10.18

Does “The Waste Land” end on a positive note? In debating with myself, I found my answer to remain hopelessly inconclusive. In the final section of the poem, it seems that our protagonist, in a role similar to a quester, has finally arrived at the Waste Land’s “Chapel Perilous” following the hopeful “violet hour” (380). Still, readers are left clueless regarding whether the desired task of regeneration has been completed. In what seems to be the most climactic scene, a rooster announces the arrival of rain from the chapel rooftop, yet two details keep me unnerved about this resolution:

Firstly, where on Earth did the rain go? The “damp gust” is responsible for “bringing [the] rain,” yet this action is trapped in an unfinished, infinitive state (394-5). In fact, the “black clouds,” confined in a distant mountain chain, can never rejuvenate the withering land in the riverbanks and valleys (397).

In addition, the cock, the announcer of the rain, is itself heavily connected to the uncertain state between life and death. Firstly, the animal figures in Ariel’s song “Hark, hark! I hear / [...] Cry, Cock a diddle dow” in Shakespeare’s Tempest, which brings to mind the fabricated death of Alonso, King of Naples. Secondly, the word is mentioned in another Shakespearian play, Hamlet, in the specific context of King Hamlet’s appearance as a ghost (ghost-hood and fabricated deaths suggest a similar border state between life and death). This brings even greater uncertainty regarding the cock’s ability of announcing/directing genuine revitalization.

This sense of incompletion persists until the very last stanza, in which border states, including the shore that the speaker sits at (between water and land) and the London Bridge (between life and death/Inferno), figure heavily. In addition, the insufficiency of Philomela’s transformation is emphasized once again. The line “quando fiam uti chelidon” merely anticipates a future gaining of a voice similar to that of the swallow’s, yet the task is essentially unfulfillable – while both sexes of the swallow can sing, only the male nightingale sings (429). Philomela’s metamorphosis still does not liberate her from her silence, a reminder of her subjugation. It is, once again, an incomplete renewal at best.

10.13

I wanted to illustrate at length the underlying optimism that emerges in “What the Thunder Said” through a unique lens: the portrayal of towers. Before I begin my analysis, notice how the many towers in Eliot’s poem are constantly identified with the architectural structures of churches; the “white towers” mentioned in the Thames maidens’ song, for instance, immediately evokes the image of the whitewashed Church of Saint Magnus-the-Martyr introduced only two stanzas ago. Thus, the two can be considered close renderings of the same motif.

The earliest characterization of this motif occurs in “The Burial of the Dead,” where the Saint Mary Woolnoth church is depicted as “keeping the hours / with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine” (67-8). Squeezed in the increasingly industrial cityscape of London, the religious venue has lost whatever spirituality and sacred intrigue it once held, its remaining value reduced to the mechanical striking of its bell tower, the muffled sound (at nine o’clock) a lifeless reminder for the undeads “flowing over London Bridge” that the work day has begun (62). In modern Europe, the edifice only serves as a constant reminder of God’s death.

Thus the collapse of towers – and of the “Unreal City” – in section five of the poem should seem less lamentable than it appears. In fact, since churches only survive as witnesses of the replacement of divinity with human industrial progress, their destruction is reminiscent of the ruination of the gargantuan Tower of Babel, where the collective hubris of humans is met with devastating consequences.

So how should we perceive towers in “The Waste Land”? Madame Sosostris’ Tarot reading has hinted at the proper approach. Though the Tower (XVI), a major arcana card, illustrates a highly calamitous scene (the tower being stricken by lightning and flames), its interpretation can be less unnerving – the devastation of the tower, suggestive of radical changes, is not necessarily connotated. In the context of Eliot’s work, given how life “sprouts” from dead corpses, the tower’s change is likely a desirable one. More specifically, we can conclude that the madame’s card has long set the tone for a primary message of Eliot’s poem: destruction-induced renewal/creation.

This realization helps us rationalize the next appearance of the motif directly following the fall of the Unreal City. This is a scene of arrival: our protagonist, who now seems to be identifiable with the knight questing for the Grail and thus the young man searching for the titular destination in Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” comes to inverted towers and an empty chapel. In a way, aligning the protagonists’ arrival with that of Roland’s, the quest is a direct consequence of the deteriorating conditions of the modern world: though Roland suspects that his guide “lied in every word,” a blind indifference and lack of spiritual direction (as embodied by the Saint Mary Woolnoth Church) leads him to the Dark Tower. Browning’s poem, abruptly cut off at Roland’s declaration of arrival, portrays the journey as almost meaningless; Eliot, however, adds a strand of optimism. In addition to the social spiritual degeneration that contributes to Roland’s journey to the tower, Eliot’s quester undergoes clear individual destruction as well. He approaches the final destination strained both physically and mentally, hallucinating “fiddled music,” “bats with baby faces,” the reversal of towers (which, in traditional Tarot reading, conveys a more definite negative connotation and higher emphasis on “destruction” than the upright card), and “voices singing” (378-85).

Nonetheless, the ominous illusions dissipate in the following stanzas, with the towers now morphed into an “empty chapel” devoid of any sensual cue other than the grass, the wind, and the rooster (389). Our quester has also broken loose from any previous sense of fear – though the “tumbled graves” cast a heavy shadow of death and destruction on the chapel, the protagonist has already reconciled with this destruction, concluding that “dry bones can harm no one” (388, 392). With a sudden flash of lightning reminiscent of the one in the Tarot card, the rooster announces a time of regeneration with the impending rain. Here, Eliot seems to be reminding us readers that only through extremities – destruction on all levels and dimensions – can we finally be reborn.

10.12

Madame Sosostris’ Tarot readings didn’t sound too convincing – in addition to her bad cold is the bothering thought of her being identified with a transvestite fraudster by name. As the poem progresses, however, the death of the Phoenician sailor seems to directly corroborate the madame’s predictions. Yet the cause of death remains troubling: why would Eliot depict drowning, an overabundance by water, in this barren land, especially after the flow of water has been identified with the vitality of love (and its contamination with that of modern love, as shown in the starting lines of “The Fire Sermon”)? What’s more, doesn’t the speaker repeatedly make clear in the subsequent section that there is simply “no water” (359) across the infertile land?

The answer becomes clear as soon as we examine the original draft of “Death by Water,” largely the first-hand recount of an unfortunate shipwreck. The narrative voice, which originally seems to belong to an arbitrary sailor, becomes more curious as it consistently expresses emotions incongruous with the rest of the seamen. For instance, in “the men pulled the nets, and laughed, and thought / [...] / I laughed not,” the emotional incompatibility is evident (Draft 48-51). This unusual speaker further complicates in identity and dimension as readers encounter the line “when / I like, I can wake up and end the dream” (Draft 72). Just as we are about to decide that the speaker merely experiences the situation in a De Quincey-style dream, the ship crashes onto a mass of ice; the climax doesn’t end with the crash, but with a sudden, certainly intrusive imperative “Remember me” (Draft 81). So we hear not a dreamer, but a prophet: a prophet who has been emotionally detached from the start, who has long transcended the context of the scene, who clearly views the story from an authoritative, omniscient dimension.

But prophecy might not be applaudable, at least in the waste land. Considering prophets in Eliot’s poem, in addition to Madame Sosostris’ marked incredibility, we find the incompetence even of Tiresias – readers never witness his magic, since an inspection reveals that all his predictions are simply based on induction and experience. As an example, it appears that he only visualizes an affair between the typist and the clerk because he “foresuffered all” from both parties’ perspectives.

Therefore, we reach the likely conclusion that the drowning of the Phoenician sailor is flawed in truth – an extension of Madame Sosostris’ (and all The-Waste-Land prophets’) unreliability – which finally reconciles the inconsistencies between this passage and other sections of the poem. In fact, given the original draft, we might even identify the speaker of “Death by Water” as the madame proceeding with her misguided “foretelling,” rendering the readers as easy targets of misinformation. Eliot’s waste land remains that sterile, arid place, though now full of deceptions like this.

10.10

I thought it best to add a little to my last comment rather than start another annotation. Eliot instructs us to view the latter half of this indented section as a song performed in turn by the three Thames maidens, but I suggest that the lyric’s setting in London (at Highbury, at Moorgate, etc.) render it possible to attribute the musical passage to Queen Elizabeth herself, and concurrently identify the maidens with the queen. The change in interpretation is quite smooth – for instance, we can then interpret the line “My people humble people who expect / Nothing” as an expression of the collective public approval of and insistence on the queen’s chastity, which has occupied a place of national interest (305).

But isn’t the song one of violation? In Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the Rhine maidens are disentitled when the dwarf Alberich steals their gold; the Thames maidens’ song seems to recount a memory of sexual assault not too distinct from the typist’s encounter, though with striking indifference. How, then, could the virgin queen have been violated, if we now identify her with the Thames – and thus the Rhine – maidens?

Was the earl the culprit of this violation, should it be a physical one? I think not. While “a gilded shell” seems to be describing the boat of Elizabeth and Leicester, the mention of “red and gold” hints directly at the branded colors of the Spanish Empire at the time (282-3). Accompanied by the previous line, we then recall a specific episode in the 1585 Anglo-Spanish War. As the Spanish Armada advanced towards London, the Earl of Leicester was appointed the “Captain-General of the Queen's Armies,” and established a line of defense based on the Thames River, two months before his death. Since “The Waste Land” identifies the Thames with the Rhine River, it is reasonable to understand this defense as one of true love – what Alberich gives up and curses in his theft of the Rhine gold. The earl could be seen as having guarded love until his death. He could not have been the violator.

Then there is only one possibility remaining: those “humble people” who “expect” the queen’s maidenhood. Rationalizing the passage with this perspective makes Eliot’s message suddenly clear – the forced virginity of the queen is as degenerating to the modern world as the industrial, again forced sexual encounter between the typist and the young clerk.

10.6

My last annotation argued for an equivalence in gender portrayals in “The Waste Land,” in the sense that both sexes have been unanimously subjected to the similar degenerative consequences of contemporary industrialization and mechanization of love. Here, however, I want to highlight a disparity between the presentation of the two sexes.

Why does Eliot include here the hidden affair between Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester? The standard interpretation recognizes this scene as another instance of modern degraded love – though their aristocratic roles place them as far away from industrial degeneration as possible, Eliot’s position of the boat in a contaminated river full of “Oil and tar” suggests that their relationship is merely an illusion of prosperity (267). Lifeless love has thoroughly penetrated society.

But there is another layer of meaning hidden here. Recall that a consistent motif throughout the poem is the identification of characters with the Fisher King, who, due to a physical impotence, leads to sterility throughout his country’s land. Queen Elizabeth, however, serves as a complete antithesis in “The Fire Sermon.” Publicly known as the “Virgin Queen,” her physical chastity is often celebrated along with the glamor of the country during her rule. In fact, we can easily identify causal relationships between the two – for instance, it is precisely to ensure Britain’s political stability that members of the nobility propagated rumors that prevented a marriage between the queen and the earl. Unlike for the Fisher King, whose sexual potency is restored through the renewal of the land, it seems like female virility is negatively related to the prosperity (and therefore metaphorical fertility) of the land.

On the other hand, the positive correlation between male virility and the fertility of the land, as manifested through the Fisher King, persists in Earl Dudley: throughout her reign as queen, Elizabeth never bestowed any additional power or land to the earl; whether we cite incomplete dominance or sexual impotence as the reason, the virginity of the relationship undoubtedly corresponds to the earl’s incompetency in ruling land.

Despite all of that, perhaps there is no disparity after all. If we interpret the queen’s virginity not as a sterile state, but the potential for future fertility, she perfectly demonstrates the pattern embodied in the Fisher King. In a historical context, this interpretation indeed holds some truth – for other European powers at the time, Elizabeth’s chastity meant she was constantly available for a future arrangement of political marriage; as such, the stability and prosperity of the nation was maintained. To reach a final answer on this matter of gender portrayal, a comparison of patterns throughout the poem will be ideal.

10.4

Poor typist. Yet another character who has lost their vitality to the modern “Unreal City.” As readers we never have access to her name – she is known by her occupation, specifically one that had been associated with so many sexist wartime/postwar stereotypes. The typist represents not an individual but an entire social class of proletariat women. A class of labor identified with their relationship to a machine. Presumably like many others, this typist has industrially preserved (canned) food for dinner, piles her “bed” with cheap undergarment, awaits the arrival of some “small house agent’s clerk,” and is raped (232). Like the typist herself the sex is a robotic, “bored and tired” one, with both parties quick to flee the scene directly after it ends.

What’s interesting to me is the lens that the story is told from. The prophet Tiresias lost his own sight after claiming to Juno that women experience more pleasure in sexual acts, making his narration of this incident ironic in itself. Furthermore, readers notice a curious overlap between his characterization and that of the young man’s – the former has “walked among the lowest of the dead” centuries past while the latter stays as “one of the low” in modern society. There are two possible interpretations of this connection: perhaps the man (which we can also infer to refer to a class of proletariat males), no less industrialized than the typist, is currently living among the “lowest of the dead” himself, stripped of life and humanity; or perhaps the sexual encounter has emasculated him, much like how the intercourse of two snakes has Tiresias.

Both interpretations lead to the following: Sex, now lifeless and “indifferent,” is not enjoyed to any greater extent by the young clerk. Perhaps a little forced passion fueled the start of his assault, but the rest of the physical interaction seems automatic at best, with “no response” expected from the other party (241). An unfeeling kiss concludes this episode, and the young man escapes the scene “groping his way, finding the stairs unlit,” having gained nothing from his cheap sexual encounter. The waste land is not only a space of female maltreatment, but depletes both sexes of pre-industrial humanity.

Having “foresuffered all” and experienced modern sexual relations (through his prophesy) from the perspectives of both sexes, perhaps Tiresias’ response to Juno and Jupiter should have been “neither” (243).

10.1

The positioning of this French phrase is most curious. It seems to deliver some message about innocence – especially chastity, given the general themes of this section of the poem – but finds itself stuck between colliding episodes of unnatural, purchased, and violent sex. Most notably, the “Sweeney” mentioned a few lines before recurs in several of Eliot’s poems as a client of prostitution; using the clues given by Eliot, the “Mrs. Porter” in the same line seems to refer to a wartime brothel-keeper who owns the bodies of her “daughters”; lastly, in the following stanza, we see another retelling of Philomela’s rape, its now archaic voicing (as the conjugation of “forc’d” suggests) rendering this savagery continuous across time (198-200, 205).

Why would Eliot place the line here? To start, I don’t think sarcasm or optimism are feasible explanations. Eliot would not have used the portrayed sexual innocence of children to satirize contemporary carnal practices; throughout the poem, he has repeatedly illustrated that reproductive virility is beneficial and even necessary to the health of the land and its inhabitants, so this line’s message must not run contrariwise. For the same reason the line is not designed to simply express optimism – for Eliot, a more ideal state of the world would not be one of complete religious abstinence evoked by the voices of choir youths.

Perhaps it would be valuable that we now reflect on the general characterization of children in the literature of the early 20th century. For many, including Conrad, childishness entails traditional qualities of innocence and simplicity; on the other hand was, however, an emerging view of childhood as a pre-adulthood, with all its potential strengths, challenges, and vices. This can be exemplified through the Boy Scout movement prevalent in England at the time – premature masculinity/virility was increasingly welcomed and strived for among the general public.

I believe Eliot tries to capture this sentiment with the excerpted line from Parsifal. The sound of children singing in a distant church no longer constitutes the imagery of a young knight resisting sexual temptations with his natural innocence, but is stranded in – and even possibly contaminated by – a society of sinful sexual morbidity. Recall that for Eliot, morbid reproduction is identified with degeneration and sterilization. Thus, this message is consistent with another depiction of the action of youth in the poem: the departure of the presumably young Hyacinth pair from the Hyacinth garden, a symbol of healthy and cyclical reproductive forces, to a degenerative state (36-7). Even children cannot escape the devitalizing forces of the modern waste land.

9.28

Here we have an exchange of sorts between two voices, one spoken (placed in speech marks) and the other likely in the form of private thoughts. That is interesting in itself – readers have just finished a passage discussing the reclaiming of and response to Philomela’s feminine voice. However, I’m more interested in the content: What do these lines try to depict, and what is the significance of that? The primary theme of this section, which I consider to be seduction, has been clear since the beginning; the mention of nerves suggests a form of hyper-sensitivity related to this seduction. Considering these aspects, we arrive at two possibilities: the quoted speaker, presumably a female, might have either undergone an unpleasant, distressing sexual experience or is anticipating a future sexual encounter, presumably with the unquoted speaker.

The first spoken line ends with the imperative “stay with me,” evoking the precise image of an awaited seduction/adulterous affair and the anxiety that accompanies this. Therefore, I am inclined to accept the second story as I continue my analysis. It seems that, within this passage, this future sexual act is obstructed by a completely antithetical idea: death itself. On the first level of interpretation, notice how each of the female speaker’s questions, which I consider to be requests for dependence and comfort, fall into silence. The other character, presumably male, never articulates their thoughts in response, consequently leading the former speaker to accuse them of losing certain human functions, including speech, sight, and memory. In another work of Eliot, “Gerontion,” this loss of human features is causally connected with “the tiger”’s mercilessness Second Coming (56-59). Thus, the characters’ interactions are quite literally impeded by death – for the female speaker, the unresponsiveness of her companion allows her to identify him with death and thus the impossibility of further procreation.

In another dimension, death clouds the male character’s unspoken thoughts. They are plagued by visions of a “rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones,” referring to a traumatic wartime experience. The conceptions of life and its meaning have been so distorted through the war that the man’s mind is constantly occupied by death and destruction, rendering him rather incapable of engaging in sexual acts. I can’t help but think of the Fisher King, whose impotence is depicted as directly resulting from the lack of vitality in the land – a feature of postwar Europe as well. The theme of war-induced sterility all across the waste land persists in this scene.

The man recalls that “those are pearls that were his eyes,” a scene from Shakespeare’s Tempest where the death of King Alonso is announced by song (126). Importantly, it is later revealed in the play that the death was fake – in a sense, King Alonso was resurrected on stage. So is the death seen by the pair only temporary? Eliot does not make it clear whether there remains hope for the characters to proceed with seduction, and whether there remains hope for life.

9.17

Though the section takes its title from a burial ritual of Orthodox tradition, and readers originally expect to be invited to a sterile, visually dissonant landscape, it begins counterintuitively with an awakening. April, a time of resurgence and revival, is chosen as the first imagery readers encounter. In this annotation, I am interested in a very specific feature of this opening. In lines 2-3, the speaker uses curious language as he describes April “mixing / Memory and desire” – what do “memory” and “desire” refer to? What is their relationship? A review of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, which Eliot likely drew inspiration for his opening lines, can provide us with some insight.

The Canterbury Tales begins its Prologue with a similar depiction of a waking world. Spring has returned, flowers are blossoming, and the land teems with a newfound vitality. In one view, considering the setting of Tales – a journey to visit the relics of a Christian saint – these lines evoke a divine sense of rebirth. Indeed, plants undergo a dimension of physical maturation in the spring, but they do not regain vitality through natural processes of the material world. Instead, life must be “breathed into” by a personified “West Wind,” an embodiment of supernatural life-giving forces similar to that of God’s in Ezekiel 37 (Chaucer 5). Likewise, flowers can only be engendered by a certain “vertu,” once again reminiscent of Christian allegories of spiritual resurrection and cyclicality (Chaucer 4).

Conversely, however, the passage can be approached through a perspective completely detached from the idea of religious revival. Rather, we can identify a pagan, or at least secular, form of awakening – more specifically, of sexual revival. The blossoming of flowers are emblematic of both sensual and poetic renewal; as the April showers "bathe every vein in such liquor,” a clearly carnal appeal is evoked, as if the rain is not merely nourishing but also stimulating. Such a perspective corresponds to ancient pagan celebrations of fertility in the spring, intended to bring physical rejuvenation to the world.

The above duality of perspective/interpretation is carried into “The Waste Land.” For instance, as the showers in Tales bathe plant veins in liquor, the spring rain “stirs / Dull roots with spring rain” in Eliot’s work (3-4).

In “The Waste Land,” April, the medium of both Christian renewal and pagan revitalization, brings a blend of two forces: “memory,” the traditional conception of divine life-giving faculties, and “desire,” a seemingly primitive yet universal sexual awakening. To reinforce the connections I have established, even the types of life-instillation in the two approaches, as their corresponding names suggest, are distinct,: the “memory”-type is concerned with returning to a prior state of vitality, while the “desire”-type seeks a forward, creation-based virility.

What can we conclude? Perhaps that Eliot is, for disembodiment purposes, blending two historically distinct approaches to life in nature; perhaps he is highlighting some multidimensional nature of the modern sense of progress (a life-giving force). But this will require further justifications.

Informal annotation: There is another way to interpret the role of prophecy in "The Waste Land." Perhaps Eliot has intentionally characterized the prophets as creators instead of foretellers of the future. This is certainly true in the case of Huxley's Mme. Sesostris (Mr. Scogan), from which Eliot's clairvoyante takes her name -- his predictions are only true because he renders them true (i.e., he will hit his client with a hammer; he will ask the village girl about heaven outside the local church). In the context of Eliot's poem, it could be argued that it is exactly Mme. Sosostris' vision of the Phoenician Sailor that drowns him in later sections of the work.

Having established this, the final line of this stanza could be directed at prophets and interpreted in another way. It warns them of their reality-morphing powers in the modern world.

9.25

On many levels of interpretations, the section “A Game of Chess” depicts the rape of one or several female characters. The meticulous steps of the sport of chess bring to mind a careful, calculated series of sexual manipulation, and the rather disjunct imagery throughout these stanzas seem to be linked together by the metaphorical or literal subjugation of the female body. Of great interest to me here is the portrayal of Philomela’s metamorphosis, framed and “[displayed] above the antique mantel” (97).

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela transforms into a nightingale after revenging King Tereus for the assailment and mutilation of her body. In Eliot’s poem, however, she is forever frozen in this frame of incomplete mutation. In a way, her fate-like tragedy endures through this artwork; even from the modern observer’s perspective, “still she cried, and still the world pursues” (98). Philomela’s animalistic freedom is unachieved or at least incomplete. Recalling Sibyl’s male-given “liberation” from the natural laws of mortality and Marie’s temporary freedom sledding with an unnamed man “down [...] in the mountains,” Eliot seems to characterize female autonomy with a sense of ephemera throughout the poem (14-7).

As Ira points out, the female nightingale is naturally mute in terms of singing – it is factually impossible for their voices to permeate the desert air. Rather, female nightingales can at best produce a soft collection of sounds resemblant of the “crying” that Eliot attributes to the pronoun “she” (98). Given that it traverses biological gender boundaries, one could argue that this line is yet another example of the disembodiment of perspectives.

But I think there’s more to it. We cannot confirm what this intrusive non-female voice has filled the desert with, but we notice that the only sound emphasized in the rest of the stanza is an onomatopoeia “Jug Jug” (103). Having had her tongue cut off, the violated female exemplified by Philomela does not regain her voice through the transformation to a nightingale. Moreover, this transformation – this scene hanging over the ancient mantel, this “withered stumps of time” – can only generate impact through the interpretation of the (presumably male) observer (104). Sadly, all that the “dirty ears” of the viewer can perceive from the image is condensed into the obscene “Jug Jug.” The strength and resolution that Philomela supposedly represents does not resonate in the modern waste land. Only the vulgar, filthy perception seems to live on.

9.23

The choice of using “undone” to describe death’s consequence on the inhabitants of the Unreal City is significant (Eliot 63). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “undone” as a past participle bears the meaning of “unbounded; released or freed from a bond, bandage, covering, etc.” Interpreting the word in this fashion, it seems like Eliot is suggesting some liberating force within death – perhaps from social norms, from life’s hardships, etc. But then we remember that the line is almost entirely borrowed from Dante’s Inferno – it serves as Dante’s first visual impression of the marginal space beyond Hell’s Gates, where the “neutrals” must endure eternal suffering (Dante 57). How could they possibly be considered “freed,” trapped in this inescapable pool of blood, pus, and melted flesh?

Then, we must consider a reinterpretation of the word. We ask ourselves: What happens when a knot, a computer command, or a damage is “undone”? Very simply, they are restored to a previous, more natural state: the knot is unraveled to a linear rope, the computer command is reversed, and the effects of the damage are offset. It seems, however, that such an explanation hardly applies to an individual’s death. In any case, what original state would the citizens of the Unreal City be restored to upon their death? Certainly the answer here doesn’t involve a physical decomposition to dust, since the swarming crowd comprises men with functioning “eyes” and “feet”; neither is there a complete loss of consciousness, for that the people still “exhaled sighs” along their paths (Eliot 65-6).

But I still think this restoring connotation of the word is at work in the poem. Recall Eliot’s original decision to incorporate a quotation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness as his epigraph. When death nears Mr. Kurtz, his response fascinates me – at that moment, for the narrator, it seems as if Mr. Kurtz “lived his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender” (Conrad 4). Indeed, in a particular sense, Mr. Kurtz is “undone” by death. Death descends upon him dramatically, rewinding his life many decades, forcing him to witness every pain and suffering he once experienced. Death, then, is no retreat. It provides no sense of closure.

Inferno suggests a similar message. The neutrals, having died, are nonetheless portrayed as “[having] no hope of death” (Dante 46). This characterization can only be considered logical if we accept the restoring definition of “undone” above – those unfortunate souls are forced to live painfully and perpetually beyond their deaths. Similarly, we are reminded of Eliot’s finalized epigraph, where the oracle Sibyl craves a never-attainable death. Thus, the word choice of “undone” becomes an important illustration of Eliot’s conception of death in “The Waste Land.”

An unexpected figure is introduced in line 43 of “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot: Madame Sosostris. On first glance, the intrusion of the character is merely another brushstroke of culture Eliot decided to add to the dissonant landscape – we’ve had Latin references, Greek myths, and German lieds, so it seems fit that we now have a French magicien.

But the choice of Madame’s Sosostris’ name is most curious. Perhaps the Egyptian mythological King Sesostris? It seems fit, since Tarot cards did originate as a method of water level prediction in Ancient Egypt (Weston 8-9). That said, another reading of the name would prove substantially helpful to understanding the development and visions of the poem.

In Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow, Madame Sesostris is a faux Tarot reader played by a deceitful Mr. Scogan. Perhaps we should first notice the gender duality present in the character. The Sosostris in Eliot’s poem is likely a transvestite male, immediately reminiscent of the epicene nature of another fortuneteller in the poem – “I Tiresias, [...] / Old man with wrinkled female breasts” (Eliot 218-9). Given Eliot’s general vision for the poem, Eliot’s choice of la madame’s name has allowed disembodiment to extend beyond that of the borderless speaker. Now the characters have become amorphous as well.

Another essential feature of Huxley’s Madame Sesostris is this: he practices magic not for the sake of truth, but towards his own benefit (namely, to arrange a likely sexual encounter with a village girl). Then what about Eliot’s Madame Sosostris, the “famous clairvoyante”? It seems like we must accept her incredibility as well. Considering the postwar context, how bleak and hopeless this waste land has become – even the “wisest woman in Europe” knows not the future, only how to toy with it for her own benefit.

In fact, rather than the future, Madame Sosostris’ cards evoke more images of the past. From characters carrying Christian undertones to mythological figures, we are presented with a kaleidoscope towards historical cultures. For instance, we can identify an important purpose in this specific presentation of the Tarot reading: it blends the Grail quest and the more historic quest in Aeneid together. The tale of the Fisher King, present throughout “The Waste Land,” is brought to mind immediately by the “man with three staves,” who stares motionlessly at a body of water; the “one-eyed merchant,” suggestive of a cyclops, and “Belladonna,” whose name is indirectly associated with one of the Greek Fates, are famous features of Virgil’s Aeneid. Eliot has used Madame Sosostris’ reading to dilute the dimension of time.

Lastly, the impotence of Madame Sosostris in enlightening us about the truth is reminiscent of yet another prophet referenced to in the poem – that “son of man” from Ezekiel. This character can wield no individual power; even in the final scene of the Book of Ezekiel, the namesake prophet can only intervene in death through the power of God. Through the character of Madame Sosostris, Eliot has connected all the fortune-tellers in “The Waste Land.”

9.21

The point I want to raise concerns flowers. Lines 35-42 of the poem is a recount of experience. Here, the hyacinth flower seems to be of particular importance. It is a multidimensional symbol – on one hand, the cognate name of a Greek celebration; and on the other, the mythological story of Apollo and his lover. The excerpt from John Lemprière’s work suggests the unique cyclical nature of the Hyacinthia celebration: starting with the mourning of a death, it develops into a mass rejoicing over Apollo (a bright, life-giving force) before returning to a time of public grief.

Similarly, we can identify an analogous cycle of life in the story of Hyacinthus. The young boy, while sharing his love and vitality with Apollo, dies by an unfortunate accident, and yet is resurrected by the god himself soon afterwards. In the most accepted version, Hyacinthus’ soul is preserved in the purple hyacinth flower – strongly reminiscent of the vegetatively resurrected Adonis mentioned in Weston’s work, an aboriginal deity of fertility. In such a manner, we conclude that the hyacinth is a likely symbol of the natural, even primitive pattern of vegetative virility.

Notice now that these lines are not set in the titular waste land. The section only comprises spoken dialogue, self reflection, and descriptions of specific bodily features, allowing us to approach it as a geographical void – the only imagery of setting we see here is the “hyacinth garden” from which the speaker has departed. Then, it seems convincing that this “garden” does not coexist with the waste land spatiotemporally. Instead, we can interpret it as a precursor to the waste land: a land that hasn’t been wasted, a land characterized by the healthy, cyclical vital/reproductive forces that the hyacinth represents.

Unfortunately, this hyacinth garden undergoes levels of degeneration – or better, will undergo this degeneration, given that the Tarot reading foretells the future. By the time readers reach line 49, they have returned to the titular landscape. The “Rocks,” whose tutelary figure is some Christian-toned goddess “Belladonna,” brings to mind heaps and piles of deteriorating waste. The namesake plant (full name atropa belladonna) was heavily used in cosmetic products; considering the negative connotation given by the plant’s toxic nature, we can almost infer that the plant represents a form of poisonously irresistible seduction. In contrast with the natural reproductive forces identified with the hyacinth before, the Belladonna seems to represent a more artificial, unhealthy form of regeneration.

The irresistibility evoked by the plant is corroborated by the name’s etymological root. Coming from the Greek goddess Atropos, “she who may not be turned aside,” it carries a clear sense of determinism. Further, the finality suggested by this mythological connection – in Greek tradition, Atropos is tasked with the responsibility of cutting moral life-threads as an execution of destiny – similarly contradicts the cyclical nature of seasonal vegetation patterns discussed before. The speaker has truly taken readers away “from the hyacinth garden” (37).

This contradiction confirms our suspicion about the consistency of “The Waste Land.” Indeed, there is no mentioning of the Fisher King in this section, nor any explicit mentioning of reproductive or social debilitation, but we can now be certain that a coherent message of reproductive degeneration is carried throughout the sections, from the hyacinth-turned-belladonna to a rushed sexual encounter, then to the Fisher King, etc.

9.16

Joseph Conrad marks a pivotal transition from Victorian styles to what is now known as “modern” literature. Conradian impressionism, as we see in the excerpt from Heart of Darkness, takes away the omniscient consciousness completely and, as if inspired by the Buddhist concept of ksanas – unthinkably short moments of time – captures plots with fragments of setting and imagery that only vaguely constitute a “whole.” Indeed, in this sense Eliot accords with Conrad, with his emphasis of human epistemological incompetence beyond a “heap of broken images.”

Likewise, we can infer that Eliot’s original title, “He Do The Police In Different Voices,” was intended to deliver a similar message. As an intensified extension of Conradian style, which is characterized by the constant mashing of distinct points of view, Eliot’s original opening involves stark transitions between marked different, and even dissonant, speakers. Furthermore, readers immediately notice a glaring inconsistency between internal and spoken narrations, evident in Eliot’s unpredictable use of speechmarks throughout the opening section (Eliot 19-34).

That said, an examination of the revised opening of The Waste Land reveals a clear movement beyond Conradian literary thinking. Two details stand out; I will highlight one here and discuss another in class.

First, let us consider the ending of Heart of Darkness, specifically the narrator’s – and what he suggests to be Kurtz’s – characterization of death. Marlow implies that Kurtz’s desperate cry “The horror! The horror!” as death nears expresses not a fear of death in itself; rather, it denotes some horrific realization of the hollowness of the concept. Similarly, when Marlow is briefly approached by death, he finds himself in “an impalpable greyness, with nothing around, [...] without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat” (Conrad 5). This sentiment is characteristic of two historical philosophical stances that re-emerged in the 19th century: Epicureanism and Skepticism. Thinkers from both schools contend that, due to the lack of (or the impossibility of justification of) a percipient after death, we can logically assign no meaning or value to it, since things only “mean” in some direct or indirect relationship to human concerns.

In the published opening of The Waste Land, Eliot has clearly moved beyond Skepticism. I have established elsewhere that the poem’s first speaker is likely a buried corpse – consequently, we are met with a form of postmortem consciousness unacceptable in Conradian thinking. Soon, the speaker asks, “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / ‘Has it begun to sprout?” (Eliot 71-72). It seems like a sense of prolonged/renewed life has been instilled in death.

9.14

The Waste Land does not exist in an arbitrary time – in fact, the title is delivered much like a description, or even definition, of the year stamped next to it. What image or impression of the 1922 postwar world is Eliot trying to evoke in the reader? A semantical examination could prove useful. The Oxford English Dictionary provides two contrasting definitions: in one, the word refers to a “natural, uncultivated” state; in the other, this land is one “unfit for cultivation and left to run wild.” Interestingly, the latter definition only first emerged in 1922, coinciding with the publication of Eliot's poem. It seems that Eliot has successfully reinvented a word.

But how could the change in interpreting the word “wasteland” have been so drastic, rapid, and uniform that reachers reached a collective new conception so efficiently? Eliot’s separation of the original word “wasteland” played a significant role. We are left with an unsettling composition of two separate concepts: “waste” and “land.” Most importantly, “waste” is no longer simply a descriptive feature of the land, but a much more extensive, pervasive force that diverts the land (and more) from its natural state. In other words, the addition of the space directly allows a dynamic interaction between a subject and an object, which the new definition incorporates. From Eliot’s notes crediting the Grail legends, as quite comprehensively retold by Jessie L. Weston, we reach the likely suspicion that this pervasive force is brought about by the inhabitants of this 1922 desolate landscape – humans, with whom the land shares its virility.

So, what does the barrenness of land correspond to in humans? Lethargy? Immorality? Impotence? It seems like each of these options could be analogous to what the Fisher King experiences in the Arthurian legends, which is then projected onto the state of his “land.” To understand what Eliot identifies as the primary problem in the human dimension, perhaps we can interpret his separation of “waste” and “land” through another lens.

Take “land” now to represent the postwar world and its inhabitants. Then, the addition of the space could be viewed as a gesture of complete discontinuity – the land has lost connection with what it now regards as “waste (adj. or n.),” something that is either 1) no longer considered useful or 2) overly rich/extravagant to the point of being superfluous. What is this entity? Further investigation is necessary, but discontinuity of culture/civilization is a plausible answer, as it continues to be illustrated by a long series of specific imagery throughout the poem (e.g., the immediate departure of the nymphs as the speaker zooms into the River Thames, 174-9).

Despite the heavy messages carried in the title, Eliot decides to open his stanzas with two distinctly optimistic elements: 1) the season of April, a time of restoration for the natural dimension, and 2) the consciousness and sprouting of a dead corpse, symbolizing renewed vitality for the human dimension. Eliot’s aim in this work, then, becomes clear – to bridge the discontinuity that is the waste land.