Peaster 1

William M. Peaster

20 April. 2012

“I have shored against my ruins”: Fragmentation in The Waste Land

First published by the London based “The Criterion” in October 1922, The Waste Land

is a reaction to the spiritual devastation found in the immediate aftermath of the First World War,

a war caused by the nationalistic chaos of twentieth-century civilization. The poem does not

react to a literal or physical devastation from the war, but to “the emotional and spiritual sterility

of Western man, the ‘waste’ of our civilization” which was not only capable of pointless

atrocities such as the Battle of Somme, but morally culpable for them (Southam 126). The

principal theme explored in the poem is the possibility of the Waste Land’s salvation, whether or

not “emotional, spiritual, and intellectual vitality [could] be regained” for the myriad denizens

that resided there (Southam 126). In this way, the Waste Land mimics the reality the citizens of

the world post-World War I experienced: salvation (peace, vitality regained) was only a

possibility and not a guarantee (more war, more strife). Eliot uses the “prosaic language of the

huge cities of our century” in The Waste Land to mirror upon these “huge cities” precisely what

they have become: emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually disrupted, or fragmented (qtd. in

Hoover 14). In this regard, The Waste Land serves in a similar function to James Joyce’s

Dubliners, as a “nicely polished looking-glass” wherein readers may become self-aware of the

modern existential afflictions that have beset them (qtd. in Shashaty 214). Lyndall Gordon,

author of Eliot’s Early Years, proposes that for Eliot “experienc[ing] the world as a waste land

was a prerequisite to experiencing it in faith” (Southam 133). So in being a reaction to and

reflection of the chaos of modernity, The Waste Land suggests that the only way to salvation was

through necessary confrontation with the labyrinth of fragments and ruins that was twentieth-
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century experience. The juxtaposition of various fragments and allusions in the poem’s content

allows for such a “confrontation,” and provides a prime example of the modernist technique of

blending form and content: the poem is about the fragmentation of twentieth-century experience,

and so uses literary, historical, and cultural fragments stylistically to great extent to reflect the

modern experience.

Through close examination of The Waste Land’s epigraph and five sections, the disparate

fragments of the poem can be seen as reflections or simulations of the chaos of twentieth-century

existence. The very first fragment of the poem is its epigraph; it is a quotation from the Roman

writer Petronius’s first-century work, Satyricon (Southam 133). In this quotation, the character

Trimalchio encounters a caged and prophetic Sybil at the entrance of hell, and when Trimalchio

asks the Sybil what is that she wants, the Sybil replies: “I wish that I were dead” (Eliot 61). So

standing guard at the entrance of Eliot’s Waste Land can be found a prophetic Sybil, who in

Greek mythology “answered questions by throwing to the winds handfuls of leaves bearing

letters” (Southam 133). Consequently, it fell upon the Sybil’s questioner to order and arrange

these letters, or fragments, into a sort of cohesion (Southam 134). This opening epigraph to The

Waste Land thus has a twofold purpose: to warn entrants of the hellish waste land they are about

to enter, and to relay to them that they will be required to order and arrange the poem’s

fragments into a subjective coherence just like the Sybil’s questioner. Thus, the story behind this

epigraph parallels the experience of all denizens of the twentieth century: you have entered a

strange and terrifying place (modernity), and you alone will be required to piece together its

chaos (disparate, challenging elements of modernity).

In The Waste Land’s first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” the chaos of modern

experience is replicated by the jumbling together of disparate remnants. In this section of the
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poem’s second stanza, the poetic narrator declares: “You cannot say, or guess, for you only know

/ A heap of broken images …” (Eliot 21-22). While this line alludes to and connects each of the

various “broken images” of this section’s content (i.e. its various fragments), the poetic

conscious also seems to be suggesting that post-World War I experience is composed of a “heap

of broken images,” and that faith, purpose, and meaning have all become nearly impossible in

the wake of modernity (Southam 144). As for the literal “heap of broken images” in this section,

there are many. The title of the section is a reference to the Church of England’s burial service,

“The Order for The Burial of the Dead,” which instantaneously initiates readers to the poem’s

(and existence’s) impending cycle of birth, life, and death (Southam 138). We are then

immediately introduced to birth, as symbolized by lilacs: “April is the cruelest month, breeding /

Lilacs out of the dead land …” (Eliot 1-2). These two lines are literary fragments in two ways;

firstly, they seem to be a phrasal and tonal inversion of the merry beginning of Geoffrey

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and secondly, they are suggestive of the melancholic first

stanza of the poem Walt Whitman wrote regarding Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, “When

Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (Southam 140). As the first stanza progresses, several

cultural references are made, such as to the Starnbergesee lake-resort of Munich, the Hofgarten

park of Munich, and then the untranslated German of “Bin gar keine Russian, stamm’ aus

Litauen, echt deutsch” (Eliot 8-12). Then, the aristocratic eastern European voice of the stanza

remarks of “staying at the / archduke’s,” a historical reference to Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

whose assassination was the catalyst which sparked off World War I (Eliot 13). In the second

stanza, the line “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” is a literary allusion Meditation IV of

John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (“when himself shrinks himself, and

consumes himself in a handful of dust…”), Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Maud (“And my heart is a
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handful of dust”), and Joseph Conrad’s Youth (“the heat of life in a handful of dust”); the line

seems to be indicative of the Book of Job 7:21 and the Sybil of Cumae’s act of throwing

“handfuls of leaves,” or “broken images” at her questioners (Eliot 30; Southam 144-145). Here,

the poetic consciousness seems to be suggesting how terrifying and daunting it is to attempt to

make sense of the infinite chaos (i.e. fragmentation) that composes twentieth-century experience.

The next cultural fragment that occurs is an appropriation of lyrics from Richard Wagner’s opera

Tristan and Isolde: “Frisch weht der Wind / Der Heimat zu / Mein Irisch Kind, / Wo weilest

du?” (Eliot 31-34; Southam 145). At the end of the second stanza, the poetic narrator declares

“and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of the light,” which is a direct phrasal inversion of

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Eliot 40-41; Southam 146). The third stanza of “The Burial” opens

with a reference to the occult theosophy that was becoming popular in the intellectual circles of

post-World War I Europe:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards.
(Eliot 43-46)
The stanza then progresses to catalogue the various characters Madame Sosostris draws

from her “pack of cards,” such as the Phoenician Sailor, the Belladonna, the “man with three

staves,” the “one-eyed merchant,” and the Hanged Man (Eliot 47-54). In the aftermath of World

War One, occult theosophy is offered up as an alternative to traditional theologies, but is still

spiritually uninvigorating in the midst of the Waste Land. The final stanza of the section brings

together elements from Dante’s Inferno (Eliot 63), Charles Baudelaire’s poetry (Eliot 60 and 76),

locations in London (Eliot 62; 66; 67), ancient fertility rites (Eliot 71), and a Roman naval

victory in the First Punic War at Mylae (Eliot 70; Southam 151-156). Towards the end of “The
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Burial,” the poetic consciousness asks the question: “Has it begun to sprout?” (Eliot 72). This

phrase is reminiscent of a personal letter Eliot once sent to Conrad, in which he said “it’s

interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while, and wait to see if the fragments sprout” (qtd.

in Southam 155). The various disparate literary, cultural, and historical fragments of “The

Burial” will begin to “sprout” in the mind of its readers, creating an extremely complex

interconnected web of historical and contemporary elements that mimics the chaotic

bombardment of stimuli that an individual experiences under the weight of modernity.

The Waste Land’s next section, “A Game of Chess,” furthers the poem’s replication of

the chaotic modern experience by continuing to assimilate contrasting remnants together. The

title of the section is an allusion to Thomas Middelton’s play A Game at Chesse (Southam 156).

As a luxurious scene unfolds involving a woman and a man playing chess, many fragments

occur. The very first two lines of this section, “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, /

Glowed on the marble,” strongly echo a moment from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra:

“The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / Burn’d on the water” (Eliot 77-78; Southam

157). As the stanza progresses, another play is soon referenced, that of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,

in which Philomela escapes murder at the hands of King Tereus by being transformed into a

nightingale: “The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forced; yet there the

nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable voice” (Eliot 99-101; Southam 158). The

aimless conversation that occurs next, in lines 111-123 of The Waste Land, strongly resembles (if

not nearly photographically) dialogue from D. H. Lawrence’s shot story “The Fox”; the story

appeared in The Dial, a publication Eliot consistently contributed to, and so it is likely that Eliot

would have been completely cognizant of the allusion (Southam 161). A cultural fragment

appears soon thereafter: “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag− / It’s so elegant / So intelligent”

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(Eliot 128-130). This is a reference to an American ragtime song by Ziegfield’s Follies that was

very popular at the time of the First World War; if sounded out, these lines even closely mimic

the syncopated rhythm of a ragtime song (Southam 163). The last stanza of this section ends with

a direct quote of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good

night, good night” (Eliot 172; Southam 164). “A Game of Chess” makes particular use of many

fragments from famous plays of the past, seemingly implying that contemporary twentieth-

century existence is the intensified sum of all the dramas, loves, and deaths of all the plays that

have ever come before. The play of all plays then is modernity, in which all its actors are

bombarded with the entire canon of dramas from the past, present, and future, and in which the

stakes are higher (and more confusing) than they have ever been before. “A Game of Chess”

replicates the dizzying chaotic experience of the twentieth century through the composite effect

of the combination of its various fragments.

The chaos of modernity continues to be mimicked in The Waste Land’s next section,

“The Fire Sermon,” which is an allusion to Buddha’s Fire Sermon, where he preached against

the myriad carnal passions that devour men’s souls. The very first line of this section declares the

“river’s tent is broken” (Eliot 173). In the Old Testament of the Bible, tents had a holy

connotation, as well as rivers (Southam 165). In Isaiah 33:20-21, we see:

Look upon Zion, the city of our festivals;

your eyes will see Jerusalem,
a peaceful abode, a tent that will not be moved;
its stakes will never be pulled up,
nor any of its ropes broken.
There the Lord will be our Mighty One.
It will be like a place of broad rivers and streams.
(The Holy Bible)
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So the first lines of “The Fire Sermon” declares the complete inverse of Isaiah 33:20-21,

that the river’s tent which once provided spiritual shelter and comfort is now “broken” (Southam

165). As the section progresses, Eliot makes rare use of two personal fragments. The first one,

“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept,” is a reference to Lake Leman, a location close to

where Eliot sought psychotherapy to cure his “emotional frigidity” during a mental breakdown in

1921 (Eliot 182; Southam 166). The second fragment occurs in lines 197-198, with the

appearance of the character Sweeney: “The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring /

Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring” (Eliot). Sweeney is a character that appears in three of

Eliot’s pre-Waste Land poems, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday

Morning Service,” and “Sweeney Erect” (Southam 168). These personal fragments are curious

because of Eliot’s advocating of “depersonalization” in poetry, but they are fragments

nonetheless and so fit into the wider interconnected web that compose The Waste Land (Eliot

605). The Sweeney reference immediately rolls into a cultural reference of a song Australian

soldiers sang during World War I, “O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter / And of her

daughter / They wash their feet in soda water” (Eliot 199-201; Southam 168). Soon after this, we

are introduced to the most important character of the poem, Tiresias: “I Tiresias, though blind,

throbbing between two lives, / Old man with wrinkled female breasts” (Eliot 218-219). Tiresias

is another fragment appropriated from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as perhaps Cantos I and

III of Ezra Pound’s “Ur-Cantos” (Southam 172-173). In the notes to The Waste Land, Eliot

points out Tiresias’s importance to the poem, in that it is the personage that unifies the entirety of

the poem’s cast of characters (Eliot 84). As the section continues to progress, several allusions to

locations in London are made, such as Strand street, Queen Victoria Street, Lower Thames

Street, and the River Thames (Southam 175-177). Towards the very end of “The Fire Sermon,”
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the importance of Buddha’s Fire Sermon is driven home: “Burning burning burning burning”

(Eliot 308). Eliot believes that this sermon of Buddha’s “corresponds in importance to [Christ’s]

Sermon on the Mount,” in which Buddha explained to his monks that all the passions of the body

and its fallible perceptions “are on fire” with hatred, envy, birth, death, anguish, and despair; at

the end of the sermon, Buddha’s monks became “free from attachment to the world” (Eliot 85;

Southam 180). This brings to mind the Lyndall Gordon quote from earlier: “experienc[ing] the

world as a waste land was a prerequisite to experiencing it in faith” (Southam 133). So in using

literary, cultural, and historical fragments as a reflection of the chaos of modernity, “The Fire

Sermon” suggests one of The Waste Land’s most important themes: the only way to salvation

was through unavoidable confrontation with the maze of fragments and ruins that was twentieth-

century experience.

Section four of The Waste Land, “Death by Water,” continues to replicate the chaos of

modern experience by continuing to assimilate fragments, though less than the other four

sections of the poem because it is the shortest. The title of the section, “Death by Water,” is a

self-referential fragment, as the Madame Sosostris of “The Burial” gives her client a warning:

“Fear death by water” (Eliot 55). In its first line, we are introduced to Phlebas the Phoenician,

who has drowned (Eliot 312). There are likely two sources for this allusion. Firstly, in Book XIV

of Homer’s Odyssey, Homer describes the tale of a Phoenician sailor who has drowned (Southam

183). Secondly, Plato’s Philebas is potentially a source for Phlebas, which is a philosophical

treatise Plato wrote regarding pleasure (Southam 183). Line 319-321 of “Death by Water” state

that regardless of being “Gentile or Jew,” the reader should “Consider Phlebas, who was once

handsome and tall as you” (Eliot). The phrase “Gentile or Jew” insinuates the entirety of

humanity. This is suggestive of Romans 3:29 (“Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of
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the Gentiles?”), of I Corinthians 12:13 (“For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body,

whether we be Jews, or Gentiles”), and the “Nestor” section of James Joyce’s Ulysses (“A

merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?”)

(Southam 184; The Holy Bible). In being suggestive of all humanity through the phrase “Gentile

or Jew,” the poetic consciousness indicates that no one is beyond the reach of the waste land that

is modernity. In “Death by Water,” we again see the inescapability of the chaos of modernity

conveyed through the stylistic use of fragments.

The final section of The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said,” continues to mimic the

chaos of modern experience by continuing to juxtapose fragments against each other. The first

two lines of this section, “After the torchlight red on sweaty faces / After the frosty silence in the

gardens,” echo a portion from the Book of John in which Jesus is apprehended in the garden of

Gethsemane, where “a band of men and officers … cometh thither with lanterns and torches and

weapons” (Eliot 322-323; Southam 186; The Holy Bible). The end of the first stanza states “He

who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying,” perhaps an allusion to

Christ’s crucifixion (Eliot 328-329). In this section’s third stanza, the poetic narrator declares

“London / Unreal,” which Bertrand Russell believes was directly inspired by a dream he had

once relayed to Eliot: “[I] had once told Eliot of a nightmare in which [I] had a vision of London

as an unreal city, its inhabitants like hallucinations … its buildings passing into a mist” (Eliot

376-377; Southam 190). In line 385, we experience “voices singing out of empty cisterns and

exhausted wells” (Eliot 385). In the Old Testament, unfilled cisterns and wells were a sign of

withering faith and the worship of false deities, as God told Jeremiah: “For my people have

committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out

cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold now water” (Jeremiah 2:13) As the poem stretches into its
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final phases, elements resonant of Hinduism begin to appear. The sacred River Ganges is

mentioned in the second to final stanza, as well as the holy mountain of Himavant of the

Himalayas (Eliot 396-398; Southam192). The Sanskrit words DA, Datta, Dayadhvam, and

Damyata all appear in the two final stanzas of The Waste Land, and Eliot appropriated them from

the Hindu Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad (Southam 192). Within the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad

there is a story describing how three groups of gods, men, and demons came before the great

creator, Prajapti, and each asked him to speak; to every different group, Prajapti’s reply was the

same: “DA” (Southam 192). The gods interpreted this as “Damyata,” or, “control yourselves”;

the men interpreted this as “Datta,” or, “give alms”; the demons interpreted this as

“Dayadhvam,” or, “be compassionate” (Southam 192). The famous final line of The Waste Land,

“Shantih shantih shantih,” is derived from the closing prayer of many of the Upanishads, with

the phrase roughly translating to “the peace which passeth understanding” (Southam 192). These

final fragments seem to suggest that everyone will have a different subjective experience of

modernity (DA, Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata) and The Waste Land. As humans, we ardently

search for spiritual peace, but this peace and the comfort it would bring ultimately “passeth our

understanding” (Shantih shantih shantih). In The Waste Land’s final section, the clashing of

fragments from Christianity and Hinduism replicates the chaos of modernity in that citizens of

twentieth century were intellectually bombarded by many disparate epistemes, theologies, and

philosophies in such a way that produced great mental uncertainty as to what was ultimately the

correct mode of truth.

T. S. Eliot once wrote that “perhaps the conditions of modern life … have altered our

perceptions and rhythms” (Southam 172). It is fairly safe to say that no poem “altered [the]

perceptions and rhythms” of the twentieth century more than Eliot’s The Waste Land, and one of
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the most profound and important elements of the poem is its near-Cubist style of arranging a

multitude of disparate fragments into a collage that can be read in any number of ways. There is

an element of dizzying chaos to the poem that mimics the intellectual chaos experienced by

Western culture at the turn of the twentieth century, a culture that was spiritually, mentally, and

emotionally fragmented in the wake of the horrific devastation of the First World War. The

Waste Land attempts to reflect the fragmentation that occurred in twentieth-century experience,

and so uses literary, historical, and cultural fragments stylistically to great extent to reflect this

modern “fragmentation.”

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for

College Writers. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002. 605. Print.

---. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Ed. George Stade. New York: Barnes & Noble

Classis, 2004. 59-121. Print.

The Holy Bible: New International Version. Colorado Springs, CO: International Bible Society,

1984. Print.
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Hoover, Judith M. "The Urban Nightmare: Alienation Imagery in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot and

Octavio Paz." Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century 6.1 (1978): 13-28. JSTOR.

Web. 05 Apr. 2013.

Shashaty, Jill. “Reading Dubliners Parabolically.” James Joyce Quarterly 47.2 (2010): 213-227.

Project MUSE. Web. 15 Oct. 2012.

Southam, B. C. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. 6th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace

&, 1996. Print.