The beginning of ‘A Game of Chess’ makes allusions to several sets of lovers, all of whose stories end badly, and thus plays on the themes of deception – and as throughout the rest of the poem – hopelessness and death. The first line – ‘the Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne’ – is a direct reference to Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, wherein the description of Cleopatra opens with ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne’. The ambiguous use of the pronoun ‘she’ in ‘the Waste Land’ – ambiguous for we are never told who is being referred to – allows us to take it to refer both to all the women in these stories as well as to an Archetypal Woman, nameless because such is the fate of all humans. ‘She’ sits within some ‘vines/ from which a golden Cupidon peeped out/ (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)’. Here already are introduced the themes of concealment and deception, by the use of the words ‘peeped’ and ‘hid’. Even though Love is seemingly a good thing, it is hidden away. Notably, whilst here the woman is Cupid-adjacent, Cleopatra is become either Venus or greater than Venus (‘o’er picturing that Venus’). Hence, we are shown the strength of the Love that is felt. The Antony and Cleopatra story – especially when ‘Cupid’/’Venus’ is brought in – is reminiscent of the Aeneas and Dido story. In the ‘Aeneid’, Venus instructs Cupid to send a dart of Love into Dido’s heart: ‘you may breathe into her a hidden fire and beguile her with your poison’. The importance of fire is highly significant (note, as always, the ability of words such as Latin ‘flamma’ or Greek ‘pyr’ to mean both fire and love in their respective languages), as it is both a common image for Love and also a powerful and destructive force. In the Eliot poem, ‘the flames of sevenbranched candelabra/ reflect[...] light upon the table’. Therefore, flame – by reflection, and thus illusionary propagation – seems to multiply, but this is – of course – deceptive. Just so can love too be deceptive. It is also striking that Dido’s life is ended by fire, both metaphorically – the ‘flame’ of Love brings her to suicide – and literally – she throws herself upon a pyre.
The other theme by which deception is explored throughout these texts is that of smell and odour. In ‘The Wasteland’, there are ‘strange, synthetic perfumes’ which act to ‘trouble[...], confuse[...]/ And drown[...] the sense in odours’. This highlights the way that smells can be a mask misleading as to the truth. Similarly, in Antony and Cleopatra, upon the barge is found ‘a strange invisible perfume [that] hits the sense’. Antony and Cleopatra fall into a strong – and reckless – love, blinded by it. Therefore, this ‘perfume’ may make things appear sweet, when they are in reality far from that. In Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, Satan listens to the winds: ‘now gentle gales/ Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense/ Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole/ Those balmie spoils’. These ‘perfumes’ are far less directly linked to deception than others perhaps, as they are naturally occurring, but they still act to enstill and strengthen the general atmosphere of Eden as Paradise, something that, just like the Love of Antony and Cleopatra, is soon lost.
Most notably, the stories of Adam and Eve, Dido and Aeneas, Tereus and Philomela, Antony and Cleopatra and, by allusion, of the ‘she’ of Eliot’s poem start in love – though for a number of them, forced or false love – and end in death – though, of course, in ‘Paradise Lost’ this is a metaphorical death (‘Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint/ And knew not eating Death’, Book IX). Fatal flame and sly smells accompany these loves, and chart – even though the characters are not aware – their sad downfall. For ‘the Waste Land’, the meaning of this perhaps rests in the idea that the happiest and most hopeful moments and emotions of humanity easily end in doom, despair and death. The world – so full of Love – is also just as full of Death.
