
in the fortress at Maremma.

This is another description of a murder and imprisonment.

Perhaps Eliot’s speaker was born in Highbury, and imprisoned at Richmond or Kew.

The latter two locations (Richmond and Kew) are parts of West London on the Thames.

ACCEPTED COMMENT: Eliot’s editor Pound uses “Siena made me, Maremma unmade me” as the title of
one of the sections of his poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.”

###################################################################################

By richmond i raised my knees supine on the floor of a narrow canoe

--------------------------

This line addresses a lady’s—perhaps even a queen’s—loss of innocence as she is “undone,” portraying
the problem of loneliness, passionlessness, and sexual malaise in a “high-class” situation. The double
meaning of the word “supine” may indicate that she partially blames herself for the event. She was
“supine” in the sense of lying on her back; however, the word can also mean “marked by or showing
lethargy, passivity, or blameworthy indifference.” Perhaps, like the typist, she neither enjoyed nor
resisted the man’s advances.
###################################################################################

My feet are at moorgate

--------------------------

A postern in the London Wall originally built by the Romans, and converted to a gate in the 15th
century, and now the name of a large thoroughfare. This site provides a historical link between the
anglo-american 20th century with the holy roman empire of the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorgate

###################################################################################

He promised a new start

--------------------------

The sentence:

“He promised ‘a new start.’”

recalls Ophelia’s regretful song:

“You promised me to wed,”

from Hamlet IV.v.63, further linking the verbal twittering of the Thames daughters to the pub gossip in
“A Game of Chess.”
The previous section of The Waste Land closes with Ophelia’s call:

“Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night,”

the very same lines that signal her exit via suicide in act IV, scene V.

###################################################################################

On margate sands i can connect nothing with nothing

--------------------------

T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions refers to this recognition as “enlightening”:

it establishes the very compassionate connection among all beings that the poem’s nihilistic implications
have seemed to deny.

It also hints at the deeply personal element of the poem. Eliot wrote most of sections II, III, and portions
of V while at Margate while on paid leave from Lloyd’s Bank to recover from a state of “nervous
exhaustion."

In a letter to the novelist Sydney Schiff dated 4 November 1921, Eliot writes: “I have done a rough draft
of part III [of The Waste Land], but do not know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as
to whether it is printable. I have done this while sitting in a shelter on the front — as I am out all day
except when taking rest.”

The Nayland Rock promenade shelter, overlooking Margate Sands, has been identified as the one in
which Eliot sat, and has been preserved and listed by English Heritage.
In 1920, T.S. Eliot discovered Vivienne and Bertrand Russell’s 4-year affair: a double betrayal that began
only three months after the Eliots had been married. This knowledge deeply affected Eliot, whose
disordered nerves soon worsened, leading to his near collapse.

Tom discovered his wife and friend’s sexual antics during the period of time when “Bertie” Russell was
incarcerated. In his personal journals, letters, and noted, Russell dubbed his sexual escapades with
Vivienne:

part of the “marlow plan”

###################################################################################

My people humble people who expect nothing

--------------------------

An allusion to Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Heart of Darkness’:

They are simple people — and I want nothing, you know."

“My people” also has biblical overtones — see Psalm 50:7.

###################################################################################

La

--------------------------

Both a repetition of the Thames daughters' song from Spenser—

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

—and a reference to Philomela the nightingale and her spring song in Michael Drayton’s “The
Shepheards Garland I: The First Eglog.”

###################################################################################

La

--------------------------

Mirrors “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala.” (This is the third of the songs of the three Thames-daughters.)

Other resonances:

LA (lamb allif) is an Arabic word of negation: “no” or “not” something. This could therefore be a double
negation: la la, “nothing with nothing”…

Also, “so la la” meaning “so-so,” “middle of the road” in German.

Finally, could suggest a hollow tonal “filler,” or a dismissive “la-di-da.”

###################################################################################

To carthage then i came

--------------------------
St. Augustine’s Confessions: ‘to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about
mine ears.’ [Eliot’s note]

The passage comes from St. Augustine’s description of his debaucherous youth. It occurs here at the
height of the poem’s descriptions of seedy sexuality.

###################################################################################

Burning burning burning burning o lord thou pluckest me out o lord thou pluckest

--------------------------

Again Eliot alludes to Buddha’s “Fire Sermon,” in which 1000 white-robed acolytes from all castes
gathered and were told that the flesh, existence, connection, are all burning and that even the ascetics
are burning with attachment.

Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning? The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-
consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-
painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning.

Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.

I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs,
with despairs.

The ear is burning, sounds are burning…

The nose is burning, odors are burning…

The tongue is burning, flavors are burning…

The body is burning, tangibles are burning…

The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning…Burning with what?

Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.

I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs,
with despairs."

There is also a reference here to the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, when the city was razed to the
ground by the Romans leaving only ruins and rubble. Legend has it that the Romans then sowed the land
of Carthage with salt, rendering it infertile.

The following lines are from St. Augustine’s Confessions Book 10:

but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out; because Thy loving-kindness is before my eyes.
For I am taken miserably, and Thou pluckest me out mercifully; sometimes not perceiving it, when I had
but lightly lighted upon them; otherwhiles with pain, because I had stuck fast in them.

###################################################################################

Burning

--------------------------

In recordings of T. S. Eliot reading The Waste Land, this is the most hilarious-sounding line, rivaled only
by “Jug jug jug jug."http://youtu.be/jkQ3kxQURcI?t=18m7s

Eliot’s accent and demeanor were so uptight, they even cracked up the Queen of England. Here’s her
recollection of Eliot’s private performance of The Waste Land:
…then we had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem . . . I think it was called The
Desert. And first the girls got the giggles, and then I did, and then even the King.’

‘The Desert, ma’am?’ asks Wilson. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t called The Waste Land?’

‘That’s it. I’m afraid we all giggled. Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank, and we
didn’t understand a word.’

Fire is a major symbol in Eliot, usually representing the flames either of purgatory or Hell. Compare
these lines from his opus, ‘The Four Quartets’:

“The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-

To be redeemed from fire by fire”

###################################################################################

Death by water

--------------------------

This scene was originally a full canto equal in length to the other four. However, in discussions with Ezra
Pound, Eliot was convinced to shorten it to its present form. (Source: Open Yale Courses. )

The scene depicts the drowning of a sailor, and operates as a metaphor for a symbolic death of the self
(called upon by the Buddha in the Fire Sermon), so that divine inspiration can return in Canto V.

###################################################################################

Phlebas the phoenician a fortnight dead forgot the cry of gulls and the deep sea swell and the profit and
loss

--------------------------
The Phlebas the Phoenician episode in “Death by Water” alludes to Act 1, Scene 2 of William
Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ariel’s Song to Ferdinand:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

As in Shakespeare, there is the notion that Phlebas has “suffered a sea-change” into “something rich and
strange”. This is indicated by the detachment from temporal structure (passing the stages of his age and
youth), sensual perception (the cry of gulls and the deep sea swell), and material objects (forgot the
profit and the loss). Moreover, the allusion to Full Fathom Five brings the line “Those are pearls that
were his eyes” to bear from its mention in “The Burial of the Dead” and “A Game of Chess.”

###################################################################################

Picked his bones

--------------------------

The figure of Phlebas, his bones ground down by the currents of the sea, is reminiscent of Ariel’s song in
Act I, Scene 2 of The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Eliot has already alluded to this passage at line 48 above.

###################################################################################

Whispers

--------------------------

“Whispers” refers to the undersea current loosening the flesh from the bone. As the body undulates
undersea, the current gently hastens its deterioration. When land creatures pick at bones, it’s not “in
whispers” or quiet at all—it’s a violent act; but this is a peaceful decomposition, returning the body to
nothingness in whispers and waves.

###################################################################################

As he rose and fell he passed the stages of his age and youth

_______________________________

/web/20141110124045/http://lit.genius.com/1493887/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land/As-he-rose-and-fell-he-
passed-the-stages-of-his-age-and-youth

###################################################################################

Gentile or jew
--------------------------

Eliot’s phrasing is biblical and thus adds grandeur to these lines. “Gentile or Jew” is also pretty negative
in this context: it basically says, regardless of your religion, you’ll be no more than a pair of ragged
bones, sweeping across the floors of silent seas.

###################################################################################

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward consider phlebas who was once handsome and tall as
you

--------------------------

A moralistic end to the section. Literally, a warning to fellow sailors “who turn the wheel and look to
windward” not to be cocky and overconfident, because death comes to everyone. More broadly, a
memento mori [reminder of mortality] and a warning against hubris.

Also could be an allusion to “The wheel is come full circle” in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

###################################################################################

What the thunder said

--------------------------

The Thunder speaks in The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which is considered the most important of the 13
Principal Upanishads composing the Vedanta, consists of the three main imperatives from which spring
“The Three Principal Virtues" of Hinduism as articulated by the thunder.

In part V. 2 of the Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, each group the thunder addresses with the monosyllabic
“Da” interprets the meaning of the imperative address differently:
The Gods: Damyata — ‘Be subdued’

Men: Datta — ‘Give’

Demons: Dayadvham — ‘Be merciful’.

The thunder speaks in Sanskrit, the language in which the Rigveda and the Principal Upanishads were
written. Here, it serves as a primordial language. It’s the great-grandfather of English as well as most
other European languages.

###################################################################################

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces after the frosty silence in the gardens

--------------------------

This alludes the Gospels: Matt for sure parable of the bridegroom, as well as the silence in the Garden of
Gethsemane, where Jesus wept and his apostles slept until the mob was upon them. also when the 12
locked themselves away after the romans killed christ and had only a torch or a candle lit for a number
of days in the room as they waited for a knock upon the door. But agony in stony places and silence in
the garden are interesting. (reversed from normal Christian theology) Silence in the Hyacinth garden was
a big issue in BOD: neither living nor dead and I knew nothing looking into the heart of light (heart of
light is used by Dante in Paradiso to refer to the Divine, the big guy or to Mary and twice to Beatrice.) So
silence which Eliot equates with destruction, purgation, the divine, and a point where something
definitive happens—both the Infinite and apprehension and horror (see “Silence”) from IMH.

also see for Torchlight on faces hooded faces see Heart of Darkness, also from non-king james bibles
see Macabees the agony in stony places and shouting and crying alludes Moses and the striking of the
stone, also certainly cantos 3-6 of Purgatorio and 2-6 of Inferno could be referenced “prison and palace
and reverberation” also Abraham & Isaac (shouting/crying and agony in stony places) palace and prison
alludes Babylonian or/and Egyptian captivity and Moses' role as prince and slave. Also Torchlight red on
sweaty faces are those which which sneer and snarl who are those hooded hoards swarming over the
mountains distance…are Dantean specters, enemies of Arjuna, or and simply desacralized people of the
world who exist without ritual, water, spring, or even sound of water…

###################################################################################
After the agony in stony places

--------------------------

The agony of Christ. In his notes, Elliot comments that one of the themes in this section is the journey to
Emmaus — the town in which Jesus appeared to two of his disciples after his resurrection.

###################################################################################

He who was living is now dead we who were living are now dying

--------------------------

Alluding once again to myths of death and rebirth, Eliot ironically reverses the famous proclamation
from The Bible:

In Luke, 15:24:

For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.
(Luke 15:24)

This passage also contains echoes of Revelation 1:18:

And alive, and was dead, and behold I am living for ever and ever, and have the keys of death and of
hell. (Douay-Rheims Bible)

Compare the common ancient Roman gravestone inscription:

Eram quod es, eris quod sum.

[I was what you are, you will be what I am.]

###################################################################################

Here is no water but only rock

--------------------------

This line contrasts two symbols: rock and water. The effect is to suggest that the world is confused and
unaccommodating, and implicitly does not support life. Deprived of the live-giving waters, the land can
never be more than the barren hardness of rock.

Moreover, this line denies—through oppositional allusion—the miracle of Moses striking the rock and
bringing forth water when the Israelites were wandering the desert. This suggests that in the modern
Waste Land there is no divine presence: the old miraculous God has abandoned the people because
they have abandoned him… not even the scriptures' reminders of the miracles brought by the will of
God in the past can provide comfort to the present age.

Alternatively, the line may suggest that the people of the wasteland don’t know to look for God.
Consider this: if I don’t look for gold under my house can I say there is no gold? In this reading, God is
still around but nobody looks to him for life and aid.

###################################################################################

If there were only water amongst the rock

--------------------------

Probably a reference to the Israelites wandering in the desert where there was no water. Importantly,
water is provided when Moses strikes the rock, which again suggests salvation by divine intervention.

This line also touches on the central theme of ‘The Waste Land’ — the absent water might be the
spirituality missing from the barren ‘rock’ of modern society.
###################################################################################

If there were the sound of water only

--------------------------

Echoing verse 24

And the dry stone no sound of water

###################################################################################

Not the cicada and dry grass singing

--------------------------

The symbolism in these two lines are a confusion of virility with old age.

On the one hand, the cicada is a long-lasting symbol of insouciance, singing loudest at noon. The grass is
singing, under the fruitful wind no doubt, like in Kipling’s Kim.

The grass is singing under the wind

On the other hand, the grass is dry. The cicada may also be associated with old age, since in Greek
mythology Tithonus shrimpled into a cicada after being granted eternal life, but not eternal youth, as did
the Cumaean Sibyl alluded to in the preface.

###################################################################################
Hermit thrush sings

--------------------------

A type of bird known for singing flute-like songs.

ACCEPTED COMMENT: As in the beginning of the poem, Eliot refers to Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom’d”:

In the swamp in secluded recesses,

A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary the thrush,

The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,

Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat,

Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,

If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)

###################################################################################

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

--------------------------
Here again, as with “jug jug” and “twit twit,” are monosyllabic sounds, seeming to drive the characters
mad and desiccate the soul with their repetitive nonsense.

###################################################################################

But there is no water

--------------------------

Psych!

###################################################################################

Who is the third who walks always beside you

--------------------------

In his “Notes” on the poem, Eliot says that he took this idea from the explorer Ernest Shackleton, who
reported that a mysterious being appeared, walking alongside his group, during his journey through
Antarctica. People sometimes report this phenomenon in moments of peril.

The line is also often read as referring to the Road to Emmaus incident in Luke 24:13-35, in which two
disciples on the way home bump into the risen Christ and don’t recognise him.

The critic Harold Bloom, who has consistently argued for The Waste Land as being inspired first and
foremost by Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” links this line with a passage
from “Dooryard”:

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,

And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,

And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions…
###################################################################################

What is that sound high in the air

--------------------------

Eliot alludes here to Herman Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos, specifically to the second of Hesse’s Dostoevsky
essays in the volume: “Die Brüder Karamasow oder Der Untergang Europas” (The Brothers Karamasov
or The Downfall of Europe).

The line comes from Dimitri Karamazov’s inebriated conversation about the impossibility of his
forbidden love for Grushenka. The conversation spans 3 chapters:

Ch 3: The Confession of a Passionate Heart — In Verse

Ch 4: The Confession of a Passionate Heart — In Anecdote

Ch 5: The Confession of a Passionate Heart — Heels Up

###################################################################################

Murmur of maternal lamentation

--------------------------

Recalling the grief of Rachel in the Bible, weeping for the exiled Israelites:

Thus saith the LORD; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for
her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not."
—Jeremiah 31: 15 (KJV)

###################################################################################

Hooded hordes swarming over endless plains

--------------------------

Recalling the hordes of people, damned as Eliot sees them, walking over the bridge. And perhaps also
suggestive of people swarming over the ruins of villages and towns which were laid waste by the first
world war.

ACCEPTED COMMENT: Also suggestive of the (red riding hooded) Russian revolutionaries intent on
abolishing empires and traditional social structures.

“Ringed by the flat horizon only” = classless or non-hierarchical society repugnant to conservative Eliot?

Even the “red rock” from “The Burial of the Dead” could be interpreted as the Socialist Church, but this
might be a stretch…

###################################################################################

Cracks and reforms

--------------------------

in addition to echoing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, Eliot stresses that the way things break and
reassemble, break and reassemble over and over will destroy them. Compare the way concrete expands
in the heat and then contracts in the cold, so that it eventually shatters apart.

There may also be a political sense at play in ‘reforms’.

###################################################################################

Falling towers

--------------------------

Suggests the demise of cultural and spiritual order and authority.

Worth noting here is Tarot card XVI, The Tower. This card symbolizes the destruction of a way of life, a
catastrophic and ultimately humbling destruction of a way of life, or frame of mind.

###################################################################################

Jerusalem athens alexandria vienna london

--------------------------

Eliot reels off fallen civilisations

###################################################################################

Unreal

--------------------------

The dying echo of the previous two incantation of ‘Unreal City’ (here and here), referring of course to
the cities enumerated above.
###################################################################################

A woman drew her long black hair out tight and fiddled whisper music on those strings

_______________________________

/web/20141110124045/http://lit.genius.com/1789237/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land/A-woman-drew-her-
long-black-hair-out-tight-and-fiddled-whisper-music-on-those-strings

###################################################################################

And upside down in air were towers

--------------------------

This imagery possesses several characteristics similar to the visual phenomenon known as fata
morgana, a rare, though well documented, category of mirage in which the visual phenomena are
perceived as appearing upside down, in the air.

This phenomenon was documented by Walter Charleton in his 1654 treatise Physiologia Epicuro-
Gassendo-Charltoniana Charleton devotes several pages to the description of the famous Morgana of
Rhegium, in the Strait of Messina.

He notes that a similar phenomenon was reported in Africa by Diodorus Siculus a Greek historian writing
in the 1st century B.C.

###################################################################################

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells

--------------------------
This is reminiscent of the “broken cisterns” of Jeremiah 2:13: here, as in the scriptural text, spiritual
emptiness is being likened to a dry cistern.

Compare also Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, in which John the Baptist sings out of a well or cistern.

###################################################################################

In this decayed hole among the mountains

--------------------------

After receiving a frightening account of the figure who haunts The Green Chapel

Gawain is advised to avoid the location. However, were he to avoid the danger, he could not keep the
appointment Gawain swore he should never refuse.

Thus, he makes his way down the steep hillsides to:

“a single strange mound. Nothing but an old cave.” ln 2182

This mound was identified as The Green Chapel

###################################################################################

Over the tumbled graves about the chapel

--------------------------

This approach to the mound, identified as The Green Chapel signifies:

 The approach to the chapel perilous: an element of the narratological mythos Eliot describes as having
served as a source for much of the incidental symbolism in the poem.

—Moreover, these mythological resonances highlight Eliot’s structural allusions, which appear
throughout the poem and provide thematic, tonal, and narrative cohesion to the fragmentary
presentation of the verse.

###################################################################################

There is the empty chapel only the winds home it has no windows and the door swings

--------------------------

There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.

It has no windows, and the door swings

The sight of an empty chapel in a Grail Romance is the last test for a Questing Knight who wishes to
attain. – It is only after continuing into the empty chapel that his faith is proven.

Here, the chapel is the location of the holy grail and the speaker’s description in these two lines
approximate what Jesse Weston called “The approach to the Chapel Perilous” in the Parsifal versions of
grail legend.

-Interestingly, after finding this chapel, the rain follows quickly.

###################################################################################

Dry bones can harm no one

--------------------------
Echoes “A Game of Chess”:

Where the dead men lost their bones.

Also “The Fire Sermon”:

And bones cast in a little low dry garret

Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

Also reshapes the allusion to Ezekiel in “The Burial of the Dead”:

Son of man, you cannot say, or guess…

This admonition becomes God’s command to the prophet in 37:4:

Then he said to me, “Speak a prophetic message to these bones and say, ‘Dry bones, listen to the word
of the LORD!’”

###################################################################################

Only a cock stood on the rooftree co co rico co co rico

--------------------------

Note the phallic symbol of the silhouette of the, er, cock made by the lightning.

The cock crowing brings in a new day, and symbolizes rebirth.

According to Ad Gallicinium, Cathimeron 1 by Prudentius, Christ returned from hell after the cock
crowed on Easter morning.

Perhaps also a reference to Peter in the Bible, who denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed.

###################################################################################

In a flash of lightning

--------------------------

Not quite morning light crashing in. The lightning precedes the voice of the
thunder.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z8yVXpbmJI

###################################################################################

Ganga was sunken and the limp leaves waited for rain

--------------------------

Ganga is a river, so things are normally sunken in it. But “sunken” here means “at a lower level”, so the
level of the water has fallen from drought. Leaves can go limp when they’re very dry.

Eliot hits us with this line after the preceding: “Bringing rain.” We appear to have shifted scene from the
previous stanza. Clouds are massing on the horizon, and the rain that has started falling in the previous
location appears to be on its way here as well.

###################################################################################

Himavant
--------------------------

The Hindu God of snow, and the personification of the Himalayas. Imagine these white peaks against pit-
black skies.

###################################################################################

The jungle crouched

--------------------------

Interestingly, jungle comes from the Hindi word for ‘desert’, or alternatively, ‘wasteland’.

Cats seem to represent a feminine force in Eliot’s writing. Grishkin in “Whispers of Immortality” and the
jungle here both hold promise of release—the jungle through the replenishing rainfall, and Grishkin
through ‘pneumatic bliss’… Both the jungle/thunderstorm and Grishkin/jaguar are feminine references
presented as forces of nature that are to be awaited and experienced.

###################################################################################

Then spoke the thunder

--------------------------

The Book of Apocalypse (otherwise known as The Revelation of St John) refers to 7 thunders in chapter
10:
Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven.

(…)

And he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders
spoke. And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from heaven say,
“Seal up what the seven thunders have said and do not write it down."

(…)

Then I was told, "You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings.”

The last line in particular is an appropriate reflection of ‘The Waste Land’.

Coincidentally or not, although the word ‘thunder’ appears only 4 times in the poem, the monosyllable
‘DA’ that could stand for the onomatopoetic sound of the thunder appears 3 times, making the total 7.

###################################################################################

Da

--------------------------

“Da” in Sanskrit (द) is by itself a consonant, but it can also mean “offering”, “granting”, “effecting” or
“producing”. It can thus be interpreted as part of the Sanskrit word “Datta” (दात्त) — a gift, a donation.

The word functions as the symbolic return of a divine being, one who brings rain with it.

The monosyllabic “DA” contrasts with the “jug jug” and “twit twit” of sexual perversion, which were
before the guiding lights of the characters in the poem. It also serves as a kind of onomatopoeia,
resembling the boom of thunder.

In its original setting — the Prajāpati myth in the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad — “Da” has no intrinsic
meaning. It only becomes a gloss for self-control, giving, and mercy because of the three groups that see
themselves (respectively) as unruly, avaricious, and cruel.
Prajāpati (the divine post of the Lord of Procreation or the Protector of Life in Hinduism) teaches each
group its appropriate lesson using just one word, and dāmyata, datta, and dayadhvam are unified: for
human beings, who may have in them some complex combination of cruelty, greed, and unruliness,
“da” is all they need to hear, for it contains all three instructions. This type of interleaving is a common
feature of Hindu philosophy, and in particular the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad, and is called “neti-neti”
for the chant “neither this, nor that.”

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Datta what have we given

--------------------------

“Datta” ~ Sanskrit: Give

Taken from the first line of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, considered the most important of the 13
Principal Upanishads that compose the Vedanta, “Datta” is one of the three main imperatives from
which spring “The Three Principal Virtues" of Hinduism.

According to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the imperative "Give" is the first of three commands
discerned from the monosyllabic speech of the thunder. As with the other two commands (below), it
relates in this poem to the passage that follows. Eliot suggests that “the awful daring of a moment’s
surrender” (whether we take that surrender to be erotic, spiritual, or otherwise) is the most important
thing we “give” in our lives.

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My friend blood shaking my heart the awful daring of a moments surrender which an age of prudence
can never retract

--------------------------
This may relate to a moment in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. When the Knight appears at the
Chapel Perilous, Gawain bends his neck—as per their agreement—in a daring surrender recounted in
the poem as:

“Alle pe blode of his brest blende in his face”

or

“All the blood in Gawain’s chest blended in his face.” (line 2371)

But the lines could certainly also imply an erotic surrender—a giving in to temptation and desire—as
opposed to a moment of physical courage or spiritual self-sacrifice.

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Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

--------------------------

As Eliot’s note indicates, this is an echo of Webster, The White Devil, V, 6:

…they’ll remarry

Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider

Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.

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Under seals broken by the lean solicitor

--------------------------
Possibly alludes to the breaking of seals in the book of Revelation.

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In our empty rooms

--------------------------

This adds to the desolation of the poem.

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Da dayadhvam

--------------------------

“Dayadhvam” ~ Sanskrit: Sympathize

Taken from the first line of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, considered the most important of the 13
Principal Upanishads that compose the Vedanta, “Dayadhvam” is one of the three main imperatives
from which spring “The Three Principal Virtues" of Hinduism.

According to the aforementioned Upanishad, the second monosyllabic “Da” is interpreted by men as the
imperative “Dayadhvam,” or “Sympathize.”

“Sympathize” is the second of three such commands discerned from the monosyllabic speech of the
thunder.
###################################################################################

I have heard the key turn in the door once and turn once only

--------------------------

Quotation from Dante’s Inferno XXXIII, vv. 46-47: “ed io senti' chiavar l'uscio di sotto / a l'orribile torre”
(And I heard the key turning downstairs, closing the doors of the horrible tower)

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Coriolanus

--------------------------

According to Roman legend, the Roman hero Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus, who was of patrician descent
and was originally known simply as Gnaeus Marcius, received his cognomen (surname) after capturing
the town of Corioli in 493 BCE from the ancient Italian people known as the Volsci. Later, Coriolanus was
charged with tyrannously opposing the plebeians and refusing to give them grain when they were
starving. Banished from Rome, he returned leading an army of Volsci against the city in 491 BCE. He
spared Rome after his wife, Volumnia, and his mother, Veturia, pleaded with him (some accounts name
his mother as Volumnia and his wife as Vergilia). As a result, he was killed by the Volsci. That story forms
the basis of the play Coriolanus by William Shakespeare.

“Coriolanus” was also the one tragedy that Eliot argued is Shakespeare’s best.

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Da damyata

--------------------------
“Damyata” ~ Sanskrit: Control

Taken from the first line of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, considered the most important of the 13
Principal Upanishads that compose the Vedanta, “Damyata” is one of the three main imperatives from
which “The Three Principal Virtues" of Hinduism originate.

According to this Upanishad, the third monosyllabic “Da” issued by the thunder is interpreted by the
Demons as the imperative “Damyata,” or “Control.”

Since the construction of the imperative “Damyata” is reflexive, the Gods interpret it as “Control the
self,” or “Practice self-control,” or “Restrain desires.”

“Control” is the last of three such commands discerned from the monosyllabic speech of the thunder.
Here, again, it relates to the passage that follows, but this time with some possible irony (see note
below).

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The boat responded gaily to the hand expert with sail and oar

--------------------------

The boat responds gaily, lightheartedly, happily to the prospect of being controlled by a skilled sailor.
This comes, we should note, just after the word ‘Damyata’, meaning ‘control thyself’. Thus, Eliot stresses
restraint as a natural, beneficial manner.

Eliot himself was handy with a sailboat due to his childhood holidays on the Maine coast.

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The sea was calm

--------------------------

The opening line of “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold:

“The sea is calm tonight.”

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Your heart would have responded gaily when invited beating obedient to controlling hands

--------------------------

Although the final command issued by the thunder means “control” as in “practice self-control” or
“restrain desires,” the “controlling” the speaker describes here seems, ironically enough, more like
erotic domination. The lover’s heart is envisioned as a ship that responds beautifully to such domination
— or “would have” if the speaker’s fantasy had been fulfilled.

ACCEPTED COMMENT: Like the Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’, whose first lines speak of moving ‘by
hand’ across the water (i.e. rowing). ‘The Wanderer’ has themes of solitude and keeping silent about
strong feelings.

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I sat upon the shore fishing with the arid plain behind me

--------------------------
This is a reference to the Fisher King, a central figure in the Grail Legend. He was charged with looking
after the Holy Grail. He was injured, rendering him impotent, with little to do but fish. His lands withered
along with his health: the “arid plain”.

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Shall i at least set my lands in order

_______________________________

/web/20141110124045/http://lit.genius.com/1696330/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land/Shall-i-at-least-set-my-
lands-in-order

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London bridge is falling down falling down falling down

--------------------------

Common children’s nursery rhyme, both in Eliot’s time and ours.

###################################################################################

Poi sascose nel foco che gli affina

--------------------------

Quote from Dante’s Inferno: ‘And then he stepped back into the fire which refines.’

###################################################################################
Quando fiam ceu chelidon

--------------------------

‘When shall I be like the swallow?’

Philomela’s sister Procne was turned into a swallow by the greek gods. (Philomela into a nightingale,
Tereus into a hawk).

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O swallow swallow

--------------------------

This is a direct quotation from “The Princess,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Then I remembered one myself had made,

What time I watched the swallow winging south

From mine own land, part made long since, and part

Now while I sang, and maidenlike as far

As I could ape their treble, did I sing.

‘O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,

Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,

And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.

‘O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,

That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,

And dark and true and tender is the North.

‘O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light

Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,

And cheep and twitter twenty million loves.

‘O were I thou that she might take me in,

And lay me on her bosom, and her heart

Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.

‘Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love,

Delaying as the tender ash delays

To clothe herself, when all the woods are green?

‘O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown:

Say to her, I do but wanton in the South,

But in the North long since my nest is made.

‘O tell her, brief is life but love is long,

And brief the sun of summer in the North,

And brief the moon of beauty in the South.

‘O Swallow, flying from the golden woods,

Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine,

And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee.’

See also above:

“Twit twit twit”

“Twit” is the mnemonic representation of the Swallow’s song. Prochne, was the sister of Philomela and
wife of king Tereus of Thebes.

In “A Game of Chess” Eliot refers to the legend in which Philomela (Philomel) was imprisoned, raped,
and had her tongue cut out by Tereus. Prochne eventually learned of her sister’s fate and freed
Philomel, and as the two were being pursued by Tereus along the palace’s parapet, the gods
transformed Philomel into a nightingale and Prochne into a swallow. This is recounted in book IV of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The mnemonic bird song of the nightingale is “Jug, jug, jug.”

The two sisters and their birdsongs also appear in “The Fire Sermon.”

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc'dTereu

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Le prince daquitaine a la tour abolie

--------------------------

The Prince of Aquitaine, to the ruined tower

or
“The prince of Aquitaine whose tower is destroyed:”

I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled,

The prince of Aquitaine whose tower is destroyed:

While “à” can be translated as “at,"upon,” “to,” “with,” “in,” depending on context.

El Desdichado (Gerard de Nerval, 1853)

Je suis le ténébreux,– le Veuf, — l'inconsolé,

Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie:

Ma seule étoile est morte, et mon luth constellé

Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m'as consolé,

Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d'Italie,

La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé,

Et la treille où le Pampre à la rose s'allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phoebus ?…. Lusignan ou Biron ?

Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine ;

J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la Sirène…

Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l'Achéron :

Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d'Orphée

Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.

The Disconsolate [one]

(Gerard de Nerval, 1853)

I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled,

The prince of Aquitaine whose tower is destroyed:

My only star is dead, and my constellated lute

Bears the black sun of the Melancholy.

In the night of the Tomb, You who consoled me,

Give me back Mount Posilipo and the Italian sea,

The flower my desolate heart liked so much,

And the trellis where the grapevine unites with the rose.

Am I Amor or Phoebus?…. Lusignan or Biron?

My forehead is still red from the kiss of the queen;

I have dreamed in the grotto where the Mermaid swims…

And two times victorious I have crossed Acheron:

Modulating turn by turn on the lyre of Orpheus

The moans of the Saint and the screams of the Fairy.

See this translation; also Eliot’s own note.

The author of above translation states:

“Here’s the verse by verse translation promised of El Desdichado, done. I’m only giving it a literal
translation for the purposes of analysis”
I have neither the time nor the skill to translate it poetically.

###################################################################################

Why then ile fit you hieronymos mad againe

--------------------------

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

From Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. In the play, Hieronymo is asked to put on a play for the court.
He, instead, convinces the court to allow him to direct a play he wrote years ago.

The line:

‘Well then Ile fit you’

means something along the lines of:

‘You want a play? I’ll give you a damn play!’

In Hieronymo’s play, each character speaks a different language: Latin, Itallian, Spanish, Greek, and
French; so no one in the court can understand exactly what is happening.

(Much like with Eliot’s use of Latin, Greek, French, German, Itallian, and Sanskrit in a certain poem)

-In the confusion Heronymo’s plan for revenge against the King, (who had murdered his son) is fulfilled.
Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Comes from when the king realizes what has happened, Hieronymo bites off his own tongue so he
cannot reveal anything during the torture and interrogation he knows await him. However, to the still
shocked and confused audience it simply appears as if

Hieronymo has gone mad againe.

In this tongue-bitting action, Hieronymo also echoes Philomel

###################################################################################

Datta dayadhvam damyata

--------------------------

Sanskrit: Give. Sympathize. Control.

The first line of the The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which is considered the most important of the 13
Principal Upanishads composing the Vedanta, consists of the three main imperatives from which spring
“The Three Principal Virtues" of Hinduism as articulated by the thunder.

The thunder speaks in Sanskrit, the language in which the Rigveda and the Principal Upanishads were
written. Here, it serves as a primordial language. It’s a kind of great-great-granduncle of English and an
ancient relative of many other European languages. (English and Sanskrit share a common ancestor,
Proto-Indo-European, which was probably spoken in the 5th millennium BCE. The modern descendants
of Sanskrit are Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, etc., just as the modern descendants of Latin are French, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.)

Perhaps surprisingly, God (the voice of the thunder) doesn’t speak Hebrew. But then, it’s believed that
Sanskrit is more ancient than Hebrew, a Semitic language unrelated to the Indo-European family. The
Vedas (Hindu sacred texts), for example, are thought to predate the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) by over a
millennium.
###################################################################################

Shantih shantih shantih

--------------------------

Shantih shantih shantih

Means: Peace peace peace, and when preceded by “Om” is part of one of the Shanti Mantras or Peace
Mantras from the Vedas. It appears in The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and more generally is used to
both begin and end formal prayer in the Hindu religion.

Eliot’s note in the first American printing of the poem offers his “feeble translation” of Shantih: “the
peace which passeth understanding.”

The soft, repeated “shantih” sounds may also be an onomatopoeia mimicking the sound of falling rain,
which the “jungle…crouched in silence” has been anticipating and which has finally arrived after the
rumbling of the thunder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvbJUomIX6M

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