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Title: The Waste Land
Author: T. S. Eliot
Publisher: Norton
Form: Hardcover/cloth (included in The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, 6th Edition, Volume 2)
Pages: 14 (434 lines)
Date of Publication: 1922
Source: Purchased new
Dates of Reading: January 29, 2013 – February 6, 2013
The List: #17
I decided to give myself a short reading week by tackling a
long poem, and though objectively, The
Waste Land is not very long, it is certainly dense enough to qualify for my
week’s “book,” as there is as much to unpack in its 434 lines as there is in many
books of 200 pages or more, and as I write this, I continue to struggle to
understand it as a whole work, as its fragmentary nature seems to create rifts
with only fraying rope bridges to span them, Indiana Jones-style.
T. S. Eliot simply won’t go away. I read The Hollow Men in high school, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in
college, and now in my one-student schoolroom, The Waste Land. Though these poems aren’t even a hundred years old,
they seem to have that quality of literature that endures – the words sound
both old and new at the same time, the technique both shocking and classical.
At first I didn’t enjoy reading The Waste Land, though I’m almost certain that “enjoyment” was not T.
S. Eliot’s primary concern in writing it. I
couldn't see myself reading it for any other than purely academic purposes, going
slowly, line by line, in the hopes of some kind of, I don’t know, revelation?
I was reminded of something that a colleague once said to me
about reading James Joyce’s Ulysses:
“It’s the kind of book where, you first have to learn everything else there is
to learn, then you can read Ulysses
and understand it.” I felt a bit of this helplessness before the opaque mass of
The Waste Land. Much of it consists
of hopelessly obscure and self-consciously erudite literary references, things
like the Upanishads, St. Augustine,
Grail lore and the Fisher King, Buddhist texts, and so on. The fact that Eliot
himself appended footnotes to the published poem suggests his awareness that he
was plumbing some deep waters, and I may be forgiven if I detected a smug self-indulgence
on Eliot’s part that seemed to say it would be well worth the reader’s time to
try to understand all this stuff.
But in the end, as with The
Hollow Men and Prufrock, the words,
and thus the greatness, seem inevitable, and I did begin to enjoy the poem
altogether, and not just isolated lines, during my second reading. As academic
as it is, the poem is not purely cerebral; it is a highly emotional response to
the metaphorical wasteland of Eliot’s culture and times, where the soul finds
no water, no respite, no nourishment whatsoever. And yet when water comes, it
is “death by water,” as if even that singular element which sustains hope is ultimately
antithetical to human flourishing. Themes of isolation, death, the feeling of
being trapped inside your consciousness – it all spills out even if you’ve
never read the Upanishads (which I
haven’t) and have no interest in listening to a Wagner opera (which I don’t).
The Waste Land
begins with the famous line, “April is the cruelest month,” which, aside from
its quotability and coolly nihilistic irony (see its inclusion in The Big Lebowski), doesn’t really mean
anything in itself. When you continue on a few lines, an idea begins to cohere:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
(1-4)
I first encountered lilacs in Chicago, where they bloom
sometime in the spring, a sort of brightly colored affirmation that winter
doesn’t actually last forever in the Windy City. Lilacs have a wondrous and
unmistakable scent, a “perfume strong,” as Walt Whitman put it; but as readers
of Whitman know, they don’t bloom for very long, and when they die, the little
purple flowers turn brown and shriveled. Perhaps Eliot found something cruel
about the way spring beckons life to sprout out of the comfort of hiding in the
ground, only to bloom briefly and perish in the sun and air.
Like a lot of poetry, The
Waste Land can seem terribly contrived, as if Eliot’s just dishing out a
slew of images and telling us to make sense out of them. He uses a variety of
styles, bits of dialogue, short ditties, scraps of what look to be gibberish
and/or bird sounds, several lines in foreign languages. He even manages to insert
a perverse sonnet into the poem to describe a banal seduction (what was once
perhaps called a “courtship”), in effect subverting Shakespearean love using
Shakespeare’s preferred form:
The time is now propitious, as he
guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and
tired,
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if
undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at
once;
Exploring hands encounter no defense;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the
dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs
unlit . . .
(235-248)
I only seriously considered the problem of contrivance after
having read the poem twice and written a few pages about it. One of the great
annoyances of bad acting, particularly on the stage, is that you can see the
actors “acting.” It’s entirely unnatural and takes me out of the performance.
As I mulled over Eliot’s pruned images and manicured technique,
that thought occurred to me, that a reader would see the ink and paper
equivalent of “acting.” But for me, at least, the effect is like riding that neatly
stitched seam that hides the ragged edge underneath. I knew that some maniacal
effort went into the making of this object, and I was perhaps just on the cusp
of seeing that effort, when I realized that I was so deep into the finished effect
that any considerations of how it was
made became, well, purely academic. Despite its footnotes and literary
allusions drawing attention to the places it came from and the places it wants
you to go, Eliot’s poem just seems to exist.
The following passage ends with my favorite line from the
poem:
What are the roots that clutch, what
branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know
only
A heap of broken images, where the sun
beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the
cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red
rock),
And I will show you something different
from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind
you
Or your shadow at evening rising to
meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of
dust.
(19-30)
Ashes and dust, shadows and death. It’s been a somber year for literature. So next week, “something different,” something fun!
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