Page 409 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes through an unhappy marriage. Pound offered him support and friendship; his belief in and
admiration for Eliot were enormous. In turn, however, he radically trimmed Eliot’s long first draft
(nineteen pages, by some accounts), bringing the poem closer to its current version. This is not to
say Eliot would not have revised the poem on his own in similar ways; rather, the two men seemed
to have genuinely collaborated on molding what was already a loose and at times free-flowing
work. Pound, like Eliot a crucible of modernism, called for compression, ellipsis, reduction. The
poem grew yet more cryptic; references that were previously clear now became more obscure.
Explanations were out the window. The result was a more difficult work—but arguably a richer
one.
Eliot did not take all of Pound’s notes, but he did follow his friend’s advice enough to turn his
sprawling work into a tight, elliptical, and fragmented piece. Once the poem was completed, Pound
lobbied on its behalf, convincing others of its importance. He believed in Eliot’s genius, and in the
impact “The Waste Land” would have on the literature of its day. That impact ultimately stretched
beyond poetry, to novels, painting, music, and all the other arts. John Dos Passos’s Manhattan
Transfer owes a significant debt to “The Waste Land,” for example. Eliot’s take on the modern
world profoundly shaped future schools of thought and literature, and his 1922 poem remains a
touchstone of the English-language canon.

31.4 T.S.Eliot: The Waste Land (Non-detailed): Discussion and Analysis

31.4.1 Section I: “The Burial of the Dead”

“The Waste Land” begins with an excerpt from Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, in Latin and Greek,
which translates as: “For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when
the boys asked her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered, ‘I want to die.’” The quotation is followed
by a dedication to Ezra Pound, Eliot’s colleague and friend, who played a major role in shaping the
final version of the poem.
The poem proper begins with a description of the seasons. April emerges as the “cruellest” month,
passing over a desolate land to which winter is far kinder. Eliot shifts from this vague invocation of
time and nature to what seem to be more specific memories: a rain shower by the Starnbergersee; a
lake outside Munich; coffee in that city’s Hofgarten; sledding with a cousin in the days of childhood.
The second stanza returns to the tone of the opening lines, describing a land of “stony rubbish”–
arid, sterile, devoid of life, quite simply the “waste land” of the poem’s title. Eliot quotes Ezekiel 2.1
and Ecclesiastes 12.5, using biblical language to construct a sort of dialogue between the narrator—
the “son of man”—and a higher power. The former is desperately searching for some sign of life—
“roots that clutch,” branches that grow—but all he can find are dry stones, dead trees, and “a heap
of broken images.” We have here a forsaken plane that offers no relief from the beating sun, and no
trace of water.
Suddenly Eliot switches to German, quoting directly from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The passage
translates as: “Fresh blows the wind / To the homeland / My Irish child / Where do you wait?” In
Wagner’s opera, Isolde, on her way to Ireland, overhears a sailor singing this song, which brings
with it ruminations of love promised and of a future of possibilities. After this digression, Eliot
offers the reader a snatch of speech, this time from the mouth of the “hyacinth girl.” This girl,
perhaps one of the narrator’s (or Eliot’s) early loves, alludes to a time a year ago when the narrator
presented her with hyacinths. The narrator, for his part, describes in another personal account—
distinct in tone, that is, from the more grandiloquent descriptions of the waste land, the seasons,
and intimations of spirituality that have preceded it—coming back late from a hyacinth garden and
feeling struck by a sense of emptiness. Looking upon the beloved girl, he “knew nothing”; that is to
say, faced with love, beauty, and “the heart of light,” he saw only “silence.” At this point, Eliot
returns to Wagner, with the line “Oed’ und leer das Meer”: “Desolate and empty is the sea.” Also

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