The first few times I read this passage, I glossed over the spelling of “Goonight”. It wasn’t until the indented Ophelia soliloquy “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, / good night.” that I noticed that “Goonight” was missing a “d” and a space. I attributed this to the slurrish / slangy vernacular of the unnamed first person subject. The portmanteauing of the word evokes a sense of urgency, as if there isn’t enough time for the character to pronounce two full syllables separately and must combine the two into a breath. This aligns with the repeated phrases “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”, which as I am typing this, I realize is also missing punctuation “ ‘ “ that critically indicates that the word is a contraction. Again, a word is shortened, this time dropping even the apostrophe. “ITS” is also a particularly interesting case because “IT’S” represents contraction “IT IS”, which is grammatically correct and therefore what I assume the correct voice is, while just “ITS” is a possesive pronoun modifying who knows what. Whose time is it? Who does time belong to? Do we all belong to time?

The imperative “HURRY UP ITS TIME” is repeated four times in under 40 lines, first spaced out, and then condensing to repeat back to back 4 lines before the end of the poem. This increasingly urgent demand phonetically (and emotionally) elicits the pressures of living. As a third person / exterior overhead voice in the scene between Lil and the first person subject consoling/incriminating her of her domestic shortcomings as a mother and wife, the phrase is an objective pace keeper, separate from the cast of characters and their woes. Every time Lil is about to answer an emotionally wrought question, (“What you get married for if you don’t want children?”), the phrase in all-caps becomes her saving grace, interrupting the accusatory line of questioning between one character (a condescending wife or a oatrarchy-upholding man?) and her truth. Outside the scene, the phrase is a speed sign for us readers as we parse through the different voices. The insertion reads like Ophelia’s “sings” cues in Hamlet, where the theatrical cue physically separates delivered lines from those sung. Both interpretations embody the accelerando of life. Lil, her snobby friend, the various ambiguous pronouns, me, you, we are all of us running out of time, being pursued, pursued.

Eliot describes the “fruited vines” supporting the subject’s weight. This biblical reference to the Garden of Eden where the Fruit of Knowledge, synonymous with Milton’s “ambrosial fruit”, is imbued with negative connotations about the Satanic nature of women. In fact, Baudelaire, in describing the corpse of a young woman, states, “The haunches slightly sharp, and the waist sinuous / As a snake poised to strike,” directly correlating the dead woman (girl?) with a slithering Satan (A Martyred Woman). Bauderlaire continues, “The air is dangerous, fatal, / Where bouquets dying in their glass coffins / Exhale their final breath”. Remembering that the poem belongs in the collection The Flowers of Evil, women, like bouquets, are displayed in glass cases, and if bouquets are evil, women must be too.

At first, I was drawn to (and rather overwhelmed by) the series of physical materials we encounter in the opening. “The Chair” is equated to a “burnished throne” - a more authoritative rendition signifying a polished metal substance - before seeming to glow “on the marble, where the glass / Held up by standards wrough with fruited vines”. The light (and the reader’s focus) is tossed between shiny marble surfaces and glass refractions and metallic chairs, not once landing on the subject of the opening lines who we infer is indeed a queen. Amidst the influx of visual descriptions, the queen - an allusion to the title chess piece as well as the sitter of “The Chair”, is belittled. She, referring to Dido, Cleopatra, or Queen Mary (WW1/contemporary reference), is overshadowed by the focus on materialistic goods such as the “glitter of her jewels” and the “rich profusion” that poured from “satin cases”. Eliot embellishes this “Game of Chess”’s first key female figure with a plethora of perfumes, jewels, and silks instead of addressing her as a subject. Very few verbs are even connected to her, from which all are passive such as “sat” and “lurked”, with the most dramatic being “cried” in line 102. The woman in the scene feels very much secondary to the ornamentation (plug for capitalism? A critique on mass consumption? On vanity?).

True, the faceless-de-individualization argument is not singular to women in The Waste Land. However, the allusions to rape of “Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forcced” as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of Dido canonically in the Aeneid, and even with the romanticized possibility with Baudelaire’s cadaver “with eyes as provocative as the pose, / Reveals an unwholesome love, / Guilty joys and exotic revelries” suggests there may be a sexual connotation of objectifying these once-powerful women. The reader intrudes upon a crime scene (a setting deeply romanticized but still the scene of rape, suicide, regicide…) and our eyes flicker to everything but the victim. We can only reconcile with glimmers of light, hovering “under the brush,” observing “her hair / Spread out in points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still” in the inhuman MO of a guilty perpetrator. Eliot’s readers are not only deeply uncomfortable with the prolonged gawking at unburied women (not deserving of the same solace or privacy soldiers or men do, but rather publicly displayed as a symbol of fleeting beauty) but also guilty of partaking in the crime that ruined them.

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) portrays seven identical men whose identities are defaced by Parisian industrialization. In “Les Sept vieillards (The Seven Old Men), Bauderlaire’s first person subject desecribes seeing a man and his “shadow”, “And back and eye and beard, all were the same; / Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable”. The loss of identity evident in many modernist poems is evident in Baudelaire’s work, but so are undertones of violence and sin. Suspicions that these cane tapping men were creatures from the underworld are confirmed by the narrator’s exclamation, “These seven old hideous monsters had the mien / Of beings immortal”. As the title suggests, the seven old men are defiled by evil forces if not embodying it themselves. Emphasis on “the same Hell” suggests that there are multiple layers to the afterlife, perhaps not unlike Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio. The description also displays the discomforting uniformity of the seven old men, where the addendum “indistinguishable” further erases the identities of each individual and groups them together as seven.

Eliot also seems captivated by deindividualization as a result of industrialization. While Baudelaire’s poems featured dilapidation of devilish characters and the impenetrable Parisian smog, Eliot uses passive voice and plural pronouns to avoid endowing a character a face or a name. Eliot’s subject notes, “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”. Readers are overwhelmed by the volume of subjects but confused by the lack of clarity on anything other than setting. Repetition of “so many” as a modification of “a crowd” further bewilders the reader, grasping at spare eyes and feet (“And each man fixed his eyes before his feet”) for a subject, much less a concrete image. In fact, Eliot goes so far as to remove the subject from the line completely, as in, “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,” where the passive voice is jarring because it is grammatically and rhythmically awkward. Instead, the absence of a subject forces the reader to imagine walls of gasping mouths, breaths mingling from hundreds into one, not tethered to any block of concrete under the London Bridge but fluid, omnipresent.

These poems are more than laments on disembodiment, however. Eliot’s “crowd” is “undone” by death, a simple but human sentiment that the pessimistic subject deems a surprise, but the masses congregate about a symbol of British industrialization to pay tribute to human sacrifice, to sympathize with one another, to breathe (or cry) as one. The ambiguous pronouns diminish personal identity but simultaneously function to include “so many” and encompass “each man”. Suddenly the faceless crowd becomes one pounding human heart. Even the Baudelaire has glimmers of unity. The seven men are introduced first as “an aged man”, then as “centeranian twins”, before becoming an assemble of seven sinister men. Seven days of creation, seven churches, seven bowls – together, the old men become a biblically accurate whole.

I was interested in the gender dynamics surrounding TWL’s tarot reading passage in light of Mina Loy’s poem “At the Door of the House” and Weston’s tarot analysis from “From Rituals to Romance”. Eliot’s Tarot scene is anchored by Madame Sosostris, a famous clarivoyant “with a wicked pack of cards.” The description of the tarot cards as “wicked” indicates the narrator (subject of the “you” and “your” in this passage) experiences misfortune and is disdainful about it. That it is the cards that are wicked, these paper, painted, tangible objects, and not life itself, this untethered thing, is incredibly humanist. The narration of Madame Sosostris declaring, “Here, said she, / Is your card” portrays the fortune teller in the light of a god, capable of creation and judgment, blessed with omniscience. Indeed, Madame Sosostris is “known to be the wisest woman in Europe” simply because she can supposedly indicate a person’s lifeline. Yet, these supernatural powers do not go unchecked. “Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: / One must be so careful these days” indicates distrust about Madame Sosostris’s paraphernalia while revealing the subject’s need for control. That the horoscope - an astrological chart that maps in dubious scientific methods the alignment of stars, moons, and suns - must be the subject’s own reveals the irony in fate mapping. Here, Eliot stresses the need to be in possession of one’s own fate and frowns upon it.

Mina Loy’s repetition of title phrase “at the door of the house” and its subsequent modification to “for there he is at the door of the house” evokes a sense of urgency in her poem. A man’s intrusion “at the door of the house” (a symbol of virginity, of holiness because every home is a temple, of a rite of passage onto womanhood) is inevitable and untimely, Loy laments. The transformation of the phrase “You are going to make a journey / At evening about love” to “He will make a journey at evening” denotes the shifting power from the girl to the faceless suitor. Specifically, the patronizing voice decrees that this “He”, the subject is the master of his own fate. And he is, by matrimony, the master of “yours”. Fate is imbued with gender, and control over fate is a masculine ideal that women have no right to.

The role of rain in The Waste Land and in The Canterbury Tales is both injurious and invigorating, but perhaps the latter outweighs the former as both poems progress. The Canterbury Tales describes a pilgrimage undertaken in the Middle Ages to Saint Thomas Becket’s tomb in the namesake location. The poem’s opening lines “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” depicts rain as a violent “pierced … to the root” albeit aromatic “sweet-smelling showers” presence. (There is already conflict between scent and sentiment, between perception and truth). Upon closer examination, the piercing from the rain - a liquid vs a solid root - is cleansing the drought of March in a protagonistic way. The rain is rejuvenating the ground (restoring the Fisher King?) by purging the drought that April’s precursor, March, plagued the land with.

The rain is this hero that “bathed every veyne in switch liquor / Of which verto engendred is the flour”. April showers become a life force that “bathed” - a soothing, maternal, omnipresent nautical scene - and “created” - a personified Godliness, the strength fo vegetation and flourish - plants and flowers. (Perhaps the real martyrs are the raindrops we witnessed along the way.) The transition of rain from hard to soft, piercing (destruction) to engendering (creation), is representative of water’s transformative nature. Water’s fluidity is exemplified in Eliot’s opening poem The Burial of the Dead where “April (spelt “Aprill” in The Canterbury Tales and 14th century England) is the cruellest month… stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” Here, April showers are the harbinger of spring, but they are also reminders of the past, of “Memory and desire” if considering “stirring” in the phrasal sense. The rain, by existing in the present and sustaining / initiating life, is simultaneously a wake-up call and a nostalgia inducer - a tug between past and present (and the hope of a future). This hopefulness blooms throughout Eliot’s passage, and through the trickles of water, the seeds of a new life take root.

Whereas Marlow describes Krutz’s postmortem as “the next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole” in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Eliot titles the first section “The Burial of the Dead”. By specifying this amorphous “something” and titling it “the Dead”, Eliot seems to be honoring the souls (beyond the allusion to Krutz) marred by colonial / industrial greed. (Except he isn’t, and the first 10 lines of the poem pointedly do not regard humans at all).

(Regarding Eliot's initial epigraph from Heart of Darkness)

I was particularly drawn to contrasting uses of light in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and how they establish religious parallels that clarify “The horror!” in Eliot’s original epigraph. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow describes the dying Mr. Kurtz as possessing “an impenetrable darkness” that one perceives like one “peer[s] down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.” Mr. Kurtz, driven by greed and backboned by booming British imperialism, is exiled to a ravine not even God’s light can reach. Indeed, it is Marlow’s candle light that finally illuminates Kurtz’s ivory face and reveals it to be contorted to a look of “sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair”. Kurtz has arrived at, seen, and conquered what the world has to offer, and he dies for it. His “intense and hopeless despair” is the look of a mere mortal strayed to far from the sun, a sheep too far from the shepherd, an angel cast down from heaven for his knowledge but principally for his hunger.

The description, “There was a lamp in there—light, don’t you know—and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark” contrasts the pagan darkness - or is it natural wilderness? A waste land of its own? - with the lamp light of the “mess-room”. This scene takes place after the manager boy announces “Mistah Kurtz–he dead”, and the lighting of the two settings - before and after being enlightened with the knowledge of Mr. Kurtz’s death - hints at a Luciferan presence that lurks in the shadows of death. Taking Mr. Kurtz to be the devil, as Marlow intended, then “the horrors” of Mr. Kurtz were not just human horrors - colonization, exploitation of natural resources, famine, war - but godly ones. This image, this vision, this “supreme moment of complete knowledge” is Satanic, only the hellish scene belongs not in the underworld but on this earth, in this heart of darkness.

The “Waste Land” in Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the Story of the Grail mirrors the disability of the Fisher King while underscoring the need for femininity. The King’s “wound that will not heal” corresponds to the sterility of the kingdom, a wounded land marred by war, and, in many Holy Grail retellings, tainted by loss of faith. In this inverse Virgin Mary, the land which should birth plants and sustain animals fails to, and the wasted land becomes a mother who cannot bear children.

Indeed, the unexpecting mother is a recurring theme in religious canon. In The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, Adonis is born from a myrrh tree that had once been his mother. A mortal (and product of father-daughter incest), Adonis became the Greek god of fertility and vegetation after Zeus resurrected him upon Aphrodite’s behest. Ironically, the boy without a mother stands beside Persephone as a bringer of life, the herald of spring. Similarly, Attis, the son of a virgin, becomes the god of fertility in servitude of the Magna Mater despite having been conceived by almonds and pomegranates. Arthurian legend, combined with Eliot’s other literary muses, decrees it is the absence of these gods that the land turns to waste. This can be read as a subversion of femininity, where male figures in Western and Asiatic mythology embody biologically feminine roles, and where the consequence of a Fisher King, or an Austro-Hungarian monarch, upheaves the livelihoods of all.