39 pages • 1 hour read
T. S. EliotThe Waste Land
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Water
Given Eliot’s perception of Western civilization as a barren, lifeless, and sterile cultural landscape, a blasted trackless desert world, an inferno world, the poem uses water to suggest at once both reanimation and also (ironically) death. Here, water is at best a desperate hope, at worst, an agent of destruction. The poem laments the world: “Here is no water, but only rock / Rock and no water” (Lines 331-32). In the opening section, the poet describes a world struggling to tap the healing energy of water, a world despairing over the thought of the return of spring’s healing rains. Here, however, nothing grows: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” (Lines 19-20). The poem draws on the idea that water alone might heal such a bleak landscape. In an amoral modern world too easily surrendering to the fires of lust, water promises to calm that rage and to allow spiritual growth. Water represents a desperate hope. After all, within Christian tradition, water is associated with the salvation and restoration of the Holy Water and the rite of Baptism, which promises new life.
Until the closing section, however, the poem concedes the reality of the dark warning pronounced by the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris who cautions “Fear death by water” (Line 55). Through the heart of the undead city of London curls the River Thomas, little more than a smelly, oily brown trickle. Even, the poet notes wryly, “sweat is dry” (Line 337). The character of Phlebas the Phoenician in Section Four epitomizes this threat. A burly and virile sailor, he is nevertheless drowned, immersed in an abundance of water that, ironically, kills him. It is a forbidding image: “A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers” (Lines 315-316). The slender promise the poem extends in the closing section suggests the possibility of rain coming to the waste land—rain falls and even the bristle-baked grass sings in uncertain response—but the rain appears happenstance and momentary and ultimately too meager to heal such a vast and burned-out world.
Music
The Waste Land is designed to be recited aloud. Eliot, perceiving the grand mission of the Poet is to address his civilization, crafted a poem that is essentially an aural experience. It begs to be heard, to be declaimed. It does not reward silent sustained reading. It is itself a kind of musical composition in five movements, each with its own metrics and rhythms unified by a single theme. The poem uses allusions to a wide variety of musical compositions—from raucous pub singalongs to grand choruses; from classic opera to Christian hymns, to the sentimental fluff of pop music. The poem actually incorporates the rhythms and meter of these genres of music to upend traditional assumptions about the value of regularly patterned poetry. Thus, in the first section, the poet quotes a chorus from Wagnerian opera; the second section is frequently interrupted by the heavy percussive thump of the pub’s ragtime music; the fourth section breaks into the tidy rhythmic blocks of pop music choruses, including silly nonsense lines that encourage singing along: “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala” (Lines 277-78).
In so deftly mimicking the musical forms and introducing jagged fragments of lines that echo the percussive feel of the musical forms, the poem appears to abandon coherence, to lose any sustained beat or any defining music. Shifting section to section, introducing musical echoes without consequence or reference, helps create the poem’s dark sense of contemporary cultural abandonment. Music reflects the poet’s alarm over a civilization fragmented into incoherence, lost to its traditions, and adrift in a tsunami of bits unable and uninterested in creating coherence from them. Much as the office typist in “The Fire Sermon” languidly turns on her gramophone to help forget her lover’s clumsy lovemaking, music becomes an escape—a soft and enclosing prison. Music befits not the sublime experience that once stirred and shaped civilization but is rather a mindless distraction—a pastime that momentarily excites or anesthetizes what is otherwise the ennui and boredom of modern life.
The Fisher King
In the closing stanza of the final section, the narrative hears from a lonely and broken figure standing along the side of a churning river, fishing: a solitary man who oddly wonders whether he can bring order and life to his world. He asks, “[s]hall I at least set my lands in order?” (Line 426) If a work as ambitious and purposefully fragmented as The Waste Land can be said to have a narrative center, it is this enigmatic figure who briefly appears before the poem closes and before its precipitous slide of fractured lines serve as a dark response to the fisherman’s query.
The lonesome figure of the fisherman draws on the medieval Arthurian legend of King Pellam, later irreverently dubbed the Fisher King, visited by a small retinue of the Knights of the Round Table charged to secure the Holy Grail (the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper and held to be the most sacred object in Christianity, lost for centuries). It was widly held that the return of the sacred vessel would signal a rejuvenation of the Christian world. Legend held that the ancestors of King Pellam had been entrusted long ago to keep the Grail. The Knights, however, find King Pellam and his kingdom in northeastern France in ruin. The king had been wounded in the thigh; accounts vary about how he was wounded but they agree it was a grievous sword cut that rendered him impotent. Now indifferent to his kingdom and to his charge as proprietor of the Grail, he spends long empty days idly fishing without catching anything—a distraction even as his kingdom, taking its cue from his impotence, collapses into a stark and ravaged waste land. The parallels Eliot’s vision of his contemporary world, suggesting that here in the closing section, the Fisher King is still useless, impotent, and self-absorbed and consequently, the kingdom will stay in ruins as suggested by the toxic collapse in the closing ten lines into a sonic barrage of “fragments shored against my ruins” (Line 431). The useless king, in turn, renders ironic and unworkable the poem’s closing offer of inner peace that surpasses understanding—the sublime calm able to withstand the larger world’s surrender to sterility and boredom.
Related Titles
By T. S. Eliot
