T.S. Eliot reads: The Waste Land
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“The Waste Land” Introduction
T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century, as well as a modernist masterpiece. A dramatic monologue that changes speakers, locations, and times throughout, "The Waste Land" draws on a dizzying array of literary, musical, historical, and popular cultural allusions in order to present the terror, futility, and alienation of modern life in the wake of World War I.
Read the full text of “The Waste Land”
“The Waste Land” Summary
Dedicated to the poet Ezra Pound, "the better craftsman."
Section I: The Burial of the Dead
April is the most mean-spirited of all the months, with all those lilacs blooming out of the lifeless soil as a reminder of memory and love, while spring rain stirs up the painful past. Winter seemed warmer because the snow covered up the ground (and those memories), and life was like dried-up bulbs under the earth: sheltered, suppressed. Summer came all of a sudden, crossing Lake Starnbergersee in the rain. We sat in the sunny park, drinking coffee and talking. "I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a real German." When we were children, I stayed with my cousin the archduke, and he took me sledding, and I was scared. He said to me, "Marie, hold on tight," and down the hill we went. You feel a sense of freedom up there in the mountains. I read all night long, and I travel south when winter comes.
Can any roots or branches grow out of this stony, barren soil? As a human being, you cannot tell me, or even guess, because all you know are the broken symbols of modern life: a waste land where the sun is harsh and dead trees offer no shade, crickets no longer sing, and water does not run. But there is shade under this red rock (come stand in the shade under this red rock), and I will show you something other than your shadow cast behind you in the morning, or in front of you in the evening; I will show you how to fear the shadow of death. Fresh blows the wind to the homeland; my Irish child, where are you waiting? "You first expressed your love with a bouquet of hyacinths a year ago; people called me the hyacinth girl." And yet when we returned late from the garden, your arms full of flowers and your hair wet, I was speechless, I could hardly look at you, I felt empty, neither alive nor dead. I looked into your good heart and saw only silence. Desolate and empty is the sea.
Madame Sosostris, the famous fortune-teller, has a bad cold like any ordinary person, but is somehow still known as the wisest woman in Europe with her evil deck of tarot cards. "Here is your card," she said, "The drowned Phoenician Sailor, with his dead eyes like pearls, look!" She carried on, "Here is Belladonna, the beautiful and poisonous lady, the Madonna of the Rocks, that complex lady. Here is the man with three staffs, and here is the Wheel of Fortune, and here is the merchant looking sideways at us, and this blank card represents the burdens the merchant carries, which I am not allowed to see. I cannot find The Hanged Man card. You should be afraid of death by water. I see crowds of people in your future, walking aimlessly in circles. Thank you, the reading is over. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, let her know I'll come by with her horoscope myself; you can never be too careful these days."
In this unreal city, covered by the brown fog of winter mornings, a crowd of people streamed across the London Bridge. There were so many people; I did not realize just how many people were isolated, alienated, beyond reach. They sighed every now and then, and every man walked with his eyes cast down at his feet. They walked up the hill and down King William Street, to where the church bells at Saint Mary Woolnoth kept time, striking nine o'clock with a heavy sound. That's where I spotted someone I knew, and stopped him, calling out, "Stetson! You and I fought together at the battle of Mylae! That dead body you planted last year in your garden, is it growing yet? Will it bloom this year? Or did the sudden frost get to it? Keep out the dog, man's best friend, or he'll dig it right back up! You!—yes, you, hypocritical reader—my likeness, my twin—my brother!"
Section II: A Game of Chess
She sat in a chair that was like a shining throne, its glow reflected on the marble floor. A mirror, decorated with wrought-iron vines and a golden Cupid statue (and another statue who covered his eyes with one of his wings) reflected and doubled the flames of the seven-branched candelabra. The candlelight shone onto the table and caught the glitter of her jewels, which poured richly out of their satin cases. Her odd, fake perfumes were skulking around in uncorked vials made of ivory and of colorful glass. The perfumes were grease, powder, or liquid—and all of them were troubling and confusing. They overwhelmed the senses with their smells, which were stirred up by the fresh air that came in through the window, and fed the flames, whose smoke rose toward the ceiling and made the pattern look like it was moving. A huge piece of driftwood lined with copper and framed by colored stone seemed to glow green and orange, shedding sad light on a dolphin statue. Above the antique fireplace hung a painting of a forest scene depicting the transformation of Philomel, who was raped by a brutal king; but as a nightingale, she filled the desert with her unbreakable voice. Yet still she cried out, and was chased by the world, "Jug jug," a nightingale's song, which fell on deaf and ruined ears. And other old relics and their worn out stories hung on the walls; statues stared, leaned, stifling the close quarters of the room. Footsteps shuffled on the stairs. In the firelight, as she brushed her hair, the strands came to red fiery points, just like her words, which then led to savage silence.
"My anxiety is bad tonight. Yes, it is bad. Stay with me. Talk to me. Why don't you ever talk? Say something. What are you thinking about? Are you thinking? What? I never know what's going on in your head. Think."
I think we are in a broken dismal world, where men feel dead and lose their form and purpose.
"What's that sound?" It's just the wind blowing in under the door. "What's that other sound? What is the wind doing?" Nothing, again, the wind is doing nothing. "Do you know anything? Do you see anything? Do you remember anything?"
I remember the drowned man's eyes like pearls, in the tarot card. "Are you alive or not? Is there anything going on in your head?"
But oooooh, that ragtime song—it's so sophisticated, so smart! "What should I do now? What should I do? I'm going to rush outside just like this and walk the street with my hair down, like so. What should we do tomorrow? What on earth should we do?" The same thing we always do: heat the water for tea at ten, and if it rains, a car will come pick us up at four. And we will play chess, rub our eyes that cannot look away, and wait for someone to knock on the door and disturb this tired routine.
When Lil's husband got discharged from the army, I said—I spoke bluntly, saying to her myself—"HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME FOR THE PUB TO CLOSE."—"Now that Albert has come home from the war, dress yourself up. He'll want to know what you did with the money he gave you to fix your teeth. He did so give you money for your teeth, I know because I was there. Have them removed, Lil, and get a nice set of dentures; I remember, Albert said he couldn't bear to look at you like that, and neither can I," I said. "And think of your poor husband, he's been in the army four years and now he just wants to have a good time, and if you don't give it to him, others will be happy to," I said. "Oh, is that so?" she said. "Something like that," I said. "Well, if he does stray, I'll know who's to blame," she said, and gave me a pointed look. —"HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME FOR THE PUB TO CLOSE."—"If you don't like the way things are, then move on," I said. "Others will be happy to scoop him up if you don't want him. But if Albert leaves you, don't say I didn't warn you why. You should be embarrassed," I said, "to look so old and haggard." (She's only thirty-one, for goodness' sake.) "I can't help it," she said, with a sad expression, "it's because of the pills I took for the abortion." (She has five kids already, and nearly died giving birth to baby George.) "The pharmacist said it would be all right, but I haven't been the same since." "You are a true fool," I said. "Well, if Albert won't stop sleeping with you, that's that," I said. "What did you get married for if you don't want children?"—"HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME FOR THE PUB TO CLOSE."—Well, that Sunday Albert came home, they had a hot ham, and they asked me over for dinner, to enjoy that rare hot meal—"HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME FOR THE PUB TO CLOSE. HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME FOR THE PUB TO CLOSE."—"Good night Bill. Good night Lou. Good night May. Good night. Ta ta. Good night. Good night. Good night, ladies, good night, lovely ladies, good night, good night."
Section III: The Fire Sermon
The trees over the river are dormant: the last of their leaves cling and sink into the wet bank. The wind crosses the barren land without anyone around to hear it. The nymphs are all gone. Sweet river Thames, flow softly, until I my poem is over. There are no empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette butts and other trash floating along the river, all that evidence of people hanging out there on summer nights. The nymphs are all gone. And they have been replaced by so-called elites, who pollute the river anyway; they're gone now too, though, and they left no way to contact them. By the waters of Lake Leman I sat down and cried... Sweet Thames, flow softly until my poem is over. Sweet Thames, flow softly, because I only have a few short, quiet things to say. But behind me, in a strong cold wind, I hear the deathly rattle of bones, and a cold laugh that spreads from ear to ear.
A rat gently crawled through the grasses, dragging its slimy belly on the riverbank, as I was fishing in the polluted canal on a winter evening behind the slums, thinking about the shipwreck of my brother, the king, and about the death of my father, the king before that. I was thinking about their pale corpses lying naked on the low damp ground and their bones left in a little low dry attic, disturbed only by rats, year after year. But behind me from time to time I hear the sound of horns and motors of cars, which will bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. Oh, the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter, and on her daughter. They wash their feet in soda water. And, oh, those children's voices, singing in the dome!
Tweet tweet tweet, chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp, chirp, she was raped,by Tereus, whose name sounds like birdsong.
In this unreal city, covered by the brown fog of a winter afternoon, Mr. Eugenides, the unshaven merchant from Smyrna, with a pocket full of currants paid for the cost, insurance, and freight to London: documents at the ready. He asked me in colloquial French to lunch at the Cannon Street Hotel, and then invited me to spend the weekend together at the Metropole Hotel.
At dusk, when the body finally gets up from the desk, when the modern human waits, like a taxi waits, humming like an engine, I, Tiresias, though blind, caught between two genders, an elderly man with wrinkled female breasts, can see at dusk, the evening hour that leads toward home, and brings the sailor home from sea, the typist, who comes home in the afternoon at teatime, washes her breakfast dishes, lights her stove, and lays out canned food. Hanging on a laundry line out the window, her drying undergarments receive the last of the sun's rays. On the sofa (which serves as her bed at night) are piled stockings, slippers, slips, and corsets. I Tiresias, the old man with wrinkled breasts, saw the scene, and predicted the rest—I too was waiting for the expected guest. He, the young man with acne, arrives. He is a small-time clerk, with a bold stare, one of the low-born who wears confidence like a Bradford millionaire wears a silk hat. The time is advantageous, he guesses: the meal is over, and she has nothing else to do. He attempts to get her in the mood, which she does not resist, though she does not desire it. Flushed and determined, he makes his move; his wandering hands receive no resistance; he is so vain he does not care that she does not respond to his advances with enthusiasm, and even welcomes her indifference. (And I Tiresias have already suffered all the ills that took place on this same sofabed; I who have sat by the city of Thebes below the walls and walked among the worst of the dead.) The young man gives her one last condescending kiss, and fumbles his way out, onto the darkened stairs...
She turns and looks for a moment in the mirror, hardly aware of her departed lover; her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: "Well, now that's done, and I'm glad it's over." A lovely woman who has lowered herself to do a foolish thing, and now can only pace around her room alone, she smooths her hair with a robotic hand, and puts a record on the gramophone.
"This music crept by me upon the waters" and along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. Oh City, city, I can sometimes hear, when I am near a pub on Lower Thames Street, the pleasant sounds of a mandoline, and the busyness and chatter from inside, where fishermen hang out at noon. Down where the walls of the church St. Magnus Martyr preserve the unexplainable splendor of ancient Roman white and gold columns.
The river exudes oil and tar, the barges drift down the water with the changing tide, their red sails open wide, downwind, swinging on the heavy masts. The barges wash away down the river like drifting logs, down past Greenwich, reaching past the Isle of Dogs. Weialala leia... Wallala leialala...
Queen Elizabeth I and her lover Robert Leicester: the beating oars of their boat, whose stern was a gilded shell of red and gold. The same swift waters rippled the shore in their time and ours, a southwest wind carrying the peal of bells from the white towers downstream. Weialala leia... Wallala leialala...
"Trolleys and dusty trees. I was born in Highbury. I was ruined in Richmond and Kew. In Richmond, I lost my virginity, laid out on the floor of a narrow canoe."
"My feet pointed pointed toward Moorgate, and I was on my back, my heart below my feet. After we had sex, he wept. He promised a 'new start.' I said nothing. What do I have to resent?"
"At Margate Sands. I can't make connections between anything. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people are humble people who expect nothing." La la
To the ancient city of Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning, O Lord do away with me, O Lord do away
burning
Section IV: Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenician, who's been dead these last two weeks, has forgotten the cry of the seagulls, and the waves of the sea, and the profit and loss of his shipping business. A current under the sea picks at his bones bit by bit. As he rose and fell with the waves he saw his life pass before his eyes and entered the stormy whirlpool. No matter who you are, Gentile or Jew, oh, you who navigate your own life and look to the future, remember Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
V. What the Thunder Said
After the torchlight shone red on sweaty faces, after the gardens went cold and lifeless, after the agony in rocky places, after the shouting and the crying, in the prison and the palace alike, after the echoes of spring thunder over distant mountains, he who was alive is now dead. We who were alive are now dying, slowly.
There is no water here, only rock; only rock, no water, and the sandy road; the road winding up through the mountains, which are mountains made of rocks with no water. If there were water we would stop and drink. Among the rocks one cannot stop or think. Our sweat has gone dry and our feet are in the sand. If there were only water among the rocks. This is a dead mountain, like a mouth with decaying teeth that can no longer spit. This is a place where people cannot stand, lie down, nor sit. There isn't even silence in the mountains, only dry barren thunder that does not bring rain. You're not even alone in the mountains; instead, red pouting faces sneer and snarl from the doorways of their dry mud houses. If there was water and no rock, if there was rock and also water, and water, a spring, a pool among the rocks, if there were only the sound of water, not the cicadas' hum and dry grass blowing, but the sound of water running over a rock, where the hermit-bird sings in the pine trees, drip drop drip drop drop drop drop... but again there isn't any water.
Who is the third person always walking next to you? When I count, there is just you and me, side by side, but when I look ahead up the white road, there is always someone walking next to you. Gliding, wrapped in a brown cloak and hood. I do not know whether they are a man or a woman—but who is that, next to you?
What is that high-pitched sound in the air, motherly wails? Who are those hooded masses swarming over endless plains, stumbling over the cracked ground, surrounded only by the endless horizon? What is the city on the other side of the mountains? There are cracks and repairs and explosions in the dusk. Towers are falling. Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London. All of them are unreal.
A woman pulled her long black hair tight and played ominous music like a fiddle on those strings. Bats with the faces of babies whistled at dusk, beat their wings, and crawled heads-downward down a burnt wall. And upside down in the air hung towers, ringing familiar bells that kept the time. And voices sang out of empty reservoirs and dry wells.
In this decrepit hole, in the middle of the mountains, in the weak moonlight, the wind whistles through the grass, past fallen graves, around the chapel. There is the chapel, home only to the wind. It has no windows, and the door swings open and shut. Old bones can't hurt anyone. Only a rooster stood on the roof, saying cock-a-doodle-doo. There's a flash of lightning. Then, a damp gust, bringing rain.
The Ganges River was dry, and limp leaves waited for rain, while storm clouds gathered distantly over the snowy Himalayas. The jungle waited expectantly in silence. Then spoke the thunder: BOOM, or DA, like Datta, to give: what have we done? My friend, my heartbeat pounded with the awful bravery required to surrender to a moment of lust, which even our era of cautiousness cannot take back. These lustful acts, and these only, mark our existence, though they won't be found in our obituaries, or in memories cobwebbed with generosity, or in our wills unsealed by our lawyers. In our empty rooms: BOOM, or DA, like Dayadhvam, sympathize: I have heard the key turning in the lock, just once. We think of the key, each of us in prisons of our own making. As we think of the key, each of our prisons of the self are affirmed. Only at nightfall, vague rumors give momentary life to the broken man locked within himself. BOOM, or DA, like Damyata, control: the boat responded happily under expert hands. The water was quiet; your heart would also have responded happily, obediently, when invited by controlling hands.
I sat upon the shore fishing, with the barren plain behind me. Should I at least restore order to my kindgom? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down. He hid himself in the fire which refines him. When shall I be like the swallow?—Oh, swallow, swallow. The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower. These fragments, I have used as support against the ruins of my life. Why then I will accommodate you. Hieronymo's crazy again. Give. Sympathize. Control. Peace, peace, peace.
“The Waste Land” Themes
Theme The Brokenness and Isolation of Modern Life
The Brokenness and Isolation of Modern Life
“The Waste Land” can be thought of as a poem about the alienation and brokenness of modern life. Written shortly after World War I, the poem reflects the generational trauma caused by the war, both on the battlefield and the home front. The “waste land” the poem portrays represents modern society itself, which Eliot depicts as shallow and isolating, lacking both the spiritual guidance and the cultural abundance of the past.
Though the people of “The Waste Land” are simply going about their ordinary lives, their inability to connect or communicate is indicative of the broken society in which they all live. In the poem’s first section, for instance, a crowd of people stream across London Bridge like zombies, suggesting the alienating and deadening effects of the modern world. When the speaker sees a fellow former soldier in the crowd ("Stetson") and calls out to him, the man's reply (if there is one) goes unmentioned. The speaker and Stetson both represent the disillusioned survivors of World War I, and are unable to communicate except in reference to their shared, traumatic past.
Likewise, in this disconnected modern world, intimacy and love have been reduced to mere physicality. In the poem's third section, "The Fire Sermon," a typist tidies her apartment before the arrival of her lover, but their sex scene is anything but romantic. It stops short of rape, but the woman clearly dislikes the man; once he leaves, she is glad he is gone. This scene again illustrates the poem’s broader point that modern life alienates people from one another.
This is further emphasized by the stanza that follows, in which Eliot substitutes his own words in the place of lyrics from a well-known opera, a juxtaposition that feels empty and shallow. Modern life, the poem suggests, lacks culture and class, and this descent into vulgarity is part of what drives people apart.
Importantly, the inability to communicate or connect is true at all levels of society. In Section II, a wealthy anxious woman pleads with the speaker to talk to her, but the speaker does not reply. Instead, he thinks unhappily to himself about their mundane everyday routine, which does not bring him comfort. This suggests that the surface-level niceties of modern life—the daily routine of “hot water at ten / and if it rains, a closed car at four”—offer no real relief from its underlying despair and sense of isolation.
Likewise, two working-class women chatting in a pub at the end of Section II are also dealing with despair and isolation. A woman named Lil’s husband is back from the war, and the other woman lectures Lil about fixing her teeth in order to appeal to him. Lil, however, needed the money for an abortion. Here, the poem captures two different kinds of modern brokenness. The direct discussion of abortion suggests that social norms have lost spiritual grounding, but the poem also depicts Lil’s friend, the speaker, as terribly unkind, again implying that a broken society prevents genuine human connection.
In the poem’s final section, however, Eliot pivots away from scenes of everyday life. Instead, he uses imagery and metaphor to portray the modern world as a literal waste land: a rocky barren place without water or sustenance, where even connecting with God is a struggle. This, the poem suggests, is the ultimate alienation from which all modern people suffer, and the source of modern life’s brokenness.
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Theme Death and Rebirth
Death and Rebirth
Death is everywhere in the “The Waste Land,” both literally and metaphorically. Corpses litter the poem, while endings of all sorts represent death of a different kind throughout. Even the people of the poem resemble the walking dead, living lonely, unhappy lives. Nevertheless, though the majority of “The Waste Land” is preoccupied with death—something it presents as inevitable and inescapable—the poem is not entirely without hope. Indeed, the poem ultimately suggests that death, however devastating, is a necessary stage on the way to rebirth and renewal. Only from the wreckage of a waste land is a new beginning made possible.
One could fill many pages chronicling and making sense of all the things that die or come to an end in this poem. To name just a few: a woman Marie mourns the end of her childhood, the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris issues warnings about death by water, a corpse “planted last year in your garden / has … begun to sprout,” marriages and romances fail, women discuss abortion, girls lose their virginity, nymphs have “departed” from the Thames, landscapes are ravaged by drought, a pub reaches closing time, and a sailor literally drowns. Even the poem’s allusions are primarily associated with death, such as the repeated references to Dante’s Divine Comedy (which involves a journey through Hell).
Altogether, this barrage of endings in the poem suggests that the experience of death is universal (especially because the poem suggests that death need not be understood literally; the end of a romance, for example, feels like death).
The universality of this experience is made most explicit in Section IV, the poem’s shortest section, titled "Death by Water." Its brevity draws attention to the poem’s central message: that the fate of Phlebas, the drowned sailor “who was once handsome and tall as you” awaits everyone. This is certainly true in the literal sense, since all people die, but is also true metaphorically, because life is full of endings, as seen throughout the poem.
However, the poem also suggests that each of these deaths and endings is a necessary pit-stop on the road to rebirth. This idea is first hinted at through multiple allusions to the Greek myth of the rape of Philomela. After being brutalized by a king, who cuts out her tongue, Philomela nevertheless keeps singing, because she transforms into a nightingale. This transformation out of desperate circumstances into new life indicates that rebirth is possible, but only after experiencing a brutal end of some kind.
Fittingly, the poem itself undergoes a journey similar to Philomela’s. Though the first four sections are consumed by death and endings, the final section looks toward rebirth. It opens in an agonizing, apocalyptic landscape, before “a damp gust” brings rain and the speaker’s tone shifts. The speaker proceeds to talk about Eastern spiritual philosophies and describes the “arid plain”—infertile land standing in for death—as “behind” him. Now, he can “set [his] lands in order,” a kind of renewal or restoration. This closing section, complex and rich with allusions, ultimately affirms the possibility of rebirth—but only, the poem suggests, after surrendering to the inevitability of death in all forms.
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Theme Religion, Spirituality, and Nihilism
Religion, Spirituality, and Nihilism
“The Waste Land” is a poem so rich with allusions to other works and ideas that Eliot himself included footnotes to help his readers understand them all. In particular, allusions to religion and spirituality play a vital role in the poem, as do depictions of nihilism (which, simply put, is the rejection of religious or moral principles, or the belief that life is meaningless). Throughout the poem, Eliot draws on both Western and Eastern religious traditions, particularly Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Ultimately, the poem suggests that a spiritual crisis is in part responsible for people’s isolation and despair in modern society. Thus, resolving that spiritual crisis—finding faith—could help restore modern civilization.
The poem's presents modern society as of a world without the spiritual guidance that the speaker thinks is essential for a moral life. Life without faith, the poem suggests, is a life of meaningless drudgery—with nothing but "The hot water at ten / And if it rains, a closed car at four." This spiritual crisis is what has led to the modern waste land, to a “burial of the dead” (as the first section is titled) among people who are in fact still living.
The speaker himself is part of this wretched population. This remains the trend throughout the poem, even as the speaker’s identity shifts and changes. Whether seeking advice from a fortune-teller, despairing over modern life, witnessing lust and vulgarity, or drowning at sea, the speaker remains distant from spiritual touchstones—from places like a chapel, a Hindu mantra, fertile soil, the nymphs of the Thames, a burial service—that might offer some relief.
Adding to this sense of distance and disconnect are Eliot’s constant allusions to religious and spiritual writings and ideas. Paradoxically, the poem uses these allusions in order to paint its picture of a deeply nihilistic world—a world without meaning. The juxtaposition of speakers who know enough to reference faith traditions, but not how to practice them and improve their lives, helps to hammer home the impact of the absence of faith on modern life.
Though the poem spares no detail in its depiction of nihilism, it also presents the possibility of redemption. To do so, Eliot alludes heavily to Buddhist and Hindu traditions, especially those that emphasize self-control, sacrifice, and compassion for others. The poem links these philosophies with the possibility of renewal (and rain) amidst the blighted waste land. In particular, the closing section expounds on the mantra “Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyatta.” Each word is linked with metaphorical glimpses of what finding faith might feel like, from turning a key in the lock of spiritual imprisonment to sailing on a calm sea.
Similarly, the poem returns several times to the allegory of the Fisher King, comparing the journey from nihilism to redemption to the Christian tradition of an impotent Fisher King made powerful again through the Holy Grail—the blood of Christ.
Ultimately, by referring to multiple spiritual traditions throughout the poem, Eliot makes clear that it does not matter which faith a person or society follows. Instead, the poem suggests that any spiritual tradition is better than the nihilism that dominates modern life. Only then can people and society reach “Shantih”—the poem’s final word, which Eliot translated in his own footnote as “the peace which passeth understanding.”
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Theme Sex, Lust, and Impotence
Sex, Lust, and Impotence
Sex in “The Waste Land” is a dirty, sinful affair that serves as a marker for the decay of modern society. The poem presents lust and casual attitudes towards sex as a mark of moral depravity. In modern times, the poem implies, genuine love and connection are almost impossible to find; sex has thus become immoral and impotent—leading to waste, emptiness, and decay. Even the "thunder" that echoes over the wasteland is "sterile," unable to bring the water that would nourish the land and create the environment necessary for new life to grow.
The poem further links sex and lust with the legend of the Fisher King, the final guardian of the Holy Grail (a vessel that contains drops of Christ’s blood). There are many stories of the Fisher King, but all describe a king who lies mortally wounded in his thigh or groin—with the implication being that he can't fulfill his duty to father more children and continue his line, until a knight completes the quest to find the Holy Grail and heals the king. Tellingly, while the king’s body wastes away, so does his land; this is, in fact, where the poem's title "The Waste Land" comes from! Finding the Grail is thus necessary to revive not just the king but also the kingdom.
Importantly, though now linked with Christianity, the legend’s roots are in pagan traditions associated with fertility. In this way, Eliot’s allusions to the Fisher King tie into the poem’s broader ideas about sex, love, and power. The modern world is barren, wasting away just like the Fisher King’s kingdom. The many speakers, including one who literally sits fishing by the polluted Thames river, all experience powerlessness, or impotence, just like the mythical king experienced.
And, the poem argues, one of the metaphorical wounds responsible for this impotence and resulting waste land is the lack of romantic love and meaningful connection. The weight of lost love, failed romance, and unhappy marriage hangs over the poem, evoking the barrenness of the Fisher King’s kingdom. For example, in the second section, especially, allusions to doomed women like Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who drowns herself when she loses Hamlet’s affections, or Cleopatra, who commits suicide after her lover Antony is killed, convey the sheer hopelessness of any attempts at romance.
Thus deprived of love, people have seemingly turned to lust, which the poem portrays as immoral and fruitless. This is particularly clear in Section III, "The Fire Sermon"—ironically named after a speech from the Buddha about the importance of freeing oneself from earthly desires, which is exactly the opposite of what happens in this section of the poem. In particular, the scene between a typist and her lover conveys the poem’s disgust with meaningless sex. It's relayed to readers through the spying eyes of Tiresias, a blind prophet from Greek myth. The many layers of ugliness (including Tiresias’s “wrinkled dugs,” or breasts; the young man “carbuncular” with acne; and the sex itself, which is “undesired” but happens anyway) emphasize the poem’s portrayal of lustful sex as something dirty and repugnant, a clear sign of moral decay.
In keeping with the mythos of the Fisher King and Holy Grail, however, the poem also points towards the possibility of a healed waste land, as symbolized by restored romantic intimacy and fertility. For starters, in Section V, the rain returns—a symbol of fertile land. Also, this section explores a series of images that reflect stages of lust, loneliness, and love, and ultimately end on a heart responding "gaily" to the confines of marriage.
Most tellingly, the poem closes with the speaker “upon the shore / Fishing” and considering “set[ting his] lands in order.” This clear reference to the Fisher King suggests that the impotence that the speaker has felt throughout the poem in the face of the waste land has been cured. As a result, restoration of the waste land is possible.
See where this theme is active in the poem.
Memory and the Past
“The Waste Land” is full of historical references. Some of these allude to real and significant historical events or figures, while others are merely personal memories tied to different speakers and characters in the poem. In many ways, the poem is an elegy for the past, mourning the decline of culture and society. But even as it mourns forgotten history, the poem itself helps to keep those memories alive by piling a dizzying number of historical allusions on top of each other. In doing so, the poem ultimately suggests that the present is simply a continuation of that past.
The poem opens with a woman, Marie, reflecting on her childhood nostalgically and with a tinge of sadness. This sets the tone for the poem’s treatment of the past as something both out of reach and impossible to forget. As the poem continues and the speakers begin to shift and change, so too do the references to the past. Eventually, past and present simply blur together. For instance, in line 70, the speaker refers to World War I by calling it “Mylae,” a battle from an ancient Roman war. This blurring speaks to the universality of war across time and place, past and present.
Similar blurring of time occurs again and again throughout the poem. The Renaissance poet, Dante, is alluded to at the modern London Bridge; the implication is that his canonical work on the many circles of hell continue to apply to the zombie-like people of present-day London. In line 197, “The sound of horns and motors” replace a "winged chariot” in an allusive line directly pulled from a seventeenth-century Marvell poem. The words of ancient St. Augustine—“To Carthage then I came”—ring through a modern subway station. And of course the ancient Greek figure of Tiresias appears amidst modern life, peeping in on moral decay.
What to make of these substitutions and allusions? The poem appears to be arguing that the past is never past—that the more things change, the more they stay the same. “The Waste Land” is certainly a response to and indictment of the unprecedented horrors of World War I. However, by consistently riffing on the past in order to talk about the present, the poem also argues that such horror has always been a part of human history.
The poem itself goes a long way toward remedying the very problem it identifies. By drawing on a rich variety of historical and literary references, the poem demands that readers become familiar with the histories that help make the poem make sense, and therefore keep alive the memories that the poem has already begun to mourn, but refuses to forget.
See where this theme is active in the poem.
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Waste Land”
Before Line 1, Lines 1-7
FOR EZRA POUND
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
The poem begins with a dedication to the poet Ezra Pound, whom Eliot deems here "the better craftsman." This praise is actually an allusion to Dante's Divine Comedy, the famous 14th-century poem about the poet's epic journey through purgatory, hell, and paradise. In this earlier poem, Dante refers to the poet Arnault Daniel, whom he meets in Hell, using the same compliment. Pound helped edit "The Waste Land," so on one level this is simply an expression of gratitude on Eliot's part. However, it also places the poem within an epic context, suggesting it, too, may be a story of heaven, hell, and humanity itself. The first section is then ominously titled "The Burial of the Dead," which suggests the dark tale to come.
Finally, readers get to the actual first line of the poem. The opening of "The Waste Land" is one of the most well-known lines in poetry, and for good reason. An unknown speaker begins by making an unusual assertion: "April is the cruellest month."
Given that April is usually associated with the return of spring, this assertion is startling, but the speaker goes on to explain why it feels that way. The lilacs are blooming out of the "dead land"—the lifeless winter soil—"mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain." This language can all be read metaphorically. In other words, the return of spring has brought back painful memories for the speaker, including memories that have to do with "desire," or love. Though spring is usually a welcome event, in the speaker's case, these "dull roots" might have been better left untouched by the change in seasons. That is, the speaker wishes those memories and feelings could remain distant and dull, buried beneath the ground.
That's why, in the next line, the speaker wishes it were still winter, when the land was covered in "forgetful snow," which kept all this pain at bay (metaphorically keeping the speaker "warm" in a blanket of denial and ignorance). Winter may have meant living "a little life with dried tubers"—in other words, settling for emotions gone cold and numb like a plant bulb beneath the soil in winter—but that still felt "warm" compared to the cruelty of spring, when the speaker must confront no longer dormant "memory and desire." The alliteration of "winter" and "warm" reflects the connection between these concepts in the speaker's mind.
This section is overflowing with alliteration and consonance, in fact. Notice the intensity of /l/, /m/, /d/, /f/, /k/, /s/, /r/, /t/, /p/, and /ng/ sounds:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
The sounds of the poem are inescapable and overwhelming, perhaps reflecting the intense blossoming of life (and memory/desire) that accompanies the spring. In the absence of meter or rhyme (the poem is written in free verse), these shared sounds add a sense of lyricism and continuity to the poem.
At the same time, the poem's use of enjambment in nearly every line makes things seem decidedly off-kilter. Each line, apart from lines 4 and 7, ends on an incomplete thought, urging readers on to the next in order to fully understand what's going on. This captures the unsettled mindset of the speaker, so that the very form of the poem mirrors what the speaker has to say. It also establishes one of the poem's primary concerns: that the traditional forms of art that were celebrated in the past are no longer meaningful in the modern age.
Indeed, these lines introduce a number of the poem's major themes. The brokenness and alienation of modern life are central to "The Waste Land," and are introduced here via the speaker's numbness and resistance to revisiting memories of a better time. The metaphors of spring and winter hint at the poem's ideas surrounding death (symbolized by winter) and rebirth (symbolized by spring); the section title here of course mentions death directly. The mention of "desire" introduces the undercurrent of sex, love, lust, and impotence that flows throughout the poem. And, of course, the mention of "memory" explicitly invokes the past, and lays the foundation for the poem's mournful treatment of memory and the past.
Lines 8-18
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
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Lines 19-30
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
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. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Lines 31-42
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—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.
Oed’ und leer das Meer
.
Lines 43-59
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Lines 60-76
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
Between Lines 76-77, Lines 77-96
II. A Game of Chess
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.
Lines 97-105
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls;
Lines 104-116
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
Lines 117-139
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
“Nothing?”
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
“What shall we ever do?”
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
Lines 140-173
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.
You
are
a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
Between Lines 173-174, Lines 174-187
III. The Fire Sermon
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
Lines 188-203
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Lines 204-215
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
Lines 216-231
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
Lines 232-257
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
Lines 258-266
“This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
Lines 267-292
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Lines 293-312
“Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
“On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
Between Lines 312-313, Lines 313-322
IV. Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Between Lines 322-323, Lines 323-331
V. What the Thunder Said
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Lines 332-360
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
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 snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Lines 361-367
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
Lines 368-386
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
Lines 387-396
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Lines 397-424
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta:
what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata:
The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
Lines 425-435
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon
—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
“The Waste Land” Symbols
Symbol Water
Water
Water is a consistent and recurrent symbol throughout "The Waste Land." The waste land suffers from lack of water, and water promises new life and rebirth. Water can douse the fires of lust and earthly passions, which the poem implies are a big factor in the moral depravity of modern life. At the same time, Madame Sosostris and the drowned sailor also serve as warnings about the dangers of water. All in all, water seems to represent the spiritual nourishment that the modern world so sorely needs, as well as purification and renewal—things the poem implies can be painful, and can come at a cost.
Let's break down the different kinds of watery symbolism that appears in the poem. First, there's rain, which is linked to both fertility and pain:
"Spring rain" brings new life to the landscape but also results in the unwanted return of memory and desire. So bad is modern life that April showers bring about only more drudgery and pain, the poem suggests, as they stir up repressed feelings that the speaker would rather keep buried and "dried." Perhaps the speaker does not yet want to face the dull reality of modern life.
Marie's childhood memories are likewise sprinkled with "a shower of rain," and in lines 37-40 the speaker remembers a lost love with her arms full of flowers and wet hair—but these are fleeting recollections of a time that has passed. The potential for new life—for genuine love and coupling—is gone in the modern waste land.
Madame Sosostris's tarot card reading then complicates water's symbolism, suggesting that too much water is also dangerous:
She links the speaker to "the drowned Phoenician sailor," comparing his dead eyes to pearls from the bottom of the sea, and then instructs the speaker to "Fear death by water." Clearly, water also has ominous, threatening potential, which resurfaces in Section IV, "Death By Water."
Here, the drowned sailor, now given a name, Phlebas, is meant to remind readers that everyone is subject to death—yes, even those "handsome and tall as you."
Water is thus presented as something more powerful than human beings, and which doesn't care about "the profit and loss"—about anyone's financial success—nor about whether they are "Gentile or Jew."
Then again, "death by water" can also mean death by lack of water—which is clearly what's happening in the present-day waste land:
This is a place marked by drought and despair, where "the dry stone [offers] no sound of water." Nothing can grow or flourish in the waste land, except for death.
Fittingly, this section lingers long over the absence of water, evoking the speaker's desperation in the face of such drought: "Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water ... there is no water." The lack of water implies a lack of vitality, faith, and morality.
The River Thames also plays a key role as a watery symbol:
Remember that the poem loosely follows the legend of the Fisher King, whose own impotence results in the barrenness of his land. The Thames in the poem is also marked by barrenness and ruin, and takes on the same significance as the Fisher King's kingdom.
For starters, the river is described as a literal waste land, a land full of trash: "the nymphs are departed," rats have overrun the riverbanks, and the trees that overhang the river have all lost their leaves. When privileged, frivolous elites— "the loitering heirs of city directors"—hang out there in the summer, they leave a bunch of waste behind—"empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs," and so on. Water represents the potential for spiritual nourishment, yet there it has been polluted and tarnished by modern immorality. People have stomped all over their symbolic chance for redemption.
As he sits by the Thames, the speaker describes himself as weeping "by the waters of Leman," in an echo of the Biblical moment when the exiled Hebrews sit beside the waters of Babylon and weep for their lost homeland, making an implicit connection between the Thames and the speaker's sense of loss and impotence.
While he lingers there, "fishing in the dull canal," the speaker also muses over the "wreck" of his brother and his father's death, again recalling death by drowning (a shipwreck) and the metaphorical wreck of the Fisher King whose wound (or death) lays waste to his kingdom. All these references to shipwrecks (and allusions to Shakespeare's The Tempest, a play about a shipwreck) reiterate water's immense power over human life.
Later, towards the end of Section III, the speaker returns to the Thames, which continues to symbolize the essence of this modern waste land: a place once visited by powerful, historical (though lovelorn) figures like Elizabeth and Leicester, but now the site of meaningless, vulgar sex among low-born people, "supine on the floor of a narrow canoe."
Clearly, water accrues multiple meanings over the course of the poem, each new appearance adding another layer to the symbol. The poem's ending helps consolidate these many meanings, by introducing another suffering river:
In line 396, the Ganges is described as "sunken," with "limp leaves" waiting for rain just like the barren trees by the Thames. But "then spoke the thunder" and a "damp gust bringing rain" moves down from the mountains and over the waste land.
Here, the poem weaves in a Hindu mantra, comparing it to the sound of the storm's thunder and evoking rebirth as rain restores the river and the landscape. This suggests that the absence of water should be understood not only in the literal sense of drought, but also as a spiritual drought or absence.
The return of the rain also marks the return of spirituality—which lines up with the legend of the Fisher King as well, when the Holy Grail, a cup that contains Christ's blood, is used to cure the impotent king. (The Holy Grail is also associated with Cups, the water-element suit in the Tarot, hearkening back to Madame Sosostris.) In both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, then, water symbolizes renewal.
Fittingly, the poem's final stanza finds the speaker back on the riverbank, presumably of the Thames, where he last "sat upon the shore / Fishing." But now, the waste land is behind him, and he wonders, "Shall I at least set my lands in order?" Like the Fisher King, the speaker has been restored by the rain's return, which means he can now look to the restoration of his land—the watery River Thames. London Bridge, which earlier represented isolation and alienation, is "falling down"; and the speaker, at last, finds "shantih," or peace.
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Symbol Fire
Fire
Fire is another symbol in "The Waste Land" that holds multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings. Fire in the poem comes to represents dangerous lust and the torment of earthly desires, but also purification. Fire is most strongly represented in Section III, aptly titled "The Fire Sermon":
This is named after a sermon the Buddha gave preaching against the fires of lust and other passions that destroy people and prevent their rebirth or renewal. Ironically, the section lingers on such "fires" in order to convey the hellish experience of living in the broken modern world. Its main scene involves a typist and her lover having meaningless sex that borders on rape, all of which is witnessed by a prophet of Greek myth who spies on them like a peeping tom.
The section ends with an allusion to St. Augustine's Confessions: "To Carthage then I came" which in the original source continues, "where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears." These unholy loves, depicted throughout the section, leave the speaker "Burning burning burning burning" and begging the Lord to "pluckest [him] out," or end his life. His sins, and those of the grotesque modern world around him, are clearly tormenting him.
This torment is exacerbated in Section V, where "torchlight red on sweaty faces" evokes the fires of hell.
Fire expands as a symbol in this section, encompassing not just literal flames but all kinds of heat and agony. The horrific drought in the mountains suggests heat and burning; it causes "red sullen faces [to] sneer and snarl" in agony and results in "dry grass" and "cracked earth."
Lines 373-377 evokes the apocalypse, with all its "cracks and reforms and bursts," suggesting the burning agonies of explosive fire striking a number of fallen cities.
Fire also appears in Section II, where it does not yet represent pure hellfire. Candles light the room of a wealthy, anxious woman who frustrates the speaker with her neediness.
Her hair "spread[s] out in fiery points" as she brushes it in the firelight, and her words alternate between "glowing" and being "savagely still," both of which add to the fire's brutal and painful symbolism.
Clearly their relationship is broken beyond repair, and the "candle-flames [flinging] their smoke into the laqueria" and reflecting the room's ominous opulence only add to the claustrophobia of the scene, and the sense that their marriage or romance is like a burning house, falling apart while they are still trapped inside.
But at the very end of the poem, fire takes on a new meaning.
Quoting from Dante's Purgatorio in the original Italian, line 428 translates to "He hid himself in the fire which refines them."
In other words, fire burns, but in that burning, contains the possibility of purification. Like a wildfire that razes a forest but leaves behind the room and rich ash needed for new growth, the fires of hell also contain the potential for rebirth and renewal.
Though the waste land suffers from fires both metaphorical and literal—burning passion and burning drought—they set the stage for starting anew.
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Symbol Tarot Cards
Tarot Cards
Tarot cards appear throughout "The Waste Land," most prominently in the first section, when the speaker has his cards read by the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris. Her "wicked pack of cards" foretell a number of the people and events that pop up throughout the poem. Tarot reading is a real fortune-telling practice that dates back to the 1400s, in which every card is associated with various allegorical images and meanings, which are then interpreted within the context of the reading recipient's life. This is not to say that the poem treats Tarot or prophecy as guaranteed messengers of truth; in fact, its cynical tone hints that Madame Sosostris might be a fraud.
Nevertheless, the poem clearly finds value and meaning in the imagery offered by the Tarot deck.
"The Wheel" card represents the dizzying wheel of fortune, which fits the poem's obsession with the ups and downs of human life.
Likewise, "the man with three staves," or the Three of Wands of card, which depicts a man setting out on an adventure, echoes the poem's interest in exploring spirituality, memory, history, and even death as adventures that add meaning and purpose to life.
Later, at the very end of the poem, there is an allusion to The Tower card, in which "The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower" represents cataclysmic destruction, and the change that follows.
Interestingly, the cards the poem describes are a mix of real Tarot cards and invented ones.
Most notably, "the drowned Phoenician Sailor," which Madame Sosostris declares to be the speaker's card, does not exist in the real Tarot deck. Neither does Belladonna, The Lady of the Rocks, nor the one-eyed merchant and the blank card that represents "something he carries on his back."
Instead, these cards seem to resurface within the poem itself: the drowned sailor is Phlebas of Section IV, and the one-eyed merchant recalls Mr. Eugenides, the "Smyrna merchant" who propositions the speaker. Belladonna, whose name suggests both a type of poisonous flower as well as the Virgin Mary, likely refers to the woman in Section II who represents both romance and its doom.
But the card with perhaps the most symbolic resonance is "The Hanged Man," which is a real Tarot card, and which Madame Sosostris is unable to find when giving the speaker his reading.
In Tarot, the Hanged Man hangs not by his neck but upside-down by his foot; he represents waiting, a period of suspension, as well as the idea of seeing things from a new angle or perspective. Like the speaker, the Hanged Man can observe the (broken, alienated) world around him, but is powerless to do anything about it.
He is also linked with the Fisher King, into whose shoes the speaker often slips. The Fisher King is another figure in suspension, waiting to be cured so his land can be restored; it is his absence, suggested by the missing Tarot card, which results in the barrenness and ruin of the waste land.
Lastly, the poem's suggestion that renewed spirituality is needed to restore the waste land also reflects the Tarot card's emphasis on seeing the world from new perspectives.
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Symbol Music and Singing
Music and Singing
Music and singing appear throughout "The Waste Land" in various forms. Fundamentally, the poem differentiates between classical music that represents the truly meaningful art of a bygone era, and popular music that symbolizes the shallowness and meaningless of modern mass culture.
Music first appears in Section I in the form of lyrics from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde:
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
These lyrics (which translate to: "Fresh blows the wind / For home; / My Irish child, / Where are you waiting?") evoke the theme of lost love and introduce the speaker's recollection of his own lost love, "the hyacinth girl." The lines are left in their original German in order to signify the kind of classical, elite art that achieves real depth of feeling—albeit feelings of sadness and loss. These emotions nevertheless remain out of the speaker's reach ("I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing" he says) but only because he lives in the waste land of modern society, rather than in the past when such art was the norm.
By contrast, Section II introduces popular music, using a line from a well-known pop song from Eliot's own era: "O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag." The lines that follow—"It's so elegant / so intelligent," with their neat rhyme scheme and silly aspirations of grandeur—are pure sarcasm, and speak directly to the poem's representation of pop culture as shallow.
This is true of the next pop music reference as well, in Section III, when lyrics from a popular World War I ballad suddenly interrupt the speaker while he sits musing by the River Thames:
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
These lyrics don't make much sense, but that's the point. The way the song suddenly and pointlessly ruptures the speaker's train of thought symbolizes the way the noise of modern life distracts from deeper thought, which in turn prevents people from recognizing that they are living in a broken, alienated society.
In fact, a typist in Section III decides to turn on some music after having just endured an unwanted sexual encounter for precisely that reason. "Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: / 'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over" before she "smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone." By turning on the gramophone, the typist purposefully prevents her brain from forming any other unwanted thoughts, including a closer examination of the bad sexual experience she's just had.
In the lines that follow, Eliot alludes to yet another Wagner opera, the Götterdämmerung. This time, however, he substitutes his own lyrics, polluting the classical form (though he does keep "Weialala leia / Wallala leialala," the chorus from the song "The Rhine-Maidens"). These lines are all about how history and fine art have been degraded by the vulgarity of modern life. The inclusion of actual singing evokes the sunny experience of singing along to a song, even as it is contrasted against references to how much the world has changed for the worse.
This is perhaps symbolized most clearly by lines 292 to 306, which are the songs of "departed river nymphs," or Wagner's three river maidens, all of whom tell stories of lust and degradation. Once again, music literally symbolizes defilement of modern society, with Eliot proving the point by deliberately laying waste to Wagner's opera.
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Symbol The Change of Philomel
The Change of Philomel
"The Waste Land" shines a spotlight on the figure of Philomela, a girl from Greek myth. In the original myth, which lines in Section II allude to, she is raped by a "barbarous king" who cuts out her tongue, before the god Apollo transforms her into a nightingale. The poem introduces Philomela's story through a painting hanging on a wall in Section II, which transfixes the speaker so much that he refers back to her several times throughout the poem.
When he does, it is by quoting Philomela's birdsong, usually represented as "Jug, jug." This refrain reoccurs throughout the poem as a symbol of the "inviolable" (or unchangeable, unbreakable) "voice" of someone who has undergone transformation in response to horror—though, as in section II, it often falls on deaf ears, since modern society is so ill-equipped to recognize true art or culture.
One version of Philomela's myth can be found in the Roman poet Ovid's collection The Metamorphoses. The poem's frequent allusions to Philomela hints, therefore, at its interest in rebirth and renewal, acts of transformation that take place after death has put an end to the old ways. That Philomela is first stripped of her voice speaks to the poem's concerns about modern-day society losing its way through forces beyond its control. That she is able to sing again, albeit in a new form, hints at hope for the waste land as well.
It's fitting, then, that the final stanza of the poem includes a line from another classic Latin poem about Philomel, in which she wonders (pre-transformation) when spring will come, because when it does, she can "cease to be silent." In this sense, Philomel serves as both an allusion and an extended metaphor for the same transformation the waste land must undergo in order to be restored.
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“The Waste Land” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
Allusion
“The Waste Land” is jam-packed with allusions—so many, in fact, that Eliot included footnotes to help readers understand some of them! These references include other literary works, but also music, history, and art. The poem's allusions add depth, richness, and complexity to its themes, which include death and rebirth, the brokenness of modern life, and spirituality and religion.
Literary allusions are foremost among Eliot's references. He quotes from the poet Charles Baudelaire (for example, "You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!" in line 76); references Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio; alludes to works by the playwrights John Webster, Thomas Kyd, and Thomas Middleton, including naming Section II after Middleton's play A Game at Chess; and of course references William Shakespeare throughout, including his plays The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Coriolanus.
The Roman poet Ovid's famous collection The Metamorphoses receives quite a lot of attention through repeated allusions to its poem the "Rape of Philomel" in Sections II, III, and IV and the appearance in Section III of Tiresias, the blind prophet, who is a character from Ovid. Aldous Huxley, Edmund Spenser, Andrew Marvell, John Day, Paul Verlaine, Oliver Goldsmith, Herman Hesse, John Milton, and Virgil are among the other poets, playwrights, and essayists Eliot alludes to. All of these literary references are used to enrich the poem's vision of a hellish, broken modern world.
Throughout the text, Eliot also alludes to many portions of the Bible, including the books of Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, and Psalms. He also alludes to the Upanishads, holy Hindu texts, and to The Fire Sermon (the title of Section II) which was preached by the Buddha. A brief quote from Saint Augustine's Confessions appears in lines 307 and 309. These allusions are particularly vital for making Eliot's point that the modern world has lost touch with spiritual guidance. There are also many references to the Christian tradition of the Fisher King and the Holy Grail. In particular, the poem's title is likely an allusion to Jessie L. Weston's 1920 book From Ritual to Romance, which was a history of ancient fertility myths and included an entire chapter on the British myth of The Fisher King.
Operas by the composer Richard Wagner are alluded to twice in "The Waste Land." First, in Section I, Eliot quotes five lines directly from Tristan und Isolde, underscoring the theme of lost love. Then, in Section III, the poem alludes to the "Rhine-maidens" song from the Götterdämmerung but replaces all of the lyrics with Eliot's own words, except for the chorus, "Weialalala leia." In contrast, Eliot also references pop music, including "The Mysterious Rag," in lines 128-130, a hit from the popular turn-of-the-century show, Ziegfield's Follies. There also an allusion to the nursery rhyme "London Bridge Is Falling Down" at the end of the poem.
In addition, "The Waste Land" is littered with references to history and physical places. The battle of Mylae referenced in line 70 took place during the Punic Wars in 260 B.C.E., but is used as a stand-in for World War I, which also looms large over the poem. Both wars come to represent the perils of greed and destruction. The Ionic columns of the St. Magnus Martyr Church (which is a real place) in line 265 hearken back to England's ancient past, as do the allusions in the lines that follow to Queen Elizabeth I and her alleged lover Robert Leicester; the River Thames; the neighborhoods of Highbury, Richmond, and Kew; the subway station Moorgate; and the seaside town of Margate. Other locations mentioned in the poem include the real-life Cannon Street and Metropole Hotels, various streets throughout London, cities named in lines 375-376, and of course London Bridge itself.
Last but not least, the poem alludes to the fortune-telling practice, Tarot, including many individual Tarot cards like The Wheel of Fortune and The Hanged Man. The practice of reading Tarot is also heavily dependent on allusions and allegory, in which fortune-tellers interpret the cards' imagery as metaphors for life, so in some ways this allusion is self-referential, pointing the poem's own habit of using others' lines, images, ideas, and concepts to interpret the modern world.
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Alliteration
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Anachronism
Anaphora
Assonance
Consonance
Extended Metaphor
Imagery
Irony
Metaphor
Onomatopoeia
Personification
Repetition
Stream of Consciousness
“The Waste Land” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
Tubers
A short, fleshy, usually underground stem able to produce a new plant.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Waste Land”
Form
“The Waste Land" doesn't follow a traditional form; its line and stanza lengths vary dramatically throughout. This lack of a predictable form is in keeping with the poem's broader ideas about the waywardness of modern life, and the failure of the forms of the past.
That said, one literary form that the poem takes cues from is the dramatic monologue—a direct address between the speaker and the reader. However, what sets "The Waste Land" apart from most other dramatic monologues is that its speaker changes constantly throughout the poem, shifting identities, cultures, and locations abruptly and with little indication that a new voice is taking over. Because of this, the poem can feel fragmented and jarring, but it also provides a diverse perspective on the waste land at the center of the poem.
One consistent aspect of the poem's form, however, is its reliance on refrains and repetitions to create a sense of cohesion even as the lines tumble all over the place. The refrain of "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" lends structure to the end of Section II, in the same way that the repetition of Philomel's "Jug jug" throughout the poem provides a kind of through-line to its messy form. The use of Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata to structure the end of Section IV is similarly bolstering, giving the conclusion of the poem a clearer shape as well as a sense of progression.
Thought the poem does not have a strict form, it is still structured by being broken up into five sections, each of which is given a title. These sections all focus on different expressions of the poem's thematic ideas.
The first section, "The Burial of the Dead," focuses on the drudgery of the modern world. It alludes specifically to the horrors of war and the dull pain and numbness that the speaker sees as characterizing post-war life. Spring rain just reminds people of their despair and loneliness. City dwellers are zombie-like, unable to connect with one another as they stream across "London Bridge" in a haze of "brown fog." A fortune-teller gives ominous messages about fearing death by water, which will come back later in the poem. Simply put, modern society seems like a living hell.
The second section, "A Game of Chess," can broadly be thought of as being about seduction, failed romance, and doomed women. It references abortion, the mythological rape of Philomela, and the tragic fate of Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet. The poem also mocks the shallowness of pop culture and laments the inability for people to appreciate the beauty and lessons of the past.
Next, the third section is titled "The Fire Sermon," an ironic reference to a sermon given by the Buddha warning against the dangerous fires of lust and earthly passions. The section, the longest in the poem, then gives explicit and grotesque descriptions of modern relationships, which the speaker see as immoral and impotent. It closes with the speaker "burning" with the shame of all this lust and depravity.
The fourth and shortest section is then "Death by Water"—a dousing of these flames and a kind of parable. The section reminds the reader that death comes for everyone, always (and as such maybe folks want to take stock of all the horrors the poem has lain out thus far and try to do better).
The fifth and final section, "What the Thunder Said," describes the waste land as a literal, physical place; it is a harsh, barren, nightmarish world where the speaker obsessively longs for water. Eventually the skies crack open and nourishing rain does come, and with it the speaker's musing on the kind of spiritual teachings that can perhaps remedy the ills of modern life.
Meter
For the most part, "The Waste Land" does not conform to any consistent meter and instead is written in sprawling free verse. Though it occasionally veers into blank verse (a classic English meter), as in the opening of Section II, these moments are fleeting and quickly fall apart, just like the waste land itself is in a state of decay. In that sense, the meter of the poem can be said to reflect its content, as erratic and unpredictable as the broken modern world.
The moments when the poem mixes in song lyrics also provide another form of structured meter. However, the majority of these moments are made up of popular song lyrics, which in the poem's eyes represent a degraded art form. Keeping time with popular music is a poor substitute for classical poetic meter, and the poem does not stick with any one song's meter for very long.
Rhyme Scheme
"The Waste Land" does rhyme at times, but it does not have any clear or predictable rhyme scheme. Like its lack of structured form and meter, the poem's lack of consistent rhyme scheme reflects its message about the decay of the modern world, and the loss of higher culture and art, which in the case of poetry relied heavily on rhyme.
Again, though, rhyme does pop up from time to time. Take lines 65 and 66:
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street
Here and in other spots, the rhymes pair together images or ideas that shore up the poem's vision of an isolated, alienated world. This is especially the case in Section III, when a number of rhymes appear while describing the terrible sex scene between the typist and her lover. Look at lines 224-230 for an example:
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
...
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
The rhymes are fleeting, suggesting yet another broken connection in this poem, grasped at but never carried through all the way. The next stanza then features a neat and tidy ABABCDCD rhyme pattern:
She turns and looks a moment in the glass, A
Hardly aware of her departed lover; B
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: A
"Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over." B
When lovely woman stoops to folly and C
Paces about her room again, alone, D
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, C
And puts a record on the gramophone. D
The steady rhyme scheme suggests how ho-hum this experience has been for the typist—that, for all the speaker's disgust, such a grotesque scene is expected and normal in the modern world. Such rhyme can sometimes lend the poem a mocking, sing-song feel that makes it sound almost like a nursery rhyme. This is clear, for example, in the two rhyming quatrains in which the poem describes sex on the Thames, after the speaker has lamented that the beauty and purity of the river is no more. These not coincidentally feature the same ABABCDCD pattern as the stanza quoted above:
"Trams and dusty trees. A
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew B
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees A
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe." B
My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart C
Under my feet. After the event D
He wept. He promised a 'new start.' C
I made no comment. What should I resent?" D
Finally, as with meter, rhyme sometimes appears in the poem incidentally as a result of its allusion to and imitation of music and song, especially at the end of Section III.
“The Waste Land” Speaker
Unusually, "The Waste Land" does not have just one speaker. Instead, it presents a number of different voices. Even more unusually (and adding to the poem's complexity), the poem rarely indicates when the speaker has switched, leaving readers to play a game of catch-up, constantly reassessing who is saying what!
In the opening stanza, the first speaker appears somewhat close to the poet's voice—it is, at least, a person describing the month of April from a poetic, mournful perspective. But by line 8, it quickly shifts to the voice of a woman named Marie, who is looking back on her childhood memories. Line 19 abruptly shifts again, to the voice of a doomsday prophet:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
But then the song interlude at lines 31-34 marks the return of the first speaker, who now seems to be dwelling on his own long-lost memories. This appears to be the same speaker who then visits Madame Sosostris and bumps into Stetson on the London Bridge in Section I; refuses to speak with a nervous woman in Section II; sits by the River Thames mourning the departed nymphs and is propositioned by Mr. Eugenides in Section III; and ends up once more by the River Thames in Section IV.
The other major speakers include a woman chatting with her friend Lil at the pub in Section II, and of course Tiresias, the blind prophet of Greek myth, through whose eyes readers experience most of Section III. Because Tiresias is a visionary from ancient times, he's a good fit for a section that jumps through time and place.
The speakers of Sections IV and V are harder to identify, but the first is a witness is to Phlebas's drowning, and the second a person walking through the cataclysmic waste land. This is to say nothing of the many quotations and allusions in the poem, some of which seem dropped into various speakers' section without much context or link to that voice.
The reason the speaker is so fragmented and hard to follow is similar to the reason the poem is written in a stream of consciousness style. It echoes the fragmentation of society experienced by the survivors of World War I, and the destruction of traditional norms and values. Essentially, the speakers are a metaphor for the waste land—for the broken, hellish modern world in which all of them coexist and are struggling to make meaning. Not only do they experience failure to connect with other people, they can barely hang on to their own dramatic monologues before somebody else takes over.
“The Waste Land” Setting
Strictly speaking, there is just one setting in "The Waste Land," and it's right there in the title. This poem is set in a waste land, a broken and barren place where nothing can grow or flourish. This is especially true in Section V, which dedicates its opening to describing the hellishness of this literal physical landscape.
But of course, the waste land itself is also a metaphor for the modern world, and there are many other settings contained within it, like Marie's childhood memories in the Swiss Alps, London Bridge, a luxuriously decorated parlor, a pub in London, the banks of the River Thames, and a typist's cramped apartment, to name just a few. (The vast majority of these, it should be noted, are all set within the city of London.)
But perhaps the best way to understand the setting is to take a step back and remember what the waste land is a metaphor for: modern life at the turn of the 20th-century. In some sense, the poem itself is set within an idea, trying to express what it's like to live in a "place" that is as much defined by time and the effects of history as by its physical attributes.
Similarly, the stream of consciousness style of the poem emphasizes that modern life takes place within the mind, as well. The tumble and claustrophobia of the many different speakers' thoughts as they try to express what it's like to live in a modern-day waste land helps capture the setting as much as any imagery dedicated to describing "the arid plain" itself.
Literary and Historical Context of “The Waste Land”
Literary Context
"The Waste Land" is considered a landmark in 20th-century English literary history. Published in 1922, it shocked many contemporary critics with its irregular metrical and rhyme patterns, disturbing subjects, and depiction of the alienating conditions of modern life.
In this sense, "The Waste Land" represents a decisive break with Victorian poets and writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Ruskin, as well as with the literary modes that dominated the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eliot's poem rejects the rigid meter and sometimes sing-song rhymes of Victorian poetry, opting instead for a collage of different dramatic monologues rendered in a stream of consciousness style.
This is not to say, however, that Eliot entirely rejects all prior poetic models. On the contrary, from Dante to Shakespeare, Eliot frequently and explicitly alludes to many of the grand masters of literature, sometimes even quoting directly from other works and citing them in the footnotes.
Indeed, throughout "The Waste Land," Eliot appears to be actively mourning the loss of an earlier artistic era, whose norms and meaning-making he sees as having been shattered by the wreckage of World War I and 20th-century modern life.
Ironically, "The Waste Land" is now considered a canonical work in its own right. It is a leading example of modernist poetry (if not the leading example) and was heavily influenced by another major modernist work, James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which Eliot read the same year that he was writing "The Waste Land."
Modernism was a literary movement of the early 20th century that emphasized a sense of large-scale social and aesthetic change in the wake of significant disruptions to European life (namely, World War I). With its damning depiction of the alienation and isolation of modern life and its rich evocation of the confusion and disorder of post-World War I society, "The Waste Land" is a prime example of the modernist movement.
It is also worth noting that "The Waste Land" was heavily influenced by the poet Ezra Pound, another modernist, who served as an editor for T. S. Eliot and cut "The Waste Land" nearly in half. The poem is dedicated to him, with a note in Italian that translates to "the better craftsman."
Historical Context
"The Waste Land" is considered one of the defining texts of Modernism because it speaks to many of the social and historical conditions that characterized that era in English literary history. It was published shortly after World War I, then known as "The Great War," which left permanent scars on British and American society, and in many ways finalized the breakdown of traditional social divisions and ways of life that had begun at the turn of the century. Many young men were killed and the survivors were left terribly wounded; many were diagnosed with something called "shell shock," a new diagnosis at the time that we recognize today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
At the same time, civilian life was also undergoing dramatic changes in both Britain and the United States. The turn of the century marked a wave of movement from the country to the city, and a peak in affluence and consumer culture now remembered as the Roaring 20s. The world was moving and changing quickly and traditional social norms and mores were in rapid decline. Doctors were also increasingly diagnosing people with something they called neurasthenia—essentially, anxiety and depression, marked by headaches, irritability, bouts of sadness and weariness, and dissatisfaction—in response to these overwhelming times.
The influence of this historical context can be seen throughout "The Waste Land." Many of the characters seem to suffer from shell shock or neurasthenia, and the setting of the poem is marked by damage and disorder. The poem also serves as something of a call to action, as Eliot sets about first capturing and diagnosing this broken modern world and then prescribing a cure to redeem and restore it.
More “The Waste Land” Resources
External Resources
"The Waste Land," With Footnotes — This hyperlinked version of "The Waste Land" includes Eliot's original footnotes, as well as additional material unpacking the poem's many (many, many) allusions.
T. S. Eliot's Reading — Listen to a recording of T. S. Eliot reading "The Waste Land" out loud.
Eliot's Life Story — An in-depth biography and analysis of this groundbreaking poet and his career.
The Fisher King and "The Waste Land" — Learn more about the connection between "The Waste Land" and the legends of the Fisher King and Holy Grail.
LitCharts on Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets: Burnt Norton
Journey of the Magi
La Figlia Che Piange
Morning at the Window
Portrait of a Lady
Preludes
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
The Hollow Men
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Waste Land
FOR EZRA POUND
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
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. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—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.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
II. A Game of Chess
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
“Nothing?”
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
“What shall we ever do?”
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
III. The Fire Sermon
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
“This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
“Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
“On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
IV. Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
V. What the Thunder Said
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
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 snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
The Waste Land Poem Summary and Analysis | LitCharts
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