Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” by Vivian de Sola Pints (Crisis in English poetry)

 All of Eliot’s early poetry converges on “The Waste Land”. Here he is attempting a task of enormous difficulty and the remarkable measure of success which he achieves is one of the chief testimonies to his genius. The Waste Land is an essay, in creating a poem on a grand scale out of a vision of a devitalized world, a world that has denied or ignored the spiritual life. In The Waste Land the problem was to create a myth that would give adequate expression to pity and terror of a comprehensive view of a devitalized society. For this purpose Eliot makes use of the two typically modern sciences of psychology and anthropology. 

The central conception of The Waste Land is ‘sexual impotence’ which is used as a symbol for the spiritual malady of the modern world. This symbol is developed by means of a myth which had been much studied by contemporary anthropologists. The specific example of the myth which he selects is derived from the theory Miss J. L. Weston expounded in several of her books and notably from “Ritual and Romance” (1920). Miss Weston’s theory was that the story of the quest for the Holy Grail was a Christianized version of an ancient ritual, having for its ultimate objects the initiation into the secret of the sources of life, physical and spiritual. The old use of mythology either as a simple tale or an allegory was clearly impossible for a poet of Eliot’s Sophistication. He showed however that a modern poet could make effective use of mythology with the help of the psychologist and the anthropologist.

The technique of the poem is that of “The music of ideas” already attempted on a small scale in “Gerontion”. Here it is organized with great skill and elaboration in 5 sections or movements, the first of which introduces the main themes, which are developed with variations in the second and third, while fourth is short, grave and slow, a kind of pause before an impressive culmination in the fifth.

The themes of this symphonic poem are a series of scenes rather like film shots fading and dissolving into each other, seen from the view point of an impersonal observer, the protagonist of the poem, who is identified with the impotent Fisher King and also with Tiresias, the blind prophet of the Greek legend. In one of his notes Eliot writes that Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. What Tiresias sees, in fact is the substance of the poem. Tiresias, like the spirit of the years in the dynasts is an embodiment of the modern mind, the keen observer who is “powerless to act”.

In the first section of the poem, this spectator is seen in a dry, desolate place, the waste land of the Grail Legend which is also Ezekiel’s ‘Valley of Dry Bones’:

“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.”

In this desert there is a red rock which seems to symbolize poetic inspiration. It is from the shadow of this red rock, the one refuge in the desolation that the spectator promises “to show you fear in a handful of dust”. This fear is both the fear of life, and as F. R. Leavis has suggested “A nameless, ultimate fear, a horror of the completely negative”; it is the horrible echo of the caves in “A Passage to India” which proclaims that “everything exists, nothing has value”.

Miss Weston has associated with the fertility ritual the Tarot pack or the ancient set of playing cards used for divination. In the first section of the poem Madam Sosostris the “famous clairvoyante” has one of these “wicked packs” and she picks from them various cards which are the starting points of the subsequent developments in the poem. These cards represent three archetypal figures with the mysterious fourth in the background who never materializes, represented by a black card.  There is the man with the three staves, who is the Fisher King, or the poet himself: There is the women “Belladona,” the lady of situations” who appears as the rich neurotic lady of the opening monologue and again in the gorgeous romantic setting at the opening of the second section. She is the poor prostitute in the pub at end of the section, the typist seduced by the house agent’s clerk and Elizebeth dallying with Leicester in a splendid bygone age. She is seen for a moment in a more attractive form as a radiant girl “the hyacinth girl” of the first section. 

“-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.”

Then there is a male figure, the “one eyed merchant” of the Tarot pack. He is Mr. Eugenides, the cosmopolitan, probably homosexual, Greek from Smyrna who “melts into the Phoenician sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand, Prince of Naples” is also apparently the carbuncular house-agent’s clerk who seduces the typist and the nobler equally empty hearted Leicester dallying with Elizebeth on a gilded barge on the Thames. This male figure ought to be the deliverer of the Fisher King; actually he fails because he profanes the mysteries. Here Eliot is almost certainly influenced by a tradition which Miss Weston found in one of the Grail romances. This tradition told how certain maidens who were guardians of the Grail mysteries were ravished by a robber king and his knights and after the outrage the land became waste. 

So, all the incarnations of the male figure in The Wasteland fail because they profane the mysteries of life through greed and loveless lust. The final failure is Phlebas, the Phoenician sailor who meets “the death by water” prophesied by the clairvoyante. He had an eye for the gulls and the sea swell but he thought too much of profit and loss and this may be considered as a symbol of modern commercialism whose arid spirits cannot endure the flood of passion. Just as behind all the women is the Hyacinth Girl, the unrealized promise of womanhood, so behind all the men is the image of the true prince Ferdinand of Naples suggested by the line quoted from Shakespeare’s lyric in the second section:

“Those are pearls that were his eyes.”

Ferdinand suffered a sea change into something rich and strange, a rebirth through the power of love in Shakespeare’s myth, but in the modern world he is only a vague memory: Madame Sosostris significantly cannot find “The Hanged Man” among the cards; this is the “Hanged God of Frazer” is a motif to describe the vegetation rites that ancient people performed to keep their lands fertile and safe. Madame Sosostris not finding this card indicates that there is no renewal for us that the traditions and religions of the past have been lost and we have only “ruins” of what is left from which to cobble together a personal meaning of our lives today.

The whole poem is dominated by nightmare vision of the great modern city where “citizens are damned beyond redemption”:

“Unreal city,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd………………………………

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.”

The effect of this passage is greatly enhanced by the knowledge that the fourth line is a translation of a line of Dante, describing the last soul in hell “I had not thought death had undone so many”. There are dozens of such literary allusions in The Waste Land sometimes they are literal quotations and sometimes passages from older authors, wittily altered and distorted. Eliot’s reading is part of his poetic experience and he uses it as freely as sensuous imagery. Effective as this use of pastiche is in many places, as in the passage quoted above, there is so much of it in The Waste Land that it becomes a mannerism and Eliot cannot be wholly acquitted of overloading his poem with recondite learning, a fault due perhaps to the influence of Ezra Pound, to whom the poem is dedicated. The introduction of Sanskrit words in the last section can hardly be defended.

Such faults however detract little from the overwhelming effect of the poem as a whole. In a sense it is fragmentary but this is because it expresses a vision of a fragmentary world. It is like a great picture of a city in ruins where the jagged outlines of the shattered buildings all contribute to a convening organic pattern. All these are presented with an even more terrifying intensity: 

“There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snart

From doors of mudcracked houses”

Nevertheless there is a real progression from the meaningless world of the bored rich woman -“What shall we ever do?” And the equally meaningless world of the woman in the pub – “Hurry up please it’s time”, to the grave tenderness of ‘Death by Water’:

“Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”

The section ‘What the Thunder said’ has an apocalyptic quality. The world remains parched and the uncreative at the end of the poem, but it is not meaningless. On the contrary the thunder (reinforcing the evidence of Buddha and St. Augustine) proclaims that the universe has a meaning and is founded on the eternal morality of “give, sympathize and control”. It is true that no hope for the future is even hinted at, and at the end the poet can only “shore against his ruins” fragments of verse representing the glories of European culture. Yet the implication is undoubtedly that humanity is condemned to living death because it has disobeyed the eternal moral law and profaned the divine mysteries. So far from being poetry severed “from all beliefs” as I. A. Richards suggested that poetry of Wasteland is based on a very strong belief in original sin and the values of religion. Eliot’s “voyage within” has taken him as far as the negative side of religion; it was almost inevitable that he should proceed from this point to positive religious belief.