The final part of The Waste Land serves to tie together many of the loose strands left throughout the poem and thus achieve an ending that feels, at first glance, somewhat complete, until one realises that this is only because it is overwhelming. In reality, it leaves many questions unanswered. Almost each of these lines alludes to another source that has been previously used, or even to a number of different sources through a singular source. Many of these allusions are related to sex and love. The line ‘poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina’ means ‘then he vanished in the fire that refines [the lustful].’ This may be alluding to Dido – who, due to her strong love, killed herself upon a pyre – or perhaps to the ‘burning burning burning’ of the Buddha’s Fire-Sermon – showing the danger of the strength of the senses. It could also cause Tiresias to resurface again, as Dante’s lustful described themselves as ‘hermaphoriditic’, that is having both male and female genitalia, perhaps similar to – Eliot’s version of – Tiresias. In this Canto, Dante also states ‘I climb from here no longer to be blind’. Eliot may have interpreted this as a response to the blindness of people such as Tiresias, and perhaps even of himself – as throughout the Waste Land there has been a lack of knowledge and understanding. The line beginning ‘Quando fiam uti chelidon’ means ‘Shall I find my voice when I shall be as the swallow?’ taken by Eliot as a reference to the Tereus and Philomela story. The next two words, notably, are ‘O swallow swallow’. The ‘swallow’ is immediately heard. Perhaps this is the first coming true of prophecy in the poem. There is perhaps some similar hope expressed in the Pervigilium: ‘tomorrow let loveless, tomorrow let lover make love’. The repetition of the word ‘love’, as opposed to simply a more carnal sex, is perhaps an expression of the hope that we are turning away from the sexual violence of the rest of the poem, and towards a more romantic loving. [nb this can of course be read in the opposite way: it can be seen as simply a constant continuation of lustfulness and perhaps even of sexual violence]. The following line is in French: ‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie’. This is a reference to de Nerval’s ‘El Desdichado’. This poem acts as almost a confluence of Eliot’s other allusions, as it itself could be suggestive of many of the things he has mentioned. The poetic voice is a ‘widower[,] his tower in ruins’. Perhaps the ‘ruins’ of the next line are taken from here, and the ‘tower’ may be related to Ugoliano’s tower in Dante. Soon, ‘Amor or Phoebus’ are brought up, ‘Amor’ being another word for Cupid, who was the god that inserted the venom of love into Dido. The ‘brow [that] still burns from the kiss of the queen’ may also conjure up images of Dido, as she killed herself by fire due to her desire. The line ‘And I have twice victorious crossed the Acheron [a river of the Underworld]’ reminds us of Charon, of Dante and of Aeneas, whilst questioning the reason that it has happened ‘twice’. Perhaps the reference to Orpheus helps: maybe it was that the poetic voice returned to seek his love and bring her from the Underworld into the world of the living, but committed some sin – just as Orpheus did by playing upon his lyre – that means they are still estranged. The present participle of ‘modulating on Orpheus’ lyre’ is also particularly notable: even though he has squandered his love, he keeps on making the mistake that caused him to lost her. Thus, humans too are in a perpetual cycle of sin and lust, unable to stop ourselves, perhaps. Finally, he is playing ‘now the sighs of the saint, now the fairy’s cry.’ This crossover of Christian and pagan acts to show just how widespread this mistake, this sin is, throughout all religions, peoples and cultures. This mistake – whatever it is: sex, loveless sex, general sin, or something else – is a destructive force that has ‘brought Death into the world and all our Woe’.

The thunder echoes through this section with the words ‘DA [...] DA [...] DA’. Each ‘DA’ is followed by a word symbolising a virtue in Hinduism. The first is followed by ‘datta’ – expressed in scripture by humans – means ‘give’. Eliot’s poem – however – inverts this by asking ‘what have we given?’ ‘The second is proceeded by ‘Dayadhvam’ – expressed by demons – ‘be self compassionate’. This section, according to Eliot, is also an allusion to Dante’s Ugolino, a story that symbolises the very opposite of compassion, hence, again, not exercising the meaning of the virtue. The final ‘DA’ is ‘Damyata’: ‘self-control’. What follows is a description of a boat obeying its captain – a metaphor for control – and then an application of this on to the human heart. However, even here, a condition is used – ‘would have’ – showing that no real ‘self-control’ exists. Therefore, this section casts humanity as not practicing any of the virtues of scripture, having moved far away from them, even though they still resound through nature.

The main interest of this section, perhaps, is the identity of the ‘third who walks always beside you’, as it may act as a key to interpretations of other parts of this section. Most obviously, and in keeping with Elot’s footnotes, this s a reference to Shackleton, who wrote of his expedition in the Arctic ‘it seemed to me often that we were four, not three’. This reference is also supported by the description of the ‘white road’, which may be indicative of snow. It is also notable that the poetic voice sees the third person when he ‘look[s] up ahead’, even though the person is ‘beside you [us?]’. This seeming mislocation adds to the confusion and mysticism of the section. Another alternative is that we are the third person, as the reader is often the other accompanying the characters. However, we may also be counted as the poetic voice’s conscious companion, meaning that this is a ‘third’ beside us. A more positive interpretation may be brought from Indian legend or Christian scripture. In the former, three seers at a doorstep ‘felt troubled by the presence of a fourth man’, only to find ‘the mysterious presence of Lord Vishnu himself and [give] expression to his ecstasy in song’. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus, having been crucified, appears to two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus: ‘Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him’. Therefore: perhaps this third figure is one of divine salvation, or at least the feeling or imagining of divine salvation. It is also notable that the ‘third’ of The Waste Land is never identified. Perhaps this is a good thing, for as soon as Jesus is identified, ‘he vanished out of their sight’. I believe that alternatively the ‘third’ man may be Death. This is suggested by the description of the ‘brown mantle, hooded’ and also by the allusions to Dracula (‘bats [...] crawled head downward down a blackened wall’) later in the passage, a common symbol for the Devil. This ambiguity – the tension between salvation (on the part of Jesus, through death) and Death – is perhaps the focal point of this section. We are lost and do not know which way we are heading whilst we walk together ‘up the white road’.

This section of the Waste Land may be read as a commentary on religion that works on multiple levels, created via allusion to the books of the Bible. The two key lines of this section are ‘He who was living is now dead/ We who were living are now dying’. The first line has much Biblical precedent. In the Book of Revelations, Jesus says ‘I am the first and the last. I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death’. The reason that Jesus used to be dead but is now living is because of the Reïncarnation. Eliot’s ‘He’ – an obvious nod to God – is a reversal. It can be read as a Jesus that was never reïncarnated, as he went simply from being alive to being dead, without the final stage, or as having been reïncarnated – so ‘living’ again – but then somehow expired following that. Whichever way we read it, however, present an anti-Biblical view, one in which Jesus is no longer ‘living’. The second line – ‘we who were living are now dying’ – casts ‘us’ (the question arising: is the reader included amongst the ‘we’?) as being in the long, drawn-out, almost timeless process of ‘dying’, but still somehow alive. Therefore: ‘we’ have outlived Jesus. This may be a commentary on religion itself – that is, Jesus does not exist in the modern world – or on failing attitudes towards religion, with the question on the minds of many at the time being ‘how is it possible for both Christian love to exist in the world and such deep suffering?’. Additionally, John 11.25 states ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’ According to Eliot, however, ‘we’ are dying, perhaps representing the decline of belief. To take this yet further, Psalm 63 begins ‘O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee’. Therefore, God is here presented as a life-nourishing water. In Eliot’s Waste Land, ‘there is no water’. By contrast, to take the other interpretation: if we, however, have outlived Jesus, then what happens now with the ‘keys to hell and to death’. Are Hell and Death flung open? Is ‘Hell empty, and all the Devils here’ (another potential reference to the Tempest…)? Is tha perhaps why such suffering permeates the world?

An additional note: few of Eliot’s contemporary readers could have read the line ‘we who were living are now dying’ without thinking of John McCrae’s famous ‘In Flanders Fields, especially those most poignant and emotive of lines: ‘We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/ Loved and were loved, and now we lie,/ In Flanders fields.’ To think of these lines allows us to perhaps transcend the meta-religious interpretation of this passage, to forget God, salvation, belief and faith, but merely to focus on the human: the suffering, the pain, the love lost – the Dead.

The original, far longer version of ‘Death by Water’ is filled with allusions to – according to Eliot – Dante and Tennyson, all centering upon the Odysseus myth, as well as to – in my humble opinion – Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The Sailor of ‘Death by Water’ – another unnamed character perhaps acting as an archetype, or as the ‘drowned Phoenician sailor’, casting us back to both tarot cards and Dido – is stopped in his journeying when ‘at eight o’clock/ And through the forenoon watch, the wind declined,/ Thereafter everything went wrong’. This is rather reminiscent of Coleridge’s ‘Rime’, in which the sailor, even after ‘the STORM-BLAST came’, having shot an albatross (perhaps also a symbol of Fate or prophecy), encounters the fact that ‘down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down’ and they were ‘stuck, nor breath nor motion;/ As idle as a painted ship/ Upon a painted ocean.’ So, in both, men find themselves at the mercy of nature, as the wind has the power to bring them from ‘tempest’ and motion to a doldrum. The power of the winds is also pertinent in the Odyssey story. Not only does Tennyson describe Troy as ‘windy’ (so perhaps mirroring the tumultuous violence of the War when it was still ongoing), but Odysseus’s crew comes to their downfall due to opening a Bag of Winds, which causes that ‘from that unknown land came/ a whirlwind that struck the ship head-on’. Hence, together these tales depict the wind as having destructive power not only when it is present but also in absentia by its very absence. Another important note to be made about the allusion to the Odyssey being through Dante is that it brings in a third sailor, besides the Phoenician and Odysseus: Charon. It is perhaps he, as the Ferryman of Hell, to whom Eliot alludes with his description of the ‘dead man in an iron coffin/ With a crowbar row[ing] from here to Hell,/ Before this vessel sail to windward’. The other option for the identity of this ‘dead man’ is Odysseus. The – rather eerie – evidence for this would be in the Tennyson poem: Odysseus, bored by the lack of adventure in Ithaka, invited his ‘mariners/ Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with [him]–’ on this journey. Notably, however, as told in Homer’s Odyssey, all of Odysseus’s men had drowned by the time that he – sole survivor – reached home. Therefore: this would be a ship of dead men. The other important comparison to be made between Eliot’s ‘Death by Water’ and Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is the appearance of a feminine figure of Death. Eliot’s Phoenician Sailor ‘saw in the fore cross-trees/ Three women leaning forward, with white hair,/ Streaming behind’. By the following description, we can identify them as Sirens, luring unsuspecting sailors to their deaths. However: we may also draw a comparison to the Woman of Coleridge’s poem: “And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a DEATH? and are there two? Is DEATH that woman's mate? Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.” She is the ‘life-in-death’ like so many of Eliot’s characters, including the Sailor, who seem to still be alive, though as we delve deeper into the literary allusions we realise that this is far from the truth. In De Quincey’s ‘Dream-fugue’ a similar scene occurs: just before the ship is sunk, a man exclaims ‘down she comes upon us’. It is unclear what the ‘she’ referred to is, but it can be read as some sort of woman of death. Therefore, here – as in many parts of the Waste Land – is the recurring image of the femme fatale.

The allusions of this section work their magic by creating a labyrinthine structure in which the reader – when they apply thought – will soon lose themselves. Wind or no wind: death comes. The Fate signified by the Albatross or the Free Will of Odysseus’s search for adventure: death comes. Sirens or other female spirits: death comes. Odysseus as ferryman, or Charon, or the Phoenician sailor: death comes. Eighty-four lines cut, and only a few preserved in the final version: death still comes. We are stuck in a labyrinth of death.

‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land ends with a synchesis of references to St Augustine’s Confessions and to the Buddha’s Fire-Sermon. The lines ‘To Carthage then I came/ Burning burning burning burning/ O Lord Thou pluckest me out/ O Lord thou pluckest/ burning’ form an interlinking as the first, third and fourth lines connect with Confessions, whilst the second and last with The Fire Sermon. The Fire Sermon is an attack on the senses as they cause us to constantly ‘burn’ because we are strongly influenced by the things that we perceive. By making the senses something separate from ourselves that has no sway over us, we can stop this burning, thus becoming free and liberated of earthly desires &c., and so escape the cycle of reincarnation. The characters of Eliot’s world, however, are ‘burning’ (note the present participle), and do not seem to be escaping this ‘burning’. The word is repeated five times in total, perhaps to mirror the five senses, the last repetition separate from the first four so that the poem seems to recycle back to it, creating the feeling of this being a permanent and inescapable state. This adds to the ideas of the social degradation that Eliot perceives as having occurred in the aftermath of the Great War. Augustine’s Confessions are, in the intial books, a form of confessional, especially in terms of his sexual desires. ‘To Carthage then I came’ are the exact words with which a section of the Confessions begins. Hence, perhaps, the Waste Land is itself a form of confessional, on behalf of all humanity: we are meant to reflect – in a far more secular way, I would argue – on the problems that have begun to plague society since the War. One of these problems is one of sex and desire. This, especially sexual violence, is something that has been greatly focussed on throughout ‘The Fire Sermon’ section, but the conclusion with St Augustine puts it on the pedestal of being the main theme of this section. Moreover, if ‘burning’ is not read as a reference to the Buddha’s thought, in such close proximity to ‘Carthage’, it may be reëvoking Dido, who, of course, died upon a pyre following her sexual desire that burned too bright. Moreover, the ‘passion’ of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon presumably also includes sexual passion, from which we must also free ourselves. Eliot repeats St Augustine’s ‘O Lord thou pluckest me out/ O Lord thou pluckest’. This plucking may be a plucking out of the mass of earthly sinners, hence a salvation that God may bestow upon a person as a result of their confessions. However, in The Waste Land, the second reiteration – the repetition having the feel of a prayer – is cut short and never finished. Therefore: this is a failed confession, just like the cycle of ‘burning’ is never escaped, but merely returned to at the very end. Thus – humanity cannot escape their errors, but stays within this vicious cycle. Eliot holds no hope for us.

This section of The Waste Land must be seen through the eyes of Tiresias, both man and woman. The poetic voice takes on his persona with the refrain of ‘I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives’. This Tiresias, however, is different to Ovid’s Tiresias. Whilst Ovid’s is at any one point either man or man, Eliot’s Tiresias is ‘throbbing between two lives,/ Old man with wrinkled female breasts’. He is neither man nor woman, but rather left in the liminal space between the two states, seemingly unable to escape into either one due to his experiences. Notably, he is ‘old’ and ‘wrinkled’. Tiresias’s age reflects the dereliction of the Waste Land, also on the verge of decay. Many of Eliot’s Classical references point in this direction: the ancient world is a world that was once full great and powerful empires but now little of it remains (‘For many states that were once great have now become small; and those that were great in my time were small before. Knowing therefore that human prosperity never continues in the same place, I shall mention both alike.’ Herodotus, Histories I). A similar effect is perhaps achieved by alluding to Sappho; her work only remains in fragmentary form, thus too is fading and decaying from this world. This extract continues the theme of sexual violence, describing as it did before the attacks of an archetypal ‘he’ on an archetypal ‘she’.* This, however, is complicated by the fact that we are looking at this tale through the lens of Tiresias, both ‘he’ and ‘she’. Therefore, there is perhaps an important interpretation to be considered that this passage may also be portraying a strange, perverse form of violence towards the self. Hence, it encompasses both humans destroying each other and the individual destroying himself. It is a true Waste Land, full of naught but brutality.

*Worth mentioning tangentially is perhaps Ezra Pound’s translation of ‘The Natural Philosophy of Love’ – sexual violence exists in all (most) species on earth, pervading all parts of nature.

The image of a ‘Waste Land’ is furthered in this section by the portrayal of its desolation, highlighted by literary and Biblical allusions. One of the few forces that still remains is ‘the wind/ cross[ing] the brown land, unheard.’ The wind is a representation of the unsubstantial, fleeting and ethereal. It does not truly add anything to this place and will soon be gone. The word ‘unheard’ – emphatically placed last, following the caesura of the comma – refocuses the poem on the people, or rather the lack thereof. There is none living who can witness even something as simple as the wind. Following this, Eliot presents an invocatio to and then description of the River Thames, sandwiched by the words ‘The nymphs are departed’. The invocatio is a reference to Spenser’s ‘Prothalmion’, a celebration of marriage – and thus birth, reproduction and renewal. This paints a stark contrast to the death and hopelessness of the Waste Land. In ‘Prothalmion’, there is love, purity and an ancient idyll, but here there is none of these. Spenser describes ‘a meadow, by the river’s side,/ A flock of nymphs I chanced to espy’. There is life and celebration here. By emphasising that ‘the nymphs are departed’, Eliot identified his River Thames with the river of Spenser, but with the key difference that all that glory of days past is long dead and buried. Indeed, the allusions of previous section of ‘The Wasteland’ add special significance to some of the lines in ‘Prothalmion’. In his celebration of love, Spenser exults: ‘And let fair Venus, that is queen of love,/ With her heart-quelling son upon you smile’. Eliot’s earlier allusions to the Dido and Aeneas story, in which these two characters leads to death, perhaps serves, in conjunction with this, as commentary on the way that the road to hell is paved with good things. Contrasting the classicism of the ‘nymphs’, Eliot’s Thames is also devoid of ‘empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends’. All these things would normally be seen as litter and their absence a welcome change. However, they are so commonplace and so expected that the lack of them creates a rather eerie atmosphere. There is not only nothing good, but also nothing bad about this Thames. It might be perfectly clean – and in that perfection lies the terror: for nature can only be perfect when Man is gone.

I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. -- William Blake

This section is a medley of confusion. When the dialogue between the two voices begins – both unnamed, to add to the chaos – there is an immediate sense of lack of voice and agency, as the voice in quotation marks keeps asking the same things again and again. It is also interesting that the voice’s assumption is that – because it does not know what its interlocutor is thinking or saying – they must not be speaking or thinking at all. Moreover, these actions are for some reason seen as vital by the interlocutor, as shown by the imperative ‘think.’ and ‘speak.’ The only thought that echoes back from the poem is that ‘we are in rats’ alley,/ Where the dead men lost their bones’. This perhaps is a flashback to the War, as it is very reminiscent of trench warfare. Soon, from a quietened, unspeaking voice, the voice of the poem becomes a voice of reassurance to that in speech-marks. The speech-marked voice takes on a panicked, semi-hysterical voice – afraid of the ‘wind’, the unsubstantial and ethereal. The senses and capabilities of the voice of the poem are then tested: they are asked if they ‘know [...]/ see [...]/ remember nothing?’ But they remember one thing: ‘those are pearls that were his eyes’. This, of course, is a reference to line 48, the tarot reading. It is notable that the only thing remembered is that which never happened, but was only ever a half-believed prediction of the future. A similar loss of the senses can be found in Hamlet, whence Eliot drew inspiration: ‘O heat, dry up my brains! [loss of ‘know[ing]’ or ‘remember[ing]’] Tears seven times salt,/ Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye! [loss of ‘see[ing]’]. Most interesting, however, is that in the Hamlet quotation this is a wish and desire to be rid of these capabilities. Perhaps, if read into the Eliot, this means that the characters of this section, presumably former soldiers suffering from PTSD, have a strong subconcious desire to forget everything that occurred, close their eyes to the suffering of the world and make a ‘Waste Land’ of their minds.

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.

Eliot adds significant complexity to his portrayal of London and its society throughout ‘The Waste Land’ using images of and allusions to death and various deathscapes. In the ‘unreal city’, the poetic voice observes ‘a crowd [that] flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’ The latter half of this is a nigh-direct quote from Dante’s ‘Inferno’, wherein Dante surveys Hell, noting ‘before [a banner] came so long a file of people/ that I could not believe/ death had undone so many’. This allusion may therefore have one of several effects. It might be painting London as a new hellscape – caused by the destruction of war which has reduced it to a spectre of its former self. This, then, is also in line with the rest of the description, which is rather Dante-esque. However, if we are to take Hell or the afterlife as a place separate from where the poetic voice is, then it is possible that the ‘so many’ – a phrase that, notably and in order to enhance its force, is twice repeated – that are dead is felt not by their presence as shades in the crowd, but rather by their absence from the crowd. Indeed, therefore, it might be that this crowd is far smaller and more solemn than those that the poetic voice is used to, which is what causes the disturbance, or, perhaps, there are friends and acquaintances that he expected to see within the crowd, who have not made it. The use of the word ‘undone’ is particularly interesting – as it presents Death not as what all humans peacefully go towards at the end of their lives, but rather as a destructive and rapacious force, such as the Death of war indeed is. Dante, in Hell, is told to ‘move aside from these now dead [...note: reversed order for clarity], you living soul.’ Therefore, Dante represents the living amongst the dead, just as the poetic voice is alive amongst the death of London. In Rime of the Ancient Mariner-fashion, the poetic voice stops a man and asks him ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ Has it begun to sprout?’ This further plays on ideas of life and death, representing death coming back to bring forth life. In De Nerval’s description of his dreams, whence Eliot took inspiration, there is a similar play with the idea of living: ‘how could I have gone on living this long so removed from nature and unable to identify with it?’ Nature, the embodiment of life, gives life, but it is somehow possible to also live without it. It is almost a sort of life lived without being in touch with other life. A life alone, an almost death. Later, De Nerval describes how ‘even Death cannot set [us] free, for we live on in our sons just as we have lived in our fathers’. Therefore, across these works, we are always in some way immortal, whilst also in some way dead, both at the same time, unable fully ever to comprehend our true state.

(Please note: I got the different days’ readings mixed up, meaning that I make allusions to future readings – as well as not having had time to complete all of today’s readings.) This section of The Wastle Land is very heavy in reference to fortune-telling, especially via the Tarot card deck. Before ‘Madame Sosostris’ is introduced the poetic voice proclaims ‘I could not speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.’ Therefore prophecy is used as a means of combatting the knowledge of ‘nothing’. Moreover, the image of the ‘eyes fail[ing]’ is very important, as it reflects a common trope in prophecy sequences. Those who can see the future are often blind – the metaphor here of course being that those who cannot see physical and present reality have their eyes open to the future. Such figures include Tiresias and the famous Pythia of Delphi. Moreover, the fortune-teller is described as a ‘clairvoyant’ which takes it etymological root in the French ‘clair-voir’, ‘clear-sighted’. Therefore, the fortune-teller is thus contrasted to the poetic voice by the fact that she has the gift of (fore-)sight. The liminal state of being neither ‘living nor dead’ has some connection to Dante’s Inferno. Therein, Dante, also unsure of everything, lost and almost blinded (metaphorically, of course), enters the underworld. In the third Canto, he stands at the gates of Hell, and thus is in the liminal position – neither ‘living nor dead’. Indeed, this is complicated further when he enters Hell, and thus becomes the living amongst the dead, and almost gets sent back for this. Therefore – perhaps this section of the Waste Land adds some complications to the idea of post-war London. It is in a static state with its future unclear, though many try to predict and prophesy it. London – following the war – is itself neither ‘living nor dead’.

The opening lines of the Wasteland, in my reading of it, portrays the difficulties and complexities of the Englishman’s relationship to Germany, a country that was once considered a close friend to the people, but caused the Great War that brought so much suffering. This sentiment is explored in Brooke’s ‘An Unusual Young Man’, which opens with the narrator describing a friend finding out about the outbreak of the war. His first thoughts are all nostalgic yearnings for past experiences he has had in Germany, including the ‘taste of beer’, the ‘restful beauty of Munich’ and, notably, the ‘quiet length of evening over the Starnberger-See’. This is the same lake to which Eliot refers in his lines ‘Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee/ With a shower of rain’. This too comes in the mix of a list of different things that the narrative voice used to enjoy in Germany, including ‘coffee’ and the ‘Hofgarten’. Therefore, both poems show a nostalgia for the simple things of Germany. Indeed, Eliot even adds in the line translated as ‘I am no Russian, I come from Lithuania, I am a real German’. All these thoughts however – in Brooke’s words – are ‘full of confused images’. As Brookes keeps thinking, his thoughts sour as he realises that a lot of what he loved will now fade – this perhaps is Eliot’s ‘heap of broken images’. Going from ‘confused’ to ‘broken’, we see the shattering of the love that so many British people shared for Germany, as well as of their understanding of the way the world worked. It is notable that Countess Marie Larisch’s book about her life also contains nostalgia for her ‘grandparents’ castle of Possenhofen on the Lake of Starnberg [thus, Starnberger-See in German]’. Eliot would likely have read both of these texts and so in his choice of the inclusion of this place in the poem, he emphasises that both Englishman and German are nostalgic for it: this used to be a universal and shared understanding that would come to be shattered by war. Larisch also makes reference to going to ‘the South’, just like the voice of Eliot’s Wasteland: ‘I read, much of the night, and go south in the Winter’. It is presented as an escape – ‘“O for the sunshine and warmth!”’ – however it is also ‘perfectly impossible’. Perhaps in referencing it, Eliot too suggests that an escape from the suffering of the war – as much as we may yearn for it – is also ‘perfectly impossible’, adding to the sense of hopelessness that I find to be pervasive throughout the poem.

Another note: the significant thing about the woman that Larisch and the Empress run into, who seems to predict the fate of Germany and Franz Ferdinand, is that she represents a Sibyl-like figure, hence going back to the idea of prophesy first introduced by the epigram of the Wasteland.

The characterisation of the Sibyl across literature is key to understanding the intention Eliot had when he evoked her with his epigram. The Sibyl of Cumae is particularly well-known for her position as Aeneas’s guide through the underworld in Book 6 of Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid, a story retold in many other works, including in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She also features as an enigmatically mystical figure in, amongst others, Petronius’s Satyricon. Beyond anything else, the Sybil is an image of time: she has existed throughout much of the past, lives yet in the present, but sees into the future. Hence she as a reference point acts to interweave and intermingle time. This is particularly notable considering Eliot’s theme, and the question of the timelessness of war. When he meets the Sibyl, Aeneas is heading away from war and death and doom and destruction. The Sibyl, however, gives no positive prediction: ‘bella, horrida bella, et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno’ (Aeneid, VI.86-87), ‘I see war! horrible war! and the River Tiber foaming and frothing with much blood’. This line – especially the ‘bella, horrida bella’ part – is undoubtedly one of the Sybil’s most famous moments (for many reasons, amongst them the subtle critique of empire that Virgil thus provides), and T. S. Eliot would have most likely been acutely aware of it. It is possible the choice of the Sibyl for the epigram – and as a symbol of death, or more accurately decay – may have been inspired by the connection between this famous line and Conrad’s ‘“The horror! The horror!’” as the last gasps of a dying man. Ovid also points out that the Sibyl predicted ‘the trials [Aeneas] must undergo in fresh wars’. Therefore, Aeneas – a man ‘multo… bella passus’ (Aeneid, I.5), having suffered much in war – must yet suffer more. Therefore: the Sybil presents war as inescapable, timeless and ever-recurring. Perhaps Eliot sees it as the same, hence mankind has turned both the world and also our own psychological and spiritual landscape into a waste land by conflict. Perhaps our desire for the end of war and the restoration of true peace and prosperity is simply the rest of ‘an intense and hopeless despair’ (Conrad, p. 4).

A key part of the Sibyl’s effect in the story rests on the imagery of the ‘pile of dust’. In Ovid, the Sibyl wishes to live to an age as great as the number of grains within this ‘pile of dust’, so that she will have a long life (notably the Latin for ‘eternal life’ is ‘aeterna lux’, which actually means ‘eternal light’, adding to the general imagery of light seen throughout this piece, as well as the beginning of both drafts of The Waste Land). However, she still ages and decays. This is perhaps the curse of basing her youth upon ‘dust’, which is itself the product of decay. Interestingly, there is a chance that the reason ‘a pile of dust’ was initially chosen was simply a matter of wordplay, as the Latin Ovid uses for it is ‘pulveris… cumulae’, whilst the Sibyl is the Sibyl of Cumae, creating a phonetic link between the two. This is the sort of wordplay that one can easily expect from ancient Roman writers. One of the most resounding lines in The Waste Land is ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ This is an easily recognisable, following the reading of the epigram, reference to the Sibyl tale: something as simple and meagre as dust – the dust of the Sibyl’s wish, or the dust of the rubble of war – can shred hope and bring about the same ‘despair’ as mentioned above. Perhaps London, and more generally, humanity after war, horrible war, is doomed to the same slow decay as the Sibyl with no true hope of rejuvenation or revival.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word ‘wasteland’ as ‘land in its natural, uncultivated state’ or as ‘a waterless or treeless region, a desert.’ It is notable that T. S. Eliot made the decision to spell the title of his poem as two separate words. The decision not to collocate the two words may act to place great importance on ‘waste’, as it is no longer simply part of the noun but rather an adjective to describe the noun. The word ‘waste’ brings with it multiple connotations. It may simply mean ‘uncultivated’ and ‘empty’, a bleak landscape, but one that has perhaps always been such. This is mimicked in the ‘waste land’ of Le Morte d’Arthur: there was ‘neither corn, nor grass, nor well-nigh no fruit, nor in the water was no fish’. There is no life – animalistic or herbal – the latter of which also means there can be no sustenance for the former, making this state seem inescapable and eternal. When considered as an inspiration for Eliot’s poem, this may act as social critique and suggest the progrees – or rather lack thereof – that he sees. According to the article from Ritual to Romance, the creation of this ‘Waste land’ is ‘connected with the death of a knight whose name and identity are never disclosed’. Again, this may have special significance for Eliot as his theme is the Great War, in which many a soldier (the modern ‘knight’) died – nameless, such as he that was buried in The Tomb of the Unknown Sodier in Westminster Abbey.

Alternatively, the word ‘waste’ may act closer to its meaning as ‘wasting’, that is slowly degrading, decaying and dissipating. This could perhaps suggest the social decline that occurred as the impact of the Great War. Interestingly enough, a ‘waste’ is also an auto-antonym (that is, its own semantic opposite) as it can mean ‘an abundance of’ things. This perhaps adds some nuance to the word, but is not the primary meaning we are to understand. Nevertheless, which of these connotations we are to accept most of all remains ambiguous, causing the mind to jump between them and so to create a web of interpretations, which all act at the same time.