La Belle Dame sans Merci

“La Belle Dame sans Merci,” written in 1819 and

published the next year in a form slightly different
John Keats
from the one here, depicts a knight-at-arms who
has been seduced and abandoned by a capricious 1819
fairy. Told in the form of a dialogue, the poem re-
counts the experience of loving dangerously and
fully, of remaining loyal to that love despite warn-
ings to the contrary, and of suffering the living
death of one who has glimpsed immortality. At the
beginning and end of the poem, the knight remains
on “a cold hill’s side,” a world devoid of happiness
or beauty, waiting for his love to return. Some read-
ers maintain that the poem is really about Keats’s
confused feelings for Fanny Brawne, his fiancée,
to whom Keats could not commit fully. Others
claim the story is symbolic of the plight of the artist,
who, having “fallen in love” with beauty, can never
fully accept the mundane. Either way, the conclu-
sion is the same: however self-destructive intense
love may be, the lover has little choice in the mat-
ter. Further, the more one entertains feelings of
beauty and love, the more desolate and more
painful the world becomes.

Author Biography
Born in 1795, Keats, the son of a stablekeeper, was
raised in Moorfields, London, and attended the
Clarke School in Enfield. After Keats’s mother’s
death in 1810, Richard Abbey took care of Keats

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 L a B e l l e D a m e s a n s M e r c i
John Keats
and his three younger siblings. Although Keats was
apprenticed to an apothecary (pharmacist), he soon
realized that writing was his true talent, and he de-
cided to become a poet. Forced to hide his ambi-
tion from Abbey, who would not have sanctioned
it, Keats instead entered Guy’s and St. Thomas’s
Hospitals in London, becoming an apothecary in
1816 and continuing his studies to become a sur-
geon. When he reached the age of twenty-one,
Keats was free of Abbey’s jurisdiction. Supported
by his small inheritance, he devoted himself to writ-
ing. Keats also began associating with artists and
writers, among them Leigh Hunt, who published
Keats’s first poems in his journal, the Examiner.
But, within a few years, the poet experienced the
first symptoms of tuberculosis, the disease that had
killed his mother and brother. He continued writ-
ing and reading the great works of literature. He
also fell in love with Fanny Brawne, a neighbor’s
daughter, though his poor health and financial dif-
ficulties made marriage impossible. He published
a final work, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes,
and Other Poems, which included his famous odes
and the unfinished narrative, Hyperion: A Frag-
ment. Keats traveled to Italy in 1820 in an effort to
improve his health but died in Rome the following
year at the age of 26.
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Poem Text
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 5
So haggard and so woebegone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew; 10
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light, 15
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan. 20
I set her on my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet, 25
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
“I love thee true.”
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d full sore; 30
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d 35
On the cold hill’s side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!” 40
I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here, 45
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Poem Summary
Lines 1–12
The ballad consists of two parts of dialogue,
each uninterrupted by the other and each un-
couched by the normal story-telling mechanisms
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

Media
Adaptations
• A reading of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is
available on a compact disc called Conversation
Pieces, released in 2001 by Folkways Records.
This recording was originally released in 1964
in LP format by Folkways.
• A compact disc named Songs, released in 2001
on the Hyperion label, has a version of “La Belle
Dame sans Merci” set to music and sung by Sir
Charles Villiers Stanford.
• Lexington Records released a recording of
Theodore Marcuse reading “La Belle Dame sans
Merci” along with others by the same author on
an LP called The Poetry of Keats and Shelley,
produced in 1950.
• The 1996 two-cassette set The Caedmon Col-
lection of English Poetry features various poetic
masterpieces, including “La Belle Dame sans
Merci,” read by famous actors such as Sir John
for identifying speakers (“I said,” “he said,” etc.).
Because of this, the identity of the first speaker,
whose part is completed in the first twelve lines,
remains cryptic. Though he (or, it could equally be
argued, she) reveals the identity of the other (the
“knight-at-arms”), the first speaker says nothing, at
least directly, about himself. He does, however,
give plenty of information about the situation of the
poem. The time is late autumn, the annual grasses
having already “wither’d” and the birds having de-
parted on their winter migration. The place, one can
infer, is not always as forbidding as it seems to be
now—its desolation is simply due to the time of
year. There has been a “harvest,” but it has ended.
There is latent life present around the two charac-
ters: “the squirrel’s granary is full.” Therefore, if
the setting symbolizes the knight’s emotional des-
olation, one must understand it as a function of an
individualized circumstance: of a very specific but
not necessarily permanent condition. Come spring,
after all, the cycle of the harvest will begin again.
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L a B e l l e D a m e s a n s M e r c i
Gielgud, Richard Burton, James Mason, and
Boris Karloff.
• Sir Ralph Richardson reads “La Belle Dame
sans Merci” on a 1996 Caedmon audiocassette
release called The Poetry of Keats.
• HighBridge Co. of St. Paul, Minnesota, includes
“La Belle Dame sans Merci” on John Keats,
Poet, a reading of Keats’s poems by Douglas
Hodge. It was released on audiocassette in 1996
as part of the HighBridge Classics series.
• Listen Library Inc. included “La Belle Dame
sans Merci” on its 1989 audiocassette The Es-
sential Keats. Poems for this recording were se-
lected and read by poet Philip Levine.
• A 1963 LP recording from Spoken Arts Records
entitled Robert Donat Reads Favorite Poems at
Home includes the famous actor’s rendition of
“La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
Yet, this seems little consolation to the knight the
speaker describes. He is “alone and palely loiter-
ing,” “so haggard and so woebegone.” His pallor
is described metaphorically in terms of a “lily” on
his brow and a “fading rose” on his cheek. Further,
he appears physically ill, “moist” from the “fever”
of some “anguish.” Though through these obser-
vations the speaker has already foreshadowed the
reasons for the knight’s grim condition, the form’s
rhetoric demands the question be asked: “O what
can ail thee?” A knowledge of chivalric lore should
prompt the correct guess. Of a knight’s three pro-
found allegiances—to his God, his lord, and his
lady—only the last would be described in terms of
lily-pallor and a faded rose.
Lines 13–24
The story’s twist occurs in the first stanza of
the knight’s speech. Though a “lady” was bound to
figure into the poem, that she is a “faery’s child”
changes the expectations of the tale’s outcome and
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causes readers to reinterpret the nature of the
knight’s desolation. Literature and myth are filled
with examples of humans who fall in love with
gods, and with little exception, such relationships
bode disastrously for the mortal party. Particularly
in that area of mythology dealing with fairies or
fairy-like creatures, humans who become enamored
of fairies, elves, pixies, and the like generally suf-
fer extreme emotional consequences once their af-
fairs with the capricious beings have ended. Having
loved an immortal, these hapless humans discover
that mere mortal beauty—which can include not
only human lovers but also life itself—will no
longer do. Based on thse conventions, readers un-
derstand immediately that this is the knight’s fate,
and through his descriptions of his fairy-love’s
beauty, readers see the caprice that brings on his
doom. In keeping with fairies’ quick and unpre-
dictable behavior, “her foot was light.” Her long
hair suggests the sensual nature of such creatures,
who in lore are given to continual pleasures, and
“her eyes were wild.” The knight confesses he was
taken in by his lady’s fairy-penchant for “seeming:”
She looked at him “as she did love.” In the terms
of chivalric belief-systems, earthly love is a mor-
tally serious concept: it is at once an all-consuming
renunciation of and at the same time the earthly
manifestation of heavenly love. As such, it is con-
sidered by the knight to be eternal. Yet for the lady,
who as a fairy has no such ideas about heaven or
about chivalry, love is a purely earthly proposition.
To her, it is merely an expression of her fairy-
embodiment of nature, which begins and ends with
the erotic. Thus, she makes a “sweet moan,” which
readers have no reason to believe is falsely manu-
factured. Thus, as well, she responds favorably to
his gifts, which all represent natural or sensual plea-
sure: a “garland,” “bracelets,” a “fragrant zone.” Her
hold over the knight becomes complete when she
sings to him her “faery’s song,” the type known to
hopelessly enchant mortals’ souls.
Lines 25–36
The lady’s gifts to the knight represent her
closeness to nature: she is able to find him “roots
of relish sweet,” “honey wild and manna dew.” She
professes to him, “I love thee true.” But, she does
so in a “language strange” whose words may (and,
it turns out, do) not hold the same meanings as the
knight’s. Still, the knight believes because, in the
truest fashion of the romantic sensibility, he wants
and needs to believe. At this point, readers might
examine the various allegorical meanings readers
have attached to the knight’s story. While some be-
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lieve it is a representation of the perils of earthly
love—whose desire and randomness can seem to
have the qualities of fairy-love—others maintain
Keats is really talking about the poet’s infatuation
with immortal concepts such as beauty. In either
case, the lover—whether of another human or of
some aesthetic concept—has little choice in the
matter. To him, the experience of love is all-
encompassing, transcendent and, at least briefly,
immortal. How many lovers, after all, have behaved
rashly, even self-destructively, in the belief that
their love took precedence over the normal modes
of conduct. In addition, how many disappointed
lovers carry with them the belief that they can never
love the same way again? Still, new lovers proceed
despite the warnings of previously disillusioned
lovers. So, the knight proceeds into the fairy-cave,
where, he says, “I shut her wild wild eyes”—the
repetition suggesting a euphemism for sex —“with
kisses four.” In a poem devoid of many particulars,
the number of kisses seems overly specific. Though
there are many numerological interpretations of this
detail, one simple explanation for the knight’s
specificity may suffice: it is the last thing he re-
members. Moreover, it is his last act before the dis-
illusionment and perhaps his last pure act. After the
kisses, he is “lulled” to sleep, has his final dream,
and awakes “on the cold hill’s side.”
Lines 37–48
In his dream, the knight is warned by previous
lovers to beware “La Belle Dame sans Merci”— the
lovely lady without pity. They come to him from the
land of death, for once they have glimpsed immor-
tality, all life seems a walking death to them. There
are “pale kings and princes,” “pale warriors”—all
heroic characters whose romantic spirit led to their
demise. Yet, the knight cannot head their warnings.
He too is a hero, and in the romantic tradition, a hero
is often someone who cannot learn from his mis-
takes. Regardless, he has already experienced a
heightened state from which he cannot return to any
previous existence. When he awakens on the hill-
side, he can only “loiter,” waiting for the experience
to return. After his fairy-romance, the world is pale
and devoid of charm, yet to the poem’s initial
speaker the knight’s vigil, however inevitable, seems
to be pointless and grim. The poem concludes with
a recollection of the first stanza: “though the sedge
is wither’d from the lake / And no birds sing.” This
not only frames the poem; it also confirms that the
knight agrees with the first speaker’s assessment of
the setting. At the same time, the knight cannot agree
with the speaker’s implication that no human ought
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

to remain in such a godforsaken place. For the
knight, who has glimpsed the immortal and will
probably never do so again, any other place would
seem equally desolate.
Themes
Unrequited Love
With its forlorn, heartbroken narrator suffer-
ing the pangs of embarrassment, “La Belle Dame
sans Merci” appears to tell readers about the uni-
versal situation known as unrequited love. While
love felt equally by two parties is a celebrated event
in stories and song, unrequited love occurs when
the love felt by one person is much stronger than
that felt by the person who is loved. The root “re-
quite” comes from “to repay,” which indicates a
balance that one expects in a love relationship and
the sense of unfairness when one person “pays”
love out but is not paid back.
In the poem the knight’s disappointment would
be less severe if he did not believe from the be-
ginning of their affair that the fairy child loved him
in equal measure. As it is, she appears to fall in
love with the knight just as he is falling for her.
The look she gives him in line 19 and her “sweet
moan” in line 20 might be read as signs of her love,
and the presents she gives him are further proof
they are equally balanced in their feelings for one
another. She even takes him back to her home, her
“elfin grot,” and makes him feel comfortable. It
would be natural for him to assume she is as in-
terested as he is in continuing their budding ro-
mance when he awakes.
It is unclear whether the knight’s intense feel-
ing when he finds his lady gone is caused primarily
by the loss of the woman herself. It could be that he
is suffering from the disappointing conclusion that
she never really loved him as much as he thought
she did. By the end of the poem he clearly feels
alone, but he does not show any anger toward her.
The only clues the poem gives about whether or not
the lady may have felt love for the knight come from
the spectral images who visit the knight in his dream
and tell him the lady is pitiless, that she has no mercy.
The presence of these dream images may be ex-
plained psychologically, as if the knight subcon-
sciously knew the lady had left him, and his mind
had already started shifting the blame toward her.
The dream might just be his rationalization, a way
of making her out to be evil in order to cope with
the pain of learning his love is unrequited.
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Find a contemporary song you think has the
same message as Keats’s poem. Compare the
song with the poem to comment on the ways
people of the nineteenth century and the twenty-
first century view love.
• Research why it is significant that Keats wrote
the title of his poem in French. Based on your
research, do you think the French title has the
same significance now that it would have had
when Keats were living? Why or why not?
• Write a sequel to this poem, explaining what will
happen when the spring comes again. Will the
lover return to the knight? If not, will he con-
tinue waiting, or will his attention fade as the
seasons change?
• Keats used a supernatural setting to explain his
idea of romance. Find a folk story from a non-
European culture that involves lovers in a super-
natural setting and explain what the supernatural
elements tell you about each culture.
Nature
The love story told in this poem is framed
within images of nature. The lady with whom the
knight falls in love is described as the child of a
fairy. Fairy stories often stem from rural folklore
traditions. The lady is described as having “wild”
eyes and as living in a cave on a hill side. When
they are together, the knight and the lady give each
other presents made from flowers, roots, honey, and
dew. After the knight awakens to find the lady
gone, the world is described as one from which life
has receded, using images associated with nature’s
death each winter: the squirrels have stored their
provisions for the long dead months, the grass in
the lake has withered, and the birds have quit
singing. The only signs of living nature after the
lady disappears are the fading ones on the knight’s
face. The “lily” that the poem’s other speaker sees
on the knight’s brow is a sign he once was blessed
with the delicate beauty of a flower, although lilies
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are associated with death. The rose color in his
cheek is another sign he has been touched by
beauty, but it, like the rest of nature, is “fading.”
Despair
Despair is the state of having lost all hope, of
finding oneself unable to believe life will ever be
good again. The knight in “La Belle Dame sans
Merci” falls into despair when he learns a rela-
tionship that seemed to be just starting has abruptly
ended. His situation is clear from the very first line,
when a stranger finds him out in the forest and can
tell just by looking at him that something is gravely
wrong. The stranger sees how pale he is and, notic-
ing he has chosen to live by a dead, frozen lake,
wants to know what ails him, by which he means
what has made the knight so sick in spirit.
In the middle stanzas of the poem, the knight
describes the romance, which meant more to him
than anything that happened before it or since. The
brief romance ended with the lady lulling him to
sleep. Readers can assume that, comfortable and
happy beside her, he expected their love to con-
tinue and even to grow when he awoke.
In the real (as opposed to magical) world, the
knight’s despair would take time to develop, be-
cause he would not know for sure that the woman
he loved was gone forever. In the magical world of
this poem, though, he is visited in his sleep by pale
figures of noble men who describe the woman as
merciless. When he wakes to find her gone, he read-
ily believes her absence confirms the damning
things the figures said about her. The poem does
not have the knight looking for his lady or trying
to find out why she has left; he is as certain she
had no intention of staying with him just as surely
as he knows he loves her. There is no hope they
will be reunited, and therefore there is no hope that
he can ever be happy again. His life is doomed to
despair.
Style
“La Belle Dame sans Merci” is a ballad, an old
form of verse adapted for singing or recitation. The
ballad form originated in the days when most po-
etry was memorized rather than written, and the
typical subject matter of the ballad reflects a folk
sensibility. Ballads are usually narrative, or story-
telling, poems, and early ballads often addressed
themes important to common people: love,
2 2
courage, the mysterious, and the supernatural.
Though the ballad is generally rich in musical qual-
ities such as rhythm and repetition, it often portrays
both characters and events in highly dramatic but
simplistic terms.
Additional characteristics of the typical ballad
include a set rhyme scheme and alternating line
lengths. Formally, the ballad stanza is a quatrain,
or a group of four lines, in which the first and third
lines contain four stressed syllables while the sec-
ond and fourth lines contain three stressed sylla-
bles. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” consists of
twelve such stanzas, with a slight variation: the last
line of each stanza contains only two stressed syl-
lables, creating a dramatic suspension between
stanzas. Aside from this, the quatrains exhibit the
typical ballad stanza pattern of rhyme: the second
and fourth lines are set in perfect end rhyme with
one another, giving the poem the musical sound
most ballads feature.
Historical Context
Romanticism
John Keats is considered one of the central fig-
ures in the English romantic movement. Romanti-
cism was a philosophical and artistic ideal that
spread across Western civilization in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth century. It sprang from
the ideas of French writer Jean Jacques Rousseau
and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Rousseau, a major figure in the Enlightenment,
wrote eloquently and convincingly about theories
of social equality. At the time, most governments
were arranged in a system that divided the oppor-
tunities for social success available to commoners
from those available to people considered to be of
noble birth. Rousseau’s writings presented society
as a corruption of humanity’s natural state. His
theory that every citizen participates in society will-
ingly, as part of an implied “social contract,” cre-
ated a cult of individual freedom that celebrated the
human spirit and led to the French Revolution in
1789. The Revolution’s ten-year struggle to over-
throw the monarchy and the nobles was one of the
most direct influences on the romantic movement.
Goethe was trained as a lawyer, but he became
a celebrated poet, playwright, and novelist. In 1775
he, along with German philosopher Johann Got-
tfriend von Herder and historian Justus Möser, pub-
lished a collection of essays called Of German Art
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

Compare
&
Contrast
• 1819: America is a small, new country with only
twenty-two states. The nation battled Great
Britain for its freedom in the American Revo-
lution from 1776 to 1783, and fought them again
for maritime rights in the War of 1812, which
lasted until 1815.
Today: America is an economic superpower,
and Great Britain is one of its closest allies.
• 1819: The entire population of England is
around 21 million, leaving much open, unpop-
ulated land.
Today: The population of England is around 46
million. With about 917 people per square mile,
it is one of the most densely populated countries
in the world.
• 1819: England has the world’s greatest navy,
and Style. Their theories about art’s relation to tra-
ditional folktales and about the place of love and
longing in art later evolved into romanticism.
Many literary critics consider the formal start
of romanticism to be the 1800 publication of Lyri-
cal Ballads, a collection of poems by William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the
preface to that book, the two poets spelled out the
principles of romantic thought. They emphasized
the importance of feelings and emotion over intel-
lectualism in poetry, and urged writers to cast away
traditional forms and follow their inspirations.
Their call for writers to focus on the natural and
spiritual aspects of the world were mirrored
throughout all the arts at the turn of the century, in-
cluding painting, music, and architecture. They
were strongly influential with the next generation
of British poets.
The names most commonly associated with ro-
manticism in literature are Keats, Lord Byron, and
Percy Bysshe Shelley. The three were friends and
associates. Their poetry combined elements of the
various romantic strains that had come before them:
the thirst for social justice of Rousseau, the mysti-
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L a B e l l e D a m e s a n s M e r c i
making it one of the most powerful countries in
the world.
Today: The Royal Navy is thirteenth largest
fleet in the world and second largest in Europe
(after Greece).
• 1819: Ordinary people rely on poetry to convey
physical experiences.
Today: Technological advances in photogra-
phy, sound recording, and computer-generated
virtual reality make it possible to give people
experiences without using words.
• 1819: Vast areas of the globe, such as the two
poles, have not yet been explored.
Today: Any areas not currently populated are
monitored from the ground and from space.
cism of Goethe, and the emphasis on nature of
Wordsworth and Coleridge. In addition, Keats, By-
ron, and Shelley lived lives of freedom dedicated
to the pursuit of love and adventure, a lifestyle of-
ten associated with romantic poets in general.
Chivalry
The fact that the character in “La Belle Dame
sans Merci” is a knight is no coincidence. One of
the key elements of romantic poetry is an interest
in the folk traditions of one’s home country. The
chivalric tradition, concerned with knights and their
relationships to the women they loved, had been
familiar in European poetry for centuries. Chivalry
was a code of ethics for knights that developed in
the south of France in the twelfth century. It re-
quired knights to commit themselves to living by
the virtues of loyalty, chastity, honor, and valor. It
bound the knight to be loyal to God and to follow
Christian ideals; to be loyal to the feudal lord un-
der whom he served; and to be loyal to one mis-
tress to whom he promised his love.
For knights of this tradition, love was consid-
ered more of an abstract ideal than something that
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could be experienced in this world. Women were
to be loved from afar and to be considered unat-
tainable. Knights chose women who were married,
or who were of a higher social rank, who could be
worshipped for their beauty and integrity but could
not become involved in any sort of physical rela-
tionship without diminishing their appeal. A knight
sworn to a lady would be bound to suffer in her
name, to work hard at making himself worthy of
her affection. This aspect of the chivalric ideal
served to make knights good servants and citizens,
directing their energies away from desire and to-
ward a higher good.
In practice, the idea of chivalry was short-
lived, falling to abuse and corruption. It was an idea
more often talked about than acted upon by knights.
It carried on in literature, however, in the songs of
troubadours, who traveled from town to town
singing poems for a living. In England, chivalry be-
came crystallized in the legends of King Arthur and
his Knights of the Round Table during the four-
teenth century. The suffering of the knight in this
poem, his all-consuming desire for the nymph, and
his relationship with her all refer back to the Eng-
lish chivalric tradition.
Critical Overview
“La Belle Dame sans Merci” is one of Keats’s most
beloved poems and one of the few important works
that seems to evade the kind of critical argumenta-
tion invoked by the odes and long poems. Typical
of critics’ magnanimity toward the ballad is T. Hall
Caine’s 1882 assessment of the poem as the “loveli-
est [Keats] gave us.” He writes that the ballad is
“wholly simple and direct, and informed through-
out by a reposeful strength. In all the qualities that
rule and shape poetry into unity of form, this little
work strides, perhaps, leagues in advance of
‘Endymion,’” one of Keats’s most noted poems.
Caine further argues that the ballad’s strength
comes from the poet’s ability to “(move) through
an atmosphere peculiar to poetry, lacing and inter-
lacing . . . combinations of thought and measure,
(and) incorporating . . . meaning with . . . music.”
In a 1913 essay, Mary de Reyes notes Keats’s fas-
cination with the doomed nature of love in “La
Belle Dame sans Merci.” She compares the poem
with the work of another principle romantic poetin
both tone and technique: “In the magical touch of
this picture of desolation and gloom, there is much
of the spirit of Coleridge. There is no full descrip-
2 4
tion. The poem is lyrical rather than narrative.” De
Reyes points out that the spare description of the
landscape “gives the very spirit of the old romance
world. And in the intense lyrical feeling we have
the climax of passion.”
Criticism
David Kelly
Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and
literature at Oakton Community College. In this es-
say, Kelly examines the many ways in which Keats
explores subjective reality in the poem.
One of the most notable things about John
Keats’s ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is the
sly way it presents one of the key issues of romantic
philosophy, that of objective versus subjective re-
ality. The quick, simple understanding—the ency-
clopedia version—is that romantic poets favor
subjectivism, particularly those who, like Keats,
wrote at the height of the romantic period and
helped define the movement, but also those aligned
with romanticism to this day. Their world view is
generally characterized as a writer focusing on his
or her own experience, with no regard for the va-
riety of perspectives that can occur when other
points of view are considered.
The central figure in “La Belle Dame sans
Merci” is a medieval knight-at-arms who has suf-
fered one of the worst relationship scenarios imag-
inable. As he explains it, he met a woman and they
fell in love, leading to a brief, passionate romance.
After he fell asleep, the unreality of the situation
assaulted him in two ways. First, he was visited in
his dream by figures who warned him the lady was
insincere in her love, and then their warning proved
true when he woke up and found her gone.
All of these events, the disappearing lover and
the warning he received about her, could just be in
the knight’s mind. Keats, however, establishes a
level of objective reality in the poem by opening it
with a second character who meets the knight in
the woods and talks with him. It is the interplay be-
tween reality and fantasy, and the poem’s refusal
to clearly define what is and is not real, that makes
this one of Keats’s most compelling works.
Another poet might have used the uncertain
existence of the phantom maiden herself as a test
case for reality. There is, after all, no proof she ever
existed anywhere but in the knight’s imagination,
while at the same time there is much evidence that
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

she did not. To begin, she appears to the knight in
the wilderness, where no one else could experience
her. He describes her as a “faery’s child,” giving
her, at the very least, mythical antecedents. The ro-
mance that transpires between them is too perfect
too quickly to be thought of as the type of rela-
tionship that might develop in the “real” world. But,
this poem does not really make much of the unreal
aspects surrounding the woman and her sudden ap-
pearance and disappearance; they are taken as a
given, as the natural course of the mysterious ways
of love. It is a fairly standard conceit in romanti-
cism to identify love as a part of the internal self,
as more a matter of one person’s mind than as a
meeting of two. In terms of human relationships,
this poem makes no effort to focus on more than
one person’s perspective, and so the mysterious na-
ture of the faery child is not very telling. She might
be a figment of the main character’s imagination,
or she might just be the catalyst that inspires it, but
the reader can presume from the tone and from
Keats’s other works that this is always the case
when one is in love.
The basic story of the poem could easily have
been conveyed by the knight narrating his experi-
ence directly to the reading audience, if all that
Keats were trying to do was to capture the dizzy
high and unexpected plummet that can happen
when one is in love. Instead, he adds another char-
acter, one whose worldly existence is never ques-
tioned. This second character defines the reality
that surrounds the knight, giving readers another
philosophical level against which to compare the
love relationship.
Readers are not given any details about who is
speaking in the first three stanzas of “La Belle
Dame sans Merci,” and so this speaker can hardly
be thought of as a character in the poem. While un-
developed, this stranger adds several vital elements
to the poem. First, having another person in the real
world offers the poet an opportunity to give read-
ers a visual description of the knight. This is im-
portant because it gives details about the knight’s
state of mind that would not otherwise come out.
The knight’s attitude is more optimistic, or at least
defiant, than his looks reveal: he himself is not
aware of the toll that his ordeal has taken on him.
In another type of poem, it might be possible for
the knight to tell readers what he looks like with-
out even being aware of how worn out he is. There
are ways for a writer to have a character think about
his own appearance, by seeing his reflection or by
feeling his face with his hands. But in this case,
having the knight take time from his broken-
V o l u m e 1 7
L a B e l l e D a m e s a n s M e r c i
The poem’s
presumption of a jump from
the emotional to the
physical world shows that,
for Keats, the boundaries
between the two were not
as fixed as readers think of
them today.”
hearted misery to think about his own looks would
have toned down the intensity of his love. His role
in the story is to concentrate on his lover, not him-
self. While it is important for the poem to show
what the knight looks like, that description has to
come from someone who is not as deeply immersed
in the situation as the knight is; therefore, the
stranger is necessary.
The stranger’s objectivity is also important for
letting readers know just how odd the knight’s be-
havior is. As is always the case in issues of sub-
jectivity and objectivity, there is no way of
knowing, from just one point of view, if the events
are mundane, shocking, or just as they should be.
If the knight’s perspective were the only one given
in the poem, readers could come away from it
thinking that the quick romance was sad, unfortu-
nate, but in some respect normal. Keats starts the
poem with someone expressing shock at the
knight’s pale complexion and at the fact that he is
loitering around the empty forest. The knight can
express the agony of love, but he by himself could
not put this agony into a social context without the
presence of another person.
In addition to the knight’s subjective view of
his situation and the objective perspective the
stranger gives to the same situation, the poem also
provides several other elements to blur the line be-
tween internal and external reality. One seldom
noted element is that the poem takes for granted
a relationship between mental and physical well-
being. The knight suffers in romance, and as a re-
sult, he is dying. His emotional turmoil leaves him
pale and sweating, the color draining from his face.
The images of dying nature that surround him can
be accounted for easily enough if one believes that,
2 5
 L a B e l l e D a m e s a n s M e r c i
in his misery, he would choose to pass his time in a
miserable setting. Even though psychologists believe
that mental states affect one’s health, the relation-
ship between the two is not generally considered as
direct as Keats presents it. According to biographer
Aileen Ward, Keats and his contemporaries believed
“that emotional agitation, especially that of an un-
happy love, could bring on consumption,” or tuber-
culosis, which was the disease Keats had, and the
one from which the knight seems to be suffering.
The poem’s presumption of a jump from the emo-
tional to the physical world shows that, for Keats,
the boundaries between the two were not as fixed as
readers think of them today.
One final way that Keats blurs the line between
subjectivity and objectivity is the appearance, in
stanza 10, of the pale images who speak the poem’s
title to the knight. There can scarcely be any ques-
tion about whether they exist in the outside world
or only in the knight’s mind: they appear in a dream,
they appear in a crowd (the way kings, princes, and
warriors never do), and they are even in the faded
colors of a dream. There is no sign of them in the
woods, only in the knight’s mind. Keats complicates
the question of existence by having them interact
with the outside world in a way that goes past the
range of the knight’s subconsciousness.
To understand the significance of the ghostly
figures, one must assume that the faery-child was
in fact real and not just a figure of the knight’s
imagination. This is a more substantial interpreta-
tion than assuming that one fantasy is warning the
knight against another fantasy. If the knight had in
fact met a girl in the woods and shared a quick ro-
mance with her, then the figures in his dream could
just be interpreted as his subconscious warning
him, presumably because it had picked up some
negative sign from her that his conscious mind had
not noticed. That would only explain the fact that
she would eventually be bad for him. In the poem,
though, they are warning him she will abandon him
at the same time she is abandoning him in real life.
Dreams sometimes are thought to have the ability
to predict reality, but granting them the ability to
know what is going on in the outside world while
the dreamer is dreaming raises a whole new ques-
tion about where the mental world leaves off and
the physical world begins.
Romantic poets are famous for describing the
world as a subjective experience, one in which the
important things happen in the human heart. There
is certainly plenty of that in “La Belle Dame sans
Merci,” with the knight-in-arms either creating a
2 6
fantasy love affair or not, creating his own tuber-
culosis within his mind, and then warning himself
about the dangers of going beyond his own mind
by entering into a relationship with another person.
There is also a strong representation of the objec-
tive world, in the unnamed stranger who encoun-
ters the knight in the woods. The poem provides
no clear-cut answers about how the world of emo-
tion affects or is affected by the physical world, but
it does raise substantive questions that cannot be
easily ignored.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “La Belle Dame sans
Merci,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Wolf Z. Hirst
In the following except, Hirst illustrates how
Keats intertwines the diverse elements of “La Belle
Dame sans Merci.”
With an inimitable magic Keats depicts an-
other cheated soul in “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
Flight into visionary experience and back again is
expressed by means of the well-known motif (to be
used once more in Lamia) of a mortal’s ruinous
love for a supernatural lady: a knight encounters
and falls in love with a beautiful “fairy’s child”,
dreams in her “elfin grot” of “pale kings, and
princes” and “Pale warriors”, and wastes away “On
the cold hill’s side.” The poet may have dashed off
this masterpiece of the literary-ballad genre straight
into the journal-letter on 21 April 1819, which
gives us the version usually preferred to the one
printed in Hunt’s Indicator in May 1820. (The lat-
ter, among other things, substituted “wretched
wight” for the “knight at arms” of the first line, and
in stanza eight omitted “kisses four,” the expres-
sion Keats singled out for the banter quoted in
chapter 2.) Whether Keats was most inspired by
Spenser, the popular ballad “Thomas Rhymer,”
Dante, vampire literature, Celtic lore, Wordsworth
and Coleridge, his own earlier poems, a painting
by William Hilton, or his relationship with Fanny
Brawne is less important than the skill with which
he conjures the most diverse elements into a uni-
fied impression of spellbinding mystery.
The poem comprises three concentric dream
circles. The outer frame (dream 1) consists of a
weird encounter between the poem’s first speaker
and a haggard knight on whose cheek the rose is
fading, while the knight’s ride through the mead
and the kisses in the grotto form an inner frame
(dream 2) to the dream about the pale kings with
the starved lips (dream 3). The aura of a transcen-
dental experience which pervades the meeting with
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

the fairy lady (dream 2) is undermined by the
knight’s dream of the death-pale kings and warriors
(dream 3) with its suggestion of mortality and be-
trayal. This dream within the knight’s dream in the
dream poem—this third dream of the starved lips
and horrid warning—comes true when the knight
awakes on the cold hillside pale and enthralled as
the dream prophesied. The realization of this dream
of deathly pallor and starvation has moved in the
opposite direction from Endymion’s and Made-
line’s dreams, where fulfillment signified a shift
from the actual to some ecstatic transcendental
realm. Within the overall dream frame of the first
speaker’s words to the fantastic knight-at-arms and
the latter’s reply, the transition from the dream
within a dream in the supermortal elfin world to
the world of the withering sedge (from dream 3 to
dream 1) has a touch of harsh reality. On the other
hand the entry into, journey through, and sojourn
in the elfin world itself remains pure dream
throughout (dream 2). This dream comprises the
poem’s six central stanzas from the knight’s en-
counter with the fairy’s child till she lulls him to
sleep; and the encroaching domination of the fairy
world is reflected in the transfer of the initiative
from the knight’s “I” in stanzas four to six to the
lady’s “she” in stanzas seven to nine. The lady’s
ambiguity (does “as she did love” in stanza five
mean that her love is true or sham? is she a flirta-
tious seductress or a caressing mother-figure?) and
eccentricity (her sidelong bending, unusual food,
strange language, and sore sighing), though ex-
plicable in a supernatural and perhaps even a nat-
ural context, yet create an atmosphere of dreamlike
vagueness. The knight has evidently never entered
a grotto and never left “the cold hill’s side,” for
here, we are told, he dreams “The latest dream”, so
that instead of awaking in the grot he finds himself
in the setting of the outer frame.
In the final stanza the knight tries to explain
his sorry condition to the questioner. A folk ballad
such as “Lord Randall,” structured on question and
reply, solves its mystery in the last stanza. In “La
Belle Dame,” however, the explanation (“And this
is why …”) raises more questions than it answers.
The knight explains his haggard appearance and
why he does not go home in the inclement season:
he is “in thrall.” But this explanation merely con-
fuses the questioner, who sees that the knight is un-
der a spell and wonders what the nature of this spell
is. It is unclear whether the knight himself knows
exactly how, why, and what things have happened
to him. The dream in the grotto (dream 3), which
is supposed to provide the key to the riddle, tells
V o l u m e 1 7
L a B e l l e D a m e s a n s M e r c i
It is unclear whether
the knight himself knows
exactly how, why, and
what things have happened
to him.”
the questioner at the most what the knight himself
has learned but what the reader has known all along
from the title: the knight is entranced by a cruel
lady. By only pretending to provide a solution to
the enigma, this ballad calls attention to the inde-
terminacy and frequent mystery of its genre just as
“St. Agnes” showed how the author of romance
manipulates his reader. But whereas in “St. Agnes”
the last stanza cast us abruptly back from romance
to reality, the last six lines of “La Belle Dame,”
though apparently returning us to a realistic level,
leave us in fact still within the dream world of the
outer frame, which makes rational explanation of
what has happened impossible and superfluous.
The solution that does not solve anything merely
confirms our initial impression that we have here
the presentation of something felt on the pulses, of
a beauty seized as a truth by the imagination and
expressed in a language of sensation inaccessible
to consecutive reasoning.
The poem pushes negative capability to a new
extreme. Since we have to guess even at what has
happened, it is not surprising that readers fail to
agree upon what the lady, the knight, his journey,
and his dream might symbolize. In this “most mys-
terious and evasive of all Keats’s poems,” we can-
not know whether the fairy’s child is a Cynthia who
has failed to “make / Men’s being mortal, immor-
tal” (Endymion, I.843–44), a vampire, a Circe, “a
fairy mistress from hell,” or “neutral as to good and
evil.” If we conjecture that she stands for the po-
etic imagination, we still do not know whether the
knight’s lapse from vision is due to her refusal to
keep up the deception or to the knight’s own fail-
ure to sustain the transcendental experience; and in
the latter case, whether this failure is, as Wasser-
man suggests, the inevitable concomitant of his
mortal condition or the result of some particular de-
ficiency on his part—for instance, as Richard Ben-
venuto argues, his fear of facing death. The lady
may stand for any of the four intensities that attract
2 7
 L a B e l l e D a m e s a n s M e r c i
What
Do I Read
Next?
• All of Keats’s poetry is available in one volume
entitled The Complete Poems. This book is
edited by John Barnard and was published in
1977 by Penguin. The Modern Library also has
a volume entitled The Complete Poems of John
Keats, published in 1994, but it uses a revised
version of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” that al-
most no other publisher uses.
• Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe was published
the same year as “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” It
is a tale of knights and sorcery set in the Middle
Ages and began a trend in historical fiction that
has come to characterize the romantic movement.
• Since Keats presents his knight as turning pale
and drawn, literally dying of lovesickness, stu-
dents might want to read Susan Sontag’s
groundbreaking 1978 essay “Illness as Meta-
phor.” It was republished in 2001 by Picador
USA in one volume with the sequel essay,
“AIDS and Its Metaphors.”
• Keats’s own death at the young age of twenty-
six is the subject of John Evangelist Walsh’s 1999
book Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death
of John Keats, published by St. Martin’s Press.
• Andrew Motion’s acclaimed biography Keats
provides one of the most thorough portraits of the
poet available. It is available in a 1999 paperback
edition from the University of Chicago Press.
• Keats’s name is almost always mentioned along
with that of his friend and fellow romantic poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley. The most dependable, au-
thoritative text of Shelley’s poetry available is
the 1977 edition entitled Shelley’s Poetry and
Prose, selected and edited by Donald H. Reiman
and Sharon B. Powers and published by W. W.
Norton & Company.
Keats in “Why did I laugh tonight?”: verse, fame,
beauty, and death. She may represent the fatality
of beauty or of what in “Ode on Indolence” the poet
sees as “a fair maid, and Love her name”, no less
2 8
than the allurements of what in the ode he calls “my
demon Poesy”, especially since the perils of love
have repeatedly appeared in Keats’s poetry, notably
in “Isabella” and in the Romeo and Juliet motif of
“St. Agnes.” But Murry’s assertion that behind the
poem lies “the anguish of an impossible love” (of
Fanny Brawne) is only one more conjecture and his
assumption that the joking comment on the four
kisses in the letter “is the detachment of a man who
has uttered his heart and must turn away from what
he has said” can be proved no more than Jane Rabb
Cohen’s contrary (and more extravagant) sugges-
tion that the comment indicates the humorous mood
in which the ballad itself was written. The suppo-
sition that the knight’s journey symbolizes the
tragedy of Faustian rejection of human limitations
is appealing, because the “starv’d lips” echo a pas-
sage in Endymion: “There never liv’d a mortal man,
who bent / His appetite beyond his natural sphere,
/ But starv’d and died”.
We only know for certain, however, that the
knight is a victim of his supernatural adventure and
no longer finds his bearings in the natural world of
birdsong, harvest, and decay. While he was jour-
neying through the fairy kingdom, birds sang and
the squirrel filled the granary; now the harvest is
over and the knight is left unprovided for. (In the
first two quatrains the truncated stanzaic close
echoes the finality of this loss.) Those who boldly
confront this world of growth and decline (as Keats
does in “To Autumn”) not only see the withered
sedge but also experience the joys and fulfillment
of harvest-time. In his vain attempt to die into the
life of fairyland the knight separates himself from
the natural order and thus becomes a double loser:
cheated of both the wonders of elfin land and of
nature, he suffers a kind of death-in-life. The Ro-
mantic journey into vision vindicated in Endymion
and still depicted as a worthwhile risk in “St.
Agnes” here proves disastrous.
Source: Wolf Z. Hirst, “Dying into Life: The First Hyper-
ion and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’,” in John Keats, Twayne,
1981, pp. 92–118.
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s
 L a B e l l e D a m e s a n s M e r c i

poem. Bostetter shows how Keats’s mistress, Fanny

Sources
Caine, T. Hall, “That Keats Was Maturing,” in Tinsley’s
Magazine, Vol. XXI, August 1882, pp. 197–200.
de Reyes, Mary, “John Keats,” in Poetry Review, Vol. III,
No. 2, August 1913, pp. 72–82.
Ward, Aileen, John Keats: The Making of a Poet, The
Viking Press, 1963, p. 273.
Further Reading
Bostetter, Edward E., Romantic Ventriloquists: Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, University of Washington
Press, 1975.
The method used here is primarily biographical with
relationships drawn between the poet’s life and the
Brawne, fit the love pattern he describes in this poem.
Evert, Walter H., Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats,
Princeton University Press, 1965.
Evert analyzes the attempts of critics to determine the
“source,” or inspiration, of this poem. Examining dif-
ferent theories, he finds substantial evidence that the
theme of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” was drawn
from a sub-theme in his earlier work, Endymion.
Grant, John E., “Discovering ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’”
in Approaches to Teaching Keats’s Poetry, edited by Wal-
ter H. Evert and Jack W. Rhodes, Modern Language Asso-
ciation of America, 1991, pp. 45–50.
This brief analysis was written primarily to help in-
structors make the poem more understandable for stu-
dents.
Harding, Anthony John, The Reception of Myth in English
Romanticism, University of Missouri Press, 1995.
Harding examines the myths and folk stories that ro-
mantic writers worked into their poetry, tracing
source materials and noting the ways in which tradi-
tional stories were altered to fit the mood of the times.
Hirst, Wolf Z., John Keats, Twayne’s English Authors Se-
ries, No. 334, Twayne Publishers, 1981.
Hirst’s analysis of the poem visualizes it in “three
concentric dream circles,” examining it in terms of
the interrelationships among the encounter between
two men, the encounter between two lovers, and the
knight’s encounter with the pale dream figures.

3 6 P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s
 The Waste Land
Because of his wide-ranging contributions to poetry,
T. S. Eliot criticism, prose, and drama, some critics consider
Thomas Sterns Eliot one of the most influential
1922 writers of the twentieth century. The Waste Land
can arguably be cited as his most influential work.
When Eliot published this complex poem in
1922—first in his own literary magazine Criterion,
then a month later in wider circulation in the Dial—
it set off a critical firestorm in the literary world.
The work is commonly regarded as one of the sem-
inal works of modernist literature. Indeed, when
many critics saw the poem for the first time, it
seemed too modern. In the place of a traditional
work, with unified themes and a coherent structure,
Eliot produced a poem that seemed to incorporate
many unrelated, little-known references to history,
religion, mythology, and other disciplines. He even
wrote parts of the poem in foreign languages, such
as Hindu. In fact the poem was so complex that
Eliot felt the need to include extensive notes iden-
tifying the sources to which he was alluding, a
highly unusual move for a poet, and a move that
caused some critics to assert that Eliot was trying
to be deliberately obscure or was playing a joke on
them.
Yet, while the poem is obscure, critics have
identified several sources that inspired its creation
and which have helped determine its meaning.
Many see the poem as a reflection of Eliot’s disil-
lusionment with the moral decay of post–World
War I Europe. In the work, this sense of disillu-
sionment manifests itself symbolically through a

2 4 6
 T h e W a s t e L a n d

type of Holy Grail legend. Eliot cited two books

from which he drew to create the poem’s symbol-
ism: Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance
(1920) and Sir James G. Frazer’s The Golden
Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890). The
1922 version of The Waste Land was also signifi-
cantly influenced by Eliot’s first wife Vivien and
by his friend Ezra Pound, who helped Eliot edit the
original 800-line draft down to the published 433
lines. While The Waste Land is widely available
today, perhaps one of the most valuable editions
for students is the Norton Critical Edition, which
was published by W. W. Norton in 2000. In addi-
tion to the poem, this edition also includes anno-
tated notes from editors and from Eliot, a
publication history, a chronology, a selected bibli-
ography, and a collection of reprinted reviews from
the 1920s to the end of the twentieth century.
An attempt to examine, line by line, the spe-
cific meaning of every reference and allusion in
The Waste Land would certainly go beyond the in-
tended scope of this entry. Instead, it is more help-
ful to examine the overall meaning of each of the T. S. Eliot
five sections of the poem, highlighting some of the
specific references as examples. But first a discus-
sion of the poem’s title The Waste Land is neces-
sary. The title refers to a myth from From Ritual Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy,
to Romance, in which Weston describes a kingdom and he finished his master’s degree in philosophy
where the genitals of the king, known as the Fisher a year later. Over the next six years, he pursued
King, have been wounded in some way. This in- further graduate studies in philosophy at a number
jury, which affects the king’s fertility, also mythi- of institutions in the United States and Europe, in-
cally affects the kingdom itself. With its vital, cluding Harvard, the Paris Sorbonne, Marburg in
regenerative power gone, the kingdom has dried up Germany, and Merton College, Oxford, ultimately
and turned into a waste land. In order for the land completing his dissertation in 1916.
to be restored, a hero must complete several tasks, During the period of his studies, he met two
or trials. Weston notes that this ancient myth was people who would prove to be influential to his writ-
the basis for various other quest stories from many ing. The first was fellow poet Ezra Pound, who be-
cultures, including the Christian quest for the Holy came Eliot’s friend, mentor, and editor. The second
Grail. Eliot says he drew heavily on this myth for was Vivien Haigh-Wood, whom he met and mar-
his poem, and critics have noted that many of the ried in 1915 while studying in England. He and
poem’s references refer to this idea. Vivien settled in London the same year, but they
experienced a troubled relationship from the start,
due in a large part to Vivien’s neurotic illnesses.
The dark tone of Eliot’s poetry during the 1910s
Author Biography and 1920s is often attributed to his marriage. In 1915
Eliot started teaching at a London boys’ schools,
Eliot was born September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, High Wycombe Grammar School, and continued
Missouri. He was a bright and hardworking stu- his teaching the next year at Highgate Junior School,
dent, who experienced a classical, wide-ranging ed- also in London. In 1917 Eliot left teaching to work
ucation. Eliot studied philosophy and French in the Colonial and Foreign Department at Lloyds
literature at Harvard. He also joined the staff of the Bank in London, a position he held until 1925. At
university’s literary journal, the Harvard Advocate, the same time he became assistant editor of the Ego-
in which he first published parts of “The Love Song ist (1917–1919), in which he published Prufrock,
of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In 1909 he graduated from and Other Observations (1917).

V o l u m e 2 0 2 4 7
 T h e W a s t e L a n d
In 1921 the combined strain of his marriage,
his bank job, and his writing and editing pursuits
led Eliot to have a nervous breakdown. He recov-
ered at a sanitorium in Switzerland, where in 1922
he completed his poem The Waste Land. Upon his
return to London the same year, Eliot became the
founding editor of the literary journal Criterion, at
which he remained editor until 1939. At the sug-
gestion of Pound, who also helped him in the en-
deavor, Eliot edited The Waste Land from about
800 lines to 433 before publishing it in late 1922,
first in Criterion, then a month later in another lit-
erary journal, the Dial. The poem, which is largely
credited with helping to launch the modern litera-
ture movement, shifted Eliot from a poet who was
only moderately in the public consciousness to a
poet who was alternately praised and vilified.
In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds to work as a literary
editor at the publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer
(later Faber & Faber). In 1927 he became a natural-
ized British subject and a member of the Anglican
Church, at which point, his work began to change
thematically, addressing more religious issues.
During the 1932 to 1933 academic year, Eliot was
invited to Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Pro-
fessor of Poetry. This physical separation from his
wife, who stayed behind in London, ultimately led
to their divorce.
During the 1930s Eliot began devoting much
of his writing time to lectures and literary criticism,
publishing such landmark works as The Use of Po-
etry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Rela-
tion of Criticism to Poetry in England (1933) and
After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy
(1934). Just as The Waste Land and Eliot’s other
works in that era helped to usher in the modernist
period of literature, his critical work in the 1930s
and 1940s is commonly acknowledged as a major
catalyst for the rise of the New Criticism move-
ment in England and the United States.
Also in the 1930s, Eliot wrote several plays.
One of his first plays, The Rock: A Pageant Play
(1934), was commissioned by the church and was
overtly religious in its themes. His next play, Mur-
der in the Cathedral (1935), was also commis-
sioned by the church, and it is widely considered
Eliot’s most successful play.
Eliot wrote his last four major poetic works in
the 1940s: East Coker (1940), Burnt Norton (1941),
The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding
(1942). Collectively these works were published
as The Four Quartets (1943). In 1947 Eliot’s life
underwent another profound change, when his
2 4 8
ex-wife died after having spent several years in an
institution. Eliot met Valerie Fletcher, who became
his secretary and eventually, in 1957, his wife. Un-
like his previous marriage, Eliot was notably happy
in this relationship.
In 1948 Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in
literature and the English Order of Merit. These and
many other awards, along with Eliot’s general pop-
ularity as a dramatist, made the author a noted lit-
erary and public figure until his death and beyond.
Eliot died January 4, 1965, in London, England, of
emphysema and related complications.
Poem Text
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the
Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the
colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt
deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the
archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15
Marie, hold on tight. And down he went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the
winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no
relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock, 25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from
either
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. 30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der-Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me Hyacinths first a year ago; 35
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s
 T h e W a s t e L a n d

“They called me the hyacinth girl.” In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

—Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth
garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured 95
40 stone,
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
45
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 100

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
50 Were told upon the walls; staring forms 105

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Wheel, Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Which is blank, is something he carries on his Spread out in fiery points
back, Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. 110
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. 55
with me.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, What are you thinking of? What thinking?
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: What?
One must be so careful these days. I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
60
Unreal City, I think we are in rats’ alley
115
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, Where the dead men lost their bones.
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many. “What is that noise?”
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, The wind under the door.
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. 65 “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, Nothing again nothing. 120
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours “Do
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: remember
“Stetson! “Nothing?”
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! 70
I remember
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Those are pearls that were his eyes. 125
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
head?”
“O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! 75 But
“You! Hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
frère!” It’s so elegant
So intelligent 130
II. A GAME OF CHESS
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
With my hair down, so. What shall we do
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
tomorrow?
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out 80
What shall we ever do?”
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
The hot water at ten. 135
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
Reflecting light upon the table as
And we shall play a game of chess,
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon
From satin cases poured in rich profusion. 85
the door.
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—
perfumes, I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself, 140
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit
That freshened from the window, these ascended 90 smart.

V o l u m e 2 0 2 4 9
 T h e W a s t e L a n d
He’ll want to know what you done with that
money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor
Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good
time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I
said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me
a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of
telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so
antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring if off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young
George).
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve
never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I
said,
What you get married for if you don’t want
children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot
gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty
of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May.
Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good
night, good night.
III. THE FIRE SERMON
The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are
departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs
are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City
directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or
long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
2 5 0
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from
ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
145
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse 190
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year. 195
150
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter 200
155
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d. 205
Tereu
160
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants 210
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
215
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
165 Turn upward from the desk, when the human
engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two
lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives 220
170
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast,
lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last 225
rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
175 Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest. 230
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
180 As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses, 235
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence; 240
185 His vanity requires no response,
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s
 T h e W a s t e L a n d

And makes a welcome of indifference. Nothing with nothing.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
Enacted on this same divan or bed; My people humble people who expect
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall 245 Nothing.” 305
And walked among the lowest of the dead.) la la
Bestows one final patronising kiss, To Carthage then I came
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
Burning burning burning burning
She turns and looks a moment in the glass, O Lord Thou pluckest me out
Hardly aware of her departed lover; 250 O Lord Thou pluckest 310
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: burning
”Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
IV. DEATH BY WATER
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Paces about her room again, alone,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
She smooths her hair with automatic hand, 255
And the profit and loss.
And puts a record on the gramophone.
A current under sea 315
”This music crept by me upon the waters” Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. He passed the stages of his age and youth
O City city, I can sometimes hear Entering the whirlpool.
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, 260 Gentile or Jew
The pleasant whining of a mandoline O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, 320
and a clatter and a chatter from within Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls as you.
Of Magnus Martyr hold V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
Inexplicable splendour of lonian white and gold. 265
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
The river sweats After the frosty silence in the gardens
Oil and tar After the agony in stony places
The barges drift The shouting and the crying 325

With the turning tide Prison and palace and reverberation

Red sails 270 Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
Wide He who was living is now dead
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar. We who were living are now dying
The barges wash With a little patience 330

Drifting logs Here is no water but only rock

Down Greenwich reach 275 Rock and no water and the sandy road
Past the Isle of Dogs. The road winding above among the mountains
Weialala leia Which are mountains of rock without water
Wallala leialala If there were only water amongst the rock 335
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Elizabeth and Leicester
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
Beating oars 280
If there were only water amongst the rock
The stern was formed
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot
A gilded shell
spit
Red and gold
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit 340
The brisk swell
There is not even silence in the mountains
Rippled both shores 285
But dry sterile thunder without rain
Southwest wind
There is not even solitude in the mountains
Carried down stream
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
The peal of bells
From doors of mudcracked houses 345
White towers
If there were water
Weialala leia 290
And no rock
Wallala leialala
If there were rock
”Trams and dusty trees. And also water
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew And water 350
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees A spring
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.” 295 A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
”My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Not the cicada
Under my feet. After the event
And dry grass singing 355
He wept. He promised ‘a new start.’
But sound of water over a rock
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
300
”On Margate Sands. Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
I can connect But there is no water
360

V o l u m e 2 0 2 5 1
 T h e W a s t e L a n d
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened
wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and
exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s
home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a crock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
2 5 2
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have 420
responded
365 Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order? 425
370 London Bridge is falling down falling down falling
down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins 430
375
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
380
Poem Summary
I. Burial of the Dead
The first section, as the section title indicates,
is about death. The section begins with the words
385
“April is the cruellest month,” which is perhaps one
of the most remarked upon and most important ref-
erences in the poem. Those familiar with Chaucer’s
poem The Canterbury Tales will recognize that
Eliot is taking Chaucer’s introductory line from the
390 prologue—which is optimistic about the month of
April and the regenerative, life-giving season of
spring—and turning it on its head. Just as
Chaucer’s line sets the tone for The Canterbury
395
Tales, Eliot’s dark words inform the reader that this
is going to be a dark poem. Throughout the rest of
the first section, as he will do with the other four
sections, Eliot shifts among several disconnected
thoughts, speeches, and images.
400 Collectively, the episodic scenes in lines 1
through 18 discuss the natural cycle of death, which
is symbolized by the passing of the seasons. The
first seven lines employ images of spring, such as
“breeding / Lilacs,” and “Dull roots with spring
405
rain.” In line 8, Eliot tells the reader “Summer sur-
prised us, coming over the Starnbergersee.” The
time has shifted from spring to summer. And while
the reference to Starnbergersee—a lake south of
410 Munich, Germany—has been linked to various as-
pects of Eliot’s past, to Eliot’s readers at the time
the poem was published, it would have stuck out
for other reasons, given that World War I had fairly
415 recently ended. During the war Germany was one
of the main opponents of the Allied forces, which
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

Media
Adaptations
• Eliot’s The Waste Land and several other works
were adapted as an unabridged audiobook in
2000, featuring narration by the author. T. S. Eliot
Reads: The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and
Other Poems is available from HarperAudio.
included both the United States and England—
Eliot’s two homes. By including German refer-
ences, which continue in the next several lines and
culminate in a German phrase, Eliot is invoking an
image of the war. Who are the dead that are being
buried in this section? All the soldiers and other ca-
sualties who died during World War I.
The German phrase leads into a conversation
from a sledding episode in the childhood of a girl
named Marie. The season has changed again, to
winter. Marie notes, “In the mountains, there you
feel free,” implying that when she is not in the
mountains, on a sledding adventure, she does not
feel free. In other words, Marie feels trapped, just
as humanity feels trapped in its own waste land. In
line 19 Eliot starts to give some visual cues about
the waste land of modern society. “What are the
roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this
stony rubbish?” the poet asks. In response, Eliot
refers to a biblical passage, addressing the reader
as “Son of man.” The poet tells the reader that
he or she “cannot say, or guess” what the roots of
this waste land are, because the reader knows only
“A heap of broken images” where “the dead tree
gives no shelter.” These and other images depict a
barren, dead land. But the poet says in line 27,
“I will show you something different.” In lines 31
to 34 Eliot reproduces a song sung by a sailor in
the beginning of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Eliot
is inviting the reader to come on a journey, a
tour of this modern waste land. The song—which
asks why somebody is postponing a journey,
when there is fresh wind blowing toward a home-
land—indicates Eliot’s desire to regenerate this
barren land. In fact his use of the word “Hyacinths,”
which are symbolic of resurrection, underscores
this idea.
V o l u m e 2 0
T h e W a s t e L a n d
In line 43 Eliot introduces the character of
Madame Sosostris, a gifted mystic with a “wicked
pack of cards,” or tarot cards. She pulls the card of
“the drowned Phoenician Sailor,” another image of
death and also a direct reference to a fertility god
who, according to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden
Bough, was drowned at the end of summer. Again
these images collectively illustrate the natural cy-
cle of death. Following the Madame Sosostris pas-
sage, Eliot, beginning in line 60, introduces the
“Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter
dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so
many.” These lines suggest a similar description of
the modern city by Baudelaire. The image of brown
fog is dismal, as is the next line, which notes “I
had not thought death had undone so many.” Eliot
here is describing a waking death. These people are
alive in the physical sense, but dead in all others.
It is a sad city, where “each man fixed his eyes be-
fore his feet.”
In line 68 Eliot notes there is “a dead sound
on the final stroke of nine,” which refers to the start
of the typical work day. In other words these peo-
ple trudge along in a sort of living death, going to
work, which has become an end in itself. Within
this procession, however, the poet sees someone he
knows, “Stetson,” who was with the poet “in the
ships at Mylae!” Mylae is a reference to an ancient
battle from the First Punic War, which by exten-
sion evokes an image of death on the civilization
scale. The poet asks his friend if the “corpse you
planted last year in your garden” has “begun to
sprout?” Here again Eliot is invoking the idea of
resurrection, and of the natural cycle of death and
life. First, when dead people decompose, their or-
ganic matter fertilizes the ground, which loops back
to the first line of the section, in which April, “the
cruellest month,” is breeding flowers, which pre-
sumably are feeding off this decomposed flesh. But
in a more specific way, this passage refers to
Frazer’s book, which details a primitive ritual
whereby in April these primitive civilizations
would plant a male corpse, or just the man’s gen-
itals, in order to ensure a bountiful harvest. This
harvest, which can be interpreted symbolically as
the rebirth of civilization, is potentially threatened
by “the Dog,” which has been interpreted as the
lack of meaning in life.
Critics interpret the dog this way largely be-
cause of the final lines of the section, a quote from
Baudelaire, which indict the reader for his or her
part in creating the waste land by sucking all mean-
ing and, thus life, out of society.
2 5 3
 T h e W a s t e L a n d
II. A Game of Chess
In the second section Eliot turns his attention
from death to sex. The title of this section refers to
a scene from Thomas Middleton’s Elizabethan play
Women Beware Women, in which the moves of a
chess game between two people are linked onstage
to the seduction played out by another pair. In the
first lines of the section, Eliot creates a lush image
of a wealthy woman, who sits in a chair “like a bur-
nished throne.” The scene also includes “standards
wrought with fruited vines,” a “sevenbranched can-
delabra,” and “jewels.” On the woman’s table are
“satin cases poured in rich profusion.” Inside these
cases are “strange synthetic perfumes,” which
“drowned the sense in odours.” In other words
aphrodisiacs (artificial substances used to create or
enhance sexual desire). Since sex is linked to pro-
creation, and thus fertility, the fact that aphrodisi-
acs are needed is telling. In this room there is also
a painting above the mantel that depicts “Philomel,”
a reference to a classical woman who was raped (in-
dicated by the words “rudely forced”) by “the bar-
barous king” Tereus. Eliot notes that “other
withered stumps of time,” or figures from history,
are depicted on the walls. Then he launches into
several disparate passages, the first of which is a
hysterical plea by the woman in the room to her
lover. “My nerves are bad to-night,” she says, and
“Stay with / me.” She also asks the man what he is
thinking, and repeats the word “think” several times
in both question and statement form, ending with a
one-word sentence, “Think.” Eliot is trying to get
his readers to think about the modern waste land,
which is clearly indicated by his multiple emphases
of the word “think” and the fact that he sets it off
on its own.
Eliot repeats this pattern in another snatch of
dialogue, in which he emphasizes the words
“noise,” “wind,” and “nothing.” He sets off “noth-
ing” in its own one-word sentence like “think,” al-
though as a question: “Nothing?” The wind and the
noise evoke an image of activity and life, but the
final “nothing” again underscores the lack of mean-
ing that Eliot is trying to convey. Following this
passage, Eliot includes a passage that talks about
remembering the “pearls that were his eyes,” which
refers back to the dead Phoenician sailor from the
first section. Finally, in the last passage that refers
to the wealthy woman and her lover, Eliot has them
talking to each other, asking what they should do.
Ultimately they decide “we shall play a game of
chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a
knock upon / the door.” While this game of chess
refers back to the sexual game from Middleton’s
2 5 4
play, the rich couple literally play a game of chess,
since their relationship is sterile.
The next passage switches relationships, from
the idle rich to the dirt poor. This scene, which con-
tinues until the end of the section, concerns “Lil”
and her husband “Albert,” who has just been “de-
mobbed,” or released from the military. The line
“HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” is a reference
to the last call at the pub, or bar, and indicates that
they must hurry if they wish to drink. The poem
talks about Albert, who has “been in the army four
years” and who “wants a good time.” In other
words he wants to have sex with his wife. He has
also given his wife money to buy “new teeth,” be-
cause he cannot stand looking at her bad teeth. And,
as Lil is warned, if she does not give Albert a good
time, “there’s others will.” The line “HURRY UP
PLEASE ITS TIME” is used again, reinforcing the
importance of alcohol in the relationship. The
woman’s appearance is described as “antique,”
even though she is only thirty-one, and she attrib-
utes this to “them pills I took, to bring it off,” a ref-
erence to abortion. As the next line notes of her
previous children, “She’s had five already,” a tes-
tament to Albert’s immense sexual appetite, which
is discussed further when Eliot says Albert will not
leave the woman alone. But Lil is asked, “What
you get married for if you don’t want children?”
This line refers back to the fertility thread in the
poem and the fact that modern sex is not always
about procreation. The section ends with several
more references to “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS
TIME,” showing that drinking has taken on more
importance in the relationship than anything else.
So, as with the first section, Eliot is showing the
loss of meaning—in this case during sex, and
through images of loveless sex—by showing that
this is true for both the rich and the poor. Just as
the king from Weston’s book is wounded sexually,
so is all of human society. It has lost the vitality
and procreative focus of sex, and instead sex is a
meaningless—and in the case of abortion, fruit-
less—act.
III. The Fire Sermon
The third section also addresses sex. The title
refers to one of Buddha’s teachings about desire
and the need to deny one’s lustful tendencies. The
images with which Eliot chooses to open this sec-
tion underscore this idea of lovelessness. For ex-
ample, “the last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink
into the wet bank.” The dying vegetation is a sign
of the death of fertility, as is the brown land and
“The nymphs” who have departed. Also the fact
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

that the river bears no litter, such as “empty bot-
tles,” “Silk handkerchiefs,” or “cigarette ends,” all
of which are a “testimony of summer nights”—in
other words, signs of a raucous party—the image
of lifelessness is enhanced. There is no youthful
passion anymore. This feeling of despair is noted
further through such phrases as “A rat crept softly
through the vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly
on the bank.” From here on, Eliot includes images
and references to sex and death, including talking
about “my father’s death” and “White bodies naked
on the low damp ground.”
After a brief, four-line stanza in which he once
again invokes the rape of Philomel, Eliot returns to
the “Unreal City,” the modern city, where he is
propositioned by a “Mr. Eugenides” to have “lun-
cheon at the Cannon Street Hotel / Followed by a
weekend at the Metropole.” These two locations,
famous for clandestine meetings, indicate that
Mr. Eugenides wants to have a homosexual affair
with the poet.
Following this interlude, Eliot introduces the
character of Tiresias, a mythological, prophetic fig-
ure who was turned into a hermaphrodite—indi-
cated by the phrases “throbbing between two /
lives” and “Old man with wrinkled female breasts.”
The fact that Tiresias is a prophet is important,
since Tiresias can see the true nature of things. In
Eliot’s notes he calls this character the most im-
portant one in the poem. Tiresias witnesses a sex
scene between a “typist home at teatime” and “A
small house agent’s clerk.” The woman prepares
food until the man arrives, and they eat. After the
meal, “she is bored and tired,” but he nevertheless
starts to “engage her in caresses.” Although these
advances are “undesired,” the woman makes no at-
tempt to stop the man, so “he assaults at once,”
oblivious to the woman’s “indifference.” After the
man leaves, “She turns and looks a moment in the
glass / Hardly aware of her departed lover,” her
only thought being, “Well now that’s done: and I’m
glad it’s over.”
At this point Eliot includes a long montage of
scenes from London interspersed with many liter-
ary references to failed relationships through the
ages. The indented passage that begins with the line
“The river sweats” invokes a Wagner poem that de-
scribes the downfall of ancient gods. The section
concludes with a quotation from St. Augustine’s
Confessions: “O Lord Thou pluckest me out / O
Lord Thou pluckest.” St. Augustine was a noted
lecher in the days before he embraced religion. This
passage is placed directly before the last line of the
V o l u m e 2 0
T h e W a s t e L a n d
section, “burning.” This one-word line refers to the
Buddhist sermon that gives the section its title, and
which encourages men to douse the fires of lust.
IV. Death by Water
The brief fourth section, the shortest of the
five, starts off with a reference to “Phlebas the
Phoenician,” the dead sailor who was first men-
tioned in the second section. Eliot is again focus-
ing on death, and in this section he gives a thorough
description of the sailor’s body being torn apart by
the sea: “A current under sea / Picked his bones in
whispers.” The section ends with an address and
warning to the reader to “Consider Phlebas, who
was once handsome and tall / as you.”
V. What the Thunder Said
The poem’s final section builds on the images
of death and sterility, but attempts to offer hope
that these can be overcome, as they are overcome
in the waste land of Weston’s book. The title of the
section is derived from an Indian fertility legend in
which all beings—men, gods, and devils—find the
power to restore life to the waste land by listening
to what the thunder says. The section begins with
a long discussion of Jesus Christ, “He who was liv-
ing is now dead,” which leads into scenes from
Christ’s journey to Emmaus following his resur-
rection, where he joins two disciples that do not
recognize him: “Who is the third who walks always
beside you?” one disciple asks the other.
Following the images of Christ, Eliot alludes to
scenes of battle, “hooded hordes swarming / Over
endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth.” The dry
earth refers back to the waste land. Eliot includes
more images of war and destruction, noting the
“Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air /
Falling towers.” The image is one of a castle being
destroyed, and Eliot follows this image with a list of
historical cities that were destroyed or that fell into
ruin and decay: “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria /
Vienna London.” By including London at the end
of this list, Eliot implies that the modern city is also
falling into decay, a moral decay. From this de-
scription Eliot moves on to discuss “the empty
chapel,” a reference to the Chapel Perilous, which
Weston’s book describes as the final stage on the
hero’s quest to restore life to the waste land. At this
point, “a damp gust” brings rain to the dry and
cracked land, and then the thunder speaks, “DA.”
According to the Indian legend, men, gods, and
devils ask the thunder the same question, and each
is given a different answer—give, sympathize, and
control, respectively. After each response, Eliot
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 T h e W a s t e L a n d
includes several lines that respond to the thunder
on these topics. Critics disagree on whether these
responses are meant to be pessimistic or optimistic,
but many feel they are Eliot’s solution to restore
life to the modern waste land.
In the last stanza of the poem, the Fisher King
from Weston’s book speaks: “I sat upon the shore /
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at
least set my lands in order?” The king wonders what
the solution is, how he can bring life back to the
waste land again. Eliot follows this passage with a
line from an English nursery rhyme: “London
Bridge is falling down falling down falling / down.”
These words take the work from the mythological
world back to Europe, which also in Eliot’s view
is a waste land that is falling down. The poem ends
with several phrases from different languages,
which give a mixed message. Some discuss rebirth,
while others discuss violence and death. The final
line consists of the same words repeated three
times, “Shantih shantih shantih,” which Eliot and
others have noted can loosely be translated as the
peace which passes understanding, and which
seems to be Eliot’s final pronouncement—only
through peace will humanity ultimately be able to
restore its vitality.
Themes
Disillusionment
There are only two master themes in the poem,
which in turn, generate many sub-themes. The first
of these major themes is disillusionment, which
Eliot indicates is the current state of affairs in mod-
ern society, especially the post–World War I
Europe in which he lived. He illustrates this per-
vasive sense of disillusionment in several ways, the
most notable of which are references to fertility rit-
uals and joyless sex. First Eliot draws on the types
of fertility legends discussed in Weston’s and
Frazer’s books. For example, in the beginning of
the first section, he uses an extended image of a
decomposing corpse lying underground in winter,
which “kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful
snow, feeding / a little life with dried tubers.” A
tuber is the fleshy part of an underground stem, but
here it is human flesh, feeding new plants. Human
society is so disillusioned that it has undergone a
moral death, an idea on which Eliot plays through-
out the poem. In fact, in the second stanza Eliot of-
fers a contrast to the first stanza, which at least
offers “a little life.” In the second stanza, however,
2 5 6
the land is all “stony rubbish,” where roots and
branches do not grow, and “the dead tree gives no
shelter,” and there is “no sound of water.”
Eliot also expresses disillusionment through
episodes of joyless sex, such as through the exam-
ple of Philomel, upon whom sex is forced. In fact
Eliot employs a litany of joyless sexual situations,
including the rich couple who would rather play
chess than have sex, and the poor couple for whom
sex becomes a way only of pleasing the husband,
and even then, only if the wife has “a nice set” of
teeth. There is no love in any of these unions, and
in the case of the poor couple, the wife has started
having abortions because she “nearly died of young
George,” one of her children. This purposeful
killing of new life is another way Eliot shows how
people are disillusioned regarding sex and how pro-
creative power in many cases is lost. But perhaps
the most prominent example of meaningless sex
comes during the scene between the typist and the
clerk. Following this joyless sexual encounter, in
which the man satisfies his lust, he leaves the
woman, who is “Hardly aware of her departed
lover.” Her indifference shows in her simple actions:
“She smooths her hair with automatic hand, / And
puts a record on the gramophone.” Her hand, like
the sex itself, is “automatic,” without emotion,
merely a routine act.
Restoration
The other major theme, restoration or rebirth,
is the opposite of disillusionment. If modern soci-
ety can somehow overcome its disillusionment, it
will be restored back to a state in which life once
again has meaning. This refers to the Fisher King
myth from Weston’s book. Yet throughout the
poem, when this idea is referred to, it is generally
handled in more subtle ways than the references
that underscore the idea of disillusionment. For
example, in the first section, “the hyacinth girl”
speaks. Hyacinths are often associated with the idea
of resurrection, which in the context of this poem
is looked at as the goal. But as soon as he intro-
duces the idea, Eliot counters it with an image of
disillusionment: “I could not / Speak, and my eyes
failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew
nothing.” The idea of restoration, in the form of
resurrection, is not explored in detail until the fi-
nal section, with the introduction of Christ. The fi-
nal section begins with talk of Christ’s betrayal and
death and of “The shouting and the crying” of
Christ’s followers at his death. With Christ’s death,
“We who were living are now dying.” Lost with-
out their savior, Christians feel morally dead. But
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

Topics for
Further
Study
• Find a painting, movie, or other visual artwork
you think could serve as a companion piece to
the poem. Explain why you think this pairing
makes sense.
• Research what life was like for soldiers during
World War I. Imagine that you are a soldier in
the trenches along the Western Front. Write a
journal entry that describes your typical day.
• Imagine that through time travel Eliot is able to
visit your town for one day and that you have
been assigned to give the poet a tour. Based on
what you know of Eliot and what you know
about your own society, write a story that de-
scribes Eliot’s reactions to modern life.
• Read another work by a different author who be-
came disillusioned by World War I. Compare
this work to Eliot’s The Waste Land.
all hope is not lost, for Christ is resurrected, and
joins his disciples on the road. Unfortunately, just
as with the blindness in the hyacinth girl passage,
Christ’s disciples do not recognize him. Ultimately,
through his use of complicated and conflicting for-
eign quotations, Eliot ends his poem on this same
noncommittal note. Restoration is possible, but so
is disillusionment.
Style
Modernism
The most important aspect of the work, and the
one that informs all others, is the literary move-
ment to which it belongs, modernism, which this
work helped define. Modernism is the broad term
used to describe post–World War I literature that
employs techniques Eliot uses in The Waste Land.
These techniques, and all the techniques associated
with modernist literature, expressed a rebellion
against traditional literature, which was noted by
V o l u m e 2 0
T h e W a s t e L a n d
its distinct forms and rules. For example, in tradi-
tional poetry, poets often sought uniformity in
stanza length and meter. Those poets who could
work within these sometimes challenging rules and
still express themselves in a unique or moving way
were considered good poets. But particularly after
World War I, as literature and other art shifted from
a traditional, romantic, or idealized, approach to an
approach that emphasized gritty realism full of dis-
continuity and despair, artists began to experiment
with nontraditional forms, ideas, and styles.
Disillusioned by the war, artists and writers
such as Eliot rebelled against the logical, traditional
thinking—which they believed helped start and es-
calate the war. Eliot’s poem, in all of its complex-
ity and obscurity, was like a catalog of modernist
poetic techniques, including free verse, odd stanza
lengths, snatches of dialogue, quotations from other
works, phrases from other languages, indistinct tran-
sitions, conflicting ideologies such as Christianity
and paganism, frank discussions and depictions of
sexuality—and the list goes on. Each of these
devices ran counter to the traditional. Collectively,
as many critics have noted, the staggering mod-
ernistic effect of this one work set off a bomb in
the public consciousness.
Historical Context
World War I
While Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922,
it was widely acknowledged as reflecting the disil-
lusionment in Europe following World War I. This
global war started from a regional tragedy. On June
28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the
Austro-Hungarian throne, made a fateful trip to
Sarajevo, capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina—
two provinces under his family’s control—where he
and his wife were assassinated. These murders re-
flected a regional tension among some residents of
the two provinces, which wished to become part of
Serbia once again. Serbia, which also wished to re-
claim Bosnia and Herzegovina, helped stage the as-
sassinations. When this fact was realized by
Austria-Hungary, the leaders of this nation state de-
clared war on Serbia on July 28, exactly one month
after the assassination. In times past this might have
been a localized battle between two countries. But
due to an extensive system of pre-existing alliances,
most other European countries were pulled into the
war, which escalated the conflict. Eventually the list
of combatants grew to include the United States and
2 5 7
 T h e W a s t e L a n d
Compare
&
Contrast
• 1920s: In the aftermath of World War I, which
introduced modern weapons and the psycholog-
ical horrors of trench warfare, some people in
the United States and Europe become shocked
and disillusioned and turn away from religion.
Today: In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks
on New York City and Washington, D.C, on
September 11, 2001—which introduced com-
mercial airliners as a new type of airborne ex-
plosive—some people turn to religion to cope
with the horror and disbelief.
• 1920s: Although major military operations in
World War I ended in 1918, the United States
and the world continue to deal with the physi-
cal, financial, and psychological costs of the
war. The U.S. Congress does not declare World
War I officially over until July 2, 1921.
Today: Although U.S. President George W.
Bush declares major military operations in Iraq
over on May 1, 2003, the United States and the
parts of Asia, all of which aligned themselves with
either the pro-Serbian “Allies” or with the “Central”
powers, who supported Austria-Hungary.
When fighting began in August 1914, each
side believed its modern weapon technologies such
as hand grenades, tanks, long-range artillery, and
poison gas would lead to a quick and efficient war,
with minimal casualties. The reverse was true, and
the war raged on for four years along two main
lines, or fronts, of fighting. The Western Front,
which ran through France, experienced some of the
bloodiest battles in the war. The front was defined
by an extensive trench that ran along its entire
length, on both sides. Allied and Central soldiers
occupied their respective trenches—which were of-
ten close to each other—and with a series of bat-
tles, each side attempted to drive their opponent out
of his trench and force the line back with a flurry
of grenades and machine-gun fire. The results were
horrific. For years the battles in the trenches held
at a virtual stalemate, and the body count rose as
2 5 8
world deal with the physical, financial, and psy-
chological costs of ongoing battles against ter-
rorists and other insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and other areas of the Middle East.
• 1920s: Women embracing personal liberation,
known as “flappers” in Britain and the United
States, engage in many previously scorned ac-
tivities, such as drinking and smoking in public,
wearing provocative clothing, participating in
wild dancing, and having promiscuous sex. So-
cial critics become concerned about the effect
on the family of this behavior along with the
general relaxing of social morals.
Today: Critics become concerned about the so-
cial and psychological effects of the rise in teenage
sex activity. In addition, incidents of school homi-
cide, such as the massacre at Columbine High
School, spark a national debate about the safety
of America’s children, as well as what parents’
roles should be in dealing with these issues.
each side added reinforcements to maintain the
trenches.
The Lost Generation
By the time the war officially ended in 1918,
an estimated eight million people were dead and
countless more wounded. For the generation of men
and women who came of age during or shortly af-
ter the war, life seemed bleak, and many of these
young men and women became disillusioned or
hopeless about their own futures and the sanctity
of humanity. While this entire group was coined
the Lost Generation, most critics today associate
this term with a group of American writers who trans-
lated their disillusionment into a social protest, and
in the process produced some of the greatest works
of twentieth century literature. Many members of this
group, which included Ernest Hemingway and
F. Scott Fitzgerald, became expatriates living in
Europe. Paris became a particularly noted hot spot
where several budding authors benefited from the
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s
 T h e W a s t e L a n d

influence of more experienced authors such as Eliot

and Ezra Pound.

Critical Overview
From the time it was published until the twenty-
first century, The Waste Land has inspired both pas-
sion and hatred. Jewel Spears Brooker sums it up
best in her entry on Eliot for Dictionary of Liter-
ary Biography: “The Waste Land was taken by
some critics as a tasteless joke, by others as a mas-
terpiece expressing the disillusionment of a gener-
ation. As far as Eliot was concerned, it was
neither.” As many critics have cited, Eliot viewed
the poem as a catharsis, a way to release much of
his frustration and stress that had ultimately led to
his nervous breakdown.
Yet, while this is what Eliot said, his decision
to include extensive notes with the poem, which
identified the source of many of the poem’s ob-
Proof page with markings on it for “The Waste
scure or confusing references, seemed to ascribe
great meaning to the poem. The author notes also
Land,” from “T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland: A
invited negative criticism. Many critics, like Facsimile and Transcript of the Original,” edited
Conrad Aiken, felt that Eliot’s notes—and indeed, by Valerie Eliot
many of the references in the poem itself—were
unnecessary. As Aiken notes in his now-famous
1922 review in New Republic: “Mr. Eliot’s sense
of the literary past has become so overmastering as review of the 1971 restored and expanded version
almost to constitute the motive of the work.” Aiken of The Waste Land, Richard Ellmann says of Eliot,
sees this approach as involving “a kind of idolatry “Lloyd’s most famous bank clerk revalued the
poetic currency” with the initial publication of
of literature with which it is a little difficult to sym-
his poem.
pathize.” As testament to the complexity and con-
troversy of the poem, however, Aiken’s overall Yet the aspects of the poem that make it “mod-
review is positive. He notes that Eliot’s focus on ern” also have led to the greatest amount of confu-
all of these references “has colored an important sion and conflict among critics. As Helen Vendler
and brilliant piece of work.” Yet, Aiken says that, says in her Time article on Eliot, the poem’s many
when these “reservations have all been made, we references focus on the past, but it is “a past so
accept The Waste Land as one of the most moving disarranged—with the Buddha next to St. Augustine,
and original poems of our time.” and Ovid next to Wagner—that a reader felt thrust
into a time machine of disorienting simultaneity.”
In fact, the originality of the poem is key to
This focus on the past seemed to be intentional, as
understanding the divided reactions that it received. John Xiros Cooper discusses in his book T. S. Eliot
The poem is largely credited with helping launch and the Politics of Voice: The Argument of ‘The
the modern literature movement, a fact that cannot Waste Land.’ Cooper says
be understated and about which many critics speak
Unlike the older generation, who saw in events like
in grand terms. For example, Nancy Duvall
the Great War the passing of a golden age, Eliot saw
Hargrove says in her entry on Eliot for Dictionary only that the golden age was itself a heap of absurd
of Literary Biography, the poem’s “originality sociopolitical axioms and perverse misreadings of the
shook the foundations of the literary world.” Like- cultural past that had proved in the last instance to
wise, in America James S. Torrens says, “A bomb- be made of the meanest alloy.
shell burst upon the world of modern poetry 75 In other words, Eliot was rebelling against
years ago.” And in his New York Review of Books the tendency to glorify the past. He wanted to

V o l u m e 2 0 2 5 9
 T h e W a s t e L a n d
demonstrate that the past was gritty and real, es-
pecially the recent past events of World War I. By
demythologizing the events of the past, Eliot forces
his readers to focus on the grim realities of his post-
war present.
Criticism
Ryan D. Poquette
Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English
and specializes in writing about literature. In the
following essay, Poquette discusses the structure of
the poem.
When Eliot first published The Waste Land in
1922, it caused a colossal stir in the literary world
and in society in general. Eliot’s use of nontradi-
tional techniques, his gritty imagery, and the sheer
incoherence of the work as a whole mystified, en-
raged, and enthralled readers and critics. As Helen
Vendler notes in her 1998 Time article, “Modern
poetry had struck its note.” In fact, readers had
never seen anything quite this modern before. The
poem seemed to have a little bit of everything, and
was much meatier than the other literary offerings
of the time, and not just in Europe. Vendler notes
that “Whether or not Eliot had written down the
Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the
lightweight poetry dominating American maga-
zines.” But even though every reference in Eliot’s
apocalyptic opus has since been documented, and
one can begin to draw parallels among the poem’s
many pieces, most critics agree that these pieces
will probably never be assembled into one cohe-
sive whole. The poem’s structure defies that type
of interpretation.
When one discusses the structure of a mod-
ernist work like The Waste Land, it helps to break
it down into two types, structure on a large scale
and structure on a small scale. On the large scale,
the poem has a clear structure. It is organized into
five sections, each of which is numbered and la-
beled, almost in the style of a traditional poem. Yet,
in her entry on Eliot for Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Jewel Spears Brooker says that these
five sections, “by traditional standards, seem unre-
lated.” The key word is “traditional.” Part of the
joy involved in modernist writing was in not play-
ing by the traditional rules. Still, Eliot did not
choose his structure on a whim. In fact, when
viewed from a modernist perspective, one that em-
phasizes the rough sense of the poem, rather than
2 6 0
Like the mythical
quest hero who must
undergo trials and assemble
information to earn
restoration, Eliot’s readers
must review the various,
fragmentary pieces of the
poem and pull from it the
ideas that make the most
sense to them.”
its specific, objectifiable meaning, one can offer up
an interpretation for Eliot’s choice of large-scale
structure.
The first section is “The Burial of the Dead”
deals mainly with issues of death. The second sec-
tion “A Game of Chess” deals mainly with issues
of sex. The third section “The Fire Sermon” also
deals with sexual issues. The fourth section “Death
by Water” deals with issues of death. The final sec-
tion, “What the Thunder Said,” is mainly about res-
urrection or restoration, which may or may not be
attainable. So, if one were to write out these gen-
eral themes in order, it would go: death, sex, sex,
death, possible restoration. One of the first notice-
able aspects about this order is that the first four
sections are symmetrical. The two sections on death
bookend the two sections on sex, almost as if the
second two sections are a mirror image of the first
two. When a poet deliberately juxtaposes thematic
material like this, it usually means something. This
is especially true when a modernist poet imposes a
distinguishable form on his or her poetry. This or-
dering of themes becomes even more suspicious
when one looks at the length of the fourth section.
When compared to the others, this is almost not a
section at all. If Eliot had left it out, however, it
would have destroyed his symmetry.
So what does this mean? Why is Eliot inter-
ested in this symmetry? To answer this question, it
is first necessary to examine the small-scale struc-
tural techniques that Eliot uses in the poem. Again,
if traditional analysis techniques were used, this
reader would examine the poem line by line and
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

stanza by stanza, searching for the connections
among them. As James S. Torrens notes in his 1997
article on the poem in America: “How many un-
dergraduates since 1922 have sweated their way
through this labyrinth and come out dazzled, or
completely dazed.” The fact is, applying traditional
analysis to the poem is a fruitless effort, for the
poem exists not in the logical world, but in a world
of indefinite reality, which disorients the reader.
But from Eliot’s point of view, the reader
needs to be disoriented. Society has become too
stale and exists in a state of living death, where
crowds of these walking dead file off to work, ex-
haling “Sighs, short and infrequent.” Even the sighs
of despair and disillusionment are “infrequent,” be-
cause this society is lost and does not even have
the energy to sigh. Eliot is attempting to shake up
society and get people to, as he notes during the
second section, through the mouthpiece of the rich
woman: “Think.” To do this, to shake up people
and force them to think about the current state of
society, Eliot structures his poem in episodes. On
the small scale, these episodes help him hook read-
ers, even as he disorients them. Within each sec-
tion, Eliot divides the narrative into episodes that
invoke aspects of the past, the present, and in many
cases both. Time and place shift with little or no
transition, like the clicks of a camera shutter. And
as the poem progresses, Eliot clicks his poetic shut-
ter rapidly, populating his bizarre landscape, his
waste land, with a litany of historical and mytho-
logical figures. In this surreal, constantly changing
setting, Vendler notes that Buddha is juxtaposed
“with St. Augustine, and Ovid next to Wagner,” il-
logical placements that defy traditional modes of
thought.
This leads back to the reason behind Eliot’s
conscious choice to include a symmetrical large-
scale structure. In the long scope of human history
and experience, Buddha and Augustine are linked,
as are Ovid and Wagner and the countless other
seemingly contradictory pairings in the poem. By
choosing Weston’s myth of the Fisher King—a
seminal myth that is thought to have ultimately in-
fluenced many religious stories, including the
Christian quest for the Holy Grail—Eliot is indi-
cating that they are one and the same, mirror im-
ages of each other. Likewise, Eliot’s modern
society and the other past societies refered to in the
poem are also mirror images of each other, which
is why he juxtaposes “Jerusalem” with “London,”
for example, and ultimately, why he chooses to
make the first four sections reflect this mirror im-
age concept.
V o l u m e 2 0
T h e W a s t e L a n d
However, the final section does not fit this sym-
metry, which makes sense too. This final section is
also the most ambiguous. The first four are clearly
about either death or sex. The fourth is about
restoration, but it leaves the question of possible
restoration open-ended, by providing mixed com-
mentary at the end in the foreign phrases. Eliot of-
fers some insight into this with the line directly
before these foreign phrases: “These fragments I
have shored against my ruins.” Some critics say that
this statement is Eliot’s introduction to the foreign
phrases themselves, which are just fragments of
thoughts. Others say that this is Eliot’s commentary
on the fragmentary nature of the entire poem itself.
The latter interpretation seems to make more sense.
In his 1923 review of the poem for New Re-
public, Conrad Aiken sees the fragmentary, inco-
herent nature of the poem as its greatest strength
and says that the work must be taken as
A brilliant and kaleidoscopic confusion; as a series
of sharp, discrete, slightly related perceptions and
feelings, dramatically and lyrically presented, and vi-
olently juxtaposed, (for effect of dissonance) so as to
give us an impression of an intensely modern, in-
tensely literary consciousness which perceives itself
to be not a unit but a chance correlation or con-
glomerate of mutually discolorative fragments.
In other words, while readers familiar with tra-
ditional, neatly ordered poetry might look for the
poet to tell them what they need to know, Eliot very
shrewdly conceals his true thoughts behind his
fragmentary structure, which ultimately reflects the
chaos of the poet’s modern, disillusioned society,
even as its links it to humanity’s shared past
through its use of mirror image. Like the mythical
quest hero who must undergo trials and assemble
information to earn restoration, Eliot’s readers must
review the various, fragmentary pieces of the poem
and pull from it the ideas that make the most sense
to them. The important thing, as Eliot indicates, is
to be engaged in this process in the first place. Be-
cause when people wake up from their moral stu-
por and start thinking about the current state of
society, then maybe they will also be motivated to
work toward improving it.
Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on “The Waste
Land,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2004.
James Torrens
In the following essay, Torrens discusses the
history of Eliot’s poem and its literary impact.
A bombshell burst upon the world of mod-
ern poetry 75 years ago this November in the
pages of the New York literary journal The
2 6 1
 T h e W a s t e L a n d
Dial—T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The author
had published this outpouring in England a month
earlier in his own magazine, The Criterion; and in
December, Boni & Liveright was to bring it out in
book form, with the famous footnotes to fill out
empty pages. A corporation lawyer in New York,
John Quinn, put up $2,000 for The Dial prize of
that year, an astonishing sum that relieved the au-
thor of the burden of medical and other expenses
weighing on him.
The 434 lines of “The Waste Land”—in
lengths and bunches that might seem totally ran-
dom—thrilled and bewildered early readers. They
found in it the following: stream-of-consciousness
writing, sudden switches of scene as in film clips,
motifs from classical and medieval myth, exposure
of the libido a la Dr. Freud, music-hall rag, anxi-
ety before the Bolshel vik menace and borrowings
from the sacred books of East and West.
Robert Penn Warren remembered that “under-
graduates were reading it all over the place, mem-
orizing it.” How many undergraduates since 1922
have sweated their way through this labyrinth and
come out dazzled, or completely dazed. I confess to
having led many of these expeditions, with sover-
eign and unwarranted self-confidence. The process
is still worth recreating at this anniversary time.
“The Waste Land” comes in five parts, start-
ing with “The Burial of the Dead,” a name taken
from the Anglican funeral ceremony. The famous
opening line yields a shock: “April is the cruellest
month.” Quite a switch from that upbeat start of
the most famous poem in English, “The Canterbury
Tales,” where the pilgrims set off to their shrine
amid the unfolding panoply of spring. But the days
after World War I were no time for medieval op-
timism. What Eliot wants to highlight is the pain
of coming back to life.
The imagery and episodes of Part One evoke a
person, indeed a civilization, numbed, distressed.
Coherence and meaning have gone out of the world,
as a prophetic voice with an Old Testament sound
announces: “Son of man . . . you know only / a heap
of broken images, where the sun beats, / and the
dead tree gives no shelter.”
To convey a vague menace, and recreate the
craze for spiritualism at the turn of the century,
Eliot introduces “Madame Sosostris, famous clair-
voyante,” with her “wicked pack” of Tarot cards.
She tells an implied hearer (the reader, actually):
Your card is “the drowned Phoenician sailor.” How
ominous. He follows this up memorably with the
sketch of London on a business morning, with all
2 6 2
Early critics summed
up ‘The Waste Land’ as
expressing the
disillusionment of a
generation. This
interpretation galled the
author, who claims he never
had illusions to begin with,
and who can be seen
anxiously searching for any
signs of life.”
its robot workers pouring in to the office with an
exhalation of sighs as if from Dante’s “Inferno.”
Early critics summed up “The Waste Land” as
expressing the disillusionment of a generation. This
interpretation galled the author, who claims he
never had illusions to begin with, and who can be
seen anxiously searching for any signs of life. The
poem addresses a Londoner named Stetson sarcas-
tically: “That corpse you planted last year in your
garden, / has it begun to sprout? . . . Oh keep the
Dog far hence, that’s friend to mend or with his
nails he’ll dig it up again!” What dog? Perhaps
Anubis, the dog-headed god of Egypt who conducts
the dead to immortal regions. All dogs love to dig
up, of course. When Eliot wrote these lines, he was
emerging from psychotherapy in Lausanne,
Switzerland, which had forced him to dig up a lot
of his own troubling history.
The poet, throughout “The Waste Land,” puz-
zles over the apparent disconnection between sex
and love, flesh and spirit. He does so through a re-
curring figure, the quester, as in medieval versions
of the quest for the Holy Grail. The quester early on
proves incapable of the romantic innocence offered
by the hyacinth girl, with an armful of flowers.
Eliot calls Part Two “A Game of Chess,” a
metaphor for sexual maneuvering. He begins again
by rewriting a classical set piece, the wide-eyed re-
port by the soldier Enobarbus about the opulent
queen Cleopatra on her barge, from Shakespeare’s
“Antony and Cleopatra.” Eliot gives us instead a
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

What
Do I Read
Next?
• Many critics highlight the fact that Eliot wrote
The Waste Land while he was suffering a ner-
vous breakdown. Another group of post–World
War I writers disillusioned by the war, the sur-
realists, attempted to create literary works while
their minds were in alternative states, a condi-
tion often reached by deliberate attempts to af-
fect their consciousness, such as through
hypnosis. The Magnetic Fields (1920), a series
• Ernest Hemingway is probably the best known
of prose poems by French poets André Breton
and Phillipe Soupault, was created during one
of these mental experiments, a marathon project
that lasted eight days.
• Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
first published in the magazine Poetry (1915) and
later collected in Prufrock, and Other Observa-
tions (1917), is considered one of Eliot’s most
important works. Like The Waste Land, the poem
• While Ezra Pound is considered one the twen-
mixes classical references with other modern im-
ages. The poem details the ramblings of the title
character, a self-doubting man who is pessimistic
about his future and the future of society.
• In 1971, Eliot’s estate authorized the release of
a facsimile edition of the poet’s original 800-
line version of the poem, entitled, The Waste
Land: A Facsimile of the Original Drafts, In-
cluding the Annotations of Ezra Pound. As the
title implies, the book includes the original re-
vision notes from Pound, but it also includes
notes from Eliot’s first wife and Eliot himself.
This landmark edition, which includes an intro-
• In his notes on The Waste Land, Eliot also cites
duction by Eliot’s widow, his second wife
Valerie Eliot, gave critics and readers insight
into the process used to create the 1922 version.
• In his original notes to The Waste Land, Eliot
states that he was inspired by Sir James G.
pampered woman in her palatial bedchamber, im-
mersed in anything that could arouse the senses
(“synthetic perfumes,” illustrations of a mythologi-
cal rape). This passage, sumptuous but labored,
shifts suddenly into Eliot’s forte, a dramatic dialogue
giving us the real measure of the jaded woman:
V o l u m e 2 0
T h e W a s t e L a n d
Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic
and Religion, which Frazer released in two vol-
umes in 1890, then revised into a one-volume
edition in 1922. Although popular in its day, this
book, which attempts to explore the origins of
magic and religion and their relevance to his
modern world, came under critical fire in later
years.
of the Lost Generation group of American writ-
ers. Like The Waste Land, Hemingway’s The
Sun Also Rises (1926) explores the post–World
War I sense of disillusionment. In the novel, the
protagonist, Jake Barnes, a World War I veteran,
suffers from physical and psychological war
wounds that greatly affect his life and view of
the world.
tieth century’s great writers, he never had a wide
reading audience, in part because he spent much
of his time helping nurture the fledgling writing
careers of Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James
Joyce, Robert Frost, and others. Yet Pound did
produce one series of works, his Cantos, pub-
lished in various pieces from 1917 to 1968 (for
a total of 117 sections), which some consider a
masterpiece. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, how-
ever, this ambitious work relies on chaotic, dis-
parate techniques that turned off some critics
and readers.
the influence of Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual
to Romance (1920), a book that explores the
Grail legend of King Arthur and its relation to
the recorded myths of ancient mystery cults and
their fertility rites.
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad.
Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak.
Speak.
What are you thinking of?” . . .
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
2 6 3
 T h e W a s t e L a n d
At one time the author had thought of naming
this poem after a line from Dickens, “He Do the
Police in Many Voices,” in the spirit of English
parlor games with their popular charades. He does
his mimicry best in a pub scene, in Cockney
English, concerning a certain Lil, whose soldier-
husband, in the days before contraceptives, has
worn her down with his appetite for sex. It ends, fa-
mously, as the bartender calls out, “Hurry up please
it’s time”—suggesting judgment is imminent—and
the customers go off with a drunken “Goonight.”
This painful vision of humanity swept up in lust
continues in Part Three, “The Fire Sermon,” which
takes its name from the preachment of Buddha
about all things being consumed by desire. Again
Eliot replays an English masterpiece, the Renaissance
wedding ode of Edmund Spenser, “Prothalamion,”
which chants in a refrain, “Sweet Thames run softly
till I end my song.” But “The Waste Land,” no cel-
ebratory flow, evokes the shores of a wintry Thames
River long after the casual lovers have left their
sandwich paper, silk handkerchiefs and bottles.
“The nymphs are departed. / And their friends, the
loitering heirs of city directors.”
Eliot’s imagery takes a step into the nightmar-
ish, a surreal world of the grinning skeleton, the
“rat’s foot creeping,” plus “white bodies naked on
the low damp ground / and bones cast in a little low
dry garret” (a gruesome fusing of sex and death).
Yet the passage ends with a wistful reminder of in-
nocence—children’s song resounding in a cupola.
Then Part Three unfurls its narratives of desire.
In the first, very briefly, a Near Eastern merchant
makes his oily offer of a homosexual weekend.
Then, at length, we watch the loveless connection
of a typist and the “small house agent’s clerk” who
comes to her apartment, “one of the low on whom
assurance sits / as a silk hat on a Bradford million-
aire.” “She is bored and tired;” but since “his van-
ity requires no response,” he takes his sexual
pleasure. We don’t get the graphic details, but rather
a quick intervention from the narrator of this tawdry
scene, Tiresias, the mythical peeping Tom, who
has “foresuffered all / enacted on this same divan
or bed.”
Throughout “The Waste Land” Eliot sows al-
lusions to “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s late ro-
mance in which a mysterious providential action
saves the victims of shipwreck. The quester quotes:
“This music crept by me upon the waters.” The
music, in this one bright spot, comes from a pub-
lic bar in Lower Thames Street that still preserves
sociability and a dignity from the past.
2 6 4
Eliot then changes the cadence for a short-line
impressionistic contrast of the mercantile present
(oily merchant ships coming up the tide) with
a regal past (Queen Elizabeth with her favorite,
Leicester, in a Cleopatra-like barge on the Thames).
After which come some brief exempla of lust, in
women’s voices, and concluding words from the
Buddha—”burning burning burning burning”—
along with the exclamation of relief from the
once lustful Augustine: “O Lord thou pluckest
me out.”
In Part Four, “Death by Water,” our poet
delivers a quick, highly concentrated homily on
the fate of an adventurer-quester of the old
Mediterranean, a Phoenician sailor. He undergoes
the judgment of the sea. The intoning voice aims
this homily at the reader, who still has his Tarot
card with the seaman’s picture.
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight
dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep
sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he
rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and
youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to
windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once
handsome and tall as you.
Ezra Pound, Eliot’s self-proclaimed mentor,
had the chance to blue pencil many a line from the
original version of “The Waste Land,” which the
poet showed him in Paris, as he was returning to
London from Lausanne. Pound’s surgery was most
radical for Part Four, which he clipped down (much
to its benefit) to the size reproduced above. The au-
thor responded with a dedication naming Pound, in
words from Dante, il miglior fabbro, “the best of
workmen.”
Now comes the most powerful and challeng-
ing section of “The Waste Land,” Part Five, “What
the Thunder Said” (a phrase from a Hindu
Upanishad), asking whether rain will come to our
parched souls, or life return to our society panting
for grace. Eliot intertwines allusions to the storm-
ing of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks, Christ’s
agony in the garden, the collapse of Babylon ac-
cording to the Apocalypse and the finding of the
Holy Grail. Consider the following passage, which
plays on the theme of the Mysterious Stranger. The
reader comes away asking, Do we have here a
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s

beneficent Christ on the road to Emmaus, or a men-
acing specter?
Who is the third who walks always
beside you?
When I count, there are only you and
I together
But when I look ahead up the white
road
There is always another one walking
beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle,
hooded
I do not know whether a man or a
woman
—But who is that on the other side of
you?
The concluding lines of “The Waste Land” do
not so much resolve The question, How shall things
end up for us? as pose a three-part challenge, in a
voice of thunder: GIVE of yourself, “in the awful
daring of a moment’s surrender” (which may be
what Eliot did in his costly marriage to Vivienne
Haigh-Wood); SYMPATHIZE, get through to oth-
ers, who are so much like yourself, “each in his
prison / thinking of the key”; CONTROL: Exert
some loving initiative and expect some beloved’s
response.
Not to end his potpourri of a poem neatly, be-
cause there is no neat resolution to our affairs, Eliot
concludes it with a shower of one-line allusions,
signaling collapse of society, then expiation, then
urge for innocence. His final words are a Hindu in-
vocation, almost a blessing, for the reader whom
he has pulled through this ordeal: Shantih shantih
shantih (“Peace,” three times).
To the initiate, “The Waste Land”—brilliant if
maddening pastiche, anguished outcry against hu-
man impurity, meditation on the decline of the
West-has an endless fascination. In its 75th year it
remains as elusive, as haunting, as thought-pro-
voking as ever.
The 1990’s do not happen to be a good season
for T. S. Eliot stock, which was once soaring. Po-
litical correctness has banished him into outer dark-
ness for some stereotypes of Jews that seem present
in earlier poems and, in his longing for a Christian
society, for drawing the boundaries a bit tight. Al-
ready in Eliot’s day some contemporaries be-
moaned and rued the ascendancy of this dizzying
poem. William Carlos Williams, in his fervent de-
sire for more writing “in the American grain” and
his battle against dependence on the European
tradition, wrung his hands and declared that “The
Waste Land” had set our poetry back at least a
generation.
V o l u m e 2 0
T h e W a s t e L a n d
What to say about this attack on “The Waste
Land” for its allusiveness? The first thing is to ac-
knowledge plainly that it takes form as a brilliant
Ph.D. exam on European literature and culture, a
genre that does not admit repeating. Eliot never
tried the method again himself. But what a fine ve-
hicle it proved to be for meditating on the fate of
civilization after World War I—and in particular
for probing, radically, the most precious documents
of the Great Tradition. Eliot was also ciphering his
own struggle with sin and for sanity and salvation.
In short, “The Waste Land” is still worth every
penny that John Quinn offered in obeisance to it
and, with all the reservations one might muster, it
remains sans pareil.
Source: James Torrens, “T. S. Eliot: 75 years of The Waste
Land,” in America, Vol. 177, No. 12, October 25, 1997, pp.
24–27.
Sources
Aiken, Conrad, “An Anatomy of Melancholy,” in New Re-
public, Vol. 33, No. 427, February 7, 1923, pp. 294–95.
Brooker, Jewel Spears, “T. S. Eliot,” in Dictionary of Lit-
erary Biography, Vol. 45: American Poets, 1880–1945,
First Series, edited by Peter Quartermain, Gale Research,
1986, pp. 150–81.
Cooper, John Xiros, T. S. Eliot and the Politics of Voice:
The Argument of “The Waste Land,” UMI Research Press,
1987.
Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land, in The Waste Land and Other
Poems, edited by Frank Kermode, Penguin Books, 1998, pp.
53–69.
Ellmann, Richard, “The First Waste Land-I,” in New York
Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 8, November 8, 1971, pp. 10,
12, 14–16.
Hargrove, Nancy Duvall, “T. S. Eliot,” in Dictionary of Lit-
erary Biography, Vol. 7: Twentieth-Century American
Dramatists, edited by John MacNicholas, Gale Research,
1981, pp. 151–72.
Torrens, James S., “T. S. Eliot: 75 Years of ‘The Waste
Land,’ ” in America, Vol. 177, October 25, 1997, pp. 24–27.
Vendler, Helen, “T. S. Eliot,” in Time, Vol. 151, No. 22,
June 8, 1998, p. 108.
Further Reading
Bloom, Harold, ed., T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (Modern
Critical Interpretations), Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
Bloom collects criticism on The Waste Land from the
1950s to the 1980s, some of which was published
2 6 5
 T h e W a s t e L a n d
here for the first time. In addition, the book includes
an introduction by Bloom, a chronology, and a
bibliography.
Conrad, Winston Stuart, Hemingway’s France: Images of
the Lost Generation, Woodford Publishing, 2000.
While this photo-essay book focuses on Heming-
way’s life, by extension it also encompasses many of
the influential figures from the Lost Generation, in-
cluding Eliot. Conrad’s modern-day color pho-
tographs of France are juxtaposed against vintage
black-and-white photos of the background and vari-
ous writers and artists who lived and worked in
France after World War I.
Fitch, Noel Riley, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A
History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, W. W.
Norton, 1983.
The influence of Sylvia Beach and her Paris book-
shop on the writers of the Lost Generation is well
known. Fitch’s history draws from the Beach family
2 6 6
papers to chronicle her experiences with these au-
thors, including Eliot.
Keegan, John, The First World War, Knopf, 1999.
While many books have been written about World
War I, Keegan’s is widely acknowledged as one of
the most comprehensive, accurate, and non-biased
versions. Keegan, a noted historian, draws on origi-
nal records to create a narrative that guides readers
through the complex causes and events of the war.
Moody, A. David, ed., The Cambridge Companion to T. S.
Eliot, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Moody’s book offers a comprehensive overview of
Eliot’s life and work. Contributors examine every-
thing from Eliot’s philosophical background to his
impact on twentieth-century poetry, offering both
critical and biographical insights in the process. The
book includes a chapter on The Waste Land, a
chronology, and a list of suggested further readings.
P o e t r y f o r S t u d e n t s