Page 411 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes concerning these matters in a piece of criticism on Baudelaire, one of his chief poetic influences: in
it, Eliot intimated that it may be better to do evil than to do nothing at all—that at least some form of
action means that one exists.
This criterion for existence, perhaps an antecedent to Existentialism, holds action as inherently
meaningful. Inaction is equated with waste. The key image in “The Waste Land” may then be
Sosostris’s vision of “crowds of people, walking round in a ring.” They walk and walk, but go
nowhere. Likewise, the inhabitants of modern London keep their eyes fixed to their feet; their
destination matters little to them and they flow as an unthinking mass, bedecking the metropolis in
apathy.
From this thicket of malaise, the narrator clings to memories that would seem to suggest life in all
its vibrancy and wonder: summer rain in Munich, coffee in a German park, a girl wearing flowers.
What is crucial to the poem’s sensibility, however, is the recognition that even these trips to the
past, even these attempts to regain happiness, must end in failure or confusion. Identities are in
flux. The Hofgarten memory precipitates a flurry of German: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus
Litauen, echt deutsch.” Translated, this line reads roughly as: “I’m not Russian at all; I come from
Lithuania, a true German.” It is not clear who the speaker is, but whatever the case the line is
nonsensical; three distinct regions of Europe are mentioned, though Lithuania arguably has far
more to do with Russia than with Germany. The sentence itself depends on a non sequitur,
anticipating by almost a century Europe’s current crisis of identity, with individual nations slowly
losing ground to a collective union. In Eliot’s time, that continent was just emerging from the
wreckage of World War I, a splintered entity teetering on chaos; Germany, in particular, suffered
from a severe identity dilemma, with various factions competing for authority, classes that were
distrustful of one another, and the old breed of military strong-men itching to renew itself for the
blood-drenched decades to come.
The historical considerations will only go so far. Biographical interpretation is a slippery slope, but
it should nonetheless be noted that Eliot was, at the time of the poem’s composition, suffering from
acute nervous ailments, chief among them severe anxiety. It was during his time of recuperation
that he was able to write much of “The Waste Land,” but his conflicted feelings about his wife,
Vivienne, did not much help his state of mind. The ambiguity of love, the potential of that emotion
to cause both great joy and great sorrow, informs the passage involving the hyacinth girl–another
failed memory, as it were. In this case, Eliot describes a vision of youthful beauty in a piece of
writing that seems at first to stem more from English Romanticism than from the arid modern
world of the rest of the poem: “Your arms full, and your hair wet.” Water, so cherished an element
and so lacking in this desolate wasteland, here brings forth flowers and hyacinth girls, and the
possibility of happiness, however fleeting. That very vision, however, causes Eliot’s eyes to fail, his
speech to forsake him; love renders him impotent, and he is left “neither living nor dead” – much
like the aforementioned residents of Limbo. The paradox is that such joy and human warmth might
elicit such pain and coldness. Eliot sums it up with the line: “Looking into the heart of light, the
silence.” Using Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as a book-end device—the first such quotation alluding
to the beginnings of love, the second describing the tragedy of a love lost—Eliot traces a swift
passage from light to darkness, sound to silence, movement to stasis. (Tristan begins on a boat, with
the wind freshly blowing, and ends on the shoreline, awaiting a boat that never comes.)
The same paradox is there at the very beginning of the poem: April is the cruelest month. Shouldn’t
it be the kindest? The lovely image of lilacs in the spring is here associated with “the dead land.”
Winter was better; then, at least, the suffering was obvious, and the “forgetful snow” covered over
any memories. In spring, “memory and desire” mix; the poet becomes acutely aware of what he is
missing, of what he has lost, of what has passed him by. Ignorance is bliss; the knowledge that
better things are possible is perhaps the most painful thing of all. Eliot’s vision of modern life is
therefore rooted in a conception of the lost ideal.

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