Selected Poems, T. S. Eliot
This is another book I found in a bookcase at Jim’s parent’s house and brought home with me. After Jim’s stepdad died, his mom invited us to take anything we liked. I choose a lovely edition of Treasure Island, and this, and a few others. I’m not necessarily a fan of T. S. Eliot, or really poetry at all, but I had been thinking I should read The Waste Land, and this collection included that poem.
The Waste Land is one of the seminal works of modernist literature but one I hadn’t read. The Waste Land was published in October 1922 in the initial edition of a British magazine, The Criterion, founded by Eliot. He published the poem in an American magazine, The Dial, (founded by the Transcendentalists, the first editor was Margaret Fuller) in November, and then published his poem in book form in December, adding several pages of notes to bring the text to sufficient length for a book. Joyce’s Ulysses and Scott Moncrieff’s English translation of Swann’s Way, had come out earlier in 1922. Virginia Woolf published Jacob’s Room that year, and began work on Mrs. Dalloway. F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and the Damned. In December, Hemingway lost all of his unpublished short stories when a valise his wife was delivering to him to show to a publisher went missing from a train car at the Paris Gare de Lyon station. Quite a year for literature.
The Waste Land is a long poem, though not terribly long, sixteen pages in the paperback edition I read. The notes are included here, too: an additional seven pages. It’s divided into five sections. The meter and rhyme-scheme are irregular, much of it entirely free. The narrator voice switches between several different characters. In a technique that feels more post-modern than modern, Eliot includes direct quotes as well as glancing references to several sources: Dante, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Spenser, The Bible, Shakespeare, Wagner, also popular songs and nursery rhymes. Similarly to the way Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey as an over-arching model for Ulysses, Eliot uses the legend of the Fisher King as a foundational metaphor and structure for The Waste Land. In the Fisher King legend, the guardian of the grail and king, sometimes called Anfortas, is punished by being made infertile, which also makes the land of his kingdom barren. He fishes, while he waits for a pure knight, sometimes Percival, or Parsifal, to complete a quest that will redeem him and the land.
Section One: The Burial of the Dead
Eliot begins with the famous line, “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire…” April is cruel because, in a barren land with no Spring, April melts the snow and exposes the dead land beneath. A woman named Marie remembers a childhood experience sledding with her cousin, “the arch-duke.” There’s an image of a “hyacinth girl.” Then a Madame Sosostris, a clairvoyante, reads tarot cards and warns to “fear death by water.” Then a vision of a line of dead souls crossing a bridge over the Thames and the narrator voice seems to recognize one as someone he knew at Mylae (a battle of the Punic wars) and asks whether a corpse his acquaintance buried in his garden has begun to sprout yet.
Section Two: A Game of Chess
In the first half, a wealthy woman applies her make-up and lotions and perfumes. She attempts to talk to her partner who answers gruffly and seems to be suffering from shell-shock. In the second half, two women chat at a bar at closing time. The bartender interrupts several times to say, in all caps, “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” One of the women tells the other about what she said to a third woman named Lil whose husband is about to return home from the war and her advice that Lil fix herself up for him or she’ll lose him.
Section Three: The Fire Sermon
The reference in the title is to a sermon of the Buddha where he preaches liberation from suffering by detachment from the five senses. Eliot gives us a portrait of London entirely given over to carnal desires. He begins with the Thames filled with the trash of a “summer night.” He references prostitutes and the men who engage them. There’s what seems to be a homosexual solicitation. Then a section narrated by Tiresias, the blind-seer, who alternates between life as male and female. He/She tells a desultory story of a typist coming home to a small apartment and receiving with no enthusiasm a disinterested lover. The imagery returns to the flowing Thames, now including a reference to the song of the Rhinemaidens from Wagner’s Das Rhinegold. One more story, this, of Elizabeth, “the Virgin Queen” and her lover Leicester, but Eliot imagines them consummating their affair: “By Richmond I raised my knees / Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”
Section Four: Death by Water
Only ten lines. “Phlebas the Phoenician” lies drowned, disconnected now from his earthly concerns. (Echoing the prophecy of “death by water” from the clairvoyante of the first section.) Eliot asks anyone sailing over the spot to “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”
Section Five: What the Thunder said
The opening image is of a drought-stricken land, “no water but only rock.” Followed by a mysterious vision of a ghostly third person accompanying two travelers (taken, Eliot says, from a story from Shakleford’s Antarctic expedition, but also referencing the Bible story of “The Road to Emmaus” where the resurrected Jesus appears to two travelers). Then the imagery of the drought-stricken land returns, but finally, to end the section and the poem, the thunder speaks, but perhaps still not accompanied by rain, saying “DA”, three times, each time with a different Sanskrit word: datta, dayadhvam, damyata (give, sympathise, control). An image of the Fisher King with his back to the “arid plain.” And lastly the word, “Shantih” three times.
What does it all mean? Generally, I believe, it’s Eliot’s response to the devastation of the First World War and the flu epidemic that followed. The war ruined the land of Europe. Moreover, it exposed the moral vacuity of modern life. This is Eliot’s cry of despair at modern society. The cheapness of life. The sexual act divorced from respect or communion or even passion. Hypocrisy, as in a “virgin” who gives herself to a lover. Duplicity, as in a woman hoping to hide her real self behind make-up. We wait, like the Fisher King, for some pure savior to restore the land, but Eliot suggests, perhaps, given who we are, we wait in vain.
I read the rest of the Selected Poems, as well. The first is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, from 1917, which I’ve read before, and perhaps is my favorite. I had read most of the others as well. “The Hollow Men” (1925) and “Ash Wednesday” (1930) are remarkable. “Gerontion”, from 1920, is more explicitly a response to the war, and is a kind of first draft of The Waste Land, if, as I believe, The Waste Land is also a response to the war. “Gerontion” begins, “Here I am an old man in a dry month, / being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.” “Journey of the Magi” (1927) I’ve used as a reading for Christmas Eve services (“A cold coming we had of it”). The final selections are “Choruses from ‘The Rock'” which was a pageant Eliot produced in 1934 with music by Martin Shaw. The choruses reflect Eliot’s growing Christian faith and read more like verse sermons than poems. Eliot converted from the Unitarian to the Anglican tradition in 1927, the same year he gave up his American citizenship and became a British subject.
This book doesn’t include Eliot’s great, Four Quartets from 1945. By that time he was mostly writing plays. He won the Nobel Prize in 1948. He died in 1965.