The Waste Land

Come, the narrator in the first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” intones, and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Line 30). This opening section serves as an invitation to acknowledge what is difficult and even disturbing: the morally bankrupt and spiritually enervated condition of a civilization capable of sustaining a pointless and brutal war for close to ten years, a war conducted with unprecedented savagery that left more than 20 million dead—most civilians. The four episodes, presented as evidence of this civilization’s decline into spiritual emptiness, reveal lives of the living dead—lives lost to hope, adrift in ennui, in a perilous, surreal culture-scape that is barren and cheerless, a civilization lost to its own grandeur now little more than “[a] heap of broken images, where the sun beats/And the dead trees give no shelter” (Lines 22-23). Marie, the countess, lives only in her few memories of a distant childhood, sledding in the mountains where for the briefest moment, she felt “free” (Line 17). Now she dreads the return of spring. “April,” she says, “is the cruelest month” (Line 1), preferring the uncomplicated wintery world of her spiritual paralysis and emotional indifference.

There is a fleeting image of a young girl, her long hair wet from rain, carrying hyacinths—an image of life, innocence, happiness, and natural beauty that inexplicably fades. The fortune-teller, Madame Sosostris, sees only death in the tarot cards she lays down—particularly death by water. The section closes with a dark vision that brings to life the fortune-teller’s grim vision of a city with “crowds of people, walking round in a ring” (Line 56). An unnamed narrator walks about London cloaked in a winter fog: “I had not thought death had undone so many” (Line 63). The narrator, growing increasingly alarmed, is comforted only by a specter of a dead war buddy named Stetson, whose hasty burial after a battlefield skirmish the narrator compares to a seed planted in the ground that will never bear life. He asks desperately, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year” (Line 72).

“A Game of Chess,” the second section, specifically examines the thinning of love into sex—the loss of the spiritual energy of love to the hard carnal selfishness of raw, predatory lust. A wealthy woman, anxiously brushing her luxurious hair, waits for her lover (perhaps her husband) amid opulent furnishings and elaborate decorations underscoring her emotional shallowness. She is regal and compared to queens of antiquity (such as Cleopatra) as she waits on her magnificent throne/divan. The ornate room, however, is little more than a prison, or—given the woman’s neurotic tics—a hospital room. The rich accoutrements—the paintings, the candelabras, the ornate perfume—however, all emphasize the emptiness of the love and the lack of emotional authenticity suggested by the painting on the wall of Philomel, a doomed and tragic figure from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s story, the king raped Philomel; then, to ensure her silence, he commanded her tongue be removed. The gods, disturbed by the offense, transformed Philomel into a nightingale gifted with the most plaintive and beautiful song. The section thus is like the song of that nightingale—at once rueful and sorrowful.

The section moves to the working-class world of a seedy dive in London’s East End where two coarse and drunk women discuss the plight of a friend, Lil. Her body is exhausted by the demands of a husband who keeps having sex without regard for the unwanted children it inevitably produces. In desperation, Lil was driven to take a dangerous over-the-counter prescription medication to abort what would have been her sixth baby. Now her teeth are falling out and her friends suggest Lil needs to get false teeth or her perpetually horny husband—just back from four years in the army—will inevitably seek other women. It is a disturbing vignette of tawdry love, set to the tacky ragtime music of the bar at closing time—a narrative of love lost to lust, love without emotional honesty, love defined entirely by the superficial, the physical. The section closes with an echo of Ophelia from Hamlet—“Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night” (Line 172)—a doomed woman, like Cleopatra, driven to suicide.

“The Fire Sermon” draws on the angry words of Buddha castigating his followers for their refusal to deny the coaxing temptations of the flesh in order to pursue the higher levels of intellect and spirit. Indeed, the section begins with a detailed description of a surreal post-apocalyptic London, a “brown land” (Line 175), as the narrator walks along the banks of the Thames littered with garbage and bleached bones, and alive with scurrying rats. He imagines Queen Elizabeth I on her barge on this same river, the Virgin Queen anticipating seeing her suitor—Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester—whose love because of her position as queen she ultimately denied. This is another example of sterility and failed love. Claiming to possess the visionary powers of Tiresias—a gifted oracle from Greek mythology who was burdened for seven years to be both a woman and a man and is cursed with blindness because he displeased Hera—the narrator shares the bleak story of the typist and the clerk who meet to make love in the afternoon—an assignation so devoid of emotion the woman is relieved when her lover finally leaves. “His vanity,” the narrator explains, “requires no response/ And makes a welcome of indifference” (Line 241-42). Only in the refuge of the pop music she plays on her gramophone does the woman find solace. The closing lines of the section bring together lines from the confessions of St. Augustine and his recovery from repeated lapses into carnal sinning—“O Lord Thou pluckest me out burning” (Line 309)—and from Buddha’s Fire Sermon itself to suggest how impossible it is for 20th-century humanity to transcend the tawdry pull of the flesh, its consuming and destructive fires thus uncontrollably burn.

The fourth section, “Death by Water,” is at once the poem’s shortest and its most disturbing vignette. The section, a scant ten lines, reveals the inevitable outcome of a material world that cannot transcend into the spiritual. The body of the drowned sailor pointlessly drifts along the currents in the ocean. Sea life feeds on it. Drawing on the lost character of a Phoenician—the civilization associated in antiquity with the invention of the alphabet and the first network of global communication—suggests the contemporary world’s lapse into silence. Without spiritual dimension, there can be no redemption. There is not even the premise of spiritual resurrection envisioned in both Eastern and Western religions. Death is simply and inevitably, the end.

The closing section, “What the Thunder Said,” struggles to offer some strategy for hope against the futility of such a conclusion but ultimately, can find none. The poem returns to the dry and sterile waste land of barren rock and unrelenting blasting sun: “Here is no water but only rock” (Line 331), and “mountains of rock without water” (Line 334). The section controverts Christian hope in the crucifixion/resurrection narrative, mocking the notion of Easter: “He who was living is now dead” (Line 328). Lines 360-67 recall the story in Luke:24 of two disciples just days after Christ’s death being joined by the presence of the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus. Here, however, the apparition is unreliable; its presence is more a trick of the eye. The narrator’s increasingly alarmed vision extends to the widest reach of Western civilization as he sees Jerusalem, then Athens, then Vienna, and London all reduced to a heap of “[f]alling towers” (Line 374). The poem yearns for heroic release, yearns for the Easter miracle, but instead, in a grim and surreal scene of a country chapel in ruins, rain blindly falls—"Then a damp gust / Bringing rain” (Lines 394-95). This is relief without grandeur or hope—rain promising only short-term respite; it is rain signifying nothing.

Accepting the impotency of Christianity, the narrator turns eastward, moving the narration to the banks of India’s Ganges River, sacred to Hindus. Drawing on the Upanishads, the sacred book of wisdom for the Hindu faith, the narrator understands the potential for spiritual renewal rests in the possibility of each person embracing the tenets of Hindu spirituality: Datta (Give), Dayadhvam (Sympathize), and Damyata (Control)—words whispered by the thunder in the distance. The too Western narrator, however, cannot celebrate such life-giving wisdom. In the contemporary waste land of the West, there is only selfishness, emotional indifference, and a profound existential sense of both vulnerability and alienation.

The poem ends in quiet panic: “We think of the key, each in his prison” (Line 414). The poem collapses into a final flurry of broken images and fragmentary lines—a final concession to chaos. In recalling the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, in the image of a wounded king helplessly, idly sitting on the shore at last returning to his desolate kingdom but unable to restore it to vitality—“London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down” (Line 427)—the narrator closes the poem in resignation. The poem is unable to offer solace. Genuine spiritual peace—the closing incantation of the Sanskrit word “Shantih” a word meaning inner peace that is chanted in the closing lines of the Upanishads—is for the lost and dead Western world at best elusive and at worst ironic.