The Waste Land (1922)

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The Waste Land (1922)

• T. S. Eliot

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Simulating a nervous breakdown, the poem The
Waste Land is a dramatic mythical journey into
the recesses of the unconscious as well as
through 1920s London for the purpose of
attaining a higher spiritual awareness and
harmony.
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In more simple psychological terms, this is an
epic poem that depicts many of the clinical
symptoms associated with depression and suggests
that in order to experience reality holistically
and begin to heal, human beings need to identify
with others to develop a sense of compassion.
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Contents

• Overview
• The Myth
• The Content of the Poem
• The Form of the Poem
• Analysis of the Poem

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Overview
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From Chaos to Harmony

• What are human beings to do when they are in
  despair, and religion offers no hope, especially
  after the senseless deaths caused by World War I
  and the Spanish flu?
• Catastrophic events suggest that we are quite
  alone in a universe in which chaos is the natural
  order of things.
• Feeling fragmented and disconnected from the
  self, society, and nature, human beings believe
  that life is futile.
• Eliots purpose is to rehabilitate a discredited
  system of beliefs to help us cope with lifes
  contingencies.
• To accomplish this goal, Eliot takes us on a
  journey of the soul.
• But this journey is not a free ride, for Eliot
  expects the reader to participate in this quest
  of discoveryan initiationwhich will reveal
  meaning, truth, virtue, and the good life.

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From Chaos to Harmony

• However, the poem is very difficult to read
  because its content and form mirror the apparent
  anarchy and meaninglessness of life.
• Filled with cryptic, chaotic networks of
  references, including the incongruent voices of
  ancient prophets and modern poets as well as
  obscure historical allusions, the poem is an
  attempt to provide mankind with the way back to
  the Gardenthe place of unity, of non-duality
  between male and female, good and evil, and God
  and man.
• It is the readers task to decipher this
  incomprehensible, puzzle-like poem by reflecting
  on the connections that exist between all of
  these jumbled, obscure references.
• The reader can only discover these
  connectionsunscramble the codeby
  transcending the temporal (the here and now) and
  embracing the spiritual (the eternal).
• In the end, this poem is meant to provide
  optimism and transform human consciousness by
  presenting a series of enduring spiritual truths
  whose aim is to encourage the flowering of our
  humanity through the letting go of the ego.

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T. S. Eliots Objective Correlative

• The experience that conveys the message

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The Waste Land as the Objective Correlative

• The waste land is the situation that signifies
  human despair and fear of death

. . . A sociological stagnation of inauthentic
lives and living that has settled upon us, and
that evokes nothing of our spiritual life, our
potentialities, or even our physical
courageuntil, of course, it gets us into one of
its inhuman wars. (Joseph Campbell, The Power
of Myth)
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Objective Correlative The Symbolic Structure

• The only way of expressing emotion in the
  form of art is by finding the objective
  correlative, in other words, a set of objects, a
  situation, a chain of events which shall be the
  formula of that particular emotion such that
  when the external facts, which must terminate in
  sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
  immediately evoked.

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The Myth
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The Journey The Mythic InitiationThe Waste Land
as a Modern Hell

• Is associated with the impulse to search,
  discover, and seek change for the sake of
  self-knowledge and of sharing the experience with
  others
• Implies the awareness of human dualitymortal
  and immortal, death and life, good and evil, male
  and femaleand the struggle to integrate these
  antagonistic elements into a new whole an
  authentic identity
• Suggests an inward return to the divine source of
  life for the sake of living in harmony with the
  self as well as with nature and society
• Affirms that heaven and hell are within us and
  that we need to find a way of life which will
  permit us to experience the divine, spiritual
  presence

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The Place to be Traversed The Waste Land

• Refers to the manifestation of a chaotic,
  meaningless place within as well as outside of
  the self
• A barren land, London, that can only be made
  fertile again through a ritual sacrifice
• A place within the self that can be humanized
  through patience, self-denial, and compassion

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The Hero The Protagonist/Tiresias

• Shares with us his psychological experiences and
  insights
• A participator as well as a spectator
• A commentator on the past, present, and future
• A synthesis of all the characters that appear in
  the poemMarie, the Fisher King, Madame
  Sosostris, the hyacinth girl, the young man
  carbuncular, Ferdinand at once the wounded god,
  the sage woman, as well as the quester, the
  initiate, and the resurrected god
• Purveys truths and how to live life in an
  authentic manner
• Suggests that we need to detach ourselves from
  our egos
• Affirms that once you die to your flesh, you are
  born to your spirit
• Implies that true reality is based on your
  identity and unity with all life
• Teaches us how to penetrate through the labyrinth
  of life so that spiritual values come through

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The Reader

• Is invited to participate in this panoramic
  journey through the waste land
• Is limited by a single perspective at any given
  moment, therefore constantly feeling lost
• Perceives the poem and life not as a whole but as
  a series of constantly shifting series of
  patterns and perspectives
• Reality appears to be fragmented and disordered
• Is challenged to unify all of the appearing and
  disappearing images into a new transcendent whole
  

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The Content of the Poem
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Purpose of The Waste Land

• To convey the souls and civilizations sense of
  emptiness, confusion, and aimlessness after WWI
• To provide a means of regeneration for the soul
  and civilization
• To revitalize poetry

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The Meaning of The Waste Land

• Convey the state of post-war civilization and the
  soul through the heap of broken images
• Transcend the ego by identifying with the
  continuity of significant tradition, of the
  inherited wisdom of the human race
• Escape chronological time to experience the truth
  of eternity

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Premise of The Waste Land Unity

• The waste land is an ever-present dimension of
  civilization.
• We need to accept that all wars are one war, all
  battles are one battle, all journeys one journey,
  all rivers one river, all rooms one room, all
  loves one love, and ultimately, all people one
  person.
• All of the specific examples of these things in
  the poem are in every case representative of
  their kind.
• Through universalizing the context of the poem,
  the poem transcends time and place.
• Chronological time takes on a cosmic as well as
  psychological dimension.

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Difficulties in Reading The Waste LandThe
Shifting Levels of Reality

• An extremely complex structure to be understood
  through free-associations
• Numerous interruptions in the narrative level
• chronological level a single day in the real
  world
• stream of consciousness the internal monologues
  in the minds of the speaker
• Piled up contrasting references, many not in
  English
• mingles past, present, and future
• intermingles a multiplicity of interrelated of
  historical, religious, and artistic sources

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Biographical, Historical, and Intellectual
Contexts
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External Sources

• Biographical and historical background
• The collective vision

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The Waste Land Biographical and Historical
ContextsModern Aimlessness
T. S. Eliot
Post-war society
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Biographical Context

• Met Ezra Pound, who introduced him to several
  modernist poets
• Married Vivien Haigh-Wood
• Worked at Lloyds Bank
• Had a nervous breakdown recuperated in Margate
  and Lausanne, Switzerland

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Historical Context WWI

• Laid the battlefields to waste
• Filled trenches with corpses
• Had spiritually scarred soldiers and the
  population at large
• Had physically weakened populations, enabling the
  Spanish flu to kill over 50 million people

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The Waste Land Regeneration
The Golden Bough

• Carl Jung

From Ritual to Romance
The Tarot
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Carl Jungs Collective Unconscious

• The unconscious inherited wisdom of the race
• Contains all of the images, archetypes, that have
  ever given rise to myths
• Archetypes, to be of value, must be recreated in
  collaboration with the conscious intelligence
  into a process of ordered growth, of
  transformation

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Jungs Archetypes of Transformation

• Refer to the integration of the personality
• Occur with the detachment from the world of
  objective reality as the center of experience and
  the finding of a new dimension in which to live
• Involve the death of an old pattern of life and
  the birth of a new

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Jungs Archetypes of Transformation

• During the process of transformation, certain
  archetypical images occur, forming a continuity
  and an interaction of symbols expressing the
  disintegration and death of the old pattern and
  the gradual emergence of the new.
• After the transformation, the center of the
  personality shifts from the ego to a point of
  equilibrium between the individual consciousness
  and the collective psyche.

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Jessie L. Weston From Ritual to Romance (1920)

• An attempt to explain the roots of the legend of
  the Holy Grail
• Enumerates the seemingly inexplicable elements of
  the quest--The Fisher King, The Wasteland, the
  Chapel Perilous, and the Grail Cup itself
• Ties them to the symbols and initiatory rites of
  the ancient mystery religions whose common source
  were the vegetation rituals and fertility rites

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The Legend The Curse

• Concerns a land which has been blighted by a
  curse so that it is arid and waterless, rendering
  it infertile
• Are linked with the plight of a ruler, the Fisher
  King, who as a result of an illness or a wound,
  has become sexually impotent

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The Legend The Curse

• Will be removed when a Knight appears who must
  ask the question as to the meaning of the Lance
  and the Grail
• the lance which pierced Christs side at the
  Crucifixion
• the cup from which Christ and the disciples drank
  at the Last Supper

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The Legend Other Versions of the Curse

• Will be removed when Knight asks why this curse
  has taken place
• Will be removed when the Knight undertakes
  various ordeals, culminating in that of the
  Chapel or Cemetery Perilous

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James Frazer The Golden Bough A Study of
Magic and Religion (1890-1915)

• Reads a bit like a novel that touches on almost
  anything
• Explores the roots of mythology, folklore,
  magic, and religion from the far East, the near
  East, Africa, Europe, America and more
• Shows the parallels between these and Christianity

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Significance of The Golden Bough

• Its thesis is that ancient religions were
  fertility cults that centered around the worship
  of, and periodic sacrifice of, a sacred king, the
  incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar
  deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a
  goddess of the earth, and who died at the harvest
  and who was reincarnated in the spring.
• It claimed that this legend was central to almost
  all of the world's mythologies.

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Significance of the Golden Bough

• The golden bough is a reference to a mystical
  tree in a Greco-Roman myth.
• In the ancient tale the hero Aeneas consults the
  prophetess who is one of the Sybil at Cumae.
• The Sybil tells Aeneas to break a branch from a
  certain tree that is sacred to Juno Inferno.
• Then Aeneas is led to the entrance of the
  Underworld that he descends.
• Aeneas approaches the Stygian lake that Charon
  will not ferry him across because he is not dead.
  
• The Sybil who accompanies Aeneas then produces a
  golden bough that allows Aeneas entrance into the
  Underworld.

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Relationship between Fertility Figures and Jesus
Christ

• Fertility figures such as Osiris, Adonis, and
  Dionysius are evoked by Eliot to show the
  resurrection of the godhead as an experience and
  a hope common to all of mankind.
• These various fertility myths are brought
  together and given concrete form in the
  personality of Jesus, the common, universal
  symbol of all the risen dead.

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The Tarot

• Based on similarities of the imagery and
  numbering, some associate the Tarot with ancient
  Egypt.
• The pack of cards was used to forecast the rising
  and falling of the waters of the Nile.
• Cards were used to control the sources of life.

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The Form of the Poem
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The Form of The Waste Land

• Syncopated rhythms of modern life
• Multiple meanings suggest transformation from
  fragmentation to re-integration
• Organizational networks

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Fragmentation and Re-integration

• A collection of fragments connected through a
  network of echoes, contrasts, parallels, and
  allusions
• Each fragment presented as incomplete until
  perceived in the context of the whole poem
• Fragments then coalesce into a new unity more
  meaningful than the former broken image

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Method of Fragmentation and Re-integration
Cubism

• Time reconstituted in much the same way as cubism
  reconstitutes spacea jumble of multiple layers
  on top of an occluded background presence the
  history of mankind
• Characters and situations seen from multiple
  points of view

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Method of Fragmentation and Re-integration
Collage

• The past and present the mythic and the real
  high and popular culture many different
  languages
• The real and the imagined co-exist in the poem
  erasing the boundaries between them
• The real and the imagined support one another
• The real creating a sense of authenticity
• The imagined control the significance of the real
  by interpreting them

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Method of Fragmentation and Re-integration
Surrealism

• Grotesque images remembered from a dream
• Elusive
• Eerie
• Enigmatic
• Images welded together of unrelated,
  contradictory elements
• Banal modern life/significant traditions
• Double image
• Every episode, character, and symbol transformed
  under pressure of its context into something else
• Achieved through ambiguous symbols, allusions,
  the exploitation of physical resemblances, and
  quotations to fit new applications

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Formal Networks
The Mythical Method
Alchemy
The Kaleidoscope
The Labyrinth
Film
Collage
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The Mythical Method

• Presents experience in symbolic form
• Harmonizes the mind, the body, and the way of
  life in accord with the way that nature dictates
• Links the individual to a social group
• Creates a pattern that brings human beings into
  significant relationship with mysterious forces
  outside the actualities of daily life

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The Mythical Method

• Means of perceiving inner realities through their
  reflection in concrete images
• Means of manipulating a continuous parallel
  between contemporaneity and antiquity
• Means of structuring experience, of projecting
  emotional material by definition fragmented
• Means of expressing revelation rather than
  explanation

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Alchemy

• An early protoscientific practice combining
  elements of chemistry, physics, astrology, art,
  semiotics, metallurgy, medicine, and mysticism
• Most well-known goal the transmutation of any
  metal into either gold or silver
• A metaphor for a spiritual transformation of the
  self
• Books on alchemy written to be decoded in order
  to discover their true meaning

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Labyrinth

• Still being used throughout the world as a
  meditative and healing tool to penetrate the
  chaos of life
• Suggest going on a pilgrimage to discover
  something about ourselves and God
• Implies losing ones way and having to start from
  the beginning all over again
• Blocks yet sets one on the path to eternal life

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Labyrinth

• Release of distracting cares as you move toward
  the center and let your mind gradually quiet
• Receptivity to whatever illumination you receive
  as you pause in the center for prayer or
  meditation
• Rejoining the world with your renewed vision or
  refreshed spirit as you follow the path outward
  again.

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Kaleidoscope

• The kaleidoscope is a tube of mirrors containing
  loose colored fragments.
• The viewer looks in one end and light enters the
  other end, reflecting off the mirrors.
• Typically there are two rectangular lengthways
  mirrors. Setting of the mirrors at 45 degrees
  creates eight duplicate images of the objects,
  six at 60 degrees, and four at 90 degrees.
• As the tube is rotated, the tumbling of the
  fragments presents the viewer with varying colors
  and patterns.
• Any arbitrary pattern of objects shows up as a
  beautiful symmetric pattern because of the
  reflections in the mirrors.
• A two-mirror model yields a pattern or patterns
  isolated against a solid black background, while
  a three-mirror (closed triangle) model yields a
  pattern that fills the entire field.

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Film

• Made up of images that are spliced (edited)
  together to elicit an emotional reaction from the
  viewer
• Can be used to document reality
• Captures the dynamism and chaos of the modern age

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Collage

• A work composed of bringing together two or more
  disparate realities
• A new relationship is enacted between low
  culture (mass culture) and high culture.
• This relationship is felt to be inappropriate,
  jarring, or wrongyet interestingly so.
• The end result is indecency, paradox, and enigma.
  

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Use of Collage in The Waste Land

• To juxtapose extreme contemporaneousness with
  mysticism and religious symbolism of the past
• To juxtapose multiple cultures in past/present
• To illustrate Eliots conception of the past as
  an active part of the present
• To illustrate how disparate materials drawn from
  the past may be fused into a new creation with
  validity of its own

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The Mythical Method

• For Eliot, the mythical method was the means of
  revitalizing poetry.
• According to Eliot, poetry had become in its
  present state too beholden to description,
  narrative, discussion, to reflection, to
  decoration.

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Form Modern Music and Jazz

• Imitates the jazz-like syncopation--and, like
  1920s jazz, essentially iconoclastic
• Captures the dissonance and urban rhythms of
  modern life
• Parallels The Rite of Spring which transforms
  the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the
  motor horn, the rattle of the machinery, the
  grind of the wheels, the beating of iron and
  steel, the roar of the underground railway, and
  the other barbaric cries of modern life and to
  transform these despairing noises into music

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Analysis of the Poem
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The Waste Land

• Epigraph
• Burial of the Dead
• A Game of Chess
• The Fire Sermon
• Death by Water
• What the Thunder Said

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The Epigraph The Sybil of Cumae

• Appears in Petronius Satyricon
• Eliot quotes the passage in which the narrator
  Encolpius quotes Trimalchios boast that he has
  seen her confined in a bottle and shrunken to the
  size of an insect.
• Has now become a freak show, on display for the
  amusement of drunken boys
• Had been both the guardian of a sacred cave from
  which she delivered oracles as well as the
  gatekeeper of the underworld (The Aeneid)
• Can be identified with the initiation ordeal to
  which novices were subjected in mystery cults
• Stands as the gatekeeper of this poem, suggesting
  to the reader that this too will be an initiation
  rite
• Is now shut in a cage and withers away
  indefinitely because she cannot die
• Is no longer able to see reality from the
  perspective of eternity, transcendence
• Now sees reality from a limited perspective as
  she hangs upside down
• Symbolizes death in life, like many of the
  characters in the poem

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Section I Burial of the Dead

• Places the poem in the context of timethe here
  and nowApril
• Recalls the following
• the Egyptian ritual of Osiris, a fertility ritual
  normally taking place in the spring
• Easter, the death and resurrection of Christ
• Canterbury Tales, Chaucers collection of stories
  told in the context of a pilgrimage taken in the
  spring for the purpose of the souls renewal

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Burial of the Dead Reference to Osiris

• Egyptian god of the dead as well as of rebirth
  and fertility also associated with order and
  harmony
• Murdered by his brother, his body put in a chest
  that was disposed in water and ended up entangled
  in the roots of a tree in the Lebanese port of
  Byblos that later became the pillar of a palace
• Married to his sister Isis, she tried to give him
  a proper burial after she retrieved the chest
• Taken back to Egypt, his brother hacked his body
  into 14 pieces
• His dismembered remains scattered all over Egypt,
  his sister Isis buried each of them wherever they
  were found

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Burial of the Dead

• States the problem faced by mankind through a
  series of anxious voices lost in the wilderness
  asking how to find peace/harmony
• Recreates the setting of the fallen garden, the
  wasteland, where nature has been corrupted and is
  no longer a manifestation of the divine spirit
• Introduces the fear of death
• The difficulty of rousing oneself from death in
  life
• Develops the theme of the attractiveness of death
• Establishes the parallels between the life
  sequences of plants and man
• Suggests that death is required for new life
  you die to your flesh and are born to your spirit
• Provides a template for getting back into the
  original Garden, where there is no longer any
  fear and desire, only peace

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Burial of the Dead Plurality of Points of View

• Who is the speakerprotagonist at the beginning of
  the poem?
• If it is the speech of one tormented person, it
  has the range of many personalities and voices.
• Is Maries voice spoken, overheard, remembered?
• There are no contextual clues as to identity.
• The poetic voice is constantly changing we
  cannot say with certainty where one concludes and
  another begins.
• No single voice dominates instead there is a
  polyphony of voices.
• A character appears, becomes prominent, and then
  disappears, sometimes merging with another.
• Each character being introduced in the poem
  represents an aspect of the speaker.
• What the reader is being asked to do is to
  discover the connections that link the characters
  and then combine them to create a new literary
  reality.
• The life of a soul does not consist in the
  contemplation of one consistent world but in the
  painful task of unifying jarring and incompatible
  ones, and passing, when possible, from two or
  more discordant viewpoints to a higher which
  shall somehow include and transmute them. (T.
  S. Eliot)
• By the end of the poem the many consciousnesses
  that appear will coalesce into one Jungs
  archetypes will become integrated for the
  transformation of self to take place.

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Burial of the Dead Marie

• Represents the Lost Generation who refuses to
  surrender to reality and identity (1-18)
• Symbolizes human beings expelled from the
  original Garden and cast out to wander and suffer
• Only feels free as a young girl, her innocent
  ego less self, on her sled going down the
  mountain
• Unable to see life in its unity, only as
  paradoxes
• Has lost touch with the cycles of nature and life
• Runs away from reality
• Is afraid of choices and of existing

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Burial of the Dead The Speaker/Protagonist

• Continues with the voice of the poet-prophet who
  speaks of the drought and despair of human
  existence how does one cope?
• Asks riddle-like, rhetorical questions and
  responds to them but questions and answers do
  not match
• Suggests that all the aspirations of man are but
  vanity man has no more consequence than the
  handful of dust of the earth

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Burial of the Dead Tristan Passage

• Provides an interlude from the barren landthe
  sea
• Alludes to Tristans rejection of the realm of
  day because it is full of desiresthe gulf
  between our desires and the possibility of
  achieving them leads to misery
• Embraces instead the realm of night, of oneness,
  truth, and realityonly in death can he be united
  with Isolde.
• Suggests that way for man to achieve inner peace
  is to renounce his desires and turn inwardly
• Suggests that life at its highest moments of
  meaning and intensity resembles death

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Burial of the Dead the Hyacinth Girl and the
Speaker

• Provides another interludethe garden
• Associates hyacinths with rebirth, suggesting new
  growth and fertility
• Remembers meeting the Hyacinth Girl in suspended
  animation, beyond the senses, in a mystical-like
  union in the heart of light, the silence. . .
• Alludes to the still point within, where
  stillness and movement are togethermovement in
  time but stillness in eternity
• Suggests that living in these moments of ecstasy
  is the difference between being outside or inside
  the Garden

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Burial of the Dead Madame Sosotris

• Uses the Tarot for vulgar, commercial
  fortune-telling rather than determining the
  events of highest importance, such as the rising
  of the waters of the Nile as originally intended
• Warns the narrator of death by water without
  realizing that the way into life is through death
• Has no insight into the spiritual meanings
  associated with each card, only of the literal
  day-to-day implications but transferred to other
  contexts, they become loaded with special
  meanings
• Mentions names of the cards of characters who
  appear in the poem

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Burial of the Dead Unreal City

• Occurs in the present of the poem
• Presents the modern city as a faceless,
  ghost-like crowd streaming into the financial
  districtsan allusion to Baudelaires poem in
  which ghosts converse with passers-by in the
  broad daylight
• Suggests that this river of humanity lacks a
  sense of spiritual community church bells only
  remind people to get to work on time
• Draws on the similarity between all wars through
  anachronistic reference narrator catches up with
  Stetson who was with the narrator at Mylae, a
  battle that took place off the coast of Sicily in
  260 B.C., during the First Punic (Phoenician)
  War, fought between Carthage and Rome over
  commercial rights
• Makes reference to the planted corpse to suggest
  regenerated life in the vegetable world, when a
  plant is cut another sprouts up
• Suggests that death is not death somehow, that
  deatha vegetation ritualprovides continuity and
  is required for new life
• Alludes to planting cultures, in which person who
  dies is buried and becomes the food
• Alludes to Osiris

70
Burial of the Dead Hypocrite Lecteur

• Alludes to the ghostly double of a living person,
  especially one that haunts its own fleshly
  counterpart
• Suggests the fragmentation of the self and of
  humanity although we are all brothers
• Implies that we are all connected through our
  humanity and yet we are unable to see it that way
• Suggests that the apparent separateness is but
  the effect of the way that we experience reality
  under the conditions of space and time
• Suggests that true reality is in our identity and
  unity with all life
• Suggests that this is Everyman, the human
  condition

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Section II A Game of Chess

• Continues the exploration of why these voices
  feel lost and isolated
• Explores the disconnect between men and women, no
  matter to what class they belong
• Suggests that these people cannot experience
  communion because they are trapped within
  themselves
• Focuses on women who have become victimized by
  menthe wasting of women
• Presents these debased womenwhether rich or
  poor from multiple, cubist-like points of view
  to suggest fragmentation from the self, lack of
  wholeness

72
A Game of Chess The Upper-class Woman

• Exists in a private room in a private world
• Is surrounded by ornate wallpaper, luxurious
  possessions, and exotic smells as she combs her
  hair
• Feels lonely and scared is invisible
• Is contrasted to Shakespeares Cleopatra, who is
  strong and commanding
• Is trapped within herself therefore cannot
  experience communion nor communicate with others
• Is afraid of being alone cannot sleep
• Is another version of Marie

73
A Game of Chess Philomel

• Is the symbol of innocent womanhood who has been
  violated and abandoned
• Has been raped by her brother-in-law and has had
  her tongue ripped out to silence her
• Has been transformed into a nightingale by the
  gods and been given a beautiful voice to sing
  about what has happened to her
• Made sacred after her desecration reborn out of
  her suffering
• Is misunderstood, however, by those who only hear
  meaningless babble Jug, jug to dirty ears
  

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A Game of Chess Lil

• Is absent from the pub setting
• Is the poor version of the rich woman is 31, has
  bad teeth, and has had 5 children
• Has lost her looks since she did not take care of
  herself after her husband went off to war
• Has had an abortion
• Is warned that she better take care of herself if
  she wants to keep her husband

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A Game of Chess The Speaker at the Pub

• Is a counterpoint to the poet/prophet
• Dispenses cheap advice just as Madame Sosostris
  does
• Is neither compassionate or insightful
• Is of this time and place HURRY UP PLEASE ITS
  TIME
• Is a contrast to Hamlets Ophelia, who rather
  face madness and death as the only way out of her
  misery

76
Section III The Fire Sermon

• Alludes to Buddhas explanation to the priests
  about the nature of reality all things which
  are received as impressions through the physical
  senses or through the mind are actually on fire
• Encourages Buddhas followers to give up earthly
  passionhatred, infatuation, sorrow, grief,
  despairand seek freedom from earthly things by
  asking about the nature of the fire of
  purification
• Suggests that Nirvana or union with God can only
  be achieved only when passions are overcome

77
The Fire Sermon

• Focuses on ennui, a feeling of weariness and
  dissatisfaction arising from lack of interest
  boredom
• Explores the inability to feel and the absence of
  suffering
• Examines the motif of mechanical sex without
  passion or without the knowledge of good an evil
  encounters that take place are barren
• Weaves the thematic strands presented in Sections
  I and II into a tapestry of despair and hope
• Suggests that the downward road to hell must be
  taken in order to reach purgation and paradise

78
The Fire Sermon Beginning

• Opens with the coming of winter to the river
  Thames the wasteland is cold, dry, and barren,
  covered in garbage.
• Describes the defiled, polluted rivera dull
  canal rats and garbage surround the speaker
• Focuses on a poet, the single person who is left
  in this landscape and is in a hurry to sing his
  song and leave
• Makes special reference to Psalm 137 By the
  waters of Leman, to the Diaspora or Babylonian
  Captivitythat period heralded by the prophets
  and marked by the destruction of the Temple of
  Solomon, a time of unspeakable spiritual
  desolation
• Describes, at first, the scene through a series
  of random montages that suggest the lack of
  connection between nature and human
  lifeincoherence
• Shifts to a series of transformations that
  underscores how the poet/speaker feels that
  tradition has been debased the vulgarity and
  shallowness of the modern is contrasted with the
  beauty, simplicity, and depth of the past
• Suggests that what was once meaningful and
  ritualistic is now empty and dirty
• Reveals no method of transcendence, no coherent
  perspective from which to make sense of these
  allusions

79
The Fire Sermon Tiresias

• Focuses on Tiresias, the hermaphroditic prophet,
  who is the cross between sensual stimulus
  (Aphrodite) and intellectual appeal (Hermes)
• Aims at mans intuitive, visionary insight into
  the essential connections
• Rejects sensory perceptions and desire
• Represents the merging of all of the characters
  in the poem
• Is the condensed history of manthe fall of man
• Comprehends that the only salvation is death
  because of out of death comes life
• Perceives timeless time

80
Tiresias The Speaker/Spectator

• Describes the merchant, typist, and clerk as
  minimalist fragments
• Shows how feelings and lust have departed these
  characters feel no desire, resent nothing, and
  expect nothing
• Provides a mythic perspective on contemporary
  reality
• Shows concern about what is going on

81
The Fishmens Pub

• Is the moment of clear value
• Is situated between the music of the gramophone
  and Ferdinands (The Tempest) music that calmed
  the fury of the sea and his fathers death
• Addresses the city as a place that is neither
  unreal or depressing
• Is the place of real community of men lounging at
  noon
• Creates analogy between the communion of workers
  and the community within the church (Magnus
  Martyr)
• Suggests that these men are part of a coherent
  social organism whose morality is natural and
  unconscious

82
The Song of the Three Thames Daughters

• Is a distortion of Spensers Prothalamion and
  Wagners Rhine Maidens
• Compares Elizabeths barge to present day ones
• Is both the music of the gramophone and the
  music crept by me upon the waters
• Is sung separately by each of the daughters, each
  telling her pitiful story
• Tells of the loss of their chastity as part of a
  pointless seduction
• Suggests that the maidens can not be cleansed by
  the waters of the river or the sea
• Alludes to Eliots own nervous breakdown and
  recuperation at Margate Sands I can connect
  nothing with nothing
• Eends with the trivial la la

83
St. Augustine

• Refers to his Confessions To Carthage then I
  came in which he writes about the emptiness of
  unholy love
• Suggests that salvation involves overcoming the
  lusts of the flesh
• Thanks God for having plucked him from despair
  (Oh Lord Thou pluckest me out)
• Is the ultimate grace

84
Section IV Death by Water

• Is full of word play
• Indicates the fulfillment of the fortune told in
  Section I
• Refers to Phlebas the Phoenician, the equivalent
  of the drowned sailor of the Tarot and unites in
  himself the one-eyed merchant, Mr. Eugenides, and
  Osiris
• Alludes to ancient fertility rites in which the
  effigy of the dead god was buried at sea and then
  welcomed as reborn at the end of its journey when
  carried back by the predictable current
• Suggests that Phlebas is himself a witness of his
  descent through the stages of his life into the
  whirlpool
• Links death and baptism
• Warns that we will all go through this passage

85
Section V What the Thunder Said

• Is an attempt to reconcile the diverse elements
  appearing throughout the poem with salvation and
  grace
• Christ, the gods associated with the fertility
  myths, and the Fisher King coalesce
• The Fisher King, Marie, and all of the other
  injured characters fuse
• The protagonist, Tiresias, and Christ become one
• Is an attempt to break the spell of the waste
  land through a magical incantation

86
Section V What the Thunder Said

• Derived from the parable of the Thunder, an
  Indian myth of the Upanishads (Hindu sacred
  writings), in which the godhead speaks through
  thunder to his offspring about the basis of
  spiritual and religious lifeDatta, Dayadhva,
  Damyata (give, sympathize, control)
• The three commandments of the Thunder have been
  violated in the waste land.
• Begins as an echo to lines 19-24 in Section I
• Constructed as a series the thunders echoes,
  sympathetic responses

87
Section V What the Thunder Said

• Builds to an apocalyptic climax, as suffering
  people become "hooded hordes swarming" and the
  "unreal" cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria,
  Vienna, and London are destroyed, rebuilt, and
  destroyed again
• Describes a decaying chapel, suggesting the
  chapel in the legend of the Holy Grail
• Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and the rains
  come, relieving the drought and bringing life
  back to the land.
• The cock is the symbol of rebirth in many
  cultures.

88
Eliots Explanation in his Notes

• States that the first passage of this section
  contains three themes
• The journey to Emmaus which recounts the
  resurrection
• The approach to the Chapel Perilous
• The present decay of eastern Europe

89
First Passage Biblical References

• Repeats the hallucinatory images that appear in
  Section I
• Serves as an account of the crucifixion
• Concerns the risen Christ as he accompanies two
  of his disciples to Emmaus
• suggests that the disciples failure to recognize
  the son of man stems from an inability to
  believe, and not from the impossibility of there
  being a resurrected One
• Also suggests the Fisher King, the Man with Three
  Staves, the Hanged God (The Golden Bough), the
  Hanged Man (Tarot), and the Christ all come
  together in this visionary figure
• Alludes to St. Pauls linking of death and
  baptism at the close of Section IV
• indicates an intense agony for baptism and
  salvation on the symbolic level
• Links the Christian mystery of life through death
  with the vegetation myths
• He who was loving is now dead
• He is a combination of Christ, Fisher King,
  Phlebas the Phoenician

90
Restoration of the Fisher King

• Woes of the land the result of the maiming of the
  Fisher King
• The fertility of the land bound to the potency
  and virility of the King
• Fertility of the land can only be restored
  through sacrifice

91
The Modern Archetypes of the Fisher King

• Anyone experiencing personal anxiety and moral
  sterility
• Difficulties in sexual matters
• Problems in other generative areas no longer
  productive
• Moral apathy
• All of the characters in The Waste Land are
  modern-day aspects of the Fisher King

92
The Protagonist and his Commitment

• Transforms passion into compassion
• Focuses on compassion for the wounded king
• Turns away from the gross concerns of life of the
  world to the specifically human values of
  self-giving in shared suffering

93
The Chapel Perilous The Trial

• Is an initiation, according to Jessie Weston, on
  two levels
• The Lower, into the mysteries of generation (of
  physical life)
• The Higher, into the Spiritual Divine Life, where
  man is made one with God
• Is an initiation to test a knights courage
  similar to the descent into the world of the dead
• Indicates that the knight was ready for final
  adventure, the relieving of the Fisher King and
  the subsequent breaking of the drought
• Stands in the middle of the cemetery which is
  full of horrors
• Is a metaphor for the true transformation of one
  kind of consciousness for another
• Giving up the ego sacrificing oneself for
  another

94
Restoration of the Land

• Waste land has been traversed and released from
  sterility.
• Initiation rite has been successfully endured.
• Baptism through both fire and water ensures
  rebirth.

95
The Coming of the Rain DattaGive

• Thunders question 1 What have we given?
• Protagonist answers Man cannot live locked in
  the self life calls for surrender.
• The giving has been a surrender to passion rather
  than to love
• Living calls for belief in something more than
  life.

96
The Coming of the Rain DayadhvamSympathize

• Surrendering to something outside the prison of
  the self is an attempt to transcend isolation.
• The door of the prison of the self is locked by
  pride.
• Passage echoes many of the symbols and references
  that have previously appeared in the poem.
• The key takes us back to The Game of Chess and
  the wealthy woman who feels alone.

97
The Coming of the RainDamyataControl

• Control follows sympathy.
• Control can be learned and used successfully, as
  the example of the boat responding to the expert
  hand.
• Passage ends with the emphasis of the failure to
  exercise the same kind of control in a human
  relationship.
• It suggests that following a coherent plan for
  dealing with the complexity of human
  relationships is not adequate.
• A person cannot be controlled like a boat.

98
The End of the Poem Acceptance and Renewal

• Protagonist/Fisher King finds the resolve to act
  rather than remain passive, to do more than just
  sit and fish.
• Shall I at least get my lands in order?
• He utters a series of fragments in foreign
  languages, each suggesting a plan, endurance and
  renewal.
• These fragments I have shored against my ruins
• Poem ends with the incantation Shantih shantih
  shantih
• The peace that passeth understanding is
  attainable through rebirth which can be attained
  only through death.