ts eliot's poetry.pdf

Rozi Khan Department of English GPGJC Swat, KPK Email: [email protected]

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PORTRY of T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was

educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton

College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and

eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director.

He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited the exclusive and

influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time

entered the Anglican Church.

Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. Never compromising

either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief that poetry should aim at

a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation

necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty his influence on modern poetic diction has

been immense. Eliot's poetry from Prufrock (1917) to the Four Quartets (1943) reflects the development

of a Christian writer: the early work, especially The Waste Land (1922), is essentially negative, the

expression of that horror from which the search for a higher world arises. In Ash Wednesday (1930) and

the Four Quartets this higher world becomes more visible; nonetheless Eliot has always taken care not

to become a “religious poet” and often belittled the power of poetry as a religious force. However, his

dramas Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) are more openly Christian

apologies. In his essays, especially the later ones, Eliot advocates a traditionalism in religion, society, and

literature that seems at odds with his pioneer activity as a poet. But although the Eliot of Notes towards

the Definition of Culture (1948) is an older man than the poet of The Waste Land, it should not be

forgotten that for Eliot tradition is a living organism comprising past and present in constant mutual

interaction. Eliot's plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party

(1949), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959) were published in one volume in

1962; Collected Poems 1909-62 appeared in 1963.

Context

Thomas Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot as he is better known, was born in 1888 in St. Louis. He was the son of

a prominent industrialist who came from a well- connected Boston family. Eliot always felt the loss of his

family’s New England roots and seemed to be somewhat ashamed of his father’s business success;

throughout his life he continually sought to return to the epicenter of Anglo- Saxon culture, first by

attending Harvard and then by emigrating to England, where he lived from 1914 until his death. Eliot

began graduate study in philosophy at Harvard and completed his dissertation, although the outbreak of

World War I prevented him from taking his examinations and receiving the degree. By that time, though,

Eliot had already written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the War, which kept him in England,

led him to decide to pursue poetry full-time.

Eliot met Ezra Pound in 1914, as well, and it was Pound who was his main mentor and editor and who

got his poems published and noticed. During a 1921 break from his job as a bank clerk (to recover from a

mental breakdown), Eliot finished the work that was to secure him fame, The Waste Land. This poem

heavily edited by Pound and perhaps also by Eliot’s wife, Vivien, addressed the fragmentation and

alienation characteristic of modern culture, making use of these fragments to create a new kind of


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poetry. It was also around this time that Eliot began to write criticism, partly in an effort to explain his

own methods. In 1925, he went to work for the publishing house Faber & Faber. Despite the distraction

of his wife’s increasingly serious bouts of mental illness, Eliot was from this time until his death the

preeminent literary figure in the English-speaking world; indeed, he was so monumental that younger

poets often went out of their way to avoid his looming shadow, painstakingly avoiding all similarities of

style.

Eliot became interested in religion in the later 1920s and eventually converted to Anglicanism. His

poetry from this point onward shows a greater religious bent, although it never becomes dogmatic the

way his sometimes controversial cultural criticism does. Four Quartets, his last major poetic work,

combines a Christian sensibility with a profound uncertainty resulting from the war’s devastation of

Europe. Eliot died in 1965 in London.

Analysis

Eliot attributed a great deal of his early style to the French Symbolists—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé,

and Laforgue—whom he first encountered in college, in a book by Arthur Symons called The Symbolist

Movement in Literature. It is easy to understand why a young aspiring poet would want to imitate these

glamorous bohemian figures, but their ultimate effect on his poetry is perhaps less profound than he

claimed. While he took from them their ability to infuse poetry with high intellectualism while

maintaining a sensuousness of language, Eliot also developed a great deal that was new and original. His

early works, like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, draw on a wide range of

cultural reference to depict a modern world that is in ruins yet somehow beautiful and deeply

meaningful. Eliot uses techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition to make his points without having to

argue them explicitly. As Ezra Pound once famously said, Eliot truly did “modernize himself.” In addition

to showcasing a variety of poetic innovations, Eliot’s early poetry also develops a series of characters

who fit the type of the modern man as described by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others of Eliot’s

contemporaries. The title character of “Prufrock” is a perfect example: solitary, neurasthenic, overly

intellectual, and utterly incapable of expressing himself to the outside world.

As Eliot grew older, and particularly after he converted to Christianity, his poetry changed. The later

poems emphasize depth of analysis over breadth of allusion; they simultaneously become more hopeful

in tone: Thus, a work such as Four Quartets explores more philosophical territory and offers

propositions instead of pessimism. The experiences of living in England during World War II inform the

Quartets, which address issues of time, experience, mortality, and art. Rather than lamenting the ruin of

modern culture and seeking redemption in the cultural past, as The Waste Land does, the quartets offer

ways around human limits through art and spirituality. The pastiche of the earlier works is replaced by

philosophy and logic, and the formal experiments of his early years are put aside in favor of a new

language consciousness, which emphasizes the sounds and other physical properties of words to create

musical, dramatic, and other subtle effects.

However, while Eliot’s poetry underwent significance transformations over the course of his career, his

poems also bear many unifying aspects: all of Eliot’s poetry is marked by a conscious desire to bring

together the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the emotional in a way that both honors the past and

acknowledges the present. Eliot is always conscious of his own efforts, and he frequently comments on

his poetic endeavors in the poems themselves. This humility, which often comes across as melancholy,


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makes Eliot’s some of the most personal, as well as the most intellectually satisfying, poetry in the

English language.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

The Damaged Psyche of Humanity

Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to express the fragile psychological state of

humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War I

challenged cultural notions of masculine identity, causing artists to question the romantic literary ideal

of a visionary-poet capable of changing the world through verse. Modernist writers wanted to capture

their transformed world, which they perceived as fractured, alienated, and denigrated. Europe lost an

entire generation of young men to the horrors of the so-called Great War, causing a general crisis of

masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place in a radically altered society. As for England, the

aftershocks of World War I directly contributed to the dissolution of the British Empire. Eliot saw society

as paralyzed and wounded, and he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. “The Love Song

of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) demonstrates this sense of indecisive paralysis as the titular speaker

wonders whether he should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, or if he has the fortitude to keep

living. Humanity’s collectively damaged psyche prevented people from communicating with one

another, an idea that Eliot explored in many works, including “A Game of Chess” (the second part of The

Waste Land) and “The Hollow Men.”

The Power of Literary History

Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western literary canon, and he packed his work full

of allusions, quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. In “The Tradition and the Individual Talent,”

an essay first published in 1919, Eliot praises the literary tradition and states that the best writers are

those who write with a sense of continuity with those writers who came before, as if all of literature

constituted a stream in which each new writer must enter and swim. Only the very best new work will

subtly shift the stream’s current and thus improve the literary tradition. Eliot also argued that the

literary past must be integrated into contemporary poetry. But the poet must guard against excessive

academic knowledge and distill only the most essential bits of the past into a poem, thereby

enlightening readers. The Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of various elements of literary and mythic

traditions with scenes and sounds from modern life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a

reinterpretation of canonical texts and a historical context for his examination of society and humanity.

The Changing Nature of Gender Roles

Over the course of Eliot’s life, gender roles and sexuality became increasingly flexible, and Eliot reflected

those changes in his work. In the repressive Victorian era of the nineteenth century, women were

confined to the domestic sphere, sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored, and a puritanical

atmosphere dictated most social interactions. Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 helped usher in a new era

of excess and forthrightness, now called the Edwardian Age, which lasted until 1910. World War I, from

1914 to 1918, further transformed society, as people felt both increasingly alienated from one another

and empowered to break social mores. English women began agitating in earnest for the right to vote in


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1918, and the flappers of the Jazz Age began smoking and drinking alcohol in public. Women were

allowed to attend school, and women who could afford it continued their education at those universities

that began accepting women in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers created gay and lesbian

characters and re-imagined masculinity and femininity as characteristics people could assume or shrug

off rather than as absolute identities dictated by society.

Eliot simultaneously lauded the end of the Victorian era and expressed concern about the freedoms

inherent in the modern age. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reflects the feelings of emasculation

experienced by many men as they returned home from World War I to find women empowered by their

new role as wage earners. Prufrock, unable to make a decision, watches women wander in and out of a

room, “talking of Michelangelo” (14), and elsewhere admires their downy, bare arms. A disdain for

unchecked sexuality appears in both “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (1918) and The Waste Land.

The latter portrays rape, prostitution, a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of

nonproductive sexuality. Nevertheless, the poem’s central character, Tiresias, is a hermaphrodite—and

his powers of prophesy and transformations are, in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia.

With Tiresias, Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by the two genders

coming together in one body.

Motifs

Fragmentation

Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern existence and to

juxtapose literary texts against one another. In Eliot’s view, humanity’s psyche had been shattered by

World War I and by the collapse of the British Empire. Collaging bits and pieces of dialogue, images,

scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and tones within one poetic work was a way for Eliot to

represent humanity’s damaged psyche and the modern world, with its barrage of sensory perceptions.

Critics read the following line from The Waste Land as a statement of Eliot’s poetic project: “These

fragments I have shored against my ruins” (431). Practically every line in The Waste Land echoes an

academic work or canonical literary text, and many lines also have long footnotes written by Eliot as an

attempt to explain his references and to encourage his readers to educate themselves by delving deeper

into his sources. These echoes and references are fragments themselves, since Eliot includes only parts,

rather than whole texts from the canon. Using these fragments, Eliot tries to highlight recurrent themes

and images in the literary tradition, as well as to place his ideas about the contemporary state of

humanity along the spectrum of history.

Mythic and Religious Ritual

Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books in the literary

tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references to both the obscure and

the well-known, thereby teaching his readers as he writes. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot explains

the crucial role played by religious symbols and myths. He drew heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in

which the fertility of the land was linked to the health of the Fisher King, a wounded figure who could be

healed through the sacrifice of an effigy. The Fisher King is, in turn, linked to the Holy Grail legends, in

which a knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable of healing the land. Ultimately, ritual fails

as the tool for healing the wasteland, even as Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities, including

Hindu chants, Buddhist speeches, and pagan ceremonies. Later poems take their images almost


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exclusively from Christianity, such as the echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men” and the

retelling of the story of the wise men in “Journey of the Magi” (1927).

Infertility

Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the people could

conceive. In The Waste Land, various characters are sexually frustrated or dysfunctional, unable to cope

with either reproductive or nonreproductive sexuality: the Fisher King represents damaged sexuality

(according to myth, his impotence causes the land to wither and dry up), Tiresias represents confused or

ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in “A Game of Chess” represent an out-of-control

sexuality. World War I not only eradicated an entire generation of young men in Europe but also ruined

the land. Trench warfare and chemical weapons, the two primary methods by which the war was

fought, decimated plant life, leaving behind detritus and carnage. In “The Hollow Men,” the speaker

discusses the dead land, now filled with stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their upraised

hands, stiffened from rigor mortis. Trying to process the destruction has caused the speaker’s mind to

become infertile: his head has been filled with straw, and he is now unable to think properly, to perceive

accurately, or to conceive of images or thoughts.

Symbols

Water

In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot’s characters wait for water to quench their

thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of

standing water. Although water has the regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also

lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from The Waste Land. Traditionally,

water can imply baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus Christ, and Eliot draws upon these

traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides solace, and water brings relief elsewhere in The

Waste Land and in “Little Gidding,” the fourth part of Four Quartets. Prufrock hears the seductive calls

of mermaids as he walks along the shore in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but, like Odysseus in

Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 800 b.c.e.), he realizes that a malicious intent lies behind the sweet voices: the

poem concludes “we drown” (131). Eliot thus cautions us to beware of simple solutions or cures, for

what looks innocuous might turn out to be very dangerous.

The Fisher King

The Fisher King is the central character in The Waste Land. While writing his long poem, Eliot drew on

From Ritual to Romance, a 1920 book about the legend of the Holy Grail by Miss Jessie L. Weston, for

many of his symbols and images. Weston’s book examined the connections between ancient fertility

rites and Christianity, including following the evolution of the Fisher King into early representations of

Jesus Christ as a fish. Traditionally, the impotence or death of the Fisher King brought unhappiness and

famine. Eliot saw the Fisher King as symbolic of humanity, robbed of its sexual potency in the modern

world and connected to the meaninglessness of urban existence. But the Fisher King also stands in for

Christ and other religious figures associated with divine resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of “What

the Thunder Said” fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder

sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliot’s scene echoes the scene in the Bible in which Christ performs


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one of his miracles: Christ manages to feed his multitude of followers by the Sea of Galilee with just a

small amount of fish.

Music and Singing

Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he

symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama, was in decline

while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with low culture by

juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and

Australian troops. Eliot splices nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men

and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, as the title, implies a song, with various lines repeated as

refrains. That poem ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowning—a

scene that echoes Odysseus’s interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another

way in which Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions. Elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics

as a kind of chorus, seconding and echoing the action of the poem, much as the chorus functions in

Greek tragedies.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Summary

This poem, the earliest of Eliot’s major works, was completed in 1910 or 1911 but not published until

1915. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man—overeducated,

eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to be addressing a

potential lover, with whom he would like to “force the moment to its crisis” by somehow consummating

their relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to “dare” an approach to the woman: In his mind

he hears the comments others make about his inadequacies, and he chides himself for “presuming”

emotional interaction could be possible at all. The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for Eliot)

physical settings—a cityscape (the famous “patient etherized upon a table”) and several interiors

(women’s arms in the lamplight, coffee spoons, fireplaces)—to a series of vague ocean images

conveying Prufrock’s emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his second-rate status

(“I am not Prince Hamlet’). “Prufrock” is powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the

vividness of character achieved.

Form

“Prufrock” is a variation on the dramatic monologue, a type of poem popular with Eliot’s predecessors.

Dramatic monologues are similar to soliloquies in plays. Three things characterize the dramatic

monologue, according to M.H. Abrams. First, they are the utterances of a specific individual (not the

poet) at a specific moment in time. Secondly, the monologue is specifically directed at a listener or

listeners whose presence is not directly referenced but is merely suggested in the speaker’s words.

Third, the primary focus is the development and revelation of the speaker’s character. Eliot modernizes

the form by removing the implied listeners and focusing on Prufrock’s interiority and isolation. The

epigraph to this poem, from Dante’s Inferno, describes Prufrock’s ideal listener: one who is as lost as the

speaker and will never betray to the world the content of Prufrock’s present confessions. In the world

Prufrock describes, though, no such sympathetic figure exists, and he must, therefore, be content with


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silent reflection. In its focus on character and its dramatic sensibility, “Prufrock” anticipates Eliot’s later,

dramatic works.

The rhyme scheme of this poem is irregular but not random. While sections of the poem may resemble

free verse, in reality, “Prufrock” is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic forms. The bits and

pieces of rhyme become much more apparent when the poem is read aloud. One of the most prominent

formal characteristics of this work is the use of refrains. Prufrock’s continual return to the “women

*who+ come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” and his recurrent questionings (“how should I presume?”)

and pessimistic appraisals (“That is not it, at all.”) both reference an earlier poetic tradition and help

Eliot describe the consciousness of a modern, neurotic individual. Prufrock’s obsessiveness is aesthetic,

but it is also a sign of compulsiveness and isolation. Another important formal feature is the use of

fragments of sonnet form, particularly at the poem’s conclusion. The three three-line stanzas are

rhymed as the conclusion of a Petrarchan sonnet would be, but their pessimistic, anti-romantic content,

coupled with the despairing interjection, “I do not think they (the mermaids) would sing to me,” creates

a contrast that comments bitterly on the bleakness of modernity.

Commentary

“Prufrock” displays the two most important characteristics of Eliot’s early poetry. First, it is strongly

influenced by the French Symbolists, like Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, whom Eliot had been

reading almost constantly while writing the poem. From the Symbolists, Eliot takes his sensuous

language and eye for unnerving or anti-aesthetic detail that nevertheless contributes to the overall

beauty of the poem (the yellow smoke and the hair-covered arms of the women are two good examples

of this). The Symbolists, too, privileged the same kind of individual Eliot creates with Prufrock: the

moody, urban, isolated-yet-sensitive thinker. However, whereas the Symbolists would have been more

likely to make their speaker himself a poet or artist, Eliot chooses to make Prufrock an unacknowledged

poet, a sort of artist for the common man.

The second defining characteristic of this poem is its use of fragmentation and juxtaposition. Eliot

sustained his interest in fragmentation and its applications throughout his career, and his use of the

technique changes in important ways across his body of work: Here, the subjects undergoing

fragmentation (and reassembly) are mental focus and certain sets of imagery; in The Waste Land, it is

modern culture that splinters; in the Four Quartets we find the fragments of attempted philosophical

systems. Eliot’s use of bits and pieces of formal structure suggests that fragmentation, although anxiety-

provoking, is nevertheless productive; had he chosen to write in free verse, the poem would have

seemed much more nihilistic. The kinds of imagery Eliot uses also suggest that something new can be

made from the ruins: The series of hypothetical encounters at the poem’s center are iterated and

discontinuous but nevertheless lead to a sort of epiphany (albeit a dark one) rather than just leading

nowhere. Eliot also introduces an image that will recur in his later poetry, that of the scavenger.

Prufrock thinks that he “should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent

seas.” Crabs are scavengers, garbage-eaters who live off refuse that makes its way to the sea floor.

Eliot’s discussions of his own poetic technique (see especially his essay “Tradition and the Individual

Talent”) suggest that making something beautiful out of the refuse of modern life, as a crab sustains and

nourishes itself on garbage, may, in fact, be the highest form of art. At the very least, this notion

subverts romantic ideals about art; at best, it suggests that fragments may become reintegrated, that

art may be in some way therapeutic for a broken modern world. In The Waste Land, crabs become rats,

and the optimism disappears, but here Eliot seems to assert only the limitless potential of scavenging.


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“Prufrock” ends with the hero assigning himself a role in one of Shakespeare’s plays: While he is no

Hamlet, he may yet be useful and important as “an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress,

start a scene or two...” This implies that there is still a continuity between Shakespeare’s world and ours,

that Hamlet is still relevant to us and that we are still part of a world that could produce something like

Shakespeare’s plays. Implicit in this, of course, is the suggestion that Eliot, who has created an

“attendant lord,” may now go on to create another Hamlet. While “Prufrock” ends with a devaluation of

its hero, it exalts its creator. Or does it? The last line of the poem suggests otherwise—that when the

world intrudes, when “human voices wake us,” the dream is shattered: “we drown.” With this single

line, Eliot dismantles the romantic notion that poetic genius is all that is needed to triumph over the

destructive, impersonal forces of the modern world. In reality, Eliot the poet is little better than his

creation: He differs from Prufrock only by retaining a bit of hubris, which shows through from time to

time. Eliot’s poetic creation, thus, mirrors Prufrock’s soliloquy: Both are an expression of aesthetic

ability and sensitivity that seems to have no place in the modern world. This realistic, anti-romantic

outlook sets the stage for Eliot’s later works, including The Waste Land.

The Waste Land Section I: “The Burial of the Dead”

Summary

The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up

of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an

autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and

claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member

of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with

remarks on the barren state of her current existence (“I read, much of the night, and go south in the

winter”). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where

the speaker will show the reader “something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding

behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of

dust” (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines). The almost

threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a “hyacinth girl” and a nihilistic

epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered through

quotations from Wagner’s operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss.

The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot

includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most

surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure

with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic

Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the

ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a

famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist

poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins.


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Form

Like “Prufrock,” this section of The Waste Land can be seen as a modified dramatic monologue. The four

speakers in this section are frantic in their need to speak, to find an audience, but they find themselves

surrounded by dead people and thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars. Because the sections are

so short and the situations so confusing, the effect is not one of an overwhelming impression of a single

character; instead, the reader is left with the feeling of being trapped in a crowd, unable to find a

familiar face.

Also like “Prufrock,” The Waste Land employs only partial rhyme schemes and short bursts of structure.

These are meant to reference—but also rework— the literary past, achieving simultaneously a

stabilizing and a DE familiarizing effect. The world of The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier

time, but it cannot be approached in the same way. The inclusion of fragments in languages other than

English further complicates matters. The reader is not expected to be able to translate these

immediately; rather, they are reminders of the cosmopolitan nature of twentieth-century Europe and of

mankind’s fate after the Tower of Babel: We will never be able to perfectly comprehend one another.

Commentary

Not only is The Waste Land Eliot’s greatest work, but it may be—along with Joyce’s Ulysses—the

greatest work of all modernist literature. Most of the poem was written in 1921, and it first appeared in

print in 1922. As the poem’s dedication indicates, Eliot received a great deal of guidance from Ezra

Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and to break up the rhyme

scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot’s wife, Vivien, also had a significant role in the poem’s

final form. A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot

considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe. A

sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem’s epigraph, taken from the

Satyr-icon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the

future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl’s predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his

own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with

reminders of its former glory. Thus, the underlying plot of The Waste Land, inasmuch as it can be said to

have one, revolves around Eliot’s reading of two extraordinarily influential contemporary

cultural/anthropological texts, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazier’s The

Golden Bough. Both of these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern

thought and religion; of particular interest to both authors is the story of the Fisher King, who has been

wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is the cause of his country becoming a desiccated

“waste land.” Heal the Fisher King, the legend says, and the land will regain its fertility. According to

Weston and Frazier, healing the Fisher King has been the subject of mythic tales from ancient Egypt to

Arthurian England. Eliot picks up on the figure of the Fisher King legend’s wasteland as an appropriate

description of the state of modern society. The important difference, of course, is that in Eliot’s world

there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all. The legend’s imperfect

integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative (like religion or

mythology) in the modern world.

Eliot’s poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot

provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent

source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the


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time of the poem’s writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would

reach its apex in the Four Quartets. The overall range of allusions in The Waste Land, though, suggests

no overarching paradigm but rather a grab bag of broken fragments that must somehow be pieced

together to form a coherent whole. While Eliot employs a deliberately difficult style and seems often to

find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display

his own intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the

twentieth century.

The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is not

the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be

regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more

fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed

preferable. Marie’s childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledding, and

coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting

from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical

importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a

juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night:

ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which

could produce a coherent literary culture.

The second episode contains a troubled religious proposition. The speaker describes a true wasteland of

“stony rubbish”; in it, he says, man can recognize only “*a+ heap of broken images.” Yet the scene seems

to offer salvation: shade and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only of

nothingness—a handful of dust—which is so profound as to be frightening; yet truth also resides here:

No longer is a religious phenomenon achieved through Christ, truth represented by a mere void. The

speaker remembers a female figure from his past, with whom he has apparently had some sort of

romantic involvement. In contrast to the present setting in the desert, his memories are lush, full of

water and blooming flowers. The vibrancy of the earlier scene, though, leads the speaker to a revelation

of the nothingness he now offers to show the reader. Again memory serves to contrast the past with the

present, but here it also serves to explode the idea of coherence in either place. In the episode from the

past, the “nothingness” is more clearly a sexual failure, a moment of impotence. Despite the overall

fecundity and joy of the moment, no reconciliation, and, therefore, no action, is possible. This in turn

leads directly to the desert waste of the present. In the final line of the episode attention turns from the

desert to the sea. Here, the sea is not a locus for the fear of nothingness, and neither is it the locus for a

philosophical interpretation of nothingness; rather, it is the site of true, essential nothingness itself. The

line comes from a section of Tristan und Isolde where Tristan waits for Isolde to come heal him. She is

supposedly coming by ship but fails to arrive. The ocean is truly empty, devoid of the possibility of

healing or revelation.

The third episode explores Eliot’s fascination with transformation. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris

conducts the most outrageous form of “reading” possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into

predictions, many of which will come true in succeeding sections of the poem. Eliot transforms the

traditional tarot pack to serve his purposes. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work of

magic and transformation in English literature, Shakespeare’s The Tempest (“Those are pearls that were

his eyes” is a quote from one of Ariel’s songs). Transformation in The Tempest, though, is the result of

the highest art of humankind. Here, transformation is associated with fraud, vulgarity, and cheap


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mysticism. That Madame Sosostris will prove to be right in her predictions of death and transformation

is a direct commentary on the failed religious mysticism and prophecy of the preceding desert section.

The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland of the poem, the

modern city. Eliot’s London references Baudelaire’s Paris (“Unreal City”), Dickens’s London (“the brown

fog of a winter dawn”) and Dante’s hell (“the flowing crowd of the dead”). The city is desolate and

depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker recognizes, is a

fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of ghoulish questions about a corpse buried

in his garden: again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and fertility. This

encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the tremendous slaughter of the first World

War; however, it can also be read as an exercise in ultimate futility: as we see in Stetson’s failure to

respond to the speaker’s inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights of history,

tradition, and the poet’s dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.

The Waste Land Section II: “A Game of Chess”

Summary

This section takes its title from two plays by the early 17th-century playwright Thomas Middleton, in one

of which the moves in a game of chess denote stages in a seduction. This section focuses on two

opposing scenes, one of high society and one of the lower classes. The first half of the section portrays a

wealthy, highly groomed woman surrounded by exquisite furnishings. As she waits for a lover, her

neurotic thoughts become frantic, meaningless cries. Her day culminates with plans for an excursion and

a game of chess. The second part of this section shifts to a London barroom, where two women discuss

a third woman. Between the bartender’s repeated calls of “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” (the bar is

closing for the night) one of the women recounts a conversation with their friend Lil, whose husband has

just been discharged from the army. She has chided Lil over her failure to get herself some false teeth,

telling her that her husband will seek out the company of other women if she doesn’t improve her

appearance. Lil claims that the cause of her ravaged looks is the medication she took to induce an

abortion; having nearly died giving birth to her fifth child, she had refused to have another, but her

husband “won’t leave *her+ alone.” The women leave the bar to a chorus of “good night(s)” reminiscent

of Ophelia’s farewell speech in Hamlet.

Form

The first part of the section is largely in unrhymed iambic pentameter lines, or blank verse. As the

section proceeds, the lines become increasingly irregular in length and meter, giving the feeling of

disintegration, of things falling apart. As the woman of the first half begins to give voice to her paranoid

thoughts, things do fall apart, at least formally: We read lines of dialogue, then a snippet from a

nonsense song. The last four lines of the first half rhyme, although they are irregular in meter,

suggesting at least a partial return to stability.

The second half of the section is a dialogue interrupted by the barman’s refrain. Rather than following

an organized structure of rhyme and meter, this section constitutes a loose series of phrases connected

by “I said(s)” and “she said(s).” This is perhaps the most poetically experimental section of the entire

poem. Eliot is writing in a lower-class vernacular here that resists poetic treatment. This section refutes

the prevalent claim that iambic pentameter mirrors normal English speech patterns: Line length and


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stresses are consistently irregular. Yet the section sounds like poetry: the repeated use of “I said” and

the grounding provided by the barman’s chorus allow the woman’s speech to flow elegantly, despite her

rough phrasing and the coarse content of her story.

Commentary

The two women of this section of the poem represent the two sides of modern sexuality: while one side

of this sexuality is a dry, barren interchange inseparable from neurosis and self-destruction, the other

side of this sexuality is a rampant fecundity associated with a lack of culture and rapid aging. The first

woman is associated by allusion with Cleopatra, Dido, and even Keats’s Lamia, by virtue of the lushness

of language surrounding her (although Eliot would never have acknowledged Keats as an influence). She

is a frustrated, overly emotional but not terribly intellectual figure, oddly sinister, surrounded by

“strange synthetic perfumes” and smoking candles. She can be seen as a counterpart to the title

character of Eliot’s earlier “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with whom she shares both a physical

setting and a profound sense of isolation. Her association with Dido and Cleopatra, two women who

committed suicide out of frustrated love, suggests her fundamental irrationality. Unlike the two queens

of myth, however, this woman will never become a cultural touchstone. Her despair is pathetic, rather

than moving, as she demands that her lover stay with her and tell her his thoughts. The lover, who

seems to be associated with the narrator of this part of the poem, can think only of drowning (again, in a

reference to The Tempest) and rats among dead men’s bones. The woman is explicitly compared to

Philomela, a character out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses who is raped by her brother-in-law the king, who

then cuts her tongue out to keep her quiet. She manages to tell her sister, who helps her avenge herself

by murdering the king’s son and feeding him to the king. The sisters are then changed into birds,

Philomela into a nightingale. This comparison suggests something essentially disappointing about the

woman, that she is unable to communicate her interior self to the world. The woman and her

surroundings, although aesthetically pleasing, are ultimately sterile and meaningless, as suggested by

the nonsense song that she sings (which manages to debase even Shakespeare).

The second scene in this section further diminishes the possibility that sex can bring regeneration—

either cultural or personal. This section is remarkably free of the cultural allusions that dominate the

rest of the poem; instead, it relies on vernacular speech to make its point. Notice that Eliot is using a

British vernacular: By this point he had moved to England permanently and had become a confirmed

Anglophile. Although Eliot is able to produce startlingly beautiful poetry from the rough speech of the

women in the bar, he nevertheless presents their conversation as further reason for pessimism. Their

friend Lil has done everything the right way—married, supported her soldier husband, borne children—

yet she is being punished by her body. Interestingly, this section ends with a line echoing Ophelia’s

suicide speech in Hamlet; this links Lil to the woman in the first section of the poem, who has also been

compared to famous female suicides. The comparison between the two is not meant to suggest equality

between them or to propose that the first woman’s exaggerated sense of high culture is in any way

equivalent to the second woman’s lack of it; rather, Eliot means to suggest that neither woman’s form

of sexuality is regenerative.


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The Waste Land Section III: “The Fire Sermon”

Summary

The title of this, the longest section of The Waste Land, is taken from a sermon given by Buddha in which

he encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolized by fire) and seek freedom from

earthly things. A turn away from the earthly does indeed take place in this section, as a series of

increasingly debased sexual encounters concludes with a river-song and a religious incantation. The

section opens with a desolate riverside scene: Rats and garbage surround the speaker, who is fishing

and “musing on the king my brother’s wreck.” The river-song begins in this section, with the refrain from

Spenser’s Prothalamion: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.” A snippet from a vulgar soldier’s

ballad follows, then a reference back to Philomela (see the previous section). The speaker is then

propositioned by Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris’s tarot pack. Eugenides

invites the speaker to go with him to a hotel known as a meeting place for homosexual trysts.

The speaker then proclaims himself to be Tiresias, a figure from classical mythology who has both male

and female features (“Old man with wrinkled female breasts”) and is blind but can “see” into the future.

Tiresias/the speaker observes a young typist, at home for tea, who awaits her lover, a dull and slightly

arrogant clerk. The woman allows the clerk to have his way with her, and he leaves victorious. Tiresias,

who has “foresuffered all,” watches the whole thing. After her lover’s departure, the typist thinks only

that she’s glad the encounter is done and over.

A brief interlude begins the river-song in earnest. First, a fisherman’s bar is described, then a beautiful

church interior, then the Thames itself. These are among the few moments of tranquility in the poem,

and they seem to represent some sort of simpler alternative. The Thames-daughters, borrowed from

Spenser’s poem, chime in with a nonsense chorus (“Weialala leia / Wallala leialala”). The scene shifts

again, to Queen Elizabeth I in an amorous encounter with the Earl of Leicester. The queen seems

unmoved by her lover’s declarations, and she thinks only of her “people humble people who expect /

Nothing.” The section then comes to an abrupt end with a few lines from St. Augustine’s Confessions

and a vague reference to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon (“burning”).

Form

This section of The Waste Land is notable for its inclusion of popular poetic forms, particularly musical

ones. The more plot-driven sections are in Eliot’s usual assortment of various line lengths, rhymed at

random. “The Fire Sermon,” however, also includes bits of many musical pieces, including Spenser’s

wedding song (which becomes the song of the Thames-daughters), a soldier’s ballad, a nightingale’s

chirps, a song from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, and a mandolin tune (which has no words

but is echoed in “a clatter and a chatter from within”). The use of such “low” forms cuts both ways here:

In one sense, it provides a critical commentary on the episodes described, the cheap sexual encounters

shaped by popular culture (the gramophone, the men’s hotel). But Eliot also uses these bits and pieces

to create high art, and some of the fragments he uses (the lines from Spenser in particular) are

themselves taken from more exalted forms. In the case of the Prothalamion, in fact, Eliot is placing

himself within a tradition stretching back to ancient Greece (classically, “prothalamion” is a generic term

for a poem-like song written for a wedding). Again this provides an ironic contrast to the debased

goings-on but also provides another form of connection and commentary. Another such reference,

generating both ironic distance and proximate parallels, is the inclusion of Elizabeth I: The liaison


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between Elizabeth and Leicester is traditionally romanticized, and, thus, the reference seems to clash

with the otherwise sordid nature of this section. However, Eliot depicts Elizabeth—and Spenser, for that

matter—as a mere fragment, stripped of noble connotations and made to represent just one more piece

of cultural rubbish. Again, this is not meant to be a democratizing move but a nihilistic one: Romance is

dead.

Commentary

The opening two stanzas of this section describe the ultimate “Waste Land” as Eliot sees it. The

wasteland is cold, dry, and barren, covered in garbage. Unlike the desert, which at least burns with heat,

this place is static, save for a few scurrying rats. Even the river, normally a symbol of renewal, has been

reduced to a “dull canal.” The ugliness stands in implicit contrast to the “Sweet Thames” of Spenser’s

time. The most significant image in these lines, though, is the rat. Like the crabs in Prufrock, rats are

scavengers, taking what they can from the refuse of higher-order creatures. The rat could be said to

provide a model for Eliot’s poetic process: Like the rat, Eliot takes what he can from earlier, grander

generations and uses the bits and pieces to sustain (poetic) life. Somehow this is preferable to the more

coherent but vulgar existence of the contemporary world, here represented by the sound of horns and

motors in the distance, intimating a sexual liaison.

The actual sexual encounters that take place in this section of the poem are infinitely unfruitful.

Eugenides proposes a homosexual tryst, which by its very nature thwarts fertility. The impossibility of

regeneration by such means is symbolized by the currants in his pocket—the desiccated, deadened

versions of what were once plump, fertile fruits. The typist and her lover are equally barren in their way,

even though reproduction is at least theoretically possible for the two. Living in so impoverished a

manner that she does not even own a bed, the typist is certainly not interested in a family. Elizabeth and

Leicester are perhaps the most interesting of the three couples, however. For political reasons, Elizabeth

was required to represent herself as constantly available for marriage (to royalty from countries with

whom England may have wanted an alliance); out of this need came the myth of the “Virgin Queen.”

This can be read as the opposite of the Fisher King legend: To protect the vitality of the land, Elizabeth

had to compromise her own sexuality; whereas in the Fisher King story, the renewal of the land comes

with the renewal of the Fisher King’s sexual potency. Her tryst with Leicester, therefore, is a

consummation that is simultaneously denied, an event that never happened. The twisted logic

underlying Elizabeth’s public sexuality, or lack thereof, mirrors and distorts the Fisher King plot and

further questions the possibility for renewal, especially through sexuality, in the modern world.

Tiresias, thus, becomes an important model for modern existence. Neither man nor woman, and blind

yet able to see with ultimate clarity, he is an individual who does not hope or act. He has, like Prufrock,

“seen it all,” but, unlike Prufrock, he sees no possibility for action. Whereas Prufrock is paralyzed by his

neuroses, Tiresias is held motionless by ennui and pragmatism. He is not quite able to escape earthly

things, though, for he is forced to sit and watch the sordid deeds of mortals; like the Sibyl in the poem’s

epigraph, he would like to die but cannot. The brief interlude following the typist’s tryst may offer an

alternative to escape, by describing a warm, everyday scene of work and companionship; however, the

interlude is brief, and Eliot once again tosses us into a world of sex and strife. Tiresias disappears, to be

replaced by St. Augustine at the end of the section. Eliot claims in his footnote to have deliberately

conflated Augustine and the Buddha, as the representatives of Eastern and Western asceticism. Both

seem, in the lines Eliot quotes, to be unable to transcend the world on their own: Augustine must call on

God to “pluck *him+ out,” while Buddha can only repeat the word “burning,” unable to break free of its


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monotonous fascination. The poem’s next section, which will relate the story of a death without

resurrection, exposes the absurdity of these two figures’ faith in external higher powers. That this

section ends with only the single word “burning,” isolated on the page, reveals the futility of all of man’s

struggles.

The Waste Land Section IV: “Death by Water”

Summary

The shortest section of the poem, “Death by Water” describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has

died, apparently by drowning. In death he has forgotten his worldly cares as the creatures of the sea

have picked his body apart. The narrator asks his reader to consider Phlebas and recall his or her own

mortality.

Form

While this section appears on the page as a ten-line stanza, in reading, it compresses into eight: four

pairs of rhyming couplets. Both visually and audibly, this is one of the most formally organized sections

of the poem. It is meant to recall other highly organized forms that often have philosophical or religious

import, like aphorisms and parables. The alliteration and the deliberately archaic language (“o you,” “a

fortnight dead”) also contribute to the serious, didactic feel of this section.

Commentary

The major point of this short section is to refute ideas of renewal and regeneration. Phlebas just dies;

that’s it. Like Stetson’s corpse in the first section, Phlebas’s body yields nothing more than products of

decay. However, the section’s meaning is far from flat; indeed, its ironic layering is twofold. First, this

section fulfills one of the prophecies of Madame Sosostris in the poem’s first section: “Fear death by

water,” she says, after pulling the card of the Drowned Sailor. Second, this section, in its language and

form, mimics other literary forms (parables, biblical stories, etc.) that are normally rich in meaning.

These two features suggest that something of great significance lies here. In reality, though, the only

lesson that Phlebas offers is that the physical reality of death and decay triumphs over all. Phlebas is not

resurrected or transfigured. Eliot further emphasizes Phlebas’s dried-up antiquity and irrelevance by

placing this section in the distant past (by making Phlebas a Phoenician).

The Waste Land Section V: “What the Thunder Said”

Summary

The final section of The Waste Land is dramatic in both its imagery and its events. The first half of the

section builds to an apocalyptic climax, as suffering people become “hooded hordes swarming” and the

“unreal” cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London are destroyed, rebuilt, and


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destroyed again. A decaying chapel is described, which suggests the chapel in the legend of the Holy

Grail. Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and the rains come, relieving the drought and bringing life back to

the land. Curiously, no heroic figure has appeared to claim the Grail; the renewal has come seemingly at

random, gratuitously.

The scene then shifts to the Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where thunder rumbles. Eliot

draws on the traditional interpretation of “what the thunder says,” as taken from the Upanishads (Hindu

fables). According to these fables, the thunder “gives,” “sympathizes,” and “controls” through its

“speech”; Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunder’s power. The

meditations seem to bring about some sort of reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting

on the shore preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his imminent death or at least abdication. The

poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children’s song, from Dante, and from

Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant of “Shantih shantih shantih”—the traditional ending to an

Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as “the peace which passeth

understanding,” the expression of ultimate resignation.

Form

Just as the third section of the poem explores popular forms, such as music, the final section of The

Waste Land moves away from more typical poetic forms to experiment with structures normally

associated with religion and philosophy. The proposition and meditation structure of the last part of this

section looks forward to the more philosophically oriented Four Quartets, Eliot’s last major work. The

reasoned, structured nature of the final stanzas comes as a relief after the obsessively repetitive

language and alliteration (“If there were water / And no rock / If there were rock / And also water...”) of

the apocalyptic opening. The reader’s relief at the shift in style mirrors the physical relief brought by the

rain midway through the section. Both formally and thematically, then, this final chapter follows a

pattern of obsession and resignation. Its patterning reflects the speaker’s offer at the end to “fit you,” to

transform experience into poetry (“fit” is an archaic term for sections of a poem or play; here, “fit” is

used as a verb, meaning “to render into a fit,” to make into poetry).

Commentary

The initial imagery associated with the apocalypse at this section’s opening is taken from the crucifixion

of Christ. Significantly, though, Christ is not resurrected here: we are told, “He who was living is now

dead.” The rest of the first part, while making reference to contemporary events in Eastern Europe and

other more traditional apocalypse narratives, continues to draw on Biblical imagery and symbolism

associated with the quest for the Holy Grail. The repetitive language and harsh imagery of this section

suggest that the end is perhaps near, that not only will there be no renewal but that there will be no

survival either. Cities are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed, mirroring the cyclical downfall of cultures:

Jerusalem, Greece, Egypt, and Austria—among the major empires of the past two millennia—all see

their capitals fall. There is something nevertheless insubstantial about this looming disaster: it seems

“unreal,” as the ghost-filled London did earlier in the poem. It is as if such a profound end would be

inappropriate for such a pathetic civilization. Rather, we expect the end to be accompanied by a sense

of boredom and surrender.

Release comes not from any heroic act but from the random call of a farmyard bird. The symbolism

surrounding the Grail myth is still extant but it is empty, devoid of people. No one comes to the ruined


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chapel, yet it exists regardless of who visits it. This is a horribly sad situation: The symbols that have

previously held profound meaning still exist, yet they are unused and unusable. A flash of light—a quick

glimpse of truth and vitality, perhaps—releases the rain and lets the poem end.

The meditations upon the Upanishads give Eliot a chance to test the potential of the modern world.

Asking, “what have we given?” he finds that the only time people give is in the sexual act and that this

gift is ultimately evanescent and destructive: He associates it with spider webs and solicitors reading

wills. Just as the poem’s speaker fails to find signs of giving, so too does he search in vain for acts of

sympathy—the second characteristic of “what the thunder says”: He recalls individuals so caught up in

his or her own fate—each thinking only of the key to his or her own prison—as to be oblivious to

anything but “ethereal rumors” of others. The third idea expressed in the thunder’s speech—that of

control—holds the most potential, although it implies a series of domineering relationships and

surrenders of the self that, ultimately, are never realized.

Finally Eliot turns to the Fisher King himself, still on the shore fishing. The possibility of regeneration for

the “arid plain” of society has been long ago discarded. Instead, the king will do his best to put in order

what remains of his kingdom, and he will then surrender, although he still fails to understand the true

significance of the coming void (as implied by the phrase “peace which passeth understanding”). The

burst of allusions at the end can be read as either a final attempt at coherence or as a final dissolution

into a world of fragments and rubbish. The king offers some consolation: “These fragments I have

shored against my ruins,” he says, suggesting that it will be possible to continue on despite the failed

redemption. It will still be possible for him, and for Eliot, to “fit you,” to create art in the face of

madness. It is important that the last words of the poem are in a non-Western language: Although the

meaning of the words themselves communicates resignation (“peace which passeth understanding”),

they invoke an alternative set of paradigms to those of the Western world; they offer a glimpse into a

culture and a value system new to us—and, thus, offer some hope for an alternative to our own dead

world.

Four Quartets: “Burnt Norton”

Summary

The first of the quartets, “Burnt Norton,” is named for a ruined country house in Gloucestershire. This

quartet is the most explicitly concerned with time as an abstract principle. The first section combines a

hypothesis on time—that the past and the future are always contained in the present—with a

description of a rose garden where children hide, laughing. A bird serves as the poet’s guide, bringing

him into the garden, showing him around, and saving him from despair at not being able to reach the

laughing children. The second section begins with a sort of song, filled with abstract images of a vaguely

pagan flavor. The poem shifts midway through the section, where it again assumes a more meditative

tone in order to sort out the differences between consciousness and living in time: The speaker asserts,

“To be conscious is not to be in time,” for consciousness implies a fixed perspective while time is

characterized by a transient relativity (around the fixed point of the present). However, this statement

does not intend to devalue memory and temporal existence, which, according to the poem, allow the

moments of greatest beauty. The third section of “Burnt Norton” reads like the bridge section of a song,


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in which the key changes. In this section, Eliot describes a “place of disaffection”—perhaps the everyday

world—which allows neither transcendence (“darkness”) nor the beauty of the moment (“daylight”).

The fourth, very short section returns to a sort of melody (some of the lines rhyme) to describe the

unattainable, fictional point of fixity around which time is organized. This point is described as

surrounded by flowers and birds; perhaps it can be found in the rose garden of the first section. The final

section of this quartet returns to reality: Despite the apparent vitality of words and music, these must

die; the children’s laughter in the garden becomes a mocking laughter, scorning our enslavement to

time.

Form

Eliot is much less experimental with rhyme and meter here than he is in his earlier works. Instead, he

displays a mature language consciousness. Through the repetition of words and the use of structures

like chiasmus and pastiche, he creates a rhythm not dependent on previous poetic forms. It is as if the

mere meaning of the words is not enough to express the philosophical concepts Eliot wants to explore,

as they “decay with imprecision”: He must exploit the physical properties of the words themselves. The

repetition and circularity of language that are this poem’s hallmarks highlight the infinite circularity of

time: Just as past, present, and future cannot be separated with any precision, neither can the words

used to describe them. Rather than exploiting bizarre combinations of images or intricate formal

devices, Eliot uses the gravity of terms like “past” and “present” to create a beautiful monument of

ideas.

Commentary

The Four Quartets were written over a period of eight years, from 1935 to 1942. These years span World

War II; they also follow Eliot’s conversion to the Church of England and his naturalization as a British

subject. These poems are the work of an older, more mature, spiritually attuned poet, facing a world

torn by war and increasingly neglectful of the past. Each of the Four Quartets considers spiritual

existence, consciousness, and the relationship of the present to the past. Whereas The Waste Land and

others of Eliot’s early works take an interest in the effects of time on culture, the Quartets are

concerned with the conflict between individual mortality and the endless span of human existence.

Accordingly, each quartet focuses on a particular place with its own distinctive significance to human

history and takes off from that place to propose a series of ideas about spirituality and meaningful

experience. Each quartet separates into five sections; Eliot used these divisions and the transitions

between them to try to create an effect he described as similar to the musical form of the sonata. The

Quartets, thus, display none of the fragmentation or collage-like qualities of Eliot’s earlier poetry;

instead, Eliot substitutes an elegant measuredness and a new awareness of language: Puns and other

forms of wordplay occur with some frequency.

Eliot does not hide the ideas behind the poetry here. His meditations on time and being are stated fairly

explicitly and can be easily traced in the poem. “Burnt Norton” is, however, a poem about distraction,

and two of the more interesting aspects of the poem are also two of its most understated moments. The

first of these surrounds the garden in which the first section is set. Certainly the garden—”our first

world”—references the Garden of Eden: A place of unattainable peace (and in this case insight) that is

normally forbidden to mere mortals but that exists in memory and in literature as a standard to which

everyday existence must be unfavorably compared. Yet the garden is also a part of the ruined estate

from which this quartet takes its name; it bears the marks of human presence and abandonment—


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empty pools and formal hedges gone wild. The wreck of the garden brings to mind the ruins so

prominent in Eliot’s earlier poetry, except that, here, ruins are a symbol of the futility of human

aspirations and particularly of the futility of trying to alter the natural order.

Ruins also call to mind fragments, especially of the kind that make up Eliot’s earlier poetry. The first line

of the second section of “Burnt Norton”—“Garlic and sapphires in the mud”—highlights Eliot’s new

attitude toward the fragmentary nature of modern culture. This famous line juxtaposes a series of

random things, but the effect is not the atmosphere of belatedness and melancholy characteristic of The

Waste Land. Rather, the collage-like arrangements of this section form a nearly coherent whole, a

meaningless song that sounds traditional but isn’t. Again fragments and ruins stand in defiance of

human aspirations, only this poem does not lament that things once made sense and have now ceased

to do so; rather, it declares that coherence never existed at all—that meaning and human experience

are necessarily mutually exclusive.

The second center of interest in this quartet is constructed around the Chinese vase and the ruminations

on poetry in the fifth section. This section clearly owes a debt to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with

which it shares some of its thematic concerns and its imagery. The Chinese jar represents the capacity of

art to transcend the limitations of the moment, to achieve a kind of victory over, or perspective upon,

time. In its form and pattern, in its physical existence, the jar is able to overcome the usual imprecision

of human expression. By emphasizing form and pattern, Eliot suggests that poetry, which takes

advantage of the linguistic versions of these, may also be able to achieve transcendence. Nevertheless,

at the end there still remains the ghostly laughter of children in the garden, mocking “the waste sad

time” of the poet and of poetry. The place of poetry and Eliot’s own poetic practices will be a subject of

scrutiny elsewhere in the Quartets.

Four Quartets: “East Coker”

Summary

This, the second of the Quartets, appeared in 1940. It takes its name from the village in Somerset,

England, that was the home of Eliot’s first forebear to leave for America in the 17th century. This poem

is most concerned with the place of man in the natural order and with the idea of renewal. The most

explicitly Christian of the quartets, this is also the one that addresses the War most directly, particularly

in its pessimism and visions of destruction. In addition, Eliot here engages in what is perhaps his most

extended and direct meditation on his poetic career.

The first section of “East Coker” describes the cycle of renewal and decay as Eliot sees it. Houses and

other signs of human habitation become empty fields or freeway overpasses. In the fields on summer

nights, if one listens carefully enough, one can hear the sounds of the simple rural life of the past. The

language of this section is reminiscent of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, with its emphasis on natural

cycles and harmony. Time here, however, is less cyclical than it is linear: “In my beginning is my end.”

The second section of the poem opens with a lyric on the disturbance of the seasons. Suddenly, the

poem reverses itself, and Eliot attacks his own poetic work as “not very satisfactory: / ...worn-out

poetical fashion.” Eliot rejects “the knowledge derived from experience” as having “only a limited


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value,” and he identifies humility as the only wisdom possible for humans. The section ends with a

reminder that the houses and the dancers of the first section have all disappeared. The third section

provides a continuation of the string of disappearances, as Eliot catalogues those who have passed into

the darkness of death. This recalls the first section of The Waste Land (“I had not thought death had

undone so many”), except that it is, of course, much more pessimistic: Here, there are not even the

ghosts of former friends with whom to converse. The meditative portion of this section combines an

Eastern nihilism and rhetorical structure with a more Christian message, as the poet tells himself to wait

patiently and to expect a difficult route to awareness. The fourth section of “East Coker” provides the

most explicit reminder of the war. It describes a hospital staffed by a “wounded surgeon” and a “dying

nurse” where patients are not healed but are led through painful illness to death and a tenuous

salvation. The section ends with a reference to Good Friday, the day of Christ’s crucifixion—a reminder

that anything worthy must come through suffering, forbearance, and deferral to a higher authority. The

final section of the poem again focuses on Eliot’s failure as a poet. He has wasted his youth and has only

learned how to articulate ideas that are no longer useful. His life is a struggle to “recover what has been

lost.” Finally, he settles for an unsatisfying earthly existence followed by the promise of darkness and

death, in which he will finally find that “*i+n my end is my beginning.”

Form

In this Quartet, Eliot continues to reject previous poetic forms in favor of an experiment with language.

Terms like “end” and “beginning” take on multiple meanings and shadings as they are reused and

juxtaposed. Eliot here displays a certain cleverness with words (the “receipt for deceit” that our

forebears leave us, for example) that suggests frustration with trying to communicate via his normal

tone of high seriousness. The fourth section of “East Coker” is written in perfect ababb rhyme and is one

of the few works in which Eliot uses a sustained formal structure. Perhaps in this submission to the

authority of tradition, Eliot mirrors his thematic submission to the authority of God in this section, which

ends with the reference to Good Friday. Perhaps Eliot resorts to a more formal structure in the feeling

that many of his previous poetic efforts seem futile. Either way, “East Coker” represents a continued

shift away from the highly fragmented style that characterizes The Waste Land and the other early

works.

Commentary

In “East Coker,” Eliot continues to work with a set of images that have appeared in his poetry since The

Waste Land. Encounters with “shades,” or ghosts, come to represent the poet’s own mortality. They also

come to represent a level of understanding that is always within sight, yet forever unattainable. In this

quartet, the children in the garden from “Burnt Norton” and the shades on London Bridge from The

Waste Land have been replaced by villagers on the green, dancing in celebration of a wedding. The

poem even shifts into archaic English at this point, as if to assert that the apparitions are momentarily

speaking through the poet. The villagers reappear at other moments in the poem, often just when Eliot

remarks that they have disappeared, and are supplemented by the shades of section three, who

represent literally the citizens of London descending into subway tunnels to escape World War II air

raids but who also seem to denote the masses of humanity who have lived and died without making a

mark on the world. Everything cycles endlessly but without meaning: What could it possibly mean to be

a part of something the whole of which no one will ever have sufficient perspective to see?


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Even Eliot’s take on Christianity is colored by despair. The rebirth he describes as resulting from Christ’s

crucifixion is no rebirth at all but a terrifying stay at a hospital staffed by corpses. The best we can hope

for is to “die of the absolute paternal care.” Eliot emphasizes not Easter Sunday—the day of the

Resurrection—but instead Good Friday: the day of Christ’s death, for which humans bear responsibility.

The hospital imagery and the emphasis on human malignity are obvious references to the European war

raging while Eliot was writing. They also, though, represent his realization that human folly and the

inability to see the larger designs behind history doom any human endeavors to failure.

Particularly doomed to failure are Eliot’s own attempts at poetry. This is by far the poet at his most

pessimistic. The beautiful, if confusing and despairing, lyric that opens the second section is erased by

the harsh assessment of poetry that follows it. Here words not only fail to signify completely but indeed

actively falsify, for they fail to appreciate the pattern rendered anew “in every moment” for what it truly

is: “a new and shocking valuation of all we have been.” This is the same assessment of time and

perspective that Eliot had made in his earlier essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” except that

here, the destruction and renovation brought about by time does not enable poetry or enrich the

cultural tradition—rather, it is merely crippling. The contemporary world in this poem is made up not of

the fragments of past glories that were featured in The Waste Land, but of disconnected, entirely new

and culturally blank features: overpasses and subway tunnels. Thus, “East Coker” offers little hope for

either humanity or poetry.

Four Quartets: “The Dry Salvages”

Summary

The third of the Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” appeared in 1941. The word “salvages” in the title should

be pronounced, as Eliot mentions in a note to the poem, to rhyme with “assuages,” with the emphasis

on the penultimate syllable. The Dry Salvages are a group of small, rocky islands with a lighthouse off

the coast of Massachusetts. Eliot presumably visited them or at least knew of them as a boy. This

quartet departs from the pessimism and human ruins of the other three to consider humanity as a

whole, as an entity with a unified subconscious and memory that produce mythic structures. Humanity

is, thus, placed on a level with the natural world as something with a history and with cycles of rebirth

and renewal.

The first section of “The Dry Salvages” makes an explicit comparison between a river and the sea as

models for the unknowable. A river, while it may figure prominently in human mythologies, is something

that can eventually be crossed and conquered, while the sea represents an endless reserve of depths

and mysteries: Man can live with the ocean but he will never master it. The second section of the poem

seems to signify reconciliation with the human lot. The sea will never be either a blank slate or an easily

circumscribed pond; “there is no end of it,” and man must always keep working in good faith. Time

destroys but it also preserves, and just as there is no mastery there is also no escape. The third section

of the poem ruminates on words attributed to Krishna, advising humanity not to “fare well” but to “fare

forward.” This is an exhortation to give up aspirations—to stop seeking to do “well”—and to be satisfied

with mere existence. Again Eliot uses a ghostly figure; in this case a voice from high in a ship’s rigging, to

represent a level of awareness unattainable for the series of travelers he describes here. The fourth


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section is a prayer to the Virgin Mary, figured as a statue watching over the sea, asking her to pray for

those who voyage on the sea and those who wait for them at home. Both the sailors and their loved

ones stand in for all of humanity, faced with uncertain conditions and a lack of knowledge. The final

section of “The Dry Salvages” at last offers something akin to hope. While man will always strive in vain

to “apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time,” everyday existence nevertheless

contains moments of only half-noticed grace—moments at which “you are the music / While the music

lasts.” Moreover, “right action,” while it will never be entirely successful, is nevertheless almost the only

way available to man to subvert the “daemonic” forces that drive him.

Form

This quartet returns to some of the same easy music of “Burnt Norton.” Again, Eliot plays with words

(“womb, or tomb”), and, particularly in the second section, there are moments in which the gravity of

the ideas forces the poetry into a somber, prose-like mode. In general, though, Eliot uses far less

repetition and circular language in this section, effectively lightening the tone. The poem also makes use

of extended “landscapes”—the river and the sea— that allow Eliot to engage in flights of descriptive

language free from the philosophical seriousness of the rest of the Quartets. Again, too, formal

structures are borrowed from religious and philosophical sources, as in the prayer of section four and

the Krishna material in the third section. In a way, Eliot is associating his poetic efforts with the other

struggles for knowledge listed in the final section—astrology, palm-reading, animal sacrifices—and this

leads him to take himself far less seriously, to look instead for the moments of hidden beauty in his

language.

Commentary

“The Dry Salvages” is interrupted at least twice by the ringing of a bell. In both cases it is a bell at sea,

either on a ship or on a buoy. The bell is a human intervention that is meant to illuminate the vastness

both of the sea and of mere existence and to point out the futility of trying to master it with anything as

ineffectual as a bell. In both cases, the bell goes unheard: In the first mention, it is a bell on a buoy out

to sea, which will be heard most likely only by those about to be wrecked on the rocks the buoy is

supposed to mark. Placed there by man, the bell has nevertheless come under the control of the sea and

has become irrelevant as a marker of human intention. The second bell is rung for the dead, for those

lost at sea. They are where the sound of the bell cannot reach them; the bell, therefore, tolls not for

them but for those left behind. This bell is mentioned in the exhortation to the Virgin Mary to pray for

those lost and those still here. Like prayer, the bell represents an attempt to appeal to a higher power,

to admit one’s own mortal limits. The bell directly refutes poetic endeavor, too: human-made, a bell’s

ring is an attempt to communicate without words, an admission that words have failed.

Perhaps the most famous part of this poem is its opening, with the description of the river as “a strong

brown god.” These lines are often coopted and used to describe the Mississippi and to talk about the

mythological importance of rivers. Curiously, though, Eliot is actually demoting the river to the status of

a false god, by pointing out its inferiority to the sea as an object for contemplation. Popular culture’s

glorification of these lines indeed illustrates the very inanity of human action that Eliot describes later in

the poem: Dazzled by the lines’ rhetorical force, we tend to attribute greater meaning to the language

than is really there, while we ignore what is actually being said. In the second section of the poem, the

river becomes a conduit for refuse and unpleasant memories, a shallow channel rather than a “strong

brown god.” Just as we can neither escape nor romanticize the river, nor can we master the past.


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The final lines of “The Dry Salvages” combine a resigned pessimism with a suggestion of hope. Couched

in the beauty of the lines is a dark meaning: “our temporal reversion” is death, which is beneficial only if

we can become “significant soil” that might nourish a tree. By hiding behind such flights of language,

Eliot once again retreats into the refuge of the poet. He may not be able to master time and experience

but he is master of the world that he writes into being. Futility does not diminish beauty.

Four Quartets: “Little Gidding”

Summary

“Little Gidding” was the last of the Quartets to be written. It appeared in print in 1942; in 1943, the four

pieces were collected and published together. “Little Gidding,” named after a 17th-century Anglican

monastery renowned for its devotion, is the place where the problems of time and human fallibility are

more or less resolved. The first section describes a sunny winter’s day, where everything is dead yet

blazing with the sun’s fire. The poem considers those who have come to the monastery, who come only

“to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.” It is here that man can encounter the “intersection of the

timeless” with the present moment, often by heeding the words of the dead, whose speech is given a

vitality by a burning fire. The second section opens with a lyric on the death of the four elements (air,

earth, water, and fire) that have figured so prominently in the previous quartets. The scene then shifts

to the poet walking at dawn. He meets the ghost of some former master, whom he does not quite

recognize. The two speak, and the ghost gives the poet the burdens of wisdom: awareness of folly, a loss

of perception of beauty, and shame at one’s past deeds. The spirit tells him that only if he is “restored

by ...refining fire” will he escape these curses. The spirit then leaves him with a benediction, and a horn

blow, which may be an air-raid siren. The third section is more propositional in nature. The poet

declares that attachment, detachment, and indifference are all related; all three look alike but

indifference comes only through the exercise of memory to create abstractions. The second part of this

section asserts that, despite this, “all shall be well.” As the poet thinks on the people who have come to

Little Gidding seeking spiritual renewal and peace, he realizes that the dead have left us only “a symbol,”

one that has been perfected but is nevertheless still only a representation or an abstraction. The fourth

section is a formal two-stanza piece describing first a dove with a tongue of fire, which both purifies and

destroys; the second stanza then considers love as the chief torment of man, which can redeem as well

as torture. Either way, we are caught between two kinds of fire. The final section of the poem, and of

the whole of the Quartets, brings the spiritual and the aesthetic together in a final reconciliation. Perfect

language results in poetry in which every word and every phrase is “an end and a beginning.” The

timeless and the time-bound are interchangeable and in the moment, if one is in the right place, like the

chapel at Little Gidding. All will be well when the fires that both destroy and redeem come together to

form a knot and “the fire and the rose”—divine wrath and mercy—become one.

Form

This is the most dramatic of the Four Quartets, in that it is here that the language most closely

approaches the rhythms of everyday speech. The diction is measured, intellectual, but always self-

conscious in its repetitiveness and in the palpable presence of the speaker. Certain sections of “Little

Gidding” (“And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well”) borrow from liturgical language


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to create the effect of attending an ideal religious service. The fourth section, like the fourth sections of

the other quartets, is a sustained formal piece that serves as a sort of contrapuntal melody to the rest of

the poem. Although not as elegant as “Burnt Norton” or as musical as “East Coker,” “Little Gidding” is

perhaps the most balanced of the quartets in its attention to imagery and language.

Commentary

Fire and roses are the main images of this poem. Both have a double meaning. Roses, a traditional

symbol of English royalty, represent all of England, but they also are made to stand for divine love,

mercy, and the garden where the children in “Burnt Norton” hide (they reappear at the end of this

poem). Fire is both the flame of divine harshness and the spiritual ether capable of purifying the human

soul and bringing understanding. The series of double images creates a strong sense of paradox: Just as

one seemingly cannot exist both in and out of time, one cannot be simultaneously both purified and

destroyed.

This sense of paradox leads to the creation of an alternative world, rendered through spiritual retreat

and supernatural figures. The dead, with their words “tongued with fire,” offer an alternative set of

possibilities for the poet seeking to escape the fetters of reality. By going to a place “where prayer has

been valid,” Eliot proposes that imagination and a little faith can conquer the strictures placed upon

man by time and history; as the ghost in the third section reminds the poet, escape is always possible.

This is particularly significant when we notice that the ghost’s words are actually generated by the

speaker (who “assumed a double part”), actually engaged in a dialogue with himself. While the dead can

offer us only a “symbol,” symbols nevertheless give us an opportunity for interpretation and exercise of

the imagination. By allowing us a way to bypass the realities of our world, they open up a spiritual

freedom.

This poem, finally, celebrates the ability of human vision to transcend the apparent limitations of human

mortality. In a place set away from the world, one can hear, if one chooses, the children laughing in the

garden. War, suffering, and the modern condition have provided Eliot with an opportunity for spiritual

reflection that ultimately transcends external events and the burden of history. While not an overtly

optimistic work, “Little Gidding” and Four Quartets as a whole offer a reasoned sense of hope. Poetry

may suffer from language’s inherent lack of precision, but it provides the aesthetic faculty with an

opportunity to disregard human limitations, if only for a moment.

Study Questions

1. How does Eliot comment on the act of writing poetry? How does his perspective change over the

course of his career? Is he optimistic or pessimistic about the power of poetry to influence the modern

world?

2. Describe the various speakers and characters in Eliot’s poems, particularly “Prufrock” and The Waste

Land. Which of these poems, or which sections of these poems, would you call monologues? How does

Eliot adapt the dramatic monologue form?


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3. How does Eliot use the relationships between men and women to comment on society and culture?

Why is “Prufrock” a “love song”?

4. What kinds of imagery does Eliot use? How do these sets of imagery change from “Prufrock” to Four

Quartets?

5. Think about Eliot’s use of form and language. What is most “poetic” about his works? What linguistic

devices does he use?

6. Describe Eliot’s range of cultural references. How do references to Eastern religions fit in with

allusions to Christ and Dante? Why does Eliot include untranslated bits from non-English works?

7. What is the place of religion in Eliot’s work? How does this change over the course of his career?

8. What is the “Waste Land” Eliot describes? What other kinds of physical settings does Eliot use? How

do they influence the messages of his poems?

9. Why is Eliot so fascinated with death imagery? What does the recurring imagery of drowning

symbolize?

10. Describe the kind of person Eliot creates in “Prufrock.” How does Prufrock fulfill or rebut stereotypes

of the modern intellectual?

Further Reading

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1998.

Howe, Elizabeth. The Dramatic Monologue. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. London: Methuen, 1995.

Lobb, Edward, ed. Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1993.

Moody, A. David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994.

Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: literary elites and public culture. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1998.

Zwerdling, Alex. Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. Perseus

Books, 1998.

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