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British Poetry

Notes Analysis

This section once again ushers in the issue of biographical interpretation. It is tempting to read the
woman on the “burnished throne” as Eliot’s wife, Vivienne; the passage then becomes a dissection of
an estranged relationship. Some of the details point to failed romance or failed marriage: the “golden
Cupidon” who must hide “his eyes behind his wing,” the depiction of Philomela’s rape—an example
of love cascading into brutality and violence—and even the woman’s “strange synthetic perfumes”
drowning “the sense in odours.”
Again the word “drowned” appears, and with it comes the specter of death by water. In this case,
the thick perfumes seem to blot out authentic sensations, just as the splendid decorations of the
room appear at times more menacing than beautiful. The trappings of a wealthy modern life come
at a price. The carving of a dolphin is cast in a “sad light.” The grandiose portraits and paintings on
the wall are but “withered stumps of time.” By the end of this first stanza, the room seems almost
haunted: “staring forms/Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.” The woman, for her
part, is a glittering apparition, seated upon her Chair (Eliot capitalizes the word as if it were a
kingdom) like a queen, recalling Cleopatra—and thus yet another failed love affair.
First Tristan and Isolde, now Cleopatra: twice now Eliot has alluded to tragic romances, filtered
from antiquity through more modern sensibilities—first that of Wagner, the great modernizer of
opera, and then that of Shakespeare, perhaps the first “modern” dramatist. Quotation and allusion
is of course a quintessential component of Eliot’s style, particularly in “The Waste Land”; the poem
is sometimes criticized for being too heavily bedecked in references, and too dependent on previous
works and canons. The poet’s trick is to plumb the old in order to find the new. It may seem at first
ironic that he relies so much on Ovid, the Bible, Dante, and other older works of literature to describe
the modern age, but Eliot’s method is an essentially universalist one. Just as the Punic War is
interchangeable with World War I—the truly “modern” war of Eliot’s time—so can past generations
of writers and thinkers shed light on contemporary life. Eliot’s greatest model in this vein was
probably Ulysses, in which James Joyce used Homer’s epic as a launching pad for a dissection of
modern Dublin. In contrast to modernist poets such as Cendrars and Appollinaire, who used the
choot-choot of trains, the spinning of wheels, and the billowing of fumes to evoke their era, or
philosophers such as Kracauer and Benjamin, who dove into the sports shows and the arcade halls
in search of a lexicon of the modern that is itself modern, Eliot is content to tease modernity out of
the old.
This is not to say that “The Waste Land” is free of the specifics of 1920s life, but rather that every
such specific comes weighted with an antiquarian reference. When Eliot evokes dance-hall numbers
and popular ditties, he does so through the “Shakespeherian Rag.” When he imitates the Cockney
talk of women in a pub, he finishes the dialogue with a quotation from Hamlet, so that the rhythms
of lower-class London speech give way to the words of the mad Ophelia.
That said, “A Game of Chess” is considerably less riddled with allusion and quotes than “The
Burial of the Dead.” The name itself comes from Thomas Middleton’s seventeenth-century play A
Game of Chess, which posited the said game as an allegory to describe historical machinations—
specifically the brewing conflict between England and Spain. What might the game allegorize for
Eliot? He offers it up as one of several activities, when the woman demands: “What shall we ever
do?” Simply a slot in a strict numerical ordering of the day, chess recalls “lidless eyes,” as its players
bide the time and wait “for a knock upon the door.” We are not far removed from the masses
crowding London Bridge, their eyes fixed on their feet. Modern city-dwellers who float along in a
fog are neither dead nor living; their world is an echo of Dante’s Limbo. Chess belongs therefore to
this lifeless life; it is the quintessential game of the wasteland, dependent on numbers and cold
strategies, devoid of feeling or human contact. Interaction is reduced to a set of movements on a
checkered board.

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