Page 416 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 31: Hughes and T.S. Eliot

who once lived as a woman recalls his encounters with Antigone and Oedipus Rex (“I who have sat Notes
by Thebes below the wall”) and Odysseus in Hades (“And walked among the lowest of the dead”)
while witnessing a quintessentially modern bit of business. That Eliot resurrects ancient tropes and
characters within such a vulgar scene is an act of audacity that was shocking in 1922, and still packs
a punch. Readers today are perhaps less surprised by the episode, but it is hard not to be moved;
quoting from Oliver Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century novel The Vicar of Wakefield, Eliot describes
the post-coital woman pacing about her room: “When lovely woman stoops to folly.” An image of
potential perfection has been spoiled; all that is left now is a mirror and a gramophone.
It was surely this kind of scene that so stirred John Dos Passos, and it does indeed find numerous
echoes in Manhattan Transfer. Eliot’s poem was a crucial inspiration for Dos Passos’ epic portrait of
New York. An American transplanted to Europe, Eliot’s narrator floats through London in “The
Fire Sermon,” beginning by the Thames and returning there to listen to the cry of the Rhine-maidens
as they bemoan their fate: “Weialala leia/Wallala leialala.” Whether quoting older sources or
capturing the rhyme and texture of modern life, Eliot is dealing in sadness; a sense of loss imbues
the writing, bubbling to the surface in the maiden’s account of her lost innocence. Just as the narrator
“knew nothing” when looking upon the hyacinth girl, so is the maiden faced with “nothing”: “I can
connect/Nothing with nothing./The broken fingernails of dirty hands./My people humble people
who expect/Nothing.”
From the typist to this last suffering woman, lust seems to portend sorrow, and that sorrow seems
in turn to be an integral feature of the modern world. The typist is never named because she is
ultimately a “type,” a representation of something larger and more widespread. Eliot is diagnosing
his London and his world with a disease of the senses, through which sex has replaced love and
meaningless physical contact has subsumed real emotional connection. Ironically, the Fisher King’s
impotence then results from an excess of carnality. The image of the river sweating oil recalls a
Biblical plague, and the “burning” at the end of the section brings Hell to mind. Through it all the
river courses, carrying history along with it. All the poet can do, it seems, is weep.

31.4.4 Section IV: “Death by Water” and “What the Thunder Said”

“Death by Water” is by far the shortest of the poem’s five sections, describing in eight lines “Phlebas
the Phoenician” lying dead in the sea. An echo of the “drowned Phoenician” Madame Sosostris
displayed in “The Burial of the Dead,” Phlebas is apparently a merchant, judging by the reference to
“the profit and loss.” Now “a current under sea” picks his bones.
“What the Thunder Said,” the final section of “The Waste Land,” picks up the same thread, referring
in the first stanza to the passion of Christ, another famous deceased. The “torchlight red on sweaty
faces” perhaps indicates the guards who come to take Christ away; the “garden” is Gethsemane;
“the agony in stony places” refers to the torture and the execution itself; and “of thunder of spring
over distant mountains” describes the earthquake following the crucifixion. From Christ’s death
springs life; similarly, the Phoenician is killed by water, that life-giving force, that symbol of fertility
and rebirth. As in “The Burial of the Dead,” life and death are inextricably linked, their borders
blurred at times: “He who was living is now dead/We who were living are now dying/With a little
patience.”
The second stanza describes a land without any water: only rocks, sand, “Dead mountain mouth of
carious teeth.” The thunder brings no rain and is therefore “sterile.” “Red sullen faces sneer and
snarl” at the poet as he makes his way through this desolate land – another wasteland.

The poet laments the absence of water, thirst imbuing his verse with longing; he
imagines the “drip drop” of water on rocks, but concludes by acknowledging
that, alas, “there is no water.”

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 409