The information contained within parentheses is perhaps the most honest and straightforward we receive in this section of devolving poetry. A Game of Chess begins in iambic pentameter, the chosen meter of Shakespeare and other prominent English playwrights, and mixes references to classical poetry which also depends on strict meter. As the section progresses, this meter devolves into jumbled lines and line breaks indicative of the psychosis all of the alluded women themselves devolve into (Dido, Cleopatra, Philomena, Ophelia, all defined by being "crazy"). Anchored amongst the chaos are these parenthetical statements, associated in my mind with being asides of truth, as the punctuation typically indicates. From these we gain three kernels of knowledge: Lil is 31, has 5 kids, and nearly died in childbirth. We are also told that her husband has been away at war for 4 years, so she must have had these 5 kids before the age of 27, meaning she most likely had the first one when she was about 20 or 21. Therefore, almost Lils entire adult life has been defined by motherhood, which has obviously aged her. Throughout most of history, women are defined by their ability to have children. In Ancient Greece, women were thought of as child-bearing vessels, holding little value beyond what their wombs could produce. So even as Lil time and time again proves her archaic value, at the cost of her own health, she ultimately fails in this job, succumbing to “madness” by taking abortion pills. As the meter devolves with the sanity of its female characters, Lils descent into craziness is marked by her long face, lack of beauty, and choice to abort her child. Her biggest failure is trying to avoid death.

This line recalls the language and setting of the room where Dido is infected by Cupid to love Aeneas, which inevitably leads to her demise. A moment marked by Dido losing her autonomy and unwillingly being transformed into a pawn, is described not by the woman herself, but the candles that surround her. As she becomes a passive agent, the inorganic flames become the subject, described with an active tense. Even they have autonomy as to where they fling their smoke, but as Dido “burns” with love sickness, she has no control over where her smoke goes.

This language depicts Dido as a chess piece in Venus’s cosmic plan, which she describes, “Wherefore I purpose to outwit the queen with guile and encircle her with love’s flame, that so no power may change her, but on my side she may be held fast in strong love for Aeneas” (Aeneid 1). The word “encircle” is indicative of predators circling around their prey before going in for the kill. Similarly, a powerful chess piece is typically killed by being surrounded, meaning no move will result in a safe square. Furthermore, “on my side” almost equates Dido as a tool in a belt, meant to be taken out when the user is ready.

Like in a game of chess, where the player is like a God, moving pieces around and sacrificing them for the safety of the King, in this same way Venus plays with Dido. This queen, once a pawn in her brother's quest for power, traveled across the ocean, across the chess board, to become a queen in a new land, like a pawn becoming a new queen. Yet in the end, her power, her ability to become a queen and then move anywhere across the board, is reduced once more as an agent for the player to use, protecting the King, Aeneas. When the game finishes, Dido is still the pawn she once came from.

The women of A Game of Chess are all similar pawns, victims of the use of divine power to serve a more powerful figure's needs. This pattern appears in all of the referenced women: Philomela becomes an object of lust for the King Tereus, and when she breaks from her role in the game, she is turned into a bird, doomed to sing her song of sorrow with a mute voice. The head being chopped off the cadaver woman brings a queen back down to the size of a pawn, and Madame Sosostris uses his “divine” powers to force women into his plan.

And it is in this repetition that these women lose even more of their individuality; they join a long list of examples, an array of chess boards with the same goal. Unless the game itself is rewritten, their fate remains final.

From our previous readings of the original epigraph, the line “heart of light” directly contrasts the title “heart of darkness”. Calling to mind this novel, one can understandably transition to another important quote, “That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal” (6). The echo is his lasting impact on the living world embodied in those who once knew him; the echo will fade when the living pass into their own echos. Similarly, when Tristan dies in Tristan und Isolde, Isolde, bent and grieving over his body, says, “Do I alone hear / this melody / so wondrously / and gently / sounding from within him, / in bliss lamenting, / all-expressing, / gently reconciling, / piercing me, / soaring aloft, / its sweet echoes / resounding about me?” (26). This repeated motif of the living hearing the echoes of the recently departed builds a baseline for Eliot. And so, if the heart of darkness represents death, then the heart of light must represent life, but instead of beating, it is silent, implying human importance is only measured and appreciated in death.

Last year, Nate Sidenstein and Naima Johnson both noticed the water motif intrinsic in the verb “flowed”, connecting it to the river Acheron, which Dante and Virgil must cross in order to enter hell. I see, however, one more layer to be peeled back. In The Inferno, like in Greek and Roman mythology, souls must cross the river separating the realm of the living from the realm of the dead via Charon’s ferry. In Ancient tradition, if a soul did not have a coin to afford passage, they became stuck in a liminal space neither dead nor alive. In Dante, these entrapped souls shift to become those who were neither good nor evil, instead more focused with themselves. All this is to track the various interpretations of souls trapped on the banks of a river. Now one must determine what river motif actually represents the border between living and dead: is it the river implied to run beneath the London Bridge? Or is it the river implied by the language of the crowd crossing the bridge? It is important to note that the word “river” is never used by Eliot, making it difficult to discern what he intended the answer to be. If it is the former, the souls cross into the afterlife, the city of London, and head towards Saint Mary Woolnoth, a church on the London side of the bridge. This church could represent salvation, or, in the context of Dante and The Underworld, judgment. It is marked by “a dead sound on the final stroke of nine” (68), which Eliot remarks in his notes as “A phenomenon which I have often noticed.” Does this mean the souls are actually returning to a world of living, their corpses sprouting new life? Is Eliot saying that all living in London are actually dead, including himself? And if so dead because of industrialization or dead because we must all die eventually?

If it is the latter, the souls become a river and are therefore unable to cross it themselves, trapping them between the world of life and death and, as Nate pointed out, insignificant and not individualized. This flow of people must be a torrent, for Eliot comments, “I had not thought death had undone so many” (63). River force is typically measured in cubic feet per second (cfs), the volume of water that passes through any given point in one second. A cubic foot is approximately one frozen turkey, but a similar value can be attributed to the flow of bodies passing through (adjusting for scale). Essentially, these souls lose meaning in an arbitrary flow of so many others like themselves. This explanation is bolstered when considered in the context of an earlier line, “I was neither living nor dead” (39-40).

Regardless of which interpretation one takes, the bridge and river dynamic always creates a cross, a visual representation of contradiction. These contradictions culminate in a paradox indicative of the liminal space Dante, and seemingly the Wasteland, inhabit, not just at the river. For Dante is a living man experiencing the world of the dead, the earlier Sybil is a dying woman trapped in the world of the living, and a dead soul buries a corpse which may or may not give life to new plants. Here, the line between life and death blurs further.

This line is most freshly reminiscent of the Sybil's request for near immortality brought to light in the preceding epithet. But, as is becoming custom in Eliot, one must examine the multiple references present in every line. In Genesis, the biblical explanation of creation, “the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2.7). Adam's name literally means “ground” to remind mankind of their origin, and the awful power of God to turn mere dust into complex life. By the cyclical patterns established in earlier references to the death and rebirth of vegetation gods in the Waste Land, Ecclesiastes (which is directly referenced in a footnote to line 23) fits as the end/new beginning of the creation cycle: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12.7). The cycle is brought to life in the Burial of the Dead, essentially a guide book for how to discuss death in the proper Christian way, when the speaker announces, “All is dust, all is ashes, a shadow” (BOTD 21), immediately then claiming, “I am dust and ashes; and again I meditate among the tombs, and I see the bare bones lie” (BOTD 21). The zoom in from “all” to “I” synonymizes the priest, the dead person, and the greater world; while lying with the “bare bones” the speaker becomes equivalent to another skeleton, meaning death returns a human to the universal dust we all came from, and to God “who gave it” (Ecclesiastes). Thus, we are created from dust and return to it once more after death.

By understanding the Biblical background of dust as a symbol of life and the Sybil’s curse of continued life equivalent to a pile of dust, this Eliot line promises the fear of life, as opposed to death. As our class discussion noted today, death seems to be a sought after state in the epigraph and earlier versions; it offers peace and solace from the turmoil of a war stricken world. April, a season of rebirth and growth – a celebration of life– is “is the cruellest month.” Therefore, life is positioned throughout the opening stanza as more of a curse than a blessing. Perhaps the Waste Land really is a positive state, one absent of life, instead a celebration of death.

While it is most likely a coincidence, it is interesting that both of the aforementioned biblical quotes are from verse 7 of their respective book and chapter, notably the final day of creation.

As Eliot shifts through different titles, openings, and epigraphs, one concept remains constant: voice. “The Waste Land” is notable in its repeated shift between first, second, and third person narration, whirling through each in a disorienting manner. This choice positions the narrator as an observer, the subject, and in dialogue with the reader, at all times, effectively overpowering traditional grammatical norms and encompassing everyone in the wasteland setting. It also calls back to the original title of the poem, “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. Although Eliot spins through a rolodex of different characters' voices to embody, the narration remains first person in the original version, which fails to ensnare the same breadth of audience that the latter version does. Despite their differences, there is an emphasis on the perspective and emotion that can be conveyed from an original voice. It forces the reader to question what they can trust the most: is it the first person narration, supposedly telling the truth from a personal view? But that leaves room for an unreliable narrator. Is it the second person, speaking directly to the reader? But the intentions of the speaker are unclear. Or is it the third person, stating things as detached fact? These questions are reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s, The Heart of Darkness and the original epigraph. As Marlow thinks of Kurtz postmortem, he says, “when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal” (6). The reader is left only with the echoes of what truth may have once been and in charge of determining what the original tone of the message may have been from the scattered pieces of its echo. In this way the Sybil’s epigraph is very fitting. When speaking to Aeneas she describes the pain of her immortality, “I will go as far as having to suffer transformation, and I will be viewed as non-existent, but still known as a voice: the fates will bequeath me a voice.” And it is her voice that permeates her immortality all the way to the epigraph of Eliot’s modernist achievement. Except, it is not her actual words, instead the written version of a drunken dinner table conversation that Trimalchio reports hearing, but we are unsure if it is just a boastful ruse. Thus, in her permanence, the Sybil is only the echo of her voice, and sets up the following voices in the poem as potential echoes as well.

In Sir James Fraziers' The Golden Bough, the cyclical ebb and flow of seasons and growth, traced through ancient religions, is directly connected to the health and death of a powerful deity: "They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay of vegetation, the birth and death of living creatures, as effects of the waxing or waning strength of divine beings, of gods and goddesses, who were born and died, who married and begot children, on the pattern of human life (3). One such deity, Osiris, was killed by his own nefarious brother, a fellow god. Another god, Adonis, dies each year, bringing with him the attention of his lover, Ishtar, embodiment of reproductive energies. It is known that Eliot saw a parallel between Frazier’s work and the myth of the Holy Grail because of his accreditation to Jessie Weston’s essay, From Ritual to Romance. One myth surrounding the literary world of the Holy Grail describes the slaying of King Labor by King Hurlame, who died by the sword he killed with. The aftermath of such a conflict left it, “so befell great pestilence and great harm to both realms. For sithen increased neither corn, nor grass, nor well-nigh no fruit, nor in the water was no fish; wherefore men call it the lands of the two marches, the waste land, for that dolorous stroke” (4). Set as a response to World War I, Eliot’s invocation of these conflicts between higher powers (kings and gods) brings to the light the suffering of the common people at the behest of those in control. It is no coincidence that the “land of the two marches” is synonymous with a “wasteland”, created by the unprecedented violence and destruction of two warring kingdoms. The unfettered power of the sword used to kill both kings falls in line with the technological advancements of warfare demonstrated to the extreme during World War I. Thus, The Waste Land connects ancient understanding of the effect of war on those not responsible for its creation.