Page 410 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 31: Hughes and T.S. Eliot

plucked from Tristan und Isolde, the line belongs to a watchman, who tells the dying Tristan that Notes
Isolde’s ship is nowhere to be seen on the horizon.
From here Eliot switches abruptly to a more prosaic mode, introducing Madame Sosostris, a “famous
clairvoyante” alluded to in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow. This fortune-teller is known across
Europe for her skills with Tarot cards. The narrator remembers meeting her when she had “a bad
cold.” At that meeting she displayed to him the card of the drowned Phoenician Sailor: “Here, said
she, is your card.” Next comes “Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,” and then “the man with three
staves,” “the Wheel,” and “the one-eyed merchant.” It should be noted that only the man with three
staves and the wheel are actual Tarot cards; Belladonna is often associated with da Vinci’s “Madonna
of the Rocks,” and the one-eyed merchant is, as far as we can tell, an invention of Eliot’s.
Finally, Sosostris encounters a blank card representing something the one-eyed merchant is carrying
on his back–something she is apparently “forbidden to see.” She is likewise unable to find the
Hanged Man among the cards she displays; from this she concludes that the narrator should “fear
death by water.” Sosostris also sees a vision of a mass of people “walking round in a ring.” Her
meeting with the narrator concludes with a hasty bit of business: she asks him to tell Mrs. Equitone,
if he sees her, that Sosostris will bring the horoscope herself.
The final stanza of this first section of “The Waste Land” begins with the image of an “Unreal City”
echoing Baudelaire’s “fourmillante cite,” in which a crowd of people—perhaps the same crowd
Sosostris witnessed—flows over London Bridge while a “brown fog” hangs like a wintry cloud
over the proceedings. Eliot twice quotes Dante in describing this phantasmagoric scene: “I had not
thought death had undone so many” (from Canto 3 of the Inferno); “Sighs, short and infrequent,
were exhaled” (from Canto 4). The first quote refers to the area just inside the Gates of Hell; the
second refers to Limbo, the first circle of Hell.
It seems that the denizens of modern London remind Eliot of those without any blame or praise
who are relegated to the Gates of Hell, and those who where never baptized and who now dwell in
Limbo, in Dante’s famous vision. Each member of the crowd keeps his eyes on his feet; the mass of
men flow up a hill and down King William Street, in the financial district of London, winding up
beside the Church of Saint Mary Woolnoth. The narrator sees a man he recognizes named Stetson.
He cries out to him, and it appears that the two men fought together in a war. Logic would suggest
World War I, but the narrator refers to Mylae, a battle that took place during the First Punic War. He
then asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted last year in his garden has begun to sprout. Finally,
Eliot quotes Webster and Baudelaire, back to back, ending the address to Stetson in French: “hypocrite
lecteur!–mon semblable,–mon frère!”

Analysis

Eliot’s opening quotation sets the tone for the poem as a whole. Sibyl is a mythological figure who
asked Apollo “for as many years of life as there are grains in a handful of sand” (North, 3).
Unfortunately, she did not think to ask for everlasting youth. As a result, she is doomed to decay for
years and years, and preserves herself within a jar. Having asked for something akin to eternal life,
she finds that what she most wants is death. Death alone offers escape; death alone promises the end,
and therefore a new beginning.
Thus does Eliot begin his magisterial poem, labeling his first section “The Burial of the Dead,” a
title pulled from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. He has been careful to lay out his central
theme before the first stanza has even begun: death and life are easily blurred; from death can
spring life, and life in turn necessitates death. Cleanth Brooks, Jr., in “The Waste Land: An Analysis,”
sees the poem’s engine as a paradox: “Life devoid of meaning is death; sacrifice, even the sacrificial
death, may be life-giving, an awaking to life.” Eliot’s vision is of a decrepit land inhabited by persons
who languish in an in-between state, perhaps akin to that of Dante’s Limbo: they live, but insofar as
they seem to feel nothing and aspire to nothing, they are dead. Eliot once articulated his philosophy

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