The poem is emblematic of modern art and poetry and the post-World War I landscape.

Eliot
relates the waste land symbol of the title to the "Unreal City" such as London, Athens,
Alexandria, Vienna or Jerusalem (all centers of human civilization destroyed in past or recent
human history).
The Burial of the Dead:
It is a title taken from an Anglican burial service. 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 initiates
readers to the poem’s (and existence’s) impending cycle of birth, life, and death.
This section is made up of four parts each with a different speaker.

Stanza 1 is spoken by Marie who recalls her life in Germany: summering along Lake
Stranbergersee and drinking coffee in the Hofgarten, a courtyard in Munich, as well as
sledding with her cousin. It is an autobiographical comment from the childhood of an
aristocratic woman in which she claims that she is German. She meditates about season and
ponders at the barren state of her current existence.

April is the cruelest month for it uncovers what has been buried in snow. The urbanization
that came with the age of Modernity acted as an antagonistic force to nature, hence the
reversal of seasons. April and lilacs are symbols of life and regeneration, but in the modern
world, they are cruel because man can no longer understand the message of nature.

 “Mixing memory and desire”:

Memory pushes one to want to go back with a changed outlook, learning from past mistakes
and wanting to do better if given the opportunity.

 “With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,”:

The lines reveal a kind of people who live a life of contentment with the bare minimum.
This is a criticism against the kind of people that are content with the “little life” that they
have, who are neither dead nor alive, and who have no direction or sense of purpose.
These activities highlight the leisurely and comfortable lifestyle that they live, and this is
easily seen as something superficial and shallow. They remind us of the women in the
room who talk about Michelangelo, whose conversations amount to small, insignificant
talk in comparison to those overwhelmed with the more important things in life.
 
 

 “Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”:
The image of a routine of going to work then going home came to mind, and this is yet
another criticism of the kind of people who work day in and day out, who think of nothing
beyond the earthly life, and miss out on the bigger meaning of life. These are people who

1
 believe that their work defines them, yet at the end of their lives, they do not realize that
all they work for amounts to nothing if not tied to the recognition of the eternal life.

 “Crowds of people’’ : another kind of people that Eliot denounces—those who

will remain unwanted by both Heaven and Hell for all eternity.

Stanza 2 is more enigmatic, addressed at first to a figure like Ezekiel, but here he cannot bring
together the “heap of broken images.” What the speaker can show him is fear and death. The
voice shifts to one who recalls his love but also to a failure that left them silent and desolate.
(Hyacinths may recall the Greek myth of Hyacinth, the friend of Apollo, whom he accidently
killed in a discuss throw. It may also recall the bleeding of the friend.) The second part is a
mixture of a threatening prophetic tone and a childhood memory of a hyacinth girl. It is
dominated by a vision of nothingness and describes a waste land of stony rubbish. The
moment of ecstasy is equated to death due to its intensity.

Eliot shows the reader an example of what love outside of the waste land looks like when he
utilizes quotes from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” to bracket a depiction of love. This song,
Cleanth Brooks notes, “is merely one of happy and naïve love. It brings to the mind of the
protagonist an experience of love—the vision of the hyacinth girl as she came back from the
hyacinth garden” (63). The song in the poem refers to Tristan, who morally wounded, awaits
the arrival of his beloved. Tristan inquires of the watchman if the ship is bringing his beloved.
The reply is negative “Empty and desolate is the sea”. It sums up the despair and the grief of
the guilty love.
Then the poet gives another example of guilty love, the story of the hyacinth girl. Like the
love of Tristan, the love of this young man is also a guilty love as he makes love to the girl
secretly in the garden. This sort of love is not free from fear and anxiety. The feeling of the
lover is summed up in the line “I was neither living nor dead and I knew nothing”. So love
offers neither joy nor relaxation under the condition of modern life.
Stanza 3 focuses on a fortune teller, Madame Sosostris who goes through a Tarot Pack of
images but can’t find the Hanged Man (Christ) and tells her customer to “fear death by
water.” The prophets of The Waste Land are powerless; the famous clairvoyante has a bad
cold; foresight is faulty and diseased. Although known to be the wisest woman in Europe, she
is unable to understand the real meaning of the cards she manipulates. Her superficial
readings are due to her belonging to the modern world.

Eliot presents another criticism of society through his description of Madame Sosostris. He
draws attention to the fact that she is a fake because she cannot see into the future even for her
own well being. The rest of the stanza serves as an introduction to the figures to be seen
throughout the succeeding parts of the poem.

Stanza 4 begins with the mention of the Unreal City, with crowds flowing over London
Bridge, constantly sighing with their eyes fixed before his feet; and the Unreal City seems to
be a striking image of Hell on earth, where people have no God and are concerned with only
the temporal things in life—with their shadows at morning and at evening, the idea of death
far from their minds. The speaker walks in London; a city populated by ghosts of the dead. He

2
encounters figures with whom he fought in a battle during WWI and the Punic War between
Rome and Carthage and he asks him about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden.

The speaker crosses London Bridge in the fog and looks upon the crowds of the dead
(recalling Dante, Inferno Canto 3). At St. Mary Woolnoth’s Church, the speaker runs into
Stetson, who apparently fought with him in the war. (Mylae is in Sicily and the site of a naval
battle between the Romans and Carthaginians in 260 BC.) He spokes with Stetson about a
buried corpse that needs to stay buried.
The first part dealt with the sterility of the land and love where love has lost the power to
redeem and invigorate the times. The first line begins with a nuance that strikes the reader as
something rather perplexing, “April is the cruellest month”. Because spring is known to be a
season of joy, of rebirth, and of relief after the harsh winter, one wonders how April could
ever be perceived to be cruel. The speaker denounces spring and elevates winter, denounces
change and elevates staying within the areas of comfort.

 “hypocrite lecteur! –monsemblable, -mon frère:

The actual meaning of the line does not add much to the poem, but the source – Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du Mal, a scandalous collection of poetry that criticized the heavy industrialization
and listless human spirit through decadent, symbolist imagery – contributes its themes to
Eliot’s poem without directly voicing them. Allusions serve to place Eliot’s poem within the
context of literary history by forcing the reader to recall the works of Ovid and Aenid. A
return to the past seems preferable to looking into a desolate empty future.
Discussion Questions:

 What is relationship between memory/memories and our current lives? What do they
amount to in this section?
 How important are the individual cards/images that Madame Sosostris lays out? Do
they have meanings that shape the larger poem?
 What does the image of the dead crossing London Bridge suggest about the modern
world? The post-WWI world?
 Why does Eliot end section one with the line from Baudelaire?

A Game of Chess

The title of this section alludes to the play by Thomas Middleton in which the chess game
functions as an allegory for political and sexual intrigues. The The title is borrowed from
Middleton’s play “Women Beware Women”. A Game of Chess is played to distract the
attention of a mother-in-law, while her daughter-in-law is seduced by a lustful duke.
The first implication in that violation of sexual discipline brings frustration and spiritual
decay. The second implication of a game of chess is a situation of check-mate where the game
enters a blind alley, meaning thereby that married life becomes dull and boring. The third
implication of the title is a life of emotional starvation in the process of mechanical routine.
Stanza 1 is an extended description of a wealthy woman’s boudoir. Eliot transforms the
description of Cleopatra in her barge in the river into the portrait of a lady in a chair in her

3
bedroom. Eliot uses Antony and Cleopatra’s love affair which led to Antony’s military
humiliation and death as a reminder of the dangers of intimacy.

The irony is that the classical painting nearby is a stylized scene of the Rape of Philomela.
 The Philomela scene:
It is taken from Metamorphoses by Ovid in which he narrates how the lady is raped and
imprisoned by her sister’s husband, king Tereus who cuts her tongue and transform her into a
nightingale. The portrait of Philomela brings the lust and cruelty into the foreground. The
woman here in the poem is like Philomela (unable to speak) sitting alone unable to reconcile
to her luxurious environs chirping meaningless verses (like a nightingale).

 The “coffered ceiling”:

Dido, the Queen of Carthage, fell in love with Aeneas during a feast hall when he recounts
the fall of Troy. That night, the ceiling light is said to dissolve and Dido’s light (beauty) is
said to illuminate all the landscape. Contrary to Dido’s wise and experienced character, the
woman in the bedroom is engaged in a querulously situation, asking what she shall do today,
will do tomorrow, what either of them shall do ever. The coffered ceiling is the woman’s
psychological enclosure.

Stanza 2 (lines 111-138) is a modern conversation between a husband and a wife, or rather
what appears to be a nagging wife and an incommunicative husband, who is internally
haunted by what he saw in WWI. While she wants to go out and do something fun, such as
hearing the popular song “Shakespeherian Rag”, he is haunted by the memories of rats, dead
men, and lidless eyes, and suggests staying home to play chess (while they wait for their own
deaths).
Belladonna’s relationship with her lover: Her mental agitation provokes his remoteness: one’s
response to the other’s question is oddly appropriate:
Her words are in quotation mark.

- { His are not.

The wealthy woman is neurotic (by excessive occupation with the self and materialism) and
pleads her lover to stay with her and talk to her, while the lover is obsessed with nihilistic
ideas and thoughts of drowning. This lack of communication and emotional attachment
negates any chances of love and alleviate the sterility of their lives.
Allusion to Tempest: the words are taken from a song, the spirit Ariel sings in the mind of
Ferdinand who believes he is the only survivor of a shipwreck in which his father was
drowned. However, the shipwreck is illusory created by the magician Prospero in order to
show the voyagers the corrupt condition of their lives.

The setting though luxuriant looks artificial and of decay and decadence. Eliot’s bar and
bedroom are claustrophobic spaces of imprisonment. The characters are all confused and
troubled by the fresh air coming from the open window. The air flattens the candles that burn

4
and smoke fills the room. “The wind under the door” - Allusion to Webster’s The Devil’s Law
Case: It refers to the breath of man on the brink of dying. The setting shows the lives of the
high society who face the emotional and sexual collapse due to self absorption.

Stanza 3 is a conversation between lower-class women at a pub near closing time. One
worries that her husband Albert will leave her now that he’s seen more attractive women
during the war. She blames her poor looks on the abortion she had after five other children.
Game of chess signifies the diversion and distraction that typically masks the routine of
married life where love has been pushed to the boundary. Two sides of sexuality are
mentioned: a barren interchange and a rampant fecundity. Sex is sterile and isolating rather
than intimate and life-giving

Eliot relies on the repetition of the phrase “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” to maintain the
poem’s theme of temporality.

Discussion Questions
 Why does Eliot give us three different class-based voices, as well as life experiences,
in this section?
 Do the stanzas relate in any way to each other?

The Fire Sermon

The title of the third section is taken from one of the Buddha’s famous sermons in which he
warns a crowd of monks that all reality is on fire with suffering and the one seeking
enlightenment must learn to develop an aversion for the experience of the senses. The speech
delivered teaches how to give up earthly passion symbolized by fire. Purification is reached
only by the mortification of body in order to give power to the spirit. The body is the modern
evil, plague.

The essence of this section is that lust burns up life. One can conquer lust by suffering and
pain by passing through fire. This is opposed to modern idea: That sex should be enjoyed
without any regulation. This section is full of debased and unfruitful love affairs: an image of
prostitution, a reminder of the raped Philomela, a proposition by Mr. Eugenides, the clerk and
typist intercourse, Earl Leicester’s flirting with the queen Elizabeth, St. Augustine’s sad
admission of a sexually active youth.

In this section, we discover that the central speaker of the poem has been the blind seer
Tiresias, who having been once female as well as male, can experience the lives of others.
Speakers are neither named nor distinguished from one another and quotation marks are not a
sure way to discern borders but Tiresias identifies himself clearly. His story is that of a man
whose body was wrenched, without warning into a completely different form. His story
displays the horror of metamorphosis.

Stanza 1 describes winter on the Thames, after the summer picnickers have all gone, both the
girls (the nymphs) and their boyfriends who work in the financial district. The speaker sits by

5
the water in winter near Leman Street Station and knows that the rattle of wintery death is at
his back. The river in fertility myths is tied to the source of life; or, in Spenser’s poetry
(among others) the river is tied to poetic inspiration. Now, without our connection to the past,
the river is just polluted – the nymphs are departed. Then the poet calls London the unreal city
because unbelievable things happen in this town. Rape, lust and cheating prevail without any
hindrance.
The landscape of The Waste Land – a land full of waste, a land without a purpose where life
has gone to waste – illustrates London's pursuit of technological development, excessive
financial aspirations and pollution. From line 60 onwards there is a scene describing
commuters “flo[wing] over London Bridge” towards the city's economic centre and stopping
to have arbitrary conversations with acquaintances. Behind them the clock of a church they
are strategically written to be walking away from strikes “a dead sound on the final stroke of
nine” –the nine-to-five workday is a death sentence.
Stanza 2 begins by recalling more of the horror of WWI, the figure recalling the rats and dead
bodies of the trenches full of water. Eliot ties this together with an allusion to The Tempest
where the young prince believes his father has died in the shipwreck. The speaker then thinks
about the present and Sweeney and a mother-daughter prostitute team.
Stanza 3 recalls the imagery of the nightingale and the rude euphemism of jugging. “Tereu” is
the song the nightingale makes in memory of Tereus, the one who raped Philomela.
Stanza 4 is a speaker remembering a proposition from a Mr. Eugenides (“Well-born”) of
possibly a political and/or sexual nature. C.i.f. means “Carriage, insurance, freight.” (Eliot
recalls it incorrectly in the note.)
Stanzas 5-6 is for many interpreters the key clue to The Waste Land. Tiresias can see a
planned encounter between a clerk and a young woman, which turns out badly, and that the
woman is soon glad it’s over. Sex has become no more than the mating of animals devoid of
emotional significance. Eliot describes an encounter between “the typist” and a carbuncular
youth where the woman is bored and unengaged, but unresisting and the man simply
opportunistic. This scene contradicts to the seduced girl in Goldsmith’s The Vicar Wakefield
who is full of shame and repentance. In the past, the loss of chastity was considered worse
than death for a girl. But in the modern age it is a mechanical routine as done by the typist
girl.
Stanza 7 is likely spoken by Tiresias, though it could be another that the seer hears. The
speaker thinks about the clash (or at least tension) between the loud sounds of the city and the
beauty and peace inside the Church of Magnus Martyr.
The Song of the River Daughters (according to Eliot lines 266-305) represents the three songs
of the river daughters who reflect on the state of the Thames. Song 1 (lines 266-278) sings of
the oil and tar and barges. Song 2 (lines 279-291) sings of two women (like Elizabeth I and
Lady Dudley) who are rowing down the river. Song 3 (lines 292-305) recalls a series of
violent murders along the river. Margate Sands is a low-class sea resort.

 Trams and dusty trees

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe:

6
The last scene of “Fire Sermon” shows some sexual violation experienced by three daughters
of Thames. The first daughter was born at Highbury which is full of trams and dusty trees.
She visited Richmond and Kew, which are picnic sports on the bank of the river. At
Richmond she was criminally assaulted by a man while she was lying on her back on the floor
of a small boat.

 The second daughter was ravished at Moorgate:

My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet after the event
He wept. He promised “a new start”
I made no comment what should I resent?”
(lines 296-299: The Waste Land)

The girl was raped by a young man. After the act, the man felt repentant and wept. He
promised to reform himself. For the girl there is nothing to regret because rape is a common
experience of the poor girl’s life.

 The third daughter was ravished on the Margate sands:

On Margate sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing
The broken fingernails of dirty hands
My people humble people who expect
Nothing
(lines 300-305: The Waste Land)

The girl does not remember anything. She compares herself to the broken fingernails of dirty
hands which are useless. Poor people could not do anything against such violation. They just
accept it as a common experience of life.
Final Stanza recalls Augustine’s words at Carthage in his Confessions in which he reflects
how God pulled him out of a cauldron of illicit loves.
“And their friends, loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed have left no address”:
After a wild party, rich businessmen left no address to their sex partners. For businessman sex
is the same as any other commodity. It could be bought and enjoyed without any sense of
moral.
Discussion Questions

 Why would Eliot use the Thames to organize this section? What role does the seer
play throughout?
 Everything that Tiresias envisions is either about death or about erotically empty
relationships. Why would these be what marks the life of post-WWI London?
 What does the song of the three river daughters add to the poem?
 What does the final quotation from Augustine suggest?

Death by Water

7
Along with perhaps an oblique allusion to baptism, it focuses on the drowned sailor Phlebas
who, once great and young, is now dead. We, too, are warned to reflect on the inevitability of
our deaths. The section also serves as a transition to the final section’s more philosophical
reflections.
Discussion Question

 What role does this section play in the larger poem? Does it put into perspective what
we have read so far? If so, how?

What the Thunder Said

Stanza 1 alludes to the arrest and crucifixion of Christ. Here the allusion focuses on the
inevitability of death for all.
Stanza 2 walks through a mountainous desert without water or consolation. The rock and the
water are contrasted—there may be a very weak allusion to Moses and the rock he struck for
water in the wilderness.
Stanza 3 alludes to the Emmaus Road and the enigma of the third figure.
Stanza 4 alludes to war and revolution and bombing in an almost apocalyptic prediction for
the cities of the world.
Stanza 5 imagines a desolate apocalyptic landscape.
Stanza 6 continues the desolate landscape with a perilous chapel of black magic followed by
an image of hope—the crowing of the rooster and rain.
Stanza 7 is organized around three spiritual principles of DA as referred to in the Upanishads:
datta (giving); dayadhvam (showing compassion); and damyata (practicing self-control). Each
examines a moment that tests these virtues. The Ganges River waits for the rain that gathers
over the Himalayas to come and refresh the jungle. In the first, the age has given away its
innocence in sexual surrender and violent conflict. In the second, the poem alludes to Count
Ruggeri locked with his children to starve in a tower (from Inferno 33) and to Coriolanus, the
brutal Roman leader who was hacked to death. The third pictures a boat responding to its
directions and the Fisher King who ponders Isaiah 38:1. (“Thus saith the LORD, Set thine
house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live.”)
Stanza 8 The final stanza of the poem is a collage of allusions and languages, fragments
“shored against my ruin.”
(line 426) from the famous children’s nursery song.
(line 427) “Then he [the poet Arnaut Daniel] vanished into the fire that refines them.”
(from Purgatorio 26.145-148)
(line 428) “She is singing, I am mute.” (from the Latin poem “The Vigil of Venus” a
reference to the Philomela myth. The anonymous poet concludes the poem no longer
singing in inspiration.)
(line 429) “The Prince of Aquitaine, his tower in ruins.” (from the sonnet by Gerard de
Nerval)

8
 (line 431) “Why then I’ll fight you. [King] Hieronymo’s mad again.” (from The
Spanish Tragedy. In context the king is driven mad by the murder of his son.)
(line 433) According to Eliot, loosely equivalent to “The peace that passeth all
understanding.” (Phil 4:7)
Eliot closes the poem with the words “Shantih shantih shantih” which he explains in the notes
to mean “Peace which passeth understanding.” This is a rather sad way to end the poem. The
world is in chaos and there is no way to know what is to come; peace can only be found in not
trying to understand too much, and accepting the chaotic nature of life that this poem
illustrates with its structure.

Discussion Questions

 Why do you think that the tone and approach changes so radically in the last section
of the poem?
 Why do you think Eliot brings together biblical and Hindu allusions in this section?
 Is the ending of the poem optimistic or pessimistic? Explain.

9
WEEK 2:
Modernist aesthetics
The Waste Land is regarded as one of the most important works of modernist literature.
Instead of writing a traditional work, with unified themes and a coherent structure, Eliot
produced a poem that incorporated many unrelated references to history, religion, mythology,
and other disciplines. The Waste Land appeared in an age when European society was
struggling in having an identity under the burden of the aftermath of World War I. Under the
weight of such chaos, Eliot attempted to give an image of the dystopian world of brutality and
irrationality which used to be known as a Utopian world of wisdom and equality.

The title of the poem indicates Eliot’s attitude toward his contemporary society, as he uses the
idea of a dry and sterile wasteland as a metaphor for a Europe devastated by war and
desperate for spiritual replenishment. The title of the poem is an allusion to the devastation of
the war and the poem itself, a metaphor for the devastated landscape of post-war Europe. The
title of the poem refers to a myth from Jessie L. Weston’s 'From Ritual to Romance', in which
Weston describes a kingdom where the genitals of the king, known as the Fisher King, have
been wounded in some way. This injury, which affects the king’s fertility, also mythically
affects the kingdom itself. With its vital, regenerative power gone, the kingdom has dried up
and turned into a waste land.

Unhappily married, he suffered a breakdown soon after the war and wrote most of The Waste
Land while recovering in a sanatorium in Switzerland, at the age of 33. The poem seemed to
his contemporaries to transcend Eliot’s personal situation and represent a general crisis in
western culture. One of its major themes is the barrenness of a post-war world in which
human sexuality has been perverted from its normal course and the natural world too has
become infertile.

The poem is deliberately obscure and fragmentary, incorporating variant voices and multiple
points of view. The poem is an attempt to counter the cultural decay of the present with the
rich cultural heritage of the past. Eliot combines images from pagan rituals and religious texts
with ancient fertility rituals and allusions to legends of the Grail. These images of tradition are
set against bleak images of modern life, where spiritual death breeds cultural death. The
Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation (in several languages), a variety of verse forms,
and a collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of speaking for an entire culture in crisis.
One of the characteristics of the poem is that the more you understand the allusions, in fact,
the more you are meant to experience the feeling of going round and round in circles. Take
the opening two lines, for instance. The title alludes to the empty, poisoned landscape
Arthurian knights had to cross in order to find the Chapel Perilous and the Holy Grail, which
would cure the king and heal the land.

Modern poets express everything indirectly; which means they leave their poetry for the
modern readers to understand and interpret. Eliot’s writings are full of allusions, which show
that the poet is content with modernism as it rejects the high moral values of culture and
society. Eliot’s aim in writing poetry is to save people from the melancholic condition, to
move them into a happy circumstance in an indirect way. Eliot maintains that all the

10
appreciations and achievements of the artists and poets belong to the dead poets and artists of
the previous ages. The evolution of “modernism” – the cultural and literary movement that
emerged in the early-20th century – was intimately bound up with the shock and experience
of the First World War. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and he imagined that
culture was crumbling and dissolving. He presents sordid images of popular culture with
allusions to classical and ancient literature and myths.
MODERNISM is an aesthetic phenomenon, to be distinguished from “modernity” as the
broader period of social, economic and intellectual history beginning with the Renaissance.

 Modernism as an artistic fascination with “making it new” – various “avant garde”

movments as subsets of this overall modernism – eg., “Imagism” of Pound and
William Carlos Williams
 Sense that the past is removed from us; the present is not connected in a “living
tradition” with the past – although perhaps it should be – texts of the past, then, only
as “fragments”
 Experimentation with form
 Sense of personal isolation and alienation for characters in modernist literature
 Experimentation with temporal flow: time itself a product of complex individual
consciousness, so can experiment with “stream of consciousness”

The Modernist movement, a response to the stark, dehumanizing realities of the

industrial revolution, found expression in all forms of Western human artistic mediums.
Woven through this era are found innovative expressions of humanity’s struggle with the
impersonalization of industrialization by visual artists such as Cubist Pablo Picasso, written
works by poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and music compositions by Stravinsky,
Schoeberg and Milhaud (“Modern Music”). Each of these mediums reflected the
fragmentation of society created by the industrial revolution. While Picasso’s Cubist collage
is a visual representation of the fragmentation of the industrial era, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste
Land” is a written one.
The Waste Land shows its modernist aesthetic value mainly through its structure. It is
inconsistent in its structure, writing style, voice, and setting, and rejects conventions set by
traditional poetry before it. The Waste Land is written in free verse, with no discernable
constant structure. Throughout the poem, there are segments with vivid imagery and powerful
symbols that stand out from the rest of the poem because they have absolutely no transition.
There are no recurring characters, settings, or writing styles. These different segments do,
however, have common themes that connect to each other to create the overall theme and
message of the poem. There is discontinuity from Eliot’s constant borrowing from other
literary works. He borrows ideas, quotes, and names of people and places from everything
from Greek mythology (Petronius’s Satyricon) and Christianity (Ezekiel II), to European
opera (Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) and Shakespeare (Tempest). This forces the reader to
make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas and symbols, helping the reader to
create his own meaning through the solving of this puzzle. This rejection of continuity forces
the reader to put more effort into the reading in order to figure out the connections between
the different segments, and to try to put them together to understand the poem as a whole. The
poem is a giant puzzle, and no clues are given by the author. T.S. Eliot rejects all the
conventions of traditional poetic structure, and what comes forth is a work that seems to have
sprung directly from his head, without any sort of filter. This is another aspect of modernist
poetry. It seems to be stream-of-consciousness. In fact, though, it is deliberately meant to be
this way, so that the reader puts more effort into the reading. At first, when reading through a

11
segment like the one in The Wasteland about Madame Sosostris the Tarot reader, it seems to
make absolutely no sense. Eliot describes different cards she draws, without bothering to
explain any of the cards’ individual meanings, or what the cards as a whole may mean to the
poem. Even when the reader looks up the meanings to the cards, they seem to add little to the
general meaning of the poem. These segments in The Wasteland are the complete opposite.
Through the first reading, they seem to make little sense, and seem to be a mess. When the
reader looks closer into it, though, with multiple readings, and a bit of effort, he can get much
out of it. Not only can he see what Eliot is trying to say, but, more importantly, he can derive
his own meaning from the poem, which is the goal of modernist poetry. The reader is just as
much of a writer as the author is, as the reader is meant to construct his own meaning from the
imagery presented.
The Waste Land starts out with a third person perspective. It quickly changes to the
perspective of what seems to be an aging aristocratic woman. The perspective then changes
back to third person, then changes its focus to a clairvoyant woman, then to a city, with a first
person view again. These quick changes in perspective and focus can send the reader reeling,
if he is not careful. The changes in perspective and focus are meant to create connections
between the seemingly unrelated settings and characters. Another technique used in
modernist poetry is the heavy use of imagery, as opposed to making statements. These
images are symbolic. The Waste Land opens up with images and symbols of spring. There
are showers of rain, blooming lilacs, sunlight, and the contrast of memories of the winter past,
with blankets of snow. These images act as symbols representing life and death, permanent
sleep and resurrection. Instead of making statements about life and death, Eliot uses spring
and winter as symbols to express his meaning. In the second part of the poem, A Game of
Chess, we are given images of incredible opulence, with candelabra, jewels, ivory, coloured
glass, synthetic perfumes. These represent wealth and high standards of living. Further
down, these images of opulence are contrasted with images of flames and smoke. This type
of imagery contrast is used throughout The Waste Land in order to provoke thought, and to
make the reader create meaning through the connections and contrasts of the images.
According to Cleanth Brooks’ 1939 essay “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth”
Eliot examines “the fact that men have lost the knowledge of good and evil…” and that
this“…keeps them from being alive, and is the justification for viewing the modern waste land
as a realm in which the inhabitants do not even exist” (60). This theme, that those that have
ceased to live in reality are dead to the world, is examined repeatedly in various ways. Eliot
depicts a multitude of people unable to connect with modern life and thus, not really living
life. Jacob Korg states “…every part of it is connected with the others, not in a conventional
way, but by means of a complicated system of echoes, contrasts, parallels, and allusions” (88).
In addition to using the collage as a framework for his poem, Eliot also uses a contrasting
device to highlight his theme. According to Brooks “The Waste Land is built on a major
contrast a device which is a favorite of Eliot’s and is to be found in many of his poems…”
Modernist schools enthusiastically supported blank verse and a depart from the rigid meters
and rhyme schemes of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
The principal theme explored in the poem is the possibility of the Waste Land’s
salvation. the Waste Land mimics the reality the citizens of the world post-World War I
experienced. Most of Eliot's visual imagery is unpleasant and grotesque, “A rat crept […]/
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I was fishing in the dull canal.” While sailors
and fishers are recurring characters, there is hardly any clean water in this poem. “The river
sweats/ Oil and tar;” then there is the water the sailor drowns in. There is illness – the
clairvoyante with a bad cold, the carbuncular young man. Many of the events and images in

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The Waste Land can be seen to symbolise the situation Europe was in after the First World
War. The story of Philomela being raped by the king could symbolically reflect the feelings in
post-war Europe; citizens had been violated and led to destruction by leaders who should
protect and guide their countries, not march people to death by millions.
ALLUSION:
One is bombarded by a host of seemingly unconnected images and lyrical fragments
that sometimes seem to bear no relation to the section under which they are found. In The
Wasteland Eliot seeks to unify the roots of human civilisation thus hearkening back to
mythology, and alluding to the great poets of former ages, such as Dante, Spenser and
Shakespeare.
“April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land …” : 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.
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.
“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 handful
of dust”), and Joseph Conrad’s Youth(“the heat of life in a handful of dust”); suggesting how
terrifying and daunting it is to attempt to make sense of the infinite chaos(i.e. fragmentation)
that composes twentieth-century experience.
“Frisch weht der Wind / Der Heimat zu / Mein Irisch Kind, / Wo weilest du?”: from Richard
Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde.
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)
“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.”
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.
“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble,” strongly echo a
moment from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
“The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale /
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice”: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Philomela
escapes murder at the hands of King Tereus by being transformed into a nightingale.

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A cultural fragment appears soon thereafter: “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag− / It’s so
elegant / So intelligent” (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.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night”
(Eliot 172).
“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 Fire Sermon,” 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)
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.”
“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
“The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring”:
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 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”
(Southam 180).
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. In its first line, we are introduced to Phlebas
the Phoenician, who has drowned. 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

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drowned. Secondly, Plato’s Philebas is potentially a source for Phlebas, which is a
philosophical treatise Plato wrote regarding pleasure (. 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”. The phrase “Gentile or Jew” insinuates the entirety of
humanity.
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,
where “a band of men and officers … cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons”
(The Holy Bible). The end of the first stanza states “He who was living is now dead / We who
were living are now dying,” is an allusion to Christ’s crucifixion.
“voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells”: In the Old Testament, unfilled
cisterns and wells were a sign of withering faith and the worship of false deities.
Hinduism: The sacred River Ganges is mentioned in the second to final stanza, as well as the
holy mountain of Himavant of the Himalayas. The Sanskrit words DA, Datta, Dayadhvam,
and Damyata all appear in the two final stanzas: Within the 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” . 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”. 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”. These final fragments seem to suggest
that everyone will have a different subjective experience of modernity (DA, Datta,
Dayadhvam, and Damyata). Citizens of twentieth century were intellectually bombarded by
many 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 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.
Eliot regarded the crumbling of religion – the very foundation of culture – as the root cause of
the cultural disintegration which he witnessed in the early 20 th century and it is that which he
mourns in The Waste Land.
Eliot believes that society has reached a point upon which there is no future and so we must
revert back to have any hope of survival. The continuous juxtaposition of classical
mythological heroes and legends with the capitalistic characters demonstrate his yearning for
past values while simultaneously condemning the present consumer culture. The typist is
portrayed as completely passive – the long-term effects of a consumer culture forcing her
blindly into a state of indifference.

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Eliot is akin to the Romantics in his notion of the alienation of the author from the existing
society.

THE MYTHIC FRAMEWORK

Eliot was indebted to Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (on the Grail legend) and to Frazer’s
The Golden Bough (on comparative vegetation myths):

 Weston traces Christian practices and beliefs to primitive fertility myths – especially
as seen in the legend of the “Fisher King”: many versions of this myth; sometimes the
king is wounded, sometimes dead. The King’s wound means the land is blighted.
 A questing-knight must endure 3 nights in the Perilous Chapel (symbolic of Christ’s
death, descent and resurrection), asks questions about the cup and lance (female and
male fertility symbols) and this regenerates the king and land.
 These Christian Fisher King legends are connected to fertility myths of a dying and
resurrected god: Osiris, Dionysus etc. Their death represents the death of fertility in
the fall-winter and their rebirth, the converse (also the cycle of human life)

THEMES:

SEX :

Sex is actually a sacred activity that is done with loving care by married couples to continue
the descent. But in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, sex has changed its function. Sex is used as
a means of gratification of lust, drugs relieve stress and even traded as a commercial item for
material gain. Deviations sex causes sterility of modern civilization. Eliot called spiritual
cleansing as a solution to these problems. According to Eliot, sex is an important aspect of
life. It is an expression of love and a means of procreation. But in modern society, sex has
been perverted from its proper function and is utilized for animal pleasure and monetary
benefits.

Eliot cites the instances of guilty love in the first section of the poem with reference to
Waqner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. Then he goes to another guilty love of the hyacinth girl.
In the section of Game of Chess we are introduced to sexual violation in high-class society
where a lustful duke seduced a young married-woman. Sex also prevails among the lower
class of society. Eliot mentions the story of Lil and the experience of three daughters of
Thames. Another example is that of mechanical sex relation between the typist girl and her
boy friend. A homosexual relation is exemplified by Mr. Eugenides. Eliot sums up the story
of European lust through the words of St. Augustine.

Eliot means that the whole of Europe is being destroyed by the fire of sexuality.

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