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Unit 31: Hughes and T.S. Eliot

31.4.3 Section III: “The Fire Sermon” Notes

Eliot opens this section with the image of a river, wind crossing silently overhead. We are on the
banks of the Thames, and Eliot cites Spenser’s “Prothalamion” with the line: “Sweet Thames, run
softly, till I end my song.” The river is empty; “the nymphs” of Spenser’s poem have departed, as
have “their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors.” Eliot unspools imagery that evokes modern
life–“empty bottles, sandwich papers,/Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends”–by
describing what is not in the river. In other words, the Thames has become a kind of stagnant slate,
devoid of detritus but also of life. The narrator remembers sitting by “the waters of Leman”—French
for Lake Geneva, where the poet recuperated while writing “The Waste Land”—and weeping. His
tears are a reference to Psalm 137, in which the people of Israel, exiled to Babylon, cry by the river as
they remember Jerusalem.
Suddenly the death-life of the modern world rears its head. “A cold blast” is sounded, bones rattle,
and a rat creeps “through the vegetation/Dragging its slimy belly on the bank.” Rats appear several
times in “The Waste Land,” and always they carry with them the specter of urban decay and death—
a death which, unlike that of Christ or Osiris or other men-deities, brings about no life. At this
point, the narrator, “fishing in the dull canal,” assumes the role of the Fisher King, alluding to Jessie
L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and its description of the Grail legend. According to this study,
of critical importance to the entirety of “The Waste Land,” the Fisher King—so named probably
because of the importance of fish as Christian fertility symbols—grows ill or impotent. As a result,
his land begins to wither away; something akin to a drought hits, and what was once a fruitful
kingdom is reduced to a wasteland. Only the Holy Grail can reverse the spell and save the king and
his land. A typical addendum to this legend involves a prior crime or violation that serves as cause
for the Fisher King’s malady. By association, the rape of a maiden might sometimes lie at the root;
hence Eliot’s allusion to the tale of Philomela in “A Game of Chess.”
The allusion to the Grail is doubled by a possible reference to Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival,
a version of the Percival stories; in this account, the brother of the Fisher King (Anfortas) tells Parzival:
“His name all men know as Anfortas, and I weep for him evermore.” Eliot’s lines “Musing upon the
king my brother’s wreck/And on the king my father’s death before him” seem to combine the
Percival legend with The Tempest, in which Ferdinand utters the verse: “Sitting on a bank, / Weeping
again the King my father’s wreck.” (North, 11) Eliot has already twice quoted The Tempest–“Those
are pearls that were his eyes,” in “The Burial of the Dead” and “A Game of Chess”—and here he
links Shakespeare’s fantastical drama, and the accompanying image of water racked by turbulent
weather, with Grail mythology.
As the impotent Fisher King, Eliot describes the wasteland that stretches out before him. “White
bodies [lie] naked on the low damp ground,” and bones are scattered “in a little dry garret, / Rattled
by the rat’s foot only, year to year.” This last line echoes verses 115-116 in “A Game of Chess”: “I
think we are in the rats’ alley/Where the dead men have lost their bones.” In both cases, the setting
is one of death, decay, a kind of modern hell. Eliot proceeds to allude to John Day’s The Parliament
of Bees, a seventeenth-century work that describes the tale of Actaeon and Diana: the former
approaches the latter while she is bathing, and, surprising her, is transformed into a stag and killed
by his own dogs. Here Actaeon is “Sweeney”—a character familiar from some of Eliot’s other poems,
and Diana is Mrs. Porter. It is springtime, suggesting love and fertility—but also cruelty, in Eliot’s
version—and Sweeney visits the object of his affection via “horns and motors.” Again ancient
mythology is updated, recast, and remolded. The stanza concludes with a quotation from Verlaine’s
“Parsifal,” a sonnet describing the hero’s successful quest for the Holy Grail.
Next come four bizarre lines: “Twit twit twit/Jug jug jug jug jug jug/So rudely forc’d./Tereu.” We
recall “Jug jug jug” from “A Game of Chess,” in which the onomatopoeia described the sound of
Philomela as nightingale; “Twit twit twit” likewise seems to represent a bird’s call. So we have
returned to the tale of the woman who was violated and took her revenge, and “So rudely forc’d”
refers to that violation. “Tereu,” then, is Tereus.

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