T.S. Eliot : The Waste Land and Prufrock 9781847600158

Citation preview

http//www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk

Literature Insights

General Editor: Charles Moseley

T. S. Eliot: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land C. J. Ackerley

‘He do the police in different voices’ For advice on use of this ebook please scroll to page 2

Publication Data © C. J. Ackerley, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

Reading Options * To use the navigation tools, the search facility, and other features of the toolbar, this Ebook should be read in default view. In Locklizard Viewer select please select 82% so as to progress using forward and back buttons. * To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked ‘Bookmarks’ at the left of the screen. * To search, expand the search column at the right of the screen or click on the binocular symbol in the toolbar. * For ease of reading, use to enlarge the page to full screen * Use to return to the full menu. * Hyperlinks appear in Blue Underlined Text. To return from a hyperlink use the ‘previous view’ button.

Licence and permissions This book is licensed for a particular computer or computers. The file itself may be copied, but the copy will not open until the new user obtains a licence from the Humanities-Ebooks website in the usual manner. The original purchaser may license the same work for a second computer by applying to the publisher with proof of purchase. You may print one copy of the book for your own use [this must be done as a single printing] but not to copy and paste text.

ISBN 978-1-84760-015-8

A Note on the Author Chris Ackerley took his BA and MA at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and his PhD at the University of Toronto. He has taught at the University of Otago, New Zealand, since 1976, and was Head of Department 2001–03. His speciality is annotation, particularly of the works of Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett. His books include: A Companion to ‘Under the Volcano’ (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1984); Demented Particulars: The Annotated ‘Murphy’ (1998; 2nd ed., rev. Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004); The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, with S.E. Gontarski (Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2005); republished as The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 2006); and Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated ‘Watt’) (Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2005).

Contents A Note on the Author Part 1: Before The Waste Land 1.1  Eliot’s Life and Works 1.2  Reading Eliot 1.3  The Music of Ideas Part 2: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 2.1  ‘Prufrock’ 2.2  From ‘Prufrock’ to The Waste Land Part 3: The Waste Land: Preliminaries 3.1  The Role of Ezra Pound 3.2  The Dramatic Consciousness 3.3  The Mythic Consciousness 3.4  The Epigraph Part 4: A Commentary on The Waste Land 4.1  The Burial of the Dead 4.2  A Game of Chess 4.3  The Fire Sermon 4.4  Death by Water 4.5  What the Thunder Said Part 5: Bibliography 5.1  Selected Works by Eliot (of relevance to The Waste Land) 5.2  Background Works 5.3  Biographies 5.4  Critical Works Part 6: Hyperlinked texts: key works in The Waste Land

And I am accustomed to more documentation; I like to know where writers get their ideas from... —Charles Augustus Conybeare, The Carlton Club, Liverpool.

  Otherwise T. S. Eliot, writing in The Egoist (December 1917). 

Part 1: Before The Waste Land 1.1  Eliot’s Life and Works Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis on 26 September 1888. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, a successful businessman and an executive of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, married in 1860 Charlotte Champe Stearns, a woman with literary intentions who wrote a biography of Eliot’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot and a dramatic poem about Savonarola. The family had New England and Unitarian connections (both are manifest in Eliot’s early writing). The young Tom Eliot was schooled at Smith Academy, St Louis, and the Milton Academy, Massachusets, before enrolling at Harvard in 1906, where he took his Master’s degree (1910) in philosophy. That year he began the ‘The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, which remained published until 1915. In 1911 Eliot went to the Sorbonne, Paris, where he met a young Frenchman named Jean Verdenal; then he returned to Harvard where he studied Sanskrit and furthered his love of French poetry as he began a doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley, author of Appearance and Reality, a text that exercised considerable influence on his thought. In 1914, Eliot was awarded the Sheldon Fellowship in philosophy, which gave him a year in England. He visited Marburg, Germany, that summer, but the outbreak of war forced him back to Merton College, Oxford, where he continued his studies before making three crucial decisions (each encouraged by Ezra Pound): to forsake philosophy for poetry; to marry Vivien Haigh-Wood; and to settle in England. Each proved momentous: Eliot would become the spokesman for the disillusion of a post-War generation; the marriage to Vivien would be a defining feature of his life, her neuralgia, insomnia and menstrual problems meeting his highly-strung consciousness and sexual fastidiousness; and he would become a quintessentially English voice and the most respected poet of his age. Partly in reaction to his marriage Eliot began to seek his personal and cultural consolation in Christianity, finally becoming, in his words, ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 

religion’. These matters found expression in The Waste Land; it remains a moot (but crucial) question as to how obvious or latent that expression might be. Eliot’s position in the years leading up that poem was precarious. Because of the war, he was unable to defend his Harvard thesis. To support his new life he took a position, first, as a teacher at High Wycombe Grammar School and later (March 1917) as a clerk at Lloyds Bank, where he remained until 1925, resisting Pound’s wellintentioned but impractical intentions of ‘rescuing’ him from that fate. Like Wallace Stevens, Eliot preferred to combine his vocation as a poet with a sedentary job. In 1922 he founded The Criterion, a conservative cultural periodical that was from 1925 sponsored by the publishing firm of Faber & Gwyer (soon Faber & Faber), which Eliot joined that year and of which he eventually became a director. Eliot’s new life is not the subject of this study, yet the difficult years between ‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land were the matrix out of which his later writing was born. ‘The Hollow Men’ and ‘Ash-Wednesday’ trace the trajectory of his increasing attraction to the religious life, as reflected in his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927 and his abandonment of Vivien in the early 1930s, a decision that haunted him like the memory of a sojourn in hell, no matter how he might justify it privately in terms of an Aeneas who must abandon his Dido to fulfil a greater spiritual duty. The public vindication of the religious vocation resides less in the controversial and intolerant essays of the 1930s on religion, culture and literature than the verse drama from Murder in the Cathedral (1935) to The Elder Statesman (1953) and the poetry that many consider his masterpiece, the Four Quartets (1935–42). 1.2  Reading Eliot If Eliot’s critical standing has had its ups and downs and has recently settled with less than the gilt-edged status it once enjoyed, ‘Prufrock’ is as fresh today as when it was first written, and, for better or worse, The Waste Land remains the celebrated poem of its age, occupying a position similar to James Joyce’s Ulysses (fiction) and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (drama), as a text that may be venerated, despised, rejected or enjoyed, but not ignored. Eliot expressed exasperation at its fame, more than once dismissing it as a piece of rhythmical grumbling; but the poem consolidated the revolution in poetry that he and Pound had initiated, making him in effect the arbiter of elegance of his age and placing him at the centre of London literary society, much as   T. S. Eliot, Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (London: Faber & Faber, 1928), 7.   Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s New Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 

Matthew Arnold had been in his. Even so, the ways of reading Eliot’s poetry remain unsettled. Is The Waste Land, for instance, a Modernist text, to be read according to the cultural principles of its own age and/or Eliot’s own critical, musical and aesthetic principles? Or is it better approached from a post-Derridean perspective, affirming the dialogic imagination and permissive meaning? A Modernist (centripetal) reading might stress coherence, seeking the unity of a fragmented discourse, a voice behind the different voices; a post-Modernist (centrifugal) reading could celebrate the diversity of tone and voice, the impulse to fragmentation and a tradition in tatters. And if Eliot finally reconciled these antithetical impulses in his vision of a Christian society, what does that imply for us? Equally, should The Waste Land be read strictly in its own terms (whatever those are), or as a prelude to the works that follow but were not then conceived? The poem in isolation seems one thing; but read as an interrupted pilgrimage towards the new life (as Lyndall Gordon has defined Eliot’s impulse towards Anglicanism) it appears as something else. And there remains the vexed question of personality: Eliot’s poetry embodies a central paradox, that of the author’s insistence on poetic impersonality even as his verse encapsulates the most harrowing personal feelings and presents the most agonizing images of the individual mind. The critical tradition reflects these dilemmas. The poem was at first typically seen as powerful but incoherent, yet the accompanying notes suggested a ‘plan’. New Critics, such as Cleanth Brooks, stressed its structural, thematic and poetic integrity, and (their lasting legacy) insisted on high standards of close reading even as they celebrated its allusive and ambiguous qualities. But as New Criticism faded, new paradigms (structuralist, post-structuralist, New Historicist, deconstructive, feminist, psycho-analytic) offered different readings that stress ‘absences’, ‘ruptures’ and ‘discontinuities’. In his excellent survey of this process, Lawrence Rainey concludes that the demise of critical consensus about the poem means that today, more than ever, questions of coherence are open to fresh interrogation. To be sure, Eliot when writing the early poems could not have imagined the intense scrutiny that they would receive, and there is thus in his later critical writing an element of defence against too much prying into the personal life behind the verse. Eliot retained a deep wish for privacy. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), he insisted on the rigorous separation of the man who suffers from the mind that creates; and eight years later, in ‘The Stoicism of Seneca’ (1927), he argued that  

Lawrence Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), 19.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 

the poet’s business is ‘to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange’. Eliot’s insistence on impersonality has discouraged many readers from seeing the poem in personal terms; equally, some biographical readings fail to distinguish between events in Eliot’s life and their representation in his poetry. One must take a stand. In what follows I attempt to reconcile the key issues of coherence/discontinuity and impersonal/personal with an approach to the purpose that seeks order (yet admits chaos) by reading it in much the way that ‘Prufrock’ might be read, as a dramatic monologue. That is, I seek a middle ground between seeing the poetry as essentially impersonal and/or regarding it as an ‘exorcism of the demons’; and I do so by relating the imagery not to the referential world but to an implied speaker or mediator. This is easily done with ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’ where the influence of Robert Browning is discernible if interiorised (as in the fiction of Henry James); and ‘Gerontion’, where the persona is identified. The Waste Land, infinitely more complex in its orchestration, may yet be seen as a dramatic poem that evokes from the outset a depressed state of mind and follows it through the stages of a partial recovery. In other words, I assume for The Waste Land as for the other poems a coherent structure of discourse, with a central consciousness uniting the various parts; in what follows I refer to this construct as ‘the protagonist’ or ‘the poet’ (as distinct from Eliot himself), and unlike some commentators I do not identify that consciousness with Tiresias. If this is an essentially modernist perspective, emphasising a mediating awareness rather than a fragmented vision, I can only affirm the need for such visions and revisions in a post-post-Modernist age. And there is a pragmatic purpose in so doing: even if my reader finally disagrees (as many will) with this emphasis, the fiction of coherence at least offers a framework to permit a close scrutiny of the particulars of the poem and the allusive and musical qualities that (on any reading) are its constitutive elements. Question: does the definition of the poem as ‘dramatic’ resolve the oppositions noted: the ‘personal’ vs ‘impersonal’ and the ‘centrifugal’ vs ‘centripetal’ readings? Is the ‘dramatic’ a genuine critical option, or a structure of convenience?

 

James E. Miller, Jr., T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (University Park & London: Pennsylvania University State Press, 1977) is an extreme instance of the tendency to reduce Eliot’s poetry to a travesty of his life.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  10

1.3  The Music of Ideas One disconcerting element of Eliot’s early poetry is his elimination of connective and transitional passages, so that the poetry moves not by narrative continuity but by the ‘music of ideas’, or the juxtaposition of image and phrase to assert patterns and relationships not immediately apparent. Another technique is allusion; in his early works Eliot draws on not only the central works of a Western tradition in ruins but a range of personal and esoteric sources, the public and the private mingled in a new and complex manner. In Sheridan’s The Critic (I.i), the finest passages of the would-be writer, Sir Fretful Plagiary, ‘lie on the surface like lumps of marl upon a barren moor, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilize’; the challenge to Eliot’s reader is to appreciate how the poetry arises from the process of fertilisation as the past is made to enrich the present, however complex that relation might be. In his essay ‘Matthew Arnold’ (1927), Eliot affirmed the primacy of the auditory imagination, ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word’; but I would stress his immediate insistence that such an imagination ‘works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense.’ That is, from the relationship between words and the contexts from which they derive. Eliot’s method is essentially allusive and, as Grover Smith has tartly observed, to argue that the poem provides so much without the allusions that one doesn’t therefore require them is like saying that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is so magnificent that one might as well close one eye to look at it. There are differences of degree between conscious allusion and indeterminate echo, but, as a reading of Marie Larisch’s My Past and Hermann Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos will show, to anticipate two examples, awareness of context can make a qualitative difference to not only the appreciation of a line but to the hidden music of the entire poem. In a later essay, ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, Eliot argued that ‘The attempt to explain the poem by tracing it back to its origins will distract attention from the poem’; this may be countered by the claim that if allusion is the device through which the reader is directed to the central concerns of the poem, then the more we understand the better placed we are to respond. This is not to make the mistake of what Eliot in ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ called confusing explanation for understanding, but rather to affirm the   T. S. Eliot, ‘Matthew Arnold’, in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), 118–19.   Grover Smith, The Waste Land (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 147.   T. S. Eliot, ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ (1953), in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 99.   T. S. Eliot, ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ (1956), in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 109.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  11

kind of comment that might enhance such understanding. In his 1986 study of Modernism, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, C.K. Stead argues with reference to the sailor’s song from Tristan und Isolde that the quotation ‘works’ in the sense that it conveys a range of feeling even to a young reader who knows nothing of Wagner, and who is consequently unmoved by such echoes:  So if the full richness of the opening music of Wagner’s opera is called up at this point, with all its promise of an intense and disastrous love, that is perhaps a bonus for the reader, but not, I think, quite part of what should be called the primary experience. It is a secondary resonance. And in fact in terms of the Symbolist poetics (which are operating here) such a quotation may be said to work more purely the less that is known about it. To the innocent reader who knows no German and nothing of Wagner, it is a magical incantation, the words and their context creating their own reality. And this innocence is lost, it is replaced by intellectual, and what might be called secondary emotional, recognitions. But it would be wrong to argue that the reader who knows more feels more, or experiences more fully. Stead is one of Eliot’s better readers, and yet this evocation of a magical incantation is almost a travesty of Eliot’s contention in ‘Dante’ (1929) that genuine poetry can communicate before it is properly understood. Ezra Pound defined the Image for all time as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex (my italics) in an instant of time; the separation of the intellectual from the emotional is thus an unwarranted dissociation of sensibility. The reader with the deeper love and knowledge of Wagner (other things being equal) should have the richer primary experience. True, readers ignorant of allusions have ‘felt’ something of their power and emotion; and, yes, knowledge without feeling is arid; yet allusions are not simply incantatory, since through them the poet (and so the reader) may penetrate to the deeper roots of feeling and consciousness, which, the more perfectly understood, may be the more intensely felt. And much needs to be known about The Waste Land, an Imagist epic about the same length as Paradise Lost, but with its images condensed instead of expanded. The challenge is that of reading ‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land in the best Imagist way, with intellect and emotion combined. Question: can The Waste Land (433 lines) really be described both as an epic (like Paradise Lost, in twelve vast books) and an Imagist poem (typically, a few lines)?

  C. K. Stead, Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement (London: Macmillan, 1986), 96.

Part 2: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 2.1  ‘Prufrock’ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was written in 1910, completed in 1911 (in Munich), and published in Poetry (Chicago) in 1915, at the insistence of Ezra Pound who cajoled Harriet Monroe and the reluctant editors of an advanced journal to accept this piece by an unknown author, however odd it might seem. Such reluctance seems curious today, with ‘Prufrock’ one of the best-loved poems of its age. After almost a century it retains the freshness and vigour (equally, the weariness and ennui) of when it was written. Yet ‘Prufrock’ was radical. To Pound’s amazement, Eliot had ‘modernised’ himself without help (that is, from Pound). His reading of the French Symbolists and English Metaphysicals (Laforgue and Gautier, Donne and Marvell), begun at Harvard with help from Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1906), had honed the hard dry edge of wit, allusion and irony that would characterize his later writing. He had thrown down the gauntlet to the Romantics and Georgians who were working in an exhausted poetic vein. By returning to the tradition Eliot had, Pound affirmed, ‘made it new’. The poem depicts the agony of inadequacy, an agony arising less from the fact of Prufrock’s inadequacy than his consciousness thereof. The title is a miniature portrait: a surname suggestive of prudes, prunes and prisms, with a touch of prissiness; a forename unusual among the Boston Brahmans; the two preceded by an initial (not ‘Alfred J.’ but ‘J. Alfred’), as if to assert that he is somebody different, someone who matters, someone who might singa love-song?? Like Hiawatha??? The name echoes the Prufrock-Littau furniture dealers in St. Louis; Eliot thought this possible, but did not recall the association. ‘Prufrock’ begins with six lines from Dante’s Inferno XXVII.61–66, translatable thus: ‘If I thought my answer were to one who could ever return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since, if what I hear be true, none did ever return above from this depth, without fear of infamy I answer thee.’ These are the words to Dante of Guido da Montefeltro, trapped for fraudulent counsel within a living flame that trembles even as he speaks. The epigraph frames the action: one trapped in hell,

willing to speak only because none will ever hear him. The condition of Prufrock’s speaking is that nobody will hear him admit the truth even to himself; the poem is not so much heard as overheard. The opening lines depict, then, one speaking to himself, convincing his divided self (‘you and I’) to get up and go. Prufrock perhaps does not leave his room: the poem may be an imagined journey through certain half-deserted streets, towards the room where women come and go, to that moment of truth when he will turn and descend the stair, an object of mockery to all. The object of his quest and the overwhelming question (words that link this poem to The Waste Land) have been disputed, but the usual assumption is that Prufrock is contemplating a proposal of marriage, not because he wants to but because it may be expected of him. His agony of indecision shapes the imagery: the evening is not enchanted, but ‘spread out against the sky’ in a line that has still the capacity to shock, ‘Like a patient etherised upon a table.’ In that image an entire school of Romanticism is undone, and the ethos of Modernism ushered forth in a vision that says nothing about the sky, but everything about the numbed emotions of the protagonist. The half-deserted streets, one-night cheap hotels, sawdust restaurants (sawdust on a concrete floor to absorb the slops, and swept into the gutters at the end of each day), oyster-shells discarded from such cheap and squalid jointsthe setting says more about Prufrock’s desolation than about the city. Hence the hollowness of ‘an overwhelming question’: an intimation of the Grail Legend, underlining the moment of failure when the questing knight fails to ask the crucial question that might relieve the sterility and redeem the waste (as in the Hyacinth Garden of The Waste Land). This failure both anticipates and conditions other failures to come: Prufrock is not one of the chosen to whom the Vision will be vouchsafed. Prufrock is painfully aware of this, as of the women in the room, coming and going, as he is aware of the manifold ironies of this partial vision: the tinkling rhyme of the couplet, which trivialises the scene; the precious conversation, reducing the virility of Michelangelo to coffee-table talk; the painful realisation of a difference (that makes all the difference) between the agony and ecstasy of the brawny sculptor and his own petty preoccupations and fears. The couplet returns to underline another such moment of failed vision. The yellow fog further images his mind. The yellow alley-cat, rubbing its back and muzzle on the window-panes, licking its tongue into the rancid corners of the night, curling about the house, will return later in the poem. The theme of ‘time’ is insinuated with the yellow smoke, and, in a sudden flashback to Hesiod’s Works and

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  14

Days, Prufrock is conscious of time past and passing, and of the need to assume his persona, or mask, a face prepared for the faces he must meet. He has time for ‘a hundred indecisions’, time to think of what lies ahead, time ‘for a hundred visions and revisions’. It is not that he lacks vision (the poem will end with a magnificent one), but rather that he changes his mind, he revises his visions, he has ‘revisions’. He envisions his questing self making its way (note the dissociation of self and sensibility) towards its Lady, wondering (in words that resonate): ‘Do I dare?’ In an immediate re-vision he sees his self turning back and descending the stair, exposing his bald spot to mockery from the ladies above (they will say, ‘How his hair is growing thin!’). He tries to assert himself: his collar mounts ‘firmly’ to the chin; his necktie is ‘rich and modest’, and ‘asserted’ by a simple pin. He is not Alfred Prufrock, nor Alfred J., certainly not Alf or Alfie, but ‘J. Alfred’, the ‘J’ asserting that he is someone who matters. In vain: all they will notice (the pronoun is accentuated) is how his arms and legs are thin. The mockery is directed against himself, one who dares not disturb the universe, one whose existence the universe does not register, one whose personal seismograph is upset by decisions and revisions that crush any possibility of his seizing the day, of acting on the moment. Prufrock’s despair is rendered in a series of insidious images that convey the worthlessness of the society for which he is mortifying himself, yet the lack of any alternative. He has known, he repeats, the evenings, mornings, afternoons, and he encapsulates their endless triviality in a remarkable metaphor: ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ He knows, he says, the voices dying with a dying fall: this is a line repeated at the end of ‘Portrait of a Lady’; it derives from the opening of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, where Orsino describes such music as the food of love. For Prufrock it remains unsubstantial manna: how should he presume? And he has known the eyes already, known them all: surreal, isolated from faces and bodies, staring like the portraits in Part II of The Waste Land. The alliteration is deadly: fixed in a formulated phrase, he likens himself to an insect half-killed (by formaldehyde), pinned but still wriggling, an object of display to the curiously uncompassionate. Then how should he begin? The metaphor is that of a cigar or cigarette spat out as useless, his sense of how others see him, of how he sees himself: again, how should he presume? The question is rhetorical; the agony is not. And he has known the arms already, known them all. This is the most graphic of images, despite its apparent gentility, for there is something unhealthy about how the arms are perceived (in parenthesis, in the lamp-light, close up, too close, downed with light brown hair, Donne’s ‘bracelet of bright haire about the bone’); and in the

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  15

triviality of rhyme (‘dress / digress’). In a reversal of figure and ground the arms are made to ‘lie upon a table’ or ‘wrap about a shawl’. This intimation will underscore The Waste Land: a sense of discomfort, an uneasy sexuality, the need to look too closely. His loneliness is brought out in two remarkable images. He imagines himself going at dusk through narrow streets, seeing the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows: he is alone, but his loneliness is not unique. Then, he wishes to be utterly anonymous, a crab scuttling across the floors of silent seas, vulnerable, frightened, uncursed by consciousness. This realization is the turning point. The image of the cat is invoked, to describe the evening sleeping peacefully. The rhyme, such a feature of the poem, becomes even more deliberate: should he, after ‘tea and cakes and ices’ have the strength ‘to force the moment to its crisis’: this is less a rhyme than a tinkle, its insufficiency forcing an incomplete closure and initiating others equally mocking: ‘prayed / bald’; ‘platter / matter’; ‘flicker / snicker’. The imagery flirts with absurdity: Prufrock as John the Baptist, his head on a platter, in mockery of Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils and its impassioned eroticism; his head (its hair grown thin) so unlike the shaggy locks of John that enflamed Herod’s step-daughter. He is no prophet; he has no great part to play. Worse, he is the object of social derision: the ‘eternal Footman’, every underling anywhere, will snicker (a horrible word). This leads to a moment of total honesty: he is afraid. There can be no going on. Total honesty does not mean freedom from evasion, for Prufrock proceeds to justify his failure. Would it have been worth it, he asks himself, would it have been worth while, to have gone through with it, if the lady might merely say, ‘That is not what I meant at all.’ Would it be worth the humiliation, the embarrassment, the pain, to find out that this was not it at all, not what she meant at all? This is evasion, and Prufrock knows it. His allusions make this clear: the self-conscious hyperbole of squeezing the universe into a ball and rolling it towards that overwhelming question. The conceit outdoes Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, combining its sense of rolling our sweetness up into a ball, ‘to tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life’ (the Freudian ironies are obvious) with Laforgue’s ‘sentiment squeezed out of the word before one begins to play ball with it’ (as Eliot had read in Symons’s study of the Symbolist poets). Equally incongruous is the image of himself as Lazarus, happy as Larry, back from the dead to reveal, well, ALL (Eliot’s mother, Charlotte, had written a poem called ‘The Raising of Lazarus’). Hyperbole gives way to self-mockery as he pieces together the scattered fragments of his social being (sunsets, dooryards, streets, novels, teacups, skirts that trail along the floor), only to

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  16

admit that it is impossible to find words to convey the right feelings, and yet (anticipating a famous passage in Proust) to have found exactly the right image to express his inability to articulate, a magic lantern (a small box made up of slides of coloured glass, lit from within), projecting his nerves in patterns on a screenas, indeed, the poem has done. The poem moves towards its end, to inconclusion. He is not, Prufrock says, Prince Hamlet, nor destined to play a role in great affairs; yet like Hamlet he suffers and doubts. But nobody cares what part he plays, that of an attendant lord, or ‘an easy tool’ such as Rosenkrantz or Guildenstern, the sententious Polonius, or even the Fool. (Is he aware that there is no Fool in Hamlet? Probably.) Prufrock’s sense of the absurd culminates in the vision of himself walking on the beach, dressed in an outmoded manner and contemplating such cosmic questions as to whether he should part his hair behind (to cover his bald spot), or if he ‘dare’ to eat a peach, a decision unlikely to disturb the universe. He echoes Falstaff’s ‘I am old, I am old’ (Henry IV Pt.2 II.iv.293); and his trousers are borrowed from Henri Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), as translated by T.E. Hulme (1913), where the inner life is compared to the unrolling of a coil and the sense of growing old ‘to a continual rolling up, like that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us’.10 The ending accentuates the pattern of vision and revision. Prufrock is a visionary creature: he has heard the mermaids singing (Donne’s ‘Song’: ‘Teach me to heare Mermaides singing’), and has had intimations of splendour and beauty (‘Combing the white hair of the waves blown back’) to which his inner being wishes to reach out and respond. But such visions are not for him, they must be revised, they are out of reach, the mermaids will not sing for him. Instead of a vision of strange beauty in the chambers of the sea, in mermaid grottos beneath the waves (Eliot borrows, as in The Waste Land, the resplendent imagery of Gérard de Nerval: ‘J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène’), attended by the sea-girls, the fantasy of every dying sailor, Prufrock awakens once more to the consciousness of his living self, out of depth in the shallows and in a painful paradox drowning on dry land. 2.2  From ‘Prufrock’ to The Waste Land While ‘Prufrock’ is a unique achievement, it typifies much of Eliot’s poetry from 1910 to 1920. Its companion-piece, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, written about the same time and in many ways a more sophisticated performance, lacks the same immediacy and 10  Anthony Hands, Sources for the Poetry of T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Hadrian Books, 1993), 6.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  17

the insidiously memorable imagery. The change is, perhaps, that from Browning to James: ‘Portrait’ is Jamesian in its title, in its subtleties of irony and tone, and in its stylization, moving from December through April to October and encapsulating in that passage of empty time the tragedy of a consciousness even more attenuated than that of Prufrock. ‘Portrait’ is remarkably free of allusion; its chief challenge to the reader, as with the novels of Henry James, is that of attuning oneself to the play of irony and tone. The precious young man mocks the lady who has ‘saved’ this afternoon for him and whose vellieties of conversation (‘So intimate this Chopin’) slip into cultivated clichés. Yet as he half-listens to her a ‘false note’ is heard, the first intimation that all is not well. In Part II of the poem the woman slowly twists lilac stalks as she talks; the association of lilacs and a ‘buried life’ (an echo of Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Buried Life’) will regenerate in The Waste Land, along with the hyacinths that recall ‘things that other people have desired’. This poem, too, is a meditation on memory and desire, and it ends with the young man conscious at last of his own foolishness, and of an opportunity missed, the chance to have responded to something more than the vacuities of her conversation and those of his own existence. ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait’ are successes of a kind not sought again by Eliot, who chose thereafter to write in the impressionist mode of the ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, developing techniques of musical orchestration to register subtleties of perception but avoiding dramatic presentation. His preferred verse form during the War years was the quatrain, the biting four-line stanzas of ‘Sweeney Erect’, ‘Whispers of Immortality’ and ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, these imitating and outdoing in their witty precision the best of Laforgue and Gautier. These poems have their attractions: the incongruous image of ‘The Hippopotamus’ taking wing, ‘Ascending from the damp savannas’, takes its point from Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo; while ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Service’, perhaps the finest of this genre, explores the ironies that arise from the superfetation of the Word, given that ‘enervate Origen’ (who wrote commentaries on the gospel of John) castrated himself so that he might move without temptation among his female catchumens, while ‘bees / With hairy bellies’ (also neuter) move amidst the sexual organs of the flowers outside. The quatrain poems introduce the world of Sweeney and the demotic that is marked in The Waste Land. It would be supercilious to suggest that Eliot had yet to find a way of combining Impressionist sensibility and epigrammatical wit within a dramatic form, but the clarity of hindsight points towards the kind of synthesis, realised in ‘Gerontion’, which Eliot had contemplated using as a prelude to The Waste Land, until dissuaded by Pound on the grounds that the latter was already the longest Imagist poem in the English language.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  18

‘Gerontion’ signals a return to the dramatic. The poem was written early in 1919, as a response to the recent death of Eliot’s father. It presents a meditation on history, the central consciousness a ‘little old man’ (the meaning of ‘Gerontion’) in a dry month, waiting for rain and for a sign (major themes of The Waste Land). Eliot took the title from A.C. Benson’s Edward FitzGerald (1905), a biography of the author of the Rubáiyát, whose poet is described as sitting ‘in a dry month, old and blind, being read to by a country boy, longing for rain.’11 The epigraph derives from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure III.i.32–34, where the Duke, disguised as a Friar, enters the prison where Claudio is held, and urges him to be ‘absolute for death’, reasoning that thereby either life or death shall be the sweeter; that life is but a trifle that none but fools would keep; that the best of rest is sleep; and that an early death prevents all the misery and afflictions of old age. Claudio seems reassured, but a little later (III. i.119–33), talking to his sanctimonious sister Isabella, he vents the terror that underlies Eliot’s poem, most forcibly in the vision of dissolution at its end, one not entirely unlike that of The Waste Land. Gerontion seeks a sign. There is a Biblical irony at this point, as his words echo the cry of the Pharisees calling upon Christ to prove his divinity (Matthew 3:38–39), Christ answering that only ‘an evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.’ Eliot’s text is from Lancelot Andrewes, the Nativity Sermon preached before James I on Christmas Day, 1618, a meditation upon the paradox of the verbum infans, the Word without a word (Eliot has ‘within’), unable to speak, manifest as Child in swaddling bands, the incarnate Lamb of God considered as Blake’s Tyger. But Gerontion lacks any sense of energy as eternal delight which that emblem proclaims. His thoughts are pessimistic: neither courage nor fear has moral value; heroism and virtue derive from and generate vice and shame. The question remains rhetorical: after such knowledge, what forgiveness can there be? The poem rises to its fearful conclusion, its moment of truth (‘I would meet you upon this honestly’) constricted by terror: terror arising from pointlessness (‘We have not reached conclusion’); from the fading of the senses and contact with others; and from the awareness of death (the spider, from Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy III. v, will not suspend its operations). Gerontion’s imagination is whirled ‘in fractured atoms’ into the winds; before finally returning to its ‘house’, exhausted rather than reconciled, with no sign in sight and the grace of rain withheld. ‘Gerontion’ is very much the harbinger of the greater poem to come. 11  B. C. Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (1968; 4th ed., rev., London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 51.

Part 3: The Waste Land: Preliminaries 3.1  The Role of Ezra Pound Most of The Waste Land was written in 1921, when Eliot, unable to cope with the physical and mental ill-health of his first wife Vivien, was on the edge of a mental breakdown. Composition was a complex affair; I offer here a summary of the fuller outline compiled by Lawrence Rainey.12 Eliot began the poem in early 1921, and in three months completed most of Parts I and II, more or less in their present form. However, after having read Joyce’s ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses, he penned a new beginning to Part I, which Pound later cut. In mid-1921 he composed much of Part III, introduced by a long passage about a socialite called Fresca in Pope-like couplets. In October 1921 Eliot took three months leave from Lloyds and went first to Margate for recuperation; during his month there he composed the final sections of Part III and began to prepare a typescript. After a week at home he set out for Lausanne, in Switzerland, for psychological treatment at the clinic of Dr. Roger Vittoz, during which time he wrote a long draft of Part IV and all of Part V. The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound, whose endeavours on Eliot’s behalf had begun with the publication of ‘Prufrock’ in Poetry (June 1915). In January 1922, in Paris on the way back from Switzerland to London, Eliot showed Pound the manuscript of a sprawling, chaotic poem of about a thousand lines, which Pound helped reduce to the present 433. Pound’s criticisms were ruthless but effective; he deleted large chunks from the beginning; he cut the Fire Sermon to half its original size; and he insisted that the Phlebas passage, but that alone, should be retained from Part IV. He left Part V virtually untouched, but elsewhere made many changes of detail, reducing the poem’s dependence on iambic measure and deleting what seemed rhythmically inert. Eliot did not accept all his suggestions, but Pound’s eye was sure, and by ‘eliminating everything not of the first intensity’ he was able to reveal ‘an unexpected corporate substantiality’ in what remained. In a letter to Eliot (24 December 1921), Pound commented on his role: ‘If you must needs Enquire / Know diligent Reader 12 

Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land, 17–33.

/ That on each Occasion / Ezra performed the caesarian Operation.’ One school of thought argues that the effect of Pound’s cuts was to make ‘cultural statement’ dominant at the expense of ‘visionary speculation’;13 but so much of the latter was indisputably bad poetry. The Waste Land is that rarity, a major work by one author that owes as much to another; as the witticism has it, ‘A tale told by an Eliot, full of Pound and fury.’ The poem was published in London (15 October 1922), in the first issue of The Criterion, which was edited by Eliot himself; then shortly afterwards in New York, in the November issue of The Dial. It appeared without Eliot’s notes, but in the first edition in book form these were added (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922 [15 December]). The first English book edition was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1923. Early publications did not include the dedication to Pound, which Eliot inscribed on a presentation copy and added permanently when The Waste land was reprinted in his collected Poems 1909–1925 (1925). The Italian phrase, il miglior fabbro, ‘the better poet’, is Dante’s tribute (Purgatorio XXVI.117) to the 12th-century Provençal poet, Arnaut Daniel, honouring his supremacy above all rivals (a possible irony is that Eliot would have considered Dante the better poet). The manuscript was sold or given to John Quinn, the New York book collector who had acted for Eliot in getting it published; Quinn received it in January 1923, but after his death in 1924 it disappeared and was thought lost. It reappeared in 1968, in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and a facsimile and transcript including Vivien’s comments and Pound’s annotations was published by Valerie Eliot in 1971. In the event, this publication did not radically affect critical understanding of the poem, as the consensus is (though there are dissenters) that by and large Pound got it right. 3.2  The Dramatic Consciousness To define The Waste Land as a dramatic poem, as I have done, might be considered proof by assertion, and some would not approve the rhetoric. Before embarking on a sustained exploration of the poem, therefore, it may be wise to consider briefly the sense in which it may be considered dramatic. My later argument is contingent on the perspective defined here, but elements of value may remain for those who resist this way of reading the poem. A first distinction concerns the time scale of the poem. The ‘present’, I suggest, 13  See, for instance, Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 117.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  21

is to be located in the second part of the poem, ‘A Game of Chess’, originally entitled ‘In the Cage’, in the dialogue between the neurotic woman and the morbidly depressed man. The relationship here is at a dead end: she is on the edge of hysteria, and he is unable to give, sympathise or control. At a critical moment the woman asks: ‘Do / You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?’ The narrator here makes a revealing response: ‘I remember / Those are pearls that were his eyes.’ Eliot’s note is mysterious, but hints at an important cross-reference: ‘Cf. Part I, l.37, 48.’ The second reference is obvious: I.48 is almost the same line, a detail from Shakespeare’s The Tempest that hints at transfiguration into ‘something rich and strange’ following a death by water. That to I.37 is more obscure, but some of the mystery is clarified in the manuscript, which reads at this point: ‘I remember / The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes.’14 On publication Eliot removed the direct reference to the hyacinth garden but hinted at the connexion by adding a footnote. The implications are crucial: at this moment of total desolation in the present of the poem the protagonist is asked if he remembers anything, and the memory that flashes involuntarily (the Proustian sense is pertinent) into his mind combines the Hyacinth garden scene with the suggestion of a death by drowning. The encounter in the Hyacinth garden is a crucial moment within the poem: a moment from the past (‘a year ago’), and associated with the memory of desire, of a time when the waste land seemed not to be waste, of potentiality and possible fulfilment that has not lasted, but which in the very possibility of its plenitude forms the absolute antithesis of the desolate present. This, then, is the feeling at the outset of the poem: in April, the season of new life, the poet feels stirrings of memory and desire, and the resurrection of painful sensations associated with something buried in his past. The intensity of this unwanted recollection makes the unredeemed present even more miserable, and the hopelessness of the relationship between himself and the woman unbearable. The dramatic movement of the poem concerns the poet’s efforts to come to terms with this present desolation, and with the pain quickened by memory. His response is, essentially, a rejection of his loveless society, a plea to be plucked from the fires of his youthful desires, and a journey across the Waste Land itselfin psychological and religious terms, a movement away from the agony depicted at the opening of the poem towards the uncertain contemplation of a different future. The end of the poem (if this dramatic reading is accepted) thus depicts a state of mind very 14  Valerie Eliot, Ed., The Waste Land: a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts. Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), 12–13.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  22

different from that at the beginning: from a state of intense despair the protagonist (if one accepts a single consciousness behind the different voices) has progressed to the point where he can at least contemplate setting his lands in order, and can survey the wreckage of his life and society (fragments to be shored against his ruin). The ending cannot be described as positive, but the poet recognises that the worst of the arid plain is now behind him, and this in itself marks a considerable advance. 3.3  The Mythic Consciousness Eliot’s title15 derives from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (XVII.iii), where Sir Galahad learns of a sword-blow and the devastating effects thereof, delivered by the Saracen King Hurlame to King Labor of Logris, father of the Maimed King: And hit was in the realme of Logris, and so befelle there grete pestilence, and grete harme to bothe reallmys; for there encresed nother corne, ne grasse, nother well-nye no fruyte, ne in the watir was founde no fyssh. Therefore men calle hitthe londys of the two marchysthe Waste Londe, for that dolerous stroke. Eliot’s acknowledged debt was to Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), which argues the common origin of the Waste Land and Holy Grail in primitive vegetation and fertility myths. In his first note to The Waste Land Eliot admitted that not only the title but the plan and incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by this book, which he recommend ‘to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble’. He also admitted a debt to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), especially ‘the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris’, noting that anyone acquainted with these would ‘immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.’ His note, while alerting readers of the poem to two of its richest sources, encouraged speculation about the role of myth and primitive ritual; Eliot later regretted having sent so many off on a wild-goose chase. The poem was influenced by these books, but only up to a point, much having been written, for instance, before Eliot had read Miss Weston’s book. Nor did he use either book in a systematic way; rather, he employed anthropology and mythology as means towards an end, that of structuring a long and apparently chaotic poem. In his 1923 essay, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’,16 Eliot described James Joyce’s use 15  Eliot probably knew of Madison Cawein’s ‘Waste Land’, Poetry (January 1913), but its influence is negligible. 16  T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 177.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  23

of myth as being ‘simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’ He clearly had his own poem in mind. What Eliot found in Jessie Weston was a mode of mythic organisation to replace narrative and an affirmation that the Waste Land and Grail Legends were inextricably interwoven, their common origin lost in the mists of antiquity. Eliot was attracted to her argument that the Waste Land theme had an Indo-Aryan origin, and that Wagner’s Bayreuth operas, and especially Parsifal, had their roots in this tradition. The Wagnerian and Vedic elements of the poem are thus informed by this precise sense of order and myth. The Waste Land legend is a fertility myth of obscure origin, dealing with the Fisher King who has been wounded in the thigh or sexual organs. As a result of his sterility a curse has descended upon his lands, rendering them also infertile and waste. His plight and that of his lands can be relieved only if a certain knight visits his castle and asks a ritual question about a number of objects that pass before him (a Lance and a Cup, symbols respectively of male and female fertility). In most versions of the story the questing knight at first fails to ask the mysterious question, so the King remains uncured and the Waste Land waste. The Holy Grail was the vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood that flowed from the wounds of Christ as He suffered on the cross. According to medieval legend, Joseph took the Grail to England, where it was hidden from human eyes in the Grail Castle. In Arthurian legend the revelation of the Grail is made to Arthur’s knights, who immediately set off in quest of it, though only the purest has any chance of attaining it, or understanding its mysteries. The revelation is made to the one worthy of it (Gawain, Galahad or Perceval), but only after long ordeal (including perhaps a night of horrors at the Chapel Perilous). The legend lacks scriptural authority, and Jessie Weston suggests that Christianity did no more than adapt to its own use ‘a symbolism already endowed with a deep-rooted prestige and importance’.17 Because the Holy Grail was also the vessel used by Christ at the Last Supper, the quest for the Grail became identified with the mysteries of the Eucharist; and when the Grail Legend and the Waste Land story came together (or rather, as the ancient Waste Land theme received its Christian colouring) the Grail was seen in Christian terms to symbolise what was needed to restore fertility to the waste land. Eliot took from Miss Weston the integrated myth but did not insist on its specific Christian qualities. If these are implicit in the poem, as perhaps they are, then they are subordinated to the general mythic pattern of the Waste Land and the search for 17 

Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 177.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  24

relief. For Eliot, the Fisher King is above all a figure symbolising his protagonist’s sexual and psychological sterility (the two closely inter-related), representing a state of mind in which the surrounding world seems equally waste. The search for the Holy Grail is not so much a search for a specifically Christian consolation (though in terms of Eliot’s later life it must inevitably seem such), as for the values needed to redeem the wasteland of existence at this most desolate and dismal time. The myth gives The Waste Land structural continuity when narrative form is conspicuously absent. The protagonist sees himself variously as Wounded King and Quester, and the poem moves from despair and sterility (both physical and spiritual), to seek the values needed to redeem the arid land (a metaphor of a state of mind). Specific details from the myth figure forth at key moments: the description of the Waste Land; the failure in the Hyacinth garden to ask the overwhelming question; images of the Fisher King; the archetypal journey of the questing knight towards the Chapel Perilous; the implied ‘task of the hero’ as being the ‘freeing of the waters’ when the Thunder speaks; and the hope of relief implicit in asking the question, ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order?’ This is not to reduce the elements of the poem to their archetypal significance alone (there is no allegory as such), yet the panorama of futility and anarchy that is The Waste Land becomes more shapely and significant with this understanding of its underlying mythic order and control. 3.4  The Epigraph The Latin citation, with Greek inset, is from #48 of the Satyricon of Petronius, ‘Arbiter of Elegance’ to the Roman Emperor Nero (1st century AD). The Satyricon is a fragmented fiction displaying the decadence of the Roman world. Outdoing his drunken fellows in tales of wonder, Trimalchio remarks, almost in passing: ‘For I myself once saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a flask, and when the boys said to her, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die.”’ The Sibyl of Cumae (on the coast, near Naples) was the best-known of several ancient crones with the gift of prophecy. Her story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses XIV.132ff: loved by Apollo, she was granted as many years of life as grains in a nearby pile of sand; but she forgot to ask for eternal youth, and, rejecting the God’s advances, was punished by growing older and more shrivelled until she shrank to the weight of a feather and could be put into a bottle or flask. The Sibyl of Cumae is mentioned in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue (often taken as a pagan prophecy of the coming of Christ), and in Book VI of the Aeneid she advises Aeneas to break off the Golden Bough and guides him into the underworld.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  25

Eliot wanted to preface the poem with an epigraph from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to emphasise the themes of horror and innate depravity but also to imply the moment of surrender and intense self-realisation that Kurtz experiences at the moment of his death: ‘Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some visionhe cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath “The horror! the horror!”' Pound doubted ‘if Conrad is weighty enough to stand the citation’; to which Eliot replied: ‘It is the most appropriate I can find, and somewhat elucidative’ (Facsimile, 125). In the event, and perhaps wrongly for it would have accentuated the darkness of the poem, Conrad was omitted. Yet the Petronius is appropriate: the Satyricon depicts the involuntary impotence of its hero for an undefined offence against Priapus; the Sibyl anticipates other prophets (Madame Sosostris, Tiresias); her cave near the entrance to the underworld is an appropriate setting; her mode of prophecy (fragments scattered by the wind) suggests the disjunctive method of the poem, forbidden knowledge divulged by riddles; and her words express painfully the situation of one who, having failed to ask the vital question, is trapped or suspended in life, wishing for death but unable to die. Eliot considered as a title for the first two parts of The Waste Land ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices.’ This is from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (I.xvi), the words of old Betty Higden on the foundling Sloppy: ‘You mightn’t think of it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’ The title would have reflected Eliot’s partial intention of social satire, but was dropped when Pound eliminated most of that; even so, it indicates something of Eliot’s structural method (apparently disconnected voices that cohere in one total image of a society), as well as an important dramatic principle (the unity, in one ‘finite centre’, of multiple and disparate perceptions). Question: examine the Facsimile of The Waste Land, and evaluate (a) the role of Ezra Pound (and Vivien Eliot) in its composition, and (b) the contention (above) that what Pound struck out was invariably inferior verse.

Part 4: A Commentary on The Waste Land 4.1  The Burial of the Dead The title derives from ‘The Order for the Burial of the Dead’ in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which begins with John 11:25–26: ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’ The agony arises because the poet (like the Sibyl) cannot die, and because the resurrection in his mind is unwanted: dead memories will not stay buried. At the same time the allusion points to the spiritual journey that the poet must take, turning away from a life ‘sown in corruption’ towards a new awakening. 4.1.1  April is the cruellest month The Waste Land begins with a painful paradox: April, the season of Spring and Easter, is described as ‘the cruellest month’: its new life an agonizing birth out of the dead land; a resurrection that is undesired. At this time of rebirth the poet feels only the unwanted stirrings of memory and desire, and would prefer the cold shrivelled existence of winter, living and partly living, feeling no pain. But Nature quickens, and the pilgrimage begins.

April, the season of Spring, is ‘the cruellest month’, because the quickening of new life is undesired. This is dramatised in the syntax: lines end not at the natural pause but with a participle (‘breeding’, ‘mixing’, ‘stirring’, ‘covering,’ ‘feeding’), forcing the reader on, reluctantly, into the next line, creating a tension between the natural impulse to stop and an urgency that compels motion. Memory quickens desire; the protagonist would prefer an emotional winter, his life preserved in dried tubers beneath the forgetful snow, living and partly living (as the Women of Canterbury in Murder in the Cathedral), feeling no pain. But Nature pricks, as at the outset of The Canterbury Tales, and the pilgrimage must begin. April is also the cruellest month because of the Crucifixion of Christ, but any Resurrection here is an undesired travesty of the Christian triumph. The action, like

that of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, is set on a spiritual Easter Saturday, after the Crucifixion but before the Resurrection; any signs of the latter are unperceived by the poet at this stage of his journey. Jessie Weston’s ‘Not Death but Resurrection the essential centre’ (ix) intimates both the unwanted memory that has surfaced and the process of spiritual rebirth that painfully gets under way. The dead land breeds lilacs, intimating Walt Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed’, his elegy on the death of Lincoln. For Eliot the lilac had a private association with his friend Jean Verdenal, who was killed at the Dardanelles in World War I, and to whom the volume Prufrock and Other Observations was dedicated in 1917. Eliot later recounted a personal memory:18 I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli. Lilacs related to memory and desire appear in Part II of ‘Portrait of a Lady’. As an image of past desire they continue into Ash-Wednesday; and are associated in Part III with blown brown hair among the distractions which the poet, climbing the third stair, must resist; while in Part VI the poet’s heart ‘stiffens and rejoices / In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices’ as it strives to find the right balance of worldly and spiritual desires. This reconciliation was not easy. Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Buried Life’ (45–48) sums up the problem: But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There arises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life. The phrase ‘memory and desire’ derives, Grover Smith has suggested,19 from the first chapter of Charles-Louis Philippe’s Bubu de Montparnasse (1898), a study of Paris as a city of degradation and exhaustion that Eliot had used in his ‘Preludes’ and in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, and for which he wrote a dedication when an 18  The Criterion XIII (April 1934): 452. 19  Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meanings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 307.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  28

English translation by Laurence Vail was published in 1930: ‘A man walks carrying with him all the properties of his life, and they churn about in his head. Something he sees awakens them, something else excites them. For our flesh has retained all our memories, and we mingle them with our desires.’ The image of that awakening is the dried tuber barely ‘feeding / A little life.’ Smith suggests (308) that these words derive from James Thompson’s ‘To Our Ladies of Death’ (1861), a poem about the indifference of Nature to the individual, taking the form of an address to ‘the solemn sisterhood’ of Death, Annihilation, and Oblivion. The poet contemplates mingling the self with the earth: ‘Our mother feedeth thus our little life, / That we in turn may feed her with our death.’ Reviewing W.P. Trent’s A History of American Literature,20 Eliot had compared Whitman and Poe to ‘bulbs in a glass bottle’ in terms of the thinness of their American experience: the hint of the Sibyl here and the imitation of Whitman in the opening lines makes it likely that Eliot’s powerful image of suspended life has its roots in his earlier criticism. 4.1.2 Summer surprised us The poet’s voice evokes a sense of contemporary rootlessness: displaced trippers in the south of Germany; refugees made homeless by the war; and echoes of a conversation with a woman, Marie, whose childish fears and memories of a sled-ride when staying at the archduke’s, her cousin’s, seem so trivial in the aftermath of World War I, the ruin of civilization and the changing of the old order. She is another for whom the past no longer exists, and for whom the memory of freedom is mixed with fear; and the poet’s voice mingles with hers in a common desire to escape the horrors of the present.

The setting is Bavaria, which Eliot had visited in August 1911 and in 1913. The Starnbergersee is south of Munich; Eliot originally wrote ‘Königsee’, but the change affirms other Wagnerian motifs: the Starnbergersee was the site of Schloss Berg, the castle of Ludwig II, the mad king and patron of Wagner who drowned himself in the lake in 1886. The Hofgarten is a small public park, with an ornate rotunda at the centre of its symmetrical lawns and paths, in the middle of Munich, adjacent to the Residenz or Palace of the Bavarian kings; it is in the older part of the city, in an area largely designed by Ludwig I (grandfather of the mad king), and approachable from the Ludwigstrasse through a colonnade. There the poet encounters a girl who claims: ‘I’m not Russian at all, come from Lithuania, a real German.’ A ‘real German’ from 20 

In The Athenaeum (25 April 1919): 236–37.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  29

Lithuania would be stateless: the German claim to it began and ended with the brief occupation of 1917, but many German families had owned vast estates in the Baltic states, lost during the War. The words of the girl, not to be identified with Marie, are not as incongruous as they first seem, but they evoke a sense of rootlessness. The second image is that of Marie. As G.L.K. Morris first noticed in 1954,21 this is based upon My Past, a set of reminiscences by Countess Marie Larisch, niece and confidante of the Austrian Empress Elizabeth, cousin of Ludwig II and go-between for Crown Prince Rudolph (the arch-duke of the poem, her cousin) and his mistress Mary Vetsera, with whom he committed suicide at Meyerling in 1889.22 Eliot had certainly read the book: ‘Marie’ can be identified with Countess Larisch; the book mentions (57) a sudden summer downpour which caught Marie and the Empress when riding near the Starnbergersee; and it mentions the happiness Marie felt when she could get away to her home in the Bavarian Alps. Elizabeth’s response to meeting Queen Victoria (100) has unattended irony: ‘Ah, I’m glad it’s over’. Mary Vetsera (171) tells of her love for Rudolph: ‘Now Marie, let me hold your hand tight’; and Marie recalls the Christmas before the Meyerling tragedy (190): ‘deep snow covered the ground, and during the long dull evenings my thoughts reverted to the South.’ The abundance of half-echoes is indicative of the extent to which My Past has entered the sub-text of Eliot’s poem. Curiously, the central image of the passage, that of sledding as a child and the sense of sudden fear, appears nowhere in the memoirs. Valerie Eliot notes that this is verbatim from a conversation Eliot had with Marie Larisch in Munich (Facsimile, 126); it suggests that he was less interested in the book than in the image of an old aristocratic order shattered by World War I, and a woman whose involvement in a tragic love affair had led to her retreat from public life. Like the poet, Marie is one whose only happiness lies in the past, a recollection tinged with fear. The memory of the mountains is less a feeling of freedom than a cliché of ennui, the line mimicking the fatigue it describes and encapsulating the restless world that collapsed during the war. The mountains reappear in Part V, again in association with fear and freedom, and the desire to escape a decaying civilisation. 4.1.3 What are the roots that clutch The sense of rootlessness is proclaimed by another voice, that of the prophet Ezekiel in the wilderness, warning the Children of Israel of their iniquities and 21  George L.K. Morris, ‘Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight’, Partisan Review XXI (March–April 1954): 231–33 22  Marie Larisch, My Past (London: George Bell, 1913).

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  30 urging them to repent their evil ways. The land is a wilderness, its barrenness reflecting the failure of desire and lack of spirituality; a desert of red rock offering not the relief vouchsafed to Isaiah but only the shadow of fear, and mornings and evenings lengthening into days that will culminate in death and dust. Any promise of relief implicit in the bracketed words, ‘Come in under the shadow of this red rock’, is not heeded by the poet at the outset of his journey.

Eliot refers to Ezekiel 2:1, where the Lord urges the prophet up: ‘Son of Man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.’ ‘Son of Man’ anticipates the Messiah, and is used throughout Ezekiel, noticeably in 37:3, where the prophet is set down amidst a valley of bones, which were very dry: ‘And he said to me, Son of Man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.’ Dry bones rattle later in the poem, and in Part II of Ash-Wednesday they signify spiritual regeneration; but here there seems little life in the wilderness. Rather, there is ‘a heap of broken images’, as in Ezekiel 6:6, where the prophet condemns the Children of Israel for worshipping false idols. Eliot echoes this in ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘This is the dead land / This is cactus land’. The speakers of that poem try to ask a question: ‘Is it like this’; but fade to a faint susurrus, the syntax imitating their failure even to desire their salvation. At the crucial moment of choice, when the soul’s fate is decided for all eternity, the Hollow Men can pray only to broken images. The failure to ask a crucial question underlines The Waste Land as it earlier had ‘Prufrock.’ The waste land remains waste, the sun beats, the dead tree gives no shelter and the cricket no relief. Another note refers to Ecclesiastes 12:5, which takes as text that the fear of God is the chief antidote to vanity, and urges man to remember his Creator in the days of his youth, for the evil days will come. The red rock offers no relief. Its redness is in stark contrast to the blue rocks of the Earthly Paradise in Part V of Ash-Wednesday. Unlike the children of Israel, for whom Moses in the desert smote the rock (Exodus 17:1–6), the poet sees no sign of water, and remains unaware of the blessings of Christ’s kingdom as promised in Isaiah 32:2: ‘And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.’ Eliot had used that image in an early poem called ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’, probably written in 1914 (Facsimile, 94–95). Grover Smith cites Donne’s ‘A Lecture on the Shadow’ wherein the shadow of love grows shorter at noon, then declines as love fails.23 Eliot’s image contrasts transient shadows of human life and love (Sweeney’s ‘lengthened shadow 23 

Smith, Poetry and Plays, 73.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  31

of a man’) with the deeper shade beneath the red rock. The final sentiment is fear in a handful of dust: an evocation of dusty death, as in the Order for the Burial of the Dead: ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’; but without the ‘sure and certain’ Resurrection. In the Ash Wednesday service, as the priest marks the forehead of each sinner with ashes he intones: ‘Son of man, remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.’ Southam cites the end of Donne’s Meditation IV of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), on the littleness of man and his innate sickness:24 ‘whats become of mans great extent & proportion, when himselfe shrinkes himselfe, and consumes himselfe to a handfull of dust? whats become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himselfe to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessnesse of the Grave?’ 4.1.4 Frisch weht der Wind The memory of an encounter in the Hyacinth garden is framed by two phrases from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: the first, from the opening scene, the carefree voice of a young sailor singing of the girl he has left behind (‘The wind blows freshly’); the second, from Act III, the emptiness and desolation as the dying Tristan awaits in vain the return of Isolde (‘Waste and empty the sea!’). Between these a world has come and gone. The poet recalls an encounter with ‘the hyacinth girl’ that took place ‘a year ago’. It was a moment of transcendent sexual and emotional ecstasy, perhaps a mystical or religious experience, ‘looking into the heart of light’; but it was also a moment of failure, when the vital question was not asked and a crucial choice not made; for the poet could not speak, or look with direct eyes, and was found wanting. The ecstatic vision then is the memory of failure now: a lost opportunity to have redeemed the waste sad time that the present has become.

Act I of Wagner’s opera depicts Isolde, an Irish princess, sailing from Ireland to Cornwall, to be the bride of King Mark. She is accompanied by Mark’s nephew, Tristan. Isolde resolves to poison herself and Tristan to avoid her fate, but her maid Brangwäne substitutes a love-potion which, at the end of Act I, the two drink. The outcome is irrevocable: trembling, they look into one another’s eyes (Eliot’s ‘heart of light’); but though they declare their love they cannot prevent the approach of King Mark. When Isolde realizes that she has drunk the potion instead of the poison she gazes in terror on Tristan and asks: ‘Muss ich leben?’ (‘Must I live?’). Act II is set in a flower-garden, where Tristan and Isolde celebrate their love and 24 

Southam, Student’s Guide, 89.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  32

the radiance of the night which, unlike the false sun of day, has revealed each to the other. But Melot, a jealous courtier who had once been a friend, has betrayed them, and as morning dawns their dream is shattered by the arrival of Mark. Tristan and Melot fight, and Tristan is mortally wounded. Act III is set in Tristan’s castle in Brittany, the wounded hero tended by his faithful retainer Kurwenal, who has sent for Isolde for she alone has the power to heal her lover. A shepherd is sent to look for Isolde’s sail, but mournfully reports, ‘Oed’ und leer das Meer!’ (‘Waste and empty the sea!’: a line from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which Eliot had recently read, to invoke the wounded hero longing for death). Isolde arrives, too late, and Tristan dies in her arms. Marks’s men come to the castle; Melot and Kurwenal are killed; and Isolde sings her famous Liebestod before sinking to her death upon Tristan’s body. Tristan und Isolde frames Eliot’s tragic action. The rapture of love in the garden is in marked contrast to the desolation that follows, and the opera offers such motifs as light and silence, as well as the hero wounded by the dolorous stroke. When The Waste Land first appeared in The Criterion (October 1922) it was preceded by an article by T. Sturge Moore, entitled ‘The Story of Tristan and Isolt in Modern Poetry, Pt I’, which deplored ‘the failure of modern writers to exploit the potential of the legend.’ Eliot, as editor, may have relished the irony. Various associations of the hyacinth garden have been noted, including these lines from Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Kayyam: I sometimes think that never blows so red The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled; That every Hyacinth the garden wears Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head. T. E. Hulme’s ‘Conversion’ recounts a moment of splendour and the inability to respond to it, the encounter ‘in the time of hyacinths’. In Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, a girl is imprisoned in a hyacinth room; a young man in love attempts to rouse her, but his feverish praise of her hyacinths yields to despair as he cannot reach her. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough describes how the dead return in the form of spring flowers, empurpled or incarnadined by the blood of the body beneath them:25 25  Sir James Frazer, ‘The Ritual of Adonis’, in The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion (3rd ed., rev. (London: Macmillan, 1911–15), Vol IV.I.ix, 234 & IV.I.xx., 410.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  33

Frazer outlines the story of Hyacinth, the youth belovèd of Apollo, the youngest and most handsome of the sons of King Amyclas.26 One day while playing with Apollo he was accidentally killed by the god, who bitterly lamented his death. The story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses X.162–219; Apollo rushes to embrace the dying youth, insisting that it cannot be a crime to love. The hyacinth that sprang from the blood of the youth (not our hyacinth but a little purple iris marked with the letters ‘AI’, Greek for ‘Alas!’) is seen by Frazer as a vernal flower heralding the advent of another spring and gladdening men’s hearts with a promise of joyful resurrection. The capitalised ‘Hyacinth’ appears in most early printings of the poem, but not in the manuscript. The punctuation is important. In July 1952, in Essays in Criticism (242–66), a controversial article by John Peter appeared. It was reprinted in April 1969 (140–75), with a ‘Postscript’ in which Peter discussed the impact of his essay and qualified his earlier assertions. He had described The Waste Land as ‘variations on a theme, the theme being omitted’; and contended that the missing theme was the poet’s lost love for a young man who had drowned. In the Postscript Peter identified the young man as Jean Verdenal and offered more evidence. When the original article was published Eliot took legal action to prevent its circulation, and Peter later disavowed the cruder implications of what he had written. Yet he reaffirmed his basic argument: the speaker has at some time fallen in love; the object of that love was a young man who drowned; the affection is irreplaceable; so the present of the poem is a meditation on the insupportable bleakness that the world now presents. Peter went too far in reducing the poem to this single theme, and many of his arguments do not hold up. Some of his attempts to see homosexual references were ludicrous; he did not appreciate the importance of the woman in Part II; nor account for the poem’s unity and progression. Lyndall Gordon in Eliot’s Early Years (1977) and Eliot’s New Life (1988) has made a case for Emily Hale, whom Eliot had known in America, as a presence behind these lines. Yet any dismissal of Peter’s argument must account for some awkward facts. There was a close friendship between Eliot and Jean Verdenal. They had met in Paris in 1910, and shared a pension; after the latter’s tragic death Eliot dedicated to him Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). Another volume, Ara Vos Prec, appeared in 1920 with an epigraph from Dante, and in the 1925 Collected Poems and thereafter dedication and epigraph were combined: ‘For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915 / mort aux Dardenelles’. The epigraph (Purgatorio XXI.133–36) may be translated as: 26  Frazer, The Golden Bough, Vol I.II.vii, 313.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  34

‘You may see the measure of the love that warms me to you when I forget our insubstantiality, treating shades as if they were real.’ Eliot elsewhere associated images such as the lost lilac and the dead Phoenician sailor with the memory of Jean Verdenal; in The Waste Land these invoke a past happiness that makes the present misery the more intense. There is a curious emphasis in The Waste Land on drowning; in a poem about spiritual dryness this motif might appear incongruous, but Peter’s argument accounts more economically that any other for its presence. Above all, at that key moment when the poet is asked what he remembers, his mind flashes back to the Hyacinth garden and the ‘pearls that were his eyes’. Much of the allusion is sexually ambiguous: Hyacinth, the youth beloved of Apollo, who tragically met his end; Madame Sosostris, a man dressed as a woman (see below); Tiresias, who experienced both sides of love and whose vision forms ‘the substance of the poem’ (Eliot’s note); and the figure of Arnaut Daniel, suffering in Purgatory; his sin is ermafradito, but he is placed among the sodomites. Finally, there is the vagueness of Eliot’s evocation of a central moment in the poem: as Graham Hough says, there is here ‘the trembling ghost of an intense emotion that is never located or defined.’27 If the poem is dramatic, the key to its movement has been concealed. Without reducing the Hyacinth garden to a weekend at the Metropole (Peter Ackroyd rightly rejects this ‘tritest form of reductionism’),28 an awareness of this background is pertinent. Finally, it must be stressed, the identification of the hyacinth girl with Jean Verdenal (or Emily Hale, or anyone else) is unimportant: what matters is the intensity of the underlying feeling of loss, and the dramatic presentation of the images of the poet’s buried life that flood into his consciousness. John Peter’s article, whatever its short-comings, may enhance that awareness. The Hyacinth garden, then, is an experience of fulfilment and failure: a moment of intense feeling and potentiality, but it was not acted on, and the opportunity was lost. This is like the end of Act I of Wagner’s Parsifal, when the hero, having seen the mystery but unable to participate in it, is roughly thrust out the door. The moment is captured in the words ‘heart of light’: an inversion of Conrad’s ‘heart of darkness’ that expresses the kind of religious intensity associated with the revelation of the Grail, or Dante’s vision of the Godhead at the end of the Paradiso, or the Eastern experience of Nirvana (Eliot would use the same phrase of the mystical experience in the garden at Burnt Norton). 27  Graham Hough, From Image and Experience (London: Duckworth, 1960); rpt. In T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land, ed. C.B. Cox and Arnold P. Hinchcliffe (London: Macmillan, 1968), 65. 28  Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), 310.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  35

Yet there are contradictions in the very language the poet uses to invoke the experience. Phrases such as ‘I could not speak’, ‘my eyes failed’, ‘I was neither living nor dead’ and ‘I knew nothing’ suggest the plenitude of a moment both in and out of time; at the same time, echoing in the memory, they point towards a door that never opened. As John Moody observes, the verbs are retrospective, and though the recall is vivid the event is charged with contradictions: ‘In the passionate moment all consciousness was suspended; now this is perceived as a kind of annihilation; so that against the remembered rapture there comes a sense of fear or terror.’29 Eliot would later note that ‘Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness’; and that ‘To be conscious is not to be in time’ (Burnt Norton, lines 85–87). The experience in the Hyacinth garden might have been such a moment, but looking back on it the poet is aware only of his failure; the reality he cannot bear is the knowledge of that failure, the agony of consciousness. The memory becomes a torment to his soul, making its life seem a desolate waste. His response is to turn from the Hyacinth garden and the memory of desire, to face the Waste Land before him. At this stage of his journey, the rose garden of Burnt Norton, the mystical fulfilment of the earlier sensual experience, is far in the future. 4.1.5 Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante The rest of Part I depicts the poet walking about in search of direction. He visits Madame Sosostris, ‘famous clairvoyante’, whose claim to occult wisdom is belied by her bad cold. Her cards predict the poet’s future: his fate is associated with the drowned Phoenician sailor (Phlebas, of Part IV); but also with the poisonous beauty of Belladonna (the woman, of Part II). There are other cards: ‘the man with three staves’, which Eliot associated with the Fisher King; the Wheel of Fortune, which has brought the poet low; the one-eyed merchant (Mr Eugenides); and the Hanged Man, with his promise of Resurrection. A warning to fear death by water reinforces the motif of drowning. The clairvoyante’s voice changes as she concludes the session, her natural gossipy tones taking over as if to suggest that what she has just said need not be taken too seriously.

The fortune-teller, a modern Sibyl, suggests Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society (1875) and author of Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888); her name assumes dimensions of grandeur. Sesostris was a twelfthdynasty king of ancient Egypt, whose deeds are recorded by Herodotus in Book II of the Histories. Eliot may have taken the name from Aldous Huxley’s first novel 29  John Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 81.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  36

Crome Yellow (1921), which depicts, satirically, the misfortunes in love of one Denis Stone, poet manqué.30 In Chapter xxvii, the saurian Mr Scogan (modelled on Bertrand Russell) at the Charity Fair dresses in a black skirt and red bodice, a yellow-andred bandana and brass ear-rings, announces himself as ‘Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana’, predicts ominous futures, and takes the chance to seduce a young girl. The scene parodies Eliot’s mythic method, ‘for which the horoscope is auspicious’ (‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, 177) by suggesting other portents: the hero confronting the Grail, or the Sibyl revealing the underworld to Aeneas. Madame Sosostris anticipates Tiresias (another sexually ambiguous figure) as one who foresuffers loveless seduction in a modern waste land stripped of ancient mystery. Eliot said that he was not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which he departed to suit his own convenience. His use of the Tarot is limited to the deterioration of arcane wisdom and the anticipation of later details in the poem. The Tarot is of ancient and obscure origin. It consists of 78 cards, the Major and Minor Arcana. The Minor consist of 56 cards, divided into four suits of Cups, Lances (or Wands), Swords and Pentacles (the Grail symbolism is obvious); each suit consisting of a King, Queen, Knight, Page, and ten other cards. The Major Arcana, or Keys, consist of 22 cards, each corresponding to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet and so endowed with Cabbalistic significance; these are, in the order given by A.E. Waite, whose Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) is Eliot’s authority: the Magician; the High Priestess; the Empress; the Emperor; the High Priest; the Lovers; the Chariot; Fortitude; the Hermit; the Wheel of Fortune; Justice; the Hanged man; Death; Temperance; the Devil; the Tower; the Star; the Moon; the Sun; the Last Judgement; the Fool; and the World. Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance connects their origins with predictions of ‘the rise and fall of the waters which brought fertility to the land’ (76). Madame Sosostris is following the correct ritual as set out by A.E. Waite. She first selects a card (the Significator) to represent the person or matter of inquiry; this, for the poet, is the drowned Phoenician Sailor.31 That card is ‘covered’ by another, one that gives the influence most directly affecting the inquiry; here, Belladonna. A third card then ‘crosses’ the second: this shows, says Waite, ‘the nature of the obstacles of the matter’; for the poet, this card is the man with Three Staves, identified by Eliot (‘quite 30  Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land, 80, argues that the composition dates disqualify this reading, but the wider presence of Russell in the poem makes the echo felicitous, however unintended it might have been. 31  See also Max Nänny, ‘“Cards are Queer”: a new Reading of the Tarot in The Waste Land’, English Studies 62.4 (1981): 335–47.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  37

arbitrarily’) with the Fisher King. This may be the Three of Lances, depicting a man looking out to sea, three flowering staves beside him in the ground. He is leaning on one; hence the suggestion of the wounded King. The significance of the other cards is less clear, but Eliot is following (up to a point) a traditional procedure, and the first cards mentioned are those of vital significance to his protagonist’s fate. The Phoenician Sailor is not an authentic member of the Tarot pack. Madame Sosostris emphasises its importance, calling it ‘your card’, then warning: ‘Fear death by water.’ The poet responds in parenthesis: ‘(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!).’ This echoes Ariel’s song in The Tempest (I.ii.396–404): Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, bewails the supposed death by drowning of his father Alonso, but Ariel tells him of the ‘sea-change’ that has taken place. This line, associated with the Hyacinth garden by the image of wet hair, flashes into the poet’s mind at a critical moment in Part II, when he is asked what he remembers. The song is used by Joyce in the opening chapters of Ulysses in relation to a drowned man. Pound had wanted to rule the line out, but Eliot retained it, for the poet’s unspoken response to Madame Sosostris reflects his awareness of its relevance to his fate. The other card, also invented, is Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations. Belladonna means in Italian ‘beautiful lady’; it is a purple bell-shaped flower used as a cosmetic to enlarge the pupil (the lady in Part II is at her dressing table); but that plant, the deadly nightshade, is the source of a lethal poison. ‘Lady of the Rocks’ refers to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’ (1490), depicting the Madonna against a craggy background. In The Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater discusses the enigmatic smile of da Vinci’s Giaconda: ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secret of the grave; and had been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.’ For all the overblown prose, a hint of the Siren or Lorelei is manifest. Other cards are authentic members of the Tarot pack. In a poem lacking a narrative they offer some structural guidance. The Wheel is that of Fortune, card Ten of the Major Arcana, representing chance, fatality and de casibus reflections on the inevitability of the misery that follows pleasure. The Wheel reappears in Part IV, where it assumes qualities of the Buddhist Wheel of Necessity. There is no one-eyed merchant in the Tarot pack, but Eliot has added it to anticipate Mr Eugenides; the blank card carried on his back is a veiled intimation of the Grail, which Madame Sosostris (as a fraud) and the protagonist (as one not yet worthy) are forbidden to see. The one eye suggests Odin, or Wagner’s Wotan, the eye surrendered as the price of wisdom; but

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  38

(unlike Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly of The Cocktail Party) the merchant is but a travesty of that former majesty. The Hanged Man is card Twelve of the Tarot, a figure hanging by one foot from a Tau cross, representing ‘life in suspension, but life and not death’ (Waite, 116), or ‘intimations concerning a great awakening’ (Waite, 119), as the Mystery of Death gives way to that of Resurrection. In esoteric ritual he is one who has achieved divine wisdom, and suffered for that knowledge; a type of the god killed that his resurrection might restore fertility to the waste land. Eliot’s note associates him with Sir James Frazer’s hanged God and refers to the hooded figure in Part V, the unrecognised Christ. ‘The Hanged God’ is the title of Chapter 5 of Frazer’s study of Attis (The Golden Bough, IV.I.ii, 288–97). Frazer tells of Marsyas, who rashly challenged Apollo to a musical contest and was flayed when he lost: this became the ritual of the priest hanged or slain on the sacred tree, whose sacrifice ensured the fertility of the crops. Frazer notes (309) the coincidence of this legend and the Crucifixion, which also celebrates a divine death and resurrection; for the poet, however, the figure is not yet to be seen. Madame Sosostris’s final vision is of ‘crowds of people, walking round in a ring’: on leaving the fortune-teller the poet will see a crowd flowing over London Bridge, of those undone by death, whose abode is the Vestibule and First Circle of Hell. This anticipates the ‘hooded hordes’ of Part V, ‘ringed’ by the flat horizon; a vision that will merge (as here) into one of the Unreal City. Yet lest we take it all too seriously, there is the bathos of her last words, in a cracked Cockney accent to the unlikely Mrs Equitone, implicitly warning the poet (and reader) that any reliance on what has been revealed is at best a dubious proposition. 4.1.6  Unreal City The poet wanders in the Unreal City of post-War London, a landscape derived from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, James Thompson’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, Conrad’s Sepulchral City and Dante’s Inferno. He walks the nightmare streets as Marlow does on his return from the Congo; and he sees, like Dante, lost souls who are neither good nor bad but have lost all spiritual capacity. In this Unreal City he meets a figure from his past, whom he accuses of burying in his garden a corpse. This surrealistic outburst, a travesty of Frazer’s vegetation rites and myths of resurrection (God as Dog), restates the opening lines of the poem, implying that repressed memories buried in the unconscious insist on returning to the surface, unwanted though they be. Part 1 ends by invoking Baudelaire’s conclusion to the opening of Les Fleurs du mal, his address to the reader, which

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  39 accentuates the all-pervasive sense of ENNUI and challenges the reader to look into himself and see if he, too, has not such guilty secrets and memories.

The Unreal City, the business centre of London (the City), is invested with a fin de siècle decadence and decay. The tone is struck by the opening line, spondee plus trochee, dead words in the manuscript struck out by Pound (‘I have sometimes seen or see’), breaking the pentameter yet invisibly retaining the weight of three blank beats (Eliot protested, but Pound was right). Eliot’s note points to Baudelaire’s ‘Les Sept vieillards’: ‘Fourmillant cité, cité plein de rêves, / Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!’ (‘Swarming city, city full of dreams, where the phantom in broad daylight clutches the passer-by!’). This is from the Tableaux Parisiens of Les Fleurs du mal, where contemporary scenes, disgusting and repulsive, correspond to the poet’s tormented being. The word ‘raccroche’, as of a whore, implies the moral decadence of the city. Eliot was later to claim that these two lines summed up Baudelaire’s significance for him, a precedent for the potential possibilities of ‘the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis’, and of the poetry to be found in ‘the impossible, the sterile, the intractably unpoetic.’32 Baudelaire tells how, amidst the dirty yellow fog of a dismal morning, he met with a decrepit old man, crippled and hostile, then another and yet others, seemingly in conspiracy against him, until he turned away and went home, frightened, sick and chilled, his mind feverish and confused, wounded by the mystery and absurdity of it all. Bertrand Russell wrote in his Autobiography (Bk. II. Ch. 18) of strange visions of London as a place of unreality: ‘I used in imagination to see the bridges collapse and sink, and the whole great city vanish like a morning mist. Its inhabitants began to seem like hallucinations, and I would wonder whether the world in which I thought I lived was a mere product of my own febrile nightmares.’ Russell added in a footnote: ‘I spoke of this to T. S. Eliot, who put it into The Waste Land.’ James Thompson’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ (1874) wakes from day-dream to the reality of night; the city dissolves in daylight. This phantasmagorical metropolis that epitomises the insubstantiality of modern existence is the antithesis of Augustine’s City of God. The poet’s feeling is similar to that felt by Marlow at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when he returns from the Congo and finds himself back in civilisation, in the ‘sepulchral city’, resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filtch a little money from each other. 32  T. S. Eliot, ‘What Dante Means to Me’ (1950), in To Criticise the Critic (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), 126–27

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 40

These are those ‘undone’ by death, as in Dante’s Inferno (III, 55–57): ‘So long a train of people, that I should never have believed that death had undone so many.’ In his 1950 lecture,33 Eliot described Dante as the most persistent and deepest influence on his own poetry, and later (128), referring specifically to this part of The Waste Land (‘the vision of my clerks trooping over London Bridge from the railway station to their offices’), said that he had borrowed the lines to ‘arouse in the reader’s mind the memory of some dantesque scene, and thus establish a relationship between the medieval inferno and modern life.’ He had given the references in his notes ‘to make the reader who recognized the allusion know that I meant him to recognize it, and know that he would have missed the point if he did not recognize it.’ Dante at the Vestibule of Hell sees a crowd of the futile running endlessly after a whirling standard; these are those whose lives were ‘without infamy and without praise’, who had neither rebelled against God nor been faithful to Him but were intent only on themselves. They are the living dead, like the City clerks trooping over London Bridge, exhaling sighs like those of the damned. Eliot’s next note refers to Dante’s Inferno IV, 25–27, the lamentations of those in Limbo, who must dwell with the knowledge that, being unbaptised, they will never see God. In his 1930 essay on Baudelaire,34 Eliot commented: ‘So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.’ The same paradox, of damnation as a form of salvation from the ennui of life, underlies Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; and Dante, Conrad and Baudelaire each shares in his own way Eliot’s rejection of the Hollow Men, who do not dare even to exist. The crowd flows up the hill, and down King William Street, into the City or financial district of London. The ‘final stroke of nine’ marks the beginning of yet another day among the drafts and invoices. Lloyds Bank, where Eliot worked in the Colonial and Foreign Department from March 1917 until November 1925, is in King William Street, near Saint Mary Woolnoth, which, Southam notes, was discussed in a report, ‘The Proposed Demolition of 19 City Churches’,35 to which Eliot refers in a note. Southam suggests that Eliot’s trivial observation of the ‘dead sound on the final stroke of nine’ may obliquely refer to the death of Christ at the ninth hour. Hands relates it to Wyndham’s Essays in Roman Literature (173–74), citing North’s transla33  Eliot, ‘What Dante Means to Me’, 125. 34  T. S. Eliot, ‘Baudelaire’ (1930), in Selected Essays (1932; rev. ed., London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 429. 35  Southam, Student’s Guide, 91–92.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 41

tion of Plutarch and the ‘dead sounde’ of Parthian kettledrums that put fear into the Romans; Eliot had noted this passage in a review of the book.36 Here the poet meets one he knew, the reference being to Dante’s Inferno (III, 58–61), the stanza immediately following those undone by death: ‘And when I recognised some of these, I saw and knew the shade of him who had made from fear the great refusal.’ This is Celestine V, made Pope in 1294 at the age of 80, but who resigned the papacy five months later to Boniface VIII, to whom Dante attributed many evils that had befallen the Church. For Eliot, the great refusal intimates the Hyacinth garden where the poet, faced with a vital choice, turned away. ‘Stetson’ is usually assumed to be Ezra Pound, who often wore such a hat; Eliot said, somewhat improbably, that he meant just any superior bank clerk in a bowler hat, black jacket and striped trousers. The encounter anticipates the familiar compound ghost of Part II of Little Gidding, finallyan image of the poet himself. Here there is no refining fire, nor valediction, but only a terror that arises as the speaker must face the self within himself. Equally unspecific are the ships: the Battle of Mylae was fought in the Bay of Milazzo, north–east of Sicily, in 260 BC during the first Punic War. That war, fought to determine economic supremacy, resulted in a decisive Roman victory. The anachronism suggests that all wars are one war, and history but the repetition of such conflicts (not a pattern of timeless moments). The corpse in the garden is beginning to sprout; ‘last year’ echoes the Hyacinth garden. In his first note Eliot refers to Frazer’s discussion in The Golden Bough of vegetation ceremonies and the intricate relationship of the deities Adonis, Attis and Osiris with rituals determining the renewal of crops. These gods were associated with annual spring festivals at which their deaths and resurrections were celebrated; Osiris with the inundation of the land by the life-giving waters of the Nile. For Eliot, the sprouting corpse symbolises an undesired resurgence of buried memories. It forms a travesty of Frazer’s vegetation ceremonies and the hope of eternal life, as figured in the New Testament image of the corn sown in corruption but raised in incorruption, and as promised in the Anglican Order for the Burial of the Dead. Eliot’s note to line 74 refers to John Webster’s The White Devil (1608), a sordid tale of intrigue and adultery: Brachiano, husband of Isabella, is weary of his wife and in love with Vittoria, wife to Camillo. With the help of Flamineo, Vittoria’s brother, Brachiano seduces her and contrives her husband’s death, while causing his own wife to be poisoned. Despite her ‘innocent-resembling boldness’ (the point of Webster’s title), Vittoria is tried for adultery and murder. Flamineo quarrels with his virtuous 36  Hands, Sources, 82–83.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 42

brother Marcello, killing him treacherously in the presence of their mother Cornelia, and in V.iv Cornelia sings a dirge over Marcello’s dead body: Call for the robin-red breast and the wren, Since o’er shady groves they hover, And with leaves and flowers do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men. Call unto his funeral dole The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole, To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm, And (when gay tombs are robb’d) sustain no harm: But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, For with his nails he’ll dig them up again. In his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Charles Lamb commented:37 ‘I never saw anything like this dirge, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates.’ This note was incorporated by the Rev. Alexander Dyce into his edition of the play (1857), and included in the first Mermaid edition of Webster and Tourneur (1903); the gloss, in the Mermaid White Devil (or Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, where the two are found together), underlies Eliot’s association of the corpse planted in the garden with the motif of death by water. The Dirge refers to the notion that the corpses of murdered men may be dug up by wolves; but the movement from Osiric rituals to The White Devil may have been suggested by Frazer’s account of how the spirit of the Corn-God might adopt animal form. Jessie Weston (44) discusses the link between Sirius, the Dog-Star, and the annual rising of the Nile that brings new life to the land. The Dog ‘that’s friend to men’ (the manuscript has ‘foe’) may be Anubis, the dog-faced Egyptian god who embalmed the dead and conducted their souls to the afterlife; but more obvious is the travesty of the Christian God. The word ‘nails’ hints at this, but Eliot might have found the God/Dog inversion in Ulysses, which he had read in serial form. And in ‘Dans le Restaurant’, which informs Part IV of The Waste Land (see below), Eliot brought together memory, scratching, ‘un gros chien’ and the sense of fear. 37  Charles Lamb, Specimens of English Dramatic Prose (1808; rpt. London: George Bell, 1910), 202.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 43

Part I ends with an impassioned plea. Eliot cites the Preface of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, the final line in the poem ‘Au lecteur’ (‘To the Reader’), where the poet analyses the follies, errors, greed and sins that occupy our souls and waste our bodies, there being one more hideous, more evil, more impure than the rest: C’est l’ENNUI!L’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire, Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka. Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, Hypocrite lecteur,mon semblable,mon frère! (‘It is BOREDOM! With its eye filled with an involuntary tear, it dreams of the gallows while smoking its hookah. You know it, reader, this fastidious monster, hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother.’) Eliot’s challenge is unequivocal: YOU (dear reader) share such guilt, YOU too have such secrets buried in your garden. The reference deepens the sense of communal guilt and human failure, and on the basis of this shared understanding the poet may expect sympathy without special pleading. Question: consider the continuities of imagery in Part I of The Waste Land from the dried tubers of the opening lines to the sprouting corpse at the end, and evaluate the argument (above) that this image is best considered in terms of repressed memories.

4.2  A Game of Chess The title of Part II suggests Thomas Middleton’s A Game of Chess (1624), wherein the Black forces of Catholic Spain try to check the White realm of England; but the specific reference (Eliot’s note to line 138) is to his Women Beware Women (1620), in which (II.ii) a game of chess is played with moves corresponding to those of a seduction played out above. Eliot’s original title for this section was ‘In the Cage’,38 from a story by Henry James about a girl trapped in the telegraph office, where she fantasizes about the lives of those who use her to send urgent and cryptic messages, before finally resigning herself to a desolate marriage within her own class. The later title suggests the monotony of an existence broken only by such diversions as chess, and hints at sexual tension and betrayal. This, the immediate present of the poem, is 38  The original Loeb translation of Petronius, which Eliot used as epigraph, translates ampulla as ‘cage’; later Loeb translations correct this to ‘flask’ .

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 44

the most obviously dramatic section, in triptych form with a central scene flanked by two contrasting panels. The relationship it depicts, between a woman on the edge of hysteria and a morbidly depressed man, is one at the point of complete stalemate. 4.2.1  The Chair she sat on Part II begins ‘in style’: an ornate room with splendid furnishings; and a woman sitting at her dressing-table described in terms that associate her with Cleopatra, dressed in her finery as she sails to meet Antony. The setting is luxurious, and the profusion of jewels and perfumes overwhelms the senses. Only gradually is the reader aware that things are not as they should be, that the ornate drapes and fittings conceal a horror at odds with the apparent splendour. The tension increases, culminating in the picture hung above the antique mantel: the rape of Philomel. This radically changes the room: the nightingale’s voice becomes a dirty sexual cry; objects of art are dismissed as ‘withered stumps of time’; and portraits lean out, staring, as if to demand an obscene silence for what is to come.

Eliot’s mastery of allusion controls the scene. The description of Cleopatra sailing up the Nile to meet Antony (Antony and Cleopatra II.ii.90) is the most purple of passages; and only retrospectively might the tragic element be perceived. The description of Cleopatra and her Cupids sets the tone of the room, which becomes shabbier as literary references undercut the opulence of what first seems glorious. Some are trivial: Musgrave notes the reflection of Whittier’s ‘Maud Miller’ in the marble.39 The ballad tells of Maud, ‘Of simple beauty and rustic health’, admired by the Judge but rejected because of her class and poverty. The Judge marries another, ‘of richest dower’, but sitting before his marble hearth sighs for his lost love. Maxwell suggests that ‘Cupidon’ may come from Madame Bovary (III.v), for in the hotel room where Emma and Léon meet there is: ‘a little bronze Cupid, which smirked, swinging its arms beneath a gilded wreath’.40 Hands suggests that other details of the room derive from Poe’s ‘The Assignation’ and ‘Shadowa Parable,’ of which Eliot had written in 1921.41 The precise details matter less than the sense of Eliot’s scene as saturated in a literary tradition of tainted love. There may even be a hint of Keats’s ‘Lamia’ (lines II.173–82): 39  S. Musgrave, T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman (Wellington, NZ: New Zealand University Press, 1952), 10. 40  J.C. Maxwell, ‘Flaubert in The Waste Land’, English Studies 44 (August 1963): 279. 41  Hands, Sources, 86–87.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 45

Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room, Fill’d with pervading brilliance and perfume: Before each lucid pannel fuming stood A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood, Each by a sacred tripod held aloft, Whose slender feet wide-served upon the soft Wool-woofed carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke From fifty censers their light voyage took To the high roof, still mimick’d as they rose Along the mirror’d walls by twin-clouds odorous. A note from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, appended by Keats to his poem, has surprising relevance: a young man […] met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house, in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play […] but she being fair and lovely, would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius; who, by some probable conjectures, found her out to be a serpent, a lamia; and that all her furniture was, like Tantalus’ gold, described by Homer, no substance but mere illusions. More obviously, the passage imitates Alexander Pope’s mock-epic, The Rape of the Lock, Canto I of which describes the fair Belinda preparing herself for the fray: And now, unveil’d, the Toilet stands display’d, Each Silver vase in mystic Order laid, First, rob’d in White, the Nymph intent adores With Head uncover’d, the Cosmetic Pow’rs. A heav’nly Image in the Glass appears, To that she bends, to that her Eyes she rears;

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 46

Th’inferior Priestess, at her Altar’s side, Trembling, begins the sacred Rites of Pride. The first impression is that of strange synthetic beauty; only in retrospect does the threat latent in the word ‘rape’ emerge. Eliot’s note to line 92: ‘Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I, 726,’ refers to the sumptuous banquet prepared for Aeneas by Dido, Queen of Carthage: ‘flaming torches hang from the golden-panelled ceiling [the laquearia], and torches conquer the night with flames.’ In ‘The Music of Poetry’, Eliot commented that ‘it is only at certain moments that a word can be made to insinuate the whole history of a language and a civilisation.’42 This may be such a moment. Aeneas is in love with Dido, but will desert her at the call of duty, and she in despair will take her life. In ‘Virgil and the Christian World’,43 Eliot defined Aeneas as ‘the original Displaced Person, the fugitive from a ruined city and an obliterated society.’ Aeneas is the prototype of the Christian hero, a man with a mission, that mission being everything. Without overstressing Eliot’s sense of ‘the very awkward position’ Venus puts Aeneas in (the need to desert Dido to fulfil his mission), there is, even at this stage of The Waste Land, the poet’s incipient awareness that his spiritual quest may mean abandoning ordinary human obligations (his wife?), a conflict that again arises in Part V of the poem, as he strives to reconcile his spiritual duties with his human sympathies. The pattern of subversive allusion continues with Eliot’s note: ‘Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 140. Satan is in prospect of Eden, the fair garden whose ruin he soon will be. Again, the suggestion is of deceptive tranquillity about to be violently disrupted. Smith suggests that Eliot’s ‘sylvan scene’, like Milton’s, derives by way of Dryden from Virgil’s silvis scaena coruscis, ‘a scene of bright woodland’ (Aeneid, I.164); Eliot’s direct source being Mark van Doren’s study of Dryden (1920), which he had recently reviewed and in which the phrase is singled out for special attention.44 This testifies to the continuity of a complex tradition. Another curious gloss is offered by lines 159–63 of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Tristram and Iseult’ (1852), Merlin about to be betrayed and imprisoned within the rocks: For here he came with the fay Vivian, 42  T. S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942), in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 33. 43  T. S. Eliot, ‘Virgil and the Christian World’ (1951), in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 127–28. 44  Smith, The Waste Land, 127.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 47

One April, when the warm days first began. He was on foot, and that false fay, his friend, On her white palfrey; here he met his end, In these lone sylvan glades, that April-day. April, Vivian, betrayal: there is perhaps no end to such allusiveness; my point is that this part of the poem uses the entire heritage of western poetry to weave its spell. The picture, or tapestry, above the antique mantel is seen on closer inspection to have as its subject a barbarous myth: the rape of Philomela by her brother-in-law, King Tereus. Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VI.424–674) tell of the ill-omened marriage of Tereus, King of Thrace, to Procne, daughter of the King of Athens. A son, Itys, is born, and after five years Procne desires to see her sister, Philomela. Tereus goes to fetch her, but takes her instead to a cottage in the woods where he rapes her and cuts out her tongue to prevent her telling the tale. He tells Procne that her sister is dead, but Philomela weaves a tapestry that is taken to the Queen. Procne rescues her sister, and carries out a fearful revenge: she kills Itys, cooks the body and serves it to Tereus. Philomela throws the bloody head if Itys at Tereus, who seizes his sword and pursues the sisters. As he is about to catch them the gods end the horror by turning all three into birds: Philomela into a nightingale, Procne into a swallow, and Tereus into a hoopoe bird (all three are heard in Eliot’s poem). Another bird is heard, the ‘inviolable voice’ of the nightingale (‘cried’ in many editions is an error for ‘cries’). This is not Keats’s immortal bird, pouring forth its soul in ecstasy, but rather Trico’s song from John Lyly’s Campaspe V.i.32–36, the ‘prick song’ of Philomela: What Bird so sings, yet so dos wayle? O ’tis the rauish’d Nightingale. Iug, Iug, Iug, Iug, tereu, shee cryes, And still her woes at Midnight rise. Brave prick song. Eliot’s note refers to line 204, where, once more, an act of sexual desecration has taken place; the theme of adulterous betrayal implicit in the song of the nightingale there is equally pertinent here. Only at the end of the poem, as he listens to the song of Philomela in the Pervigilium Veneris, will the poet have come to terms with his own sense of sexual betrayal and melancholia. The graphic ugliness precipitates suggestions of tragedy and betrayal latent in the

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 48

other allusions; and the room is now seen in its true sad light as a claustrophobic place where ‘withered stumps of time’ and ‘staring forms’ (pictures and portraits) lean out, as if eager to hear another story of squalor. A.V.C. Schmidt points out the echo of William Cowper’s ‘Conversation’ (1781), lines 50–53:45 So wither’d stumps disgrace the sylvan scene, No longer fruitful, and no longer green; The sapless wood, divested of the bark, Grows fungous, and takes fire at ev’ry sparke. Cowper tells of the prurience of speech, ‘the pamperer of lust’, when defiled in the cause of vice; Eliot not only echoes the ‘sylvan scene’ and fiery sparks, but he also mocks the ‘harmony divine’ that Cowper esteems in the art of Conversation. The final image of this section of the poem is the woman fiercely brushing her hair, as the man shuffles on the stair towards her. The ‘fiery points’ suggest the Medusa, one of the Gorgons, whose hair consisted of snakes and whose glance turned men and beasts to stone. The poet, standing behind her, emotionally petrified, is far from being a decisive Perseus. These lines rework an earlier poem, ‘The Death of the Duchess’ (Facsimile, 104–07), exploring the theme: ‘If it is terrible alone, it is sordid with one more.’ That poem is based on the ill-fated marriage in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the eerie moment when the Duchess addressing the silence behind her finds it filled with the presence of her mad and murderous brother. The poem describes a couple who lack the affection shared by Webster’s Duchess and her Antonio (‘stewart of her revenue’), and whose tragedy seems to be that of growing into a loveless old age: My thoughts tonight have tails but no wings. They hang in clusters on the chandelier Or drop one by one upon the floor. Under the brush her hair Spread out in little fiery points of will Glowed into words, then was suddenly still. ‘You have cause to love me, I did enter you in my heart Before you ever vouchsafed to ask for the key’. 45  A.’V.’C. Schmidt, ‘T. S. Eliot and William Cowper: a New Waste Land Source’, Notes and Queries 29.8 (July 1982): 347.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 49

4.2.2 My nerves are bad to-night The woman, brushing her hair, is neurotic and insistent, but her entreaties are met by a sullen silence from her acutely depressed husband, who is unable to respond to her needs or to communicate at all, and whose thoughts, unspoken, intimate a relationship at a point of no return. Only once does he make a response, and that inadvertently, when she asks: ‘Do you remember / Nothing?’; but the memory of the Hyacinth garden and the drowned past is too painful to be dwelt on. Again she asks: ‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’; but this time he takes refuge in the irrelevant ‘Shakespeherean Rag’, distancing himself from the memory of desire. Her despair rises to an hysterical outburst (‘What shall we ever do?’); but still he replies nothing, invoking images of triviality and boredom: the leisurely hot bath, an ambiguous closed car, and a meaningless game of chess as they wait for somethinganythingto happen.

Whatever Eliot said about impersonality in art, his attachment to Vivien Haigh-Wood, ‘the insoluble enigma and enduring drama’46 of his life, was the trauma from which The Waste Land arose. Peter Ackroyd’s biography (1984) stresses Eliot’s attraction to her mercurial combination of fragility and sensitivity, but notes a strong theatrical streak and element of willed drama in the relationship. Vivien suggested some of the details, and wrote ‘wonderful’ on the manuscript; Ackroyd’s assumption (115) that ‘no nervous, anxious woman who saw herself mirrored in such a passage would write in this manner’ is curiously limited. As Eliot was the first to admit, Vivien quickened his poetic instincts, but her ‘nerves’, her dependence upon drugs, and her fragile grasp on sanity made the marriage increasingly impossible; and, as the poem testifies, Eliot’s melancholia and sexual difficulties added to his wife’s restlessness and exhaustion. ‘Nerves’ was a fashionable term for hysteria, but underlying that word (with its etymology of the womb) was Vivien’s hormonal imbalance leading to menstrual problems that her fastidious young husband could not cope with. His squeamishness underlies several early poems, and explains his dismissal of The Waste Land to Conrad Aiken (on a page torn from The Midwife’s Gazette) as: ‘Bloodmucousshreds of mucouspurulent offensive discharge’.47 In 1915, shortly after they were married, the Eliots were living in London as guests of Bertrand Russell, who was apparently quicker than Eliot to see Vivien’s mental instability (defining her in his Autobiography [II.56] as ‘a person who lives 46  Robert Sencourt, T. S. Eliot: a Memoir, ed. Donald Adamson (London, Garnstone Press, 1971), 49. 47  Conrad Aiken, Ushant (1952; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 233.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  50

on a knife-edge’); but who contributed to the tensions of the marriage by having an affair with her. Russell is understandably laconic about the episode, but the fact of the matter seems beyond dispute, and the situation and the sense of betrayal underlies key moments in the Waste Land story. The woman is speaking, seeking a response, but the man is silent, and his thoughts lack speech marks. When she demands to know what he is thinking, all he can come up with is rats’ alley, at which point Pound commented ‘photography’, by which he meant, Valerie Eliot says (Facsimile, 126), too realistic a reproduction of an actual conversation. In Michael Hastings’s Tom and Viv, Vivienne [sic] describes the ‘hideous mistake’ at the heart of the poem: ‘The central voice in the poem is Tiresias the prophet. He sees Athena’s body naked. It is such a shock that he thinks of nothing but rats in a sewer.’ Eliot’s note more prosaically links it to line 195, and the bones in a dry garret, ‘Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year’. Eliot noted the comment about the wind under the door as referring to Webster. In The Devil’s Law Case (III.ii.162), one surgeon remarks this to another as they hear a groan from a man supposedly dead, the words meaning simply, ‘Is he still alive?’ Eliot later denied that the source was significant, but the context suggests the ‘hand of heaven’ acting by ‘strange accident’ to bring back the dead: Contarino, dying of an infected wound, is stabbed by Romelio, but, the surgeons note, the knife has lanced the wound and saved Contarino’s life. Another reference to Webster underlies the insistent ‘nothing’: in The White Devil (V.vi.223–27), Flamineo, facing death, replies to Lodovico’s ‘What dost think on?’: Nothing; of nothing: leave thy idle questions. I am I’the way to study a long silence. To prate were idle. I remember nothing. There’s nothing of so infinite vexation As man’s own thoughts. I. B. Cauthen, Jr., who first noted this in 1958, cited a letter in which Eliot admitted having no doubt that the passage from Webster was at the back of his mind.48 The facsimile reads at this point: ‘Carrying / Away the little light dead people.’ This refers to the lovers Francesca and Paolo in Dante’s Inferno (V.73–75). Taken in adulterous union, they were stabbed to death by Francesca’s husband (Paolo’s 48  I. B. Cauthen, Jr. ‘Another Webster Allusion in The Waste Land’, Modern Language Notes 73.7 (1958): 498–99.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  51

brother), and now whirl together upon the howling wind. This deletion is discussed by Valerie Eliot (Facsimile, 126), who links it explicitly to the Hyacinth garden passage with the comment (from Inferno V.121–23): ‘There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time in wretchedness.’ Pound did not rule out the line, but Eliot on revising the text for publication may have felt that the echo was too personal. A key dramatic moment occurs at lines 121–27, when the woman asks if the man remembers nothing, and he is briefly jolted out of his inertia. In the manuscript his response reads: ‘I remember / The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes!’ Pound deleted the final ‘yes’ with the comment ‘Penelope, J.J.’ (the last word of Joyce’s Ulysses, an inappropriate affirmation). Eliot, revising the manuscript, omitted the reference to the hyacinth garden. The omission is critical, for at this moment as the poet is asked what he remembers his mind flickers back to the moment of ecstasy in the gardena moment crucial to the entire poem, but one that excludes the woman in the room and is the antithesis of the unhappy present. Eliot stressed the cross-reference by adding a note: ‘126. Cf. Part I, l.37, 48’, referring to the Hyacinth garden, and the ‘pearls that were his eyes’. At this moment of supreme misery, then, the poet’s unhappiness is intensified by the involuntary memory of past happiness, a memory mingled with that of the drowned Phoenician Sailor. The link with the hyacinth garden is further accentuated: ‘Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?’ The woman’s words echo the earlier ‘I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing’; but now the poet is composed, and deliberately turns from the memory of desire towards the distracting and totally irrelevant ‘Shakespeherian Rag,’ a tasteless ragtime hit of 1912,49 the ‘O O O O’ and extra syllable of the title catching at the syncopated rhythm. The woman, threatening to rush out and walk the street with her hair down, is like Dido waking up to find the ships of Aeneas leaving Carthage, striking her breast and tearing her hair, and (in Dryden’s translation) urging her people to ‘rush from ev’ry street’ in pursuit (Aeneid IV.586–95). Grover Smith derives the words from Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (III.ii.160–65): Arethusa, falsely accused by her lover Philaster of giving herself to Bellario, vents her anger after the latter has left her:50 ‘Thou, Thou, or another villain with thy looks, / Might talk me out of it, and send me naked, / My hair dishevelled, through the fiery streets.’ 49  Edward B. Marks Music Corporation, published by Joseph W. Stern & Co., lyrics by Gene Buck and Herman Ruby, music by Dave Stamper. Rainey gives the lyrics and music in The Annotated Waste Land (96–99). 50  Smith, Poetry and Plays, 309.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  52

The scene reverts to the man’s unspoken responses of ennui and boredom. The ‘hot water at ten’ is an image of aristocratic luxury and indolence, which possesses ominous implications only if there is detected an allusion to Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (Chapter xiii), where Sir Hercules Lapith, tired of life, gives his wife an overdose of opium and prepares (like Petronius) to commit suicide: At last Filomena said, ‘I do not want to see tomorrow.’ ‘It is better not,’ said Sir Hercules. Going into his closet he wrote in his day-book a full and particular account of all the events of the evening. While he was still engaged in his task he rang for a servant and ordered hot water and a bath to be made ready for him at eleven o’clock. In ‘The Death of the Duchess’ (Facsimile, 107), the man’s inability to respond is displayed more graphically, but ends with the same images of the closed carriage, a game of chess, lidless eyes (Bedouin torture, eyelids cut off, staked out in the sun) and waiting for a knock upon the door (destiny? or any distraction at all?). Though it suggests the seduction vehicle in Madame Bovary, the closed car is based, Lyndall Gordon says,51 on a time in Torquay when Vivien complained of her nerves, and Eliot took her for an afternoon drive in a hired car. Eliot originally wrote ‘closed carriage’ but Pound scrawled ‘1880’ on the manuscript; he accepted ‘closed car’ when Eliot insisted he could not use ‘taxi’ more than once (Facsimile, 126). Eliot’s note to the game of chess refers to Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women, the moment of betrayal in II.ii, when the Duke of Florence, contriving the seduction of Bianca, wife to Leantio, has the older Livia distract Bianca’s mother-inlaw with a game of chess, the moves corresponding to those in a chamber above. This game of chess is very different from the innocent dalliance of Ferdinand and Miranda ‘discovered’ by Prospero in The Tempest (V.i.172). Like ‘The Death of the Duchess’, the manuscript includes at this point an extra line: ‘The ivory men make company between us.’ Eliot omitted the line at Vivien’s request, but restored it from memory when he made a holograph copy of the poem for a sale to aid the London Library in June 1960 (Facsimile, 126). It makes a too-obvious reference to Bertrand Russell, whose role in the Eliots’ early married life was insidious, and who by his own admission (Autobiography Bk. II, Ch. 55) was unable ‘to let them alone’.

51  Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, 96.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  53

4.2.3 When Lil’s husband got demobbed The location changes to a pub at closing time, where the grotesque monologue of the woman describing Lil’s husband is broken by the voice of the barman, urging those present to hurry up and go. Despite the change of setting the scene is essentially the same, the underweave of the previous tapestry displaying more blatantly the break-down of relationships, the ugliness of sex, and the squalor of modern existence. It sums up the basic truth of the relationship seen earlier, and the final lines, with their echo of Ophelia’s words before she drowns herself, make a last comment on the fragility of human sanity and its inability to bear too much of this kind of reality.

The passage originally began: ‘When Lil’s husband was coming out of the Transport Corps’ (Facsimile, 13), but Pound suggested the demotic ‘demobbed’ (demobilized, or discharged from the army). Eliot later called this passage ‘pure Ellen Kellond’; that is, based directly on the words of their maid (Facsimile, 127). The setting has changed, but not the essentials: the crudity, though more blatant, is that of the previous scene. The monologue is interrupted constantly by the voice of the barman, emphasising the passing of time (the missing apostrophe in “ITS” has led to some esoteric readings, but the correct punctuation in all versions of the typescript render these unlikely). Other changes were suggested by Vivien: line 153 originally read: ‘No, ma’am, you needn’t look old-fashioned at me’, but was replaced by the cruder and less stilted: ‘If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said’. Line 164 likewise read: ‘You want to keep him at home, I suppose’; but was replaced by the magnificently vulgar: ‘What you get married for if you don’t want children?’, added to the manuscript in Vivien’s hand (Facsimile, 14). At line 160, ‘all right’ at first read ‘alright’, which may or may not have been intentional. The dramatic immediacy of the episode is reflected in the lack of literary allusion, there being only two significant references. The first occurs at lines 156–57, where the repetition of ‘antique’ from line 97 echoes the story of Philomela underlying this very different scene of sexual squalor; while the conjunction of ‘ashamed’ and ‘thirty-one’ suggests François Villon’s ‘Testament’ (1461), in which the poet reviews his mistakes, his tragedies of love, and his sufferings: En l’an de mon trentiesme eage, Que toutes mes hontes j’eus beues, Ne du tout fol, ne de tout sage...

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  54

(‘In the thirtieth year of my life, having drunk all my shames, being neither quite foolish nor quite wise’). Eliot had used the first two of these lines as an epigraph for ‘A Cooking Egg’ (one slightly off), and would have known of Pound’s use of Villon’s phrase in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (lines 18–19): ‘He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentiesme / De son eage.’ The line now reads ‘l’an trentuniesme’, a change made by Pound in 1958, perhaps in deference to The Waste Land. The other major allusion occurs at the end of Part II, where the voices of the pub women modulate into that of Ophelia (Hamlet IV.v.71), shortly before she rushes out to drown herself, driven insane by Hamlet’s feigned madness and assumed indifference. They were perhaps suggested by Eliot’s reading of Nietszche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where Ophelia’s fate symbolises man’s awareness of the ghastly absurdity of existence, but also invokes the healing power of art that might turn his fit of nausea into imaginations with which it is possible to live. Question: evaluate the argument that the dramatic core of the poem is the encounter in Part II between the man and woman. What is its relation to the Hyacinth garden?

4.3 The Fire Sermon Part III depicts the sterile modern world, where sexual relationships are debased until they are nothing more than sordid commercial transactions that form a pallid imitation of genuine passion or ancient ritual. This is rats’ alley, and the poet, with a sense of nausea, makes tentative attempts to withdraw from it as a first step towards his spiritual rehabilitation. The section begins with an evocation of the Fire Sermon, preached by the Buddha against the fires of lust; it proceeds, following the Thames downstream, to depict meaningless sexual encounters taking place among the Waste Land inhabitants; and it concludes with the words of Saint Augustine as the poet pleads to be released from torments of the flesh. Eliot noted as his source Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translation, adding that Mr Warren was ‘one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.’ His Buddhism in Translations [sic] appeared in 1896 as Vol. 3 of the Harvard Oriental Series, founded by Warren and edited by Eliot’s teacher and friend, Charles R. Lanman. Eliot used it at Harvard in the fall of 1911, in Lanham’s Indic Philology course. The book consists of 102 short translations (Pali rather than Sanskrit), a concise yet comprehensive introduction to the tenets of Buddhist thought. ‘The Fire Sermon’ is in the

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  55

section entitled ‘Meditation and Nirvana’ (Ch. IV #73, 351–53), and tells how the Blessed One addressed a congregation of priests on the theme that all things are on fire. The sermon concludes with an ‘aversion’ for the senses that inflame the mind, until, conceiving this aversion, the disciple is divested of passion and finally ‘free from attachment and delivered from the depravities.’ This emphasis on renunciation is suited to Eliot’s theme, for the poet exposes himself to the depravities of his age only to make the first move away from the fires of lust that had consumed him. The tone is not one of assured understanding, nor the voice yet that of one like Augustine or the Buddha who has made his way to detachment, but rather that of one who has come to detest his humanity and sexuality. The poet’s problem may therefore be more complex than it seems: the scene in the Hyacinth garden and that with the woman in Part II intimate that he may be one in whom the fires of lust have never really burned, so his failure to have sinned, paradoxically, makes his salvation difficult. His renunciation of lust is thus ambiguous, embodying both the pull towards the flesh and the self-condemnation of his inadequacy; and his rejection of his society, at this deeper level, may be a response to his own emotional failure. 4.3.1 The river’s tent is broken An air of sexual desolation is present in the opening lines: the Thames has been violated and deserted; its ‘nymphs’ have departed (even the evidence of their loitering is gone); and the allusion to the beauteous river of Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’, with its ceremonious evocation of a perfect wedding on a perfect day, makes the wasted time and place seem even more grotesque. The environment is ugly: a rat dragging its belly through the rank vegetation on the river bank; the poet, like a broken King, fishing without hope in polluted waters behind the gashouse and musing on such subjects as drowning, furtive sex and bones in rat-infested garrets.

The leafy boughs that in summer canopy the water are broken with the coming of autumn and loss of leaves. The word ‘tent’ has Biblical connotations of a tabernacle, but, more brutally, the image is one of sexual violation and torn virginity, fingers that clutch and sink (like a dying Ophelia). This prefigures the sexual desecration to follow. The tone is controlled by Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’, its refrain (‘Sweet Thames, run softly’) in marked contrast to the modern desecration of the river. This ‘Spousall Verse’ written in 1596 to celebrate the double marriage of Elizabeth and Katherine, daughters of the Earl of Worcester, evokes the beauty of the river on a clear bright day. The nymphs gathering flowers on the banks to bedeck the bridal couples and the white swans swimming softly down the river bless the chaste pleas-

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  56

ures of the marriage bed and its fruitful issue. But the sights and sounds beside the modern Thames only reinforce the poet’s melancholic feelings. All mystery is gone. The nymphs have departed, those of Spenser’s day but also their modern equivalents, office girls loitering with their young men, the river having borne off the residue that might have revealed their presence: empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs (for masturbation), cardboard boxes and cigarette ends. There remains only desolation in a brown land. The poet imagines himself as one of the desolate, sitting by the waters of Leman and weeping. This imitates the first verse of Psalm 137, the lamentation of the Jews captive in Babylon who remember their homeland: ‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, / yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.’ ‘Leman’ means a mistress or prostitute, but Lac Leman is the French name for Lake Geneva, by the waters of which (in Lausanne) Eliot wrote much of The Waste Land as he underwent psychological treatment. He hears at his back not so much Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ as its theme of seduction, of time passing that leads but to the grave, a cold blast crossing the brown land (not the Spirit of God), the ‘rattle of the bones’, and a chuckle which is a Jacobean metaphor of the fixed grin of death and a throat slit from ear to ear. 4.3.2 A rat crept softly through the vegetation The poet’s disgust is intensified by the scenes of sexual squalor about him. The technique is like that of Stravinsky’s Le Sacré du printemps, which (Eliot said) was to turn ‘the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor-horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music.’52 The sound of horns and motors, a modern travesty of horns and hunting, announces not Diana, but ape-neck Sweeney and his lady of the night, Mrs Porter, to enact their version of the Rites of Spring. Eliot contrasts two acts of washing: prostitutes douching themselves between customers and the ritual washing of the feet of Parsifal, before the revelation of the Grail. The voice of the nightingale, so rudely forced, makes a final comment on the scene.

Eliot was not deeply influenced by Joyce, but he had published the first chapters of Ulysses in The Egoist in 1919 and he borrowed a few details to accentuate his sense of the city as an ossuarium of death and decay. The funeral cortège of ‘Hades’ passes 52  T. S. Eliot, ‘London Letter’ to The Dial (September 1921); rpt. in Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land, 188–91 [189].

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  57

canal and gas-works, and the words of Thomas Noel’s ‘The Pauper’s Drive’ flicker through Bloom’s mind: ‘Rattle his bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns.’ A rat appears at the end of ‘Hades’: Bloom hears a rattle of pebbles, and sees an obese grey rat wriggling beneath the crypt. The horror is similar, but Bloom’s conclusion, ‘Feel live warm beings near you [...] They are not going to get me this innings’, is in marked contrast to Eliot’s poet. Eliot would use the image of rats’ feet over broken glass in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). The poet depicts himself as the wounded King, who in some versions of the myth is fishing in a lake when he meets the questing hero. But here the waters are polluted, the surroundings obscene, and there is yet little hope of a cure. Eliot notes the reference behind ‘the king my brother’s wreck’ as from The Tempest, following the shipwreck in which (Ferdinand believes) his father Alonso, King of Naples, was drowned. Ferdinand, alone, hears the music: Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wreck, This music crept by me on the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air… Ferdinand then hears the Song of Ariel, ‘Full Fathom Five’. For Eliot’s poet there is no such music, but only a Hamlet-like musing on his father’s fate. The change from ‘father’ to ‘brother’ in line 191 has been seen as referring to the recent death of Eliot’s father (8 January 1919), but is more probably the outcome of Eliot’s reading of Jessie Weston (115–16), who discusses various versions of the myth in which the wounded King is cured at the moment of the slaying of his brother’s murderer. The tone is set by Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, with its carpe diem theme that had the lovers world enough and time the lady’s coyness, or reluctance, would be no crime, for dalliance might be indefinitely delayed; but since life is short its joys must be seized at once. The poem is cast as a syllogism leading to this conclusion, and the refutation of the first premise begins at line 21 with the lines echoed here: ‘But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’. Eliot refers to this poem in ‘Prufrock’, and in his 1921 essay on Marvell praised the Caroline poet’s fusing of wit and imagination, the poem’s ‘high speed’ and ‘succession of concentrated images’, singling out the very lines he uses himself as those in which ‘a whole

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  58

civilization resides.’53 The ‘sound of horns and motors’ is a modern perversion of ancient venery. Eliot’s note refers to John Day’s Parliament of Bees (1607), an allegorical masque that satirizes ‘the actions of good and bad men in these our daies’ under the guise of different ‘characters’ of bees with their virtues and vices. ‘Thraso’ or ‘Polypragmus’ is the third of twelve bees, ‘A meere vaineglorious Reveller.’ He wants to build a hive that shall outstrip any other, and he describes its glories: it shall be paved with clouds, with an artificial golden sun and silver moon; and the roof shall be of woods and forests, growing down-wards, full of ‘Fallow-deare’ and so contrived that: When of the sudaine, listning, you shall heare A noise of Hornes and hunting, which shall bring Acteon to Diana in the spring, Where all shall see her naked skin; and there Acteons hounds shall their owne Master teare, As Embleme of his follie that will keepe Hounds to devoure and eate him up asleepe. All this Ile doe that men with praise may crowne My fame for turning the world upside-downe. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (III.138–252), the huntsman Acteon surprises Diana, Goddess of chastity and the moon, as she is bathing with her nymphs, and is punished by being turned into a stag and hunted down by his own hounds. The story, Day points out, is an emblem of man’s lust and folly. Eliot’s horns and motors bring out ape-neck Sweeney, or elemental man (modelled on a Boston Irish tough from whom Eliot had taken boxing lessons), who appears in such poems as ‘Sweeney Erect’, featuring an epileptic fit in a brothel; ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, shifting from ham to ham in his bath; and ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ (prostitutes). The later ‘Fragment of an Agon’ sums up his philosophy in the phrase, ‘Birth, copulation and death’. There he expresses the guilty sentiment that resides at the heart of The Family Reunion, if not The Waste Land: I knew a man once did a girl in. Any man might do a girl in Any man has to, needs to, wants to 53  T. S. Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, in Selected Essays (1932, rev. & rpt. London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 295-96.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  59

Once in a lifetime, do a girl in. Mrs Porter, the modern Diana, is obviously willing to run the terrible risk, as she and Sweeney come together to celebrate the Rites of Spring. Eliot claimed not to know the origin of the ballad of Sweeney and Mrs Porter, which ‘was reported’ to him from Sydney, Australia, adding that it was sung by Australian soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915. Mrs Porter was supposedly the keeper of the largest bawdy-house in Cairo. Eliot told Clive Bell, tongue further in cheek, that Mrs Porter and her daughter were characters ‘known only from Aryian camp-fire songs of which one other line has been preserved: And so they oughter’; he added that ‘Of such pieces, epic or didactic ... most have been lost, wholly or in part, in the mists of antiquity.54 One popular music-hall version runs: Oh the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin, His boots are cracking From want of blacking, And his little baggy trousers they’ll want mending Before they send him To the Dardanelles. It is possible, but unlikely, that Eliot would have been unaware of the more basic version, which refers to the unsavoury habit of some Ladies of the Night, too busy between customers to wash themselves out properly, of douching with a bottle of soda water. Eliot later insisted that the soda water meant not the aerated drink but bicarbonate of soda; this would entail the literal washing of feet. Either way, there is a marked contrast between prostitutes washing themselves in soda water and the ceremonial washing of the feet of the Grail hero before his ultimate revelation. There may be a deeper irony here, with respect to the children in the Dome. Eliot’s note to line 202 refers to Paul Verlaine’s sonnet ‘Parsifal’ (1886), which, responding to Wagner’s Parsifal (1882), refers to the choir of youths and boys singing after the wounded Amfortas has been cured, and the Grail about to be revealed. Parsifal has resisted the Flower-maidens and the subtle charms of Kundry; he has seized the Spear of Longinus; he has healed the King; and, now, having undergone the ritual washing, he is about to experience the revelation of the Grail, to the accompaniment of sing54  Richard March and Tambimuttu, T. S. Eliot: A Symposium from Conrad Aiken and Others (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1949), 16.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 60

ing by the choir of boys and youths in the dome. The contrast of the sacred and the profane could not be greater. Yet difficulties arise with this interpretation. The usual explanation of the washing, that it reminds the poet of the foot-washing before the restoration of the Fisher King, sounds reasonable to one unfamiliar with Verlaine’s poem or Wagner’s opera; but in the poem no ablutions are mentioned, while in the opera the ceremony takes place before Parsifal reaches the Grail Castle and no singing children accompany the act. Eliot’s failure to observe Verlaine’s punctuation is of interest. He does not observe the hiatus in the final line, and may have missed the magnificent irony of the poet’s final sentiment: for at this moment of revelation, having withstood all other temptations and with the Grail about to be revealed, the hero is tempted by thoughts of the boys in the choir. If Eliot was aware of this irony his image assumes a different order of complexity, for instead of simply contrasting the sacred and the profane Verlaine’s line would express for the poet an impulse towards the flesh that he cannot harmonise. This complex moment of disgust is followed by the song of Philomela once more, ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears, while the cry ‘Tereu’ (vocative of ‘Tereus’) laments the recurrence of rape in the twittering world. Eliot’s earlier poem, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ (1918), ends with the cries of the nightingales over Agamemnon’s death; but ‘nightingale’ also means prostitute. Eliot originally published the poem in Ara Vos Prec (1920) with an epigraph from the anonymous Raigne of King Edward the Third: ‘Why should I speak of the nightingale? The nightingale sings of adulterous wrong’. Through the suppressed epigraph, the oblique allusion to the Philomela myth supports the theme of sexual infidelity and brutality implied in the reference to Agamemnon; and its implications carry into The Waste Land. 4.3.3 Unreal City In the Unreal city curious encounters take place. The poet is offended by a grotesque invitation from Mr Eugenides, a Smyrna merchant and a modern travesty of the ancient Phoenician traders who once visited Britain; a debased version of Joseph of Arimathea who brought the Holy Grail to its shores. The contrast between the blatant homosexual proposition and the poet’s memories of the Hyacinth garden is marked. The meeting thus intensifies the poet’s misery and his sense of loss.

In the Unreal City, the day has advanced from dawn to noon, but the brown fog is still there. Line 207 originally read: ‘Unreal City, I have seen and see’; but Pound

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 61

deleted the last phrase, again breaking the pentameter, cutting out the inert filling, eliminating the mannered invocation to the City. What remains is an Image, the hard and sharp presentation of an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. ‘Eugenides’ means ‘well bred’, but this is belied by his actions: a blatant homosexual invitation to lunch at the Cannon Street Hotel (in the City, a terminus to the Continent), followed by a dirty weekend in Brighton, the Metropole then a fashionable hotel. Eliot had originally written: ‘And perhaps a weekend at the Metropole’, implying that the invitation forms the poet’s unspoken thoughts as to what might follow the luncheon; Pound wrote ‘dam per’apsez’ in the margin of the manuscript, and underlined the offending word. The ugliness of the encounter and its blatant sexuality are in marked contrast to the experience of the Hyacinth garden, and typify the degraded sexuality from which the poet seeks to escape. Eliot commented: ‘the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand, Prince of Naples’; this asserts (if ironically) a continuity between the merchant of the Tarot pack, Mr Eugenides, and the various references to Death by Water. These culminate in Part IV in the image of Phlebas, who forgets ‘the profit and the loss’ as his bones are picked in whispers by a current under the sea. Mr Eugenides speaks demotic French, the language of the market-place (‘demotic’ was Pound’s suggestion). He comes from Smyrna, the modern Izmir in western Turkey, once a great trading port of Asia Minor, and of topical interest in 1922 with rival claims to its possession by Turkey and Greece (in August the Greek community there had been evicted by Turkish forces). A modern debasement of the Phoenician traders who once reached Britain, or of Joseph of Arimathea who brought the Grail to its shores, Mr Eugenides and his currants represent a shrivelling of the true vine. His invitation is a travesty of that made to the quester at the Grail Castle. Eliot’s note to line 211 is more prosaic: he originally thought that the currants were quoted at a price ‘carriage and insurance free’ to London, but when told (in 1958) that ‘C.i.f’ means ‘cost insurance and freight’ (the vendor undertaking to pay these charges) the correction was made.55 4.3.4 At the violet hour The encounter with Mr Eugenides is followed by that between the typist and her ‘young man carbuncular’. The voice is that of Tiresias, prophet and seer, one who has experienced love from both sides, and expresses the ennui of it 55  Norman Nathan, ‘Eliot’s Incorrect Note on “C.I.F. London”’, Notes and Queries 203.5 (June 1958): 262.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 62 all. Eliot claimed that Tiresias is ‘the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest’; but he is simply another voice, though distanced from the scene so as to have a special authority. For that reason what Tiresias sees is ‘the substance of the poem’: loveless sex, and an indifference that resembles fertility as death resembles life. The typist, glad it’s over, smoothes her hair with automatic hand, and, as mechanically as she has made ‘love’, puts a record on the gramophone.

At the beginning of Canto II of the Inferno, Dante, alone at evening, prepares himself for the journey ahead; Eliot’s ‘violet hour’ (at line 372 reformed into ‘the violet air’) may echo Dante’s ‘l’aer bruno’. However, the phrase refers primarily to the description of evening by Sappho (the nightingale of Lesbos, the tenth muse), whose work survives only in fragments but is celebrated for its lyricism. Eliot alludes to Fragment #149, a prayer to Hesperus, the Evening Star: ‘Evening Star, that brings back all that the shining Dawn has scattered, you bring back the sheep, you bring back the goats, you bring the child home to its mother.’ Instead, the violet evening brings the typist home at teatime, and the scene that follows is a travesty of that depicted by Sappho. The ‘human engine’ throbs like a machine, in anticipation of the mechanical sex to come. Eliot had earlier described the taxi as ‘at a stand’, and had added ‘To spring to pleasure through the horn or ivory gates’ (Facsimile, 31), an image earlier used in ‘Prufrock’, combining the tearing of pleasure through the iron gates of life with Virgil’s gates of horn and ivory (respectively, true visions and deluding lies) that adorn the silent house of Sleep in Book VI of the Aeneid (Facsimile, 128). Pound wisely deleted the lines. The scene is observed by Tiresias, whom Eliot describes as a ‘mere spectator’ yet ‘the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.’ What Tiresias sees, Eliot insisted, is the substance of the poem. This has led many to see Tiresias as the persona of the entire poem. His is an important voice, and one distanced from the scene so as to give it special authority, yet he is but one voice among the many adopted by the poet, and not the inclusive consciousness some assume. Tiresias was a blind seer of Thebes, the most famous soothsayer of antiquity; he retained his powers even in the lower world where the souls of others were insubstantial shade. Eliot’s excessive Latin quotation, untranslated and ironically said to be of great anthropological interest, is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses III.316–38. It tells how Tiresias when asked by Jove and Juno whether men or women took more pleasure from love (he had once been once changed to a woman when he disturbed two great serpents mating), affirmed the words of Jove and was punished by Saturn’s daughter with eternal blindness, which Jove could mitigate only by the gift of foreknowledge. Eliot was aware of Guillaume Apollinaire’s surrealist drama, Les Mamelles de

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 63

Tiresias, which had caused some scandal when first performed in 1917; hence the reference to wrinkled dugs. The play’s concern with fecundity is in marked contrast to the equally absurd scene taking place here; it tells of Thérèse, who changes her breasts for a beard (throwing the former into the audience as balloons), and calls herself Tiresias; her abandoned husband, in a mighty act of will, gives birth to 40,049 children in a single day. At the end of the play a repentant Thérèse returns to him, sheds her beard, and dons her breasts again. Other allusions, in a pastiche of 18th-century verse, intensify the mock heroic, the unromantic. The ‘sailor home from the sea’ echoes Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’ (1884), written when Stevenson thought he was dying and later (1894) inscribed on his tomb on Mount Vaea in Samoa; it concludes: ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.’ The drying combinations, ‘Out of the window perilously spread’, demystify Keats’s Nightingale, ‘The same that oft-times hath / Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.’ The young man is carbuncular, not in the lapidary sense of fiery red stones but covered in pimples; according to Southam,56 Eliot wanted to echo ‘that old man eloquent’ in Milton’s sonnet, ‘To the Lady Margaret Ley’ (the echo is indistinct). This section was originally written in quatrain form. Moody sees a reflection of ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1666), Dryden’s address to London in the year of the Great Fire;57 he cites from Eliot’s 1921 essay on Dryden that poet’s ability to magnify the ridiculous and trivial, and to create the object that his satire contemplates. Eliot says that Dryden remains ‘one of those who have set standards for English verse which it is desperate to ignore’; in what follows weary rhymes and indefinite echoes of 18th-century writers (Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith) invoke a lost moral standard and the need for the corrective lash of satire. The young man carbuncular is one of the low, on whom assurance sits ‘As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’ Bradford is a manufacturing town in the north of England, the centre of cotton and woollen industries, where opportunists made a quick fortune during World War I. The suggestion of exploitation, in both the sexual and commercial senses, underlies the simile. The key word is ‘indifference’, a secular version of the spiritual accidie Eliot later condemns in Little Gidding. The scene ends with a return to the figure of the prophet, whose ‘I, Tiresias’ may echo Revelation 22:8: ‘I John saw these things, and heard them’ in the manuscript following what is now line 56 (Facsimile, 9); but the important allusion is to Swinburne’s ‘Tiresias’, where the phrase ‘I Tiresias’ is reiterated.58 There are other 56  Southam, Student’s Guide, 99. 57  Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 91. 58  Smith, The Waste Land, 99.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 64

echoes of Swinburne’s poem: the ‘throbbing’ suggests ‘the low live throb of blood’ (Stanza 20); and ‘foresuffered’ repeats ‘And fiery foresight with foresuffering bought’ (Stanza 33). In Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, Tiresias sits by Thebes below the wall: pestilence has fallen upon the city, which lies waste and barren, and he is called to save it. Knowing the curse has been provoked by the unwitting killing by Oedipus of Laius, his father, and his incestuous union with Jocasta, his mother, Tiresias is unwilling to speak, but when compelled to do so informs Oedipus that he is himself the unclean thing that must be cast out before the land can be free of its curse. Tiresias has walked ‘among the lowest of the dead’; in Book XI of the Odyssey, having rescued his men from Circe, Odysseus goes to Hades to consult Tiresias, ‘Who even dead yet hath his mind entire’ (Pound, Canto XLVII). Tiresias tells him that his journey home will be hard, that he will find trouble in his house, and that Death will come to him out of the sea (as in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno), but only after an easy and prosperous old age. The scene concludes with an allusion appreciated by all early reviewers of the poem (a sign of how sensibilities have shifted), the song from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). The novel tells of kindly but unworldly Dr. Primrose and his family of six, who, at first prosperous and contented, come upon misfortune. The eldest daughter, Olivia, is seduced and deserted by young Squire Thornhill, and comes back to her family; in Chapter XXIV, ‘Fresh Calamities’, she returns to the honeysuckle bank where first she met her lover, and sings a melancholy air: When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can sooth her melancholy, What art can was her guilt away? The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom, isto die. Olivia is not forced to such extremity: her seducer’s iniquities are revealed, and he repents; the false marriage licence proves to be a real one; and she is restored ‘to reputation, to friends, and fortune at once’; and all ends happily, the Vicar’s faith in natural goodness and justice vindicated. This is not the Waste Land world.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 65

4.3.5 This music crept by me upon the waters As the poet moves through the City, ‘along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street’ and past the Billingsgate fish market, his desolation increases as he registers his inability to listen with any pleasure to the ‘whining’ of a mandoline, to share the careless ease of the lounging fish men (drinkers in a dry land), or to appreciate the ‘inexplicable splendour’ of the Church of Saint Magnus Martyr, the columns of which, Ionian white and gold, intimate a beauty, a purity, and a classical simplicity unlikely to be realised in his present life.

The music upon the waters is noted by Eliot as a reference to The Tempest, ‘as above’; and the quotation marks confirm the deliberate echoing of line 191, where Ferdinand, sitting on the bank, hears Ariel’s song. It introduces the refrain, ‘O City city’, with the echo of Unreal’ and the anticipation of escape (‘O swallow swallow’ of line 428). The discord of ‘pleasant’ and ‘whining’ suggests the poet’s inability to respond to the music creeping by. The mandoline was Eliot’s: Lyndall Gordon notes that ‘Vivienne bought him a mandoline and accompanied him to Margate where she left him to follow the rest-cure his doctor prescribed.’59 The fishmen are workers from the nearby Billingsgate fish market, in Lower Thames Street, and not fishermen. The distinction is significant, as the language of Billingsgate is a byword for crudity, but fishing for Eliot is generally a positive act. Even so, these are men in fellowship (in a world of isolation), noon-day drinkers in a dry land; and the poet cannot but contrast their careless ease with his own anguish. There is at this point a possible ‘sign’, which, if perceived, might alleviate the present misery: the walls of Saint Magnus Martyr, with their ‘Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’ (the hexameter accentuates the beauty, an intimation of relief in a waste land). Magnus Martyr, named for Saint Magnus, a Norseman martyred in 1116 AD, is a High Anglican church in the City of London, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, not far from where the fish market used to be, its white tower and fine steeple visible from London Bridge. Gordon notes that Eliot had an album of London Views with a photograph of the church, which he would sometimes visit during his lunch hour.60 White and gold are the liturgical colours of Easter. Eliot’s note on the Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches is a pedantic touch: as Brian Southam discovered, P.S. King & Son were not authors or publishers of the pamphlet, but agents for a London County Council report by the Council’s Clerk and Architect. 59  Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, 104. 60  Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, 99.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 66

Eliot took this from his ‘London Letter’ in The Dial (May 1921), when ‘casting round for material to bulk out the notes’.61 4.3.6 The river sweats The Thames, downstream from London Bridge, sweats oil and tar; it evokes images drawn from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; the Isle of Dogs is an ugly reminder of the corpse buried in the garden; history offers a sterile mockery of marriage and splendour; and the three Thames-daughters, degenerate cousins of Wagner’s Rhine-maidens, bewail meaningless sexual violations in which not even the act of desecration is resented. Their song fades out (‘la la’), but the ravishing of the river, invoked at the outset of Part III, is complete.

This passage is dominated by the Song of the Thames-daughters. Eliot’s note refers to Act III of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final opera of the Ring Cycle. The sudden shift to a two-stress rhythm imitates the song of the three Rhine-maidens (Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde), who lament the loss of their gold, yet anticipate its return. Their song suggests the violation of Eliot’s Thames, the grief of his Thames-daughters. This reflects the tragedy of the Ring, particularly the first opera in the cycle, Das Rheingold, which begins with the theft of the Rheingold from the Rhine-maidens by Alberich, a loathsome dwarf, who is willing to renounce love if he might seize the gold and fashion from it a Ring to make him master of the world. Wotan, ruler of the gods, steals the Ring from Alberich, but must use it to pay the giants Fafner and Fasolt for building Valhalla. Das Rheingold ends with Fafner slaying Fasolt and leaving with the gold, and the gods entering Valhalla as the lament of the violated Rhine-maidens rises from below. The setting is that of the Thames at the outset of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad’s second paragraph reads: The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motion61 

Southam, Student’s Guide, 28.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 67

less over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth. Conrad evokes the Thames as the heart of history and civilisation: a river crowded with memories of men and ships, a centre of past magnificence and glory: ‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ Other memories contribute to the tapestry of history: ‘barge’ suggests the empty splendour of Cleopatra, even as it anticipates the trifling of Elizabeth and Leicester. Greenwich is mentioned by Conrad as one of the ports from which the Elizabethan adventurers sailed; Greenwich Palace is where Elizabeth was born (7 September 1533), and where she resided in 1561 when Leicester gave his party on the Thames. The Isle of Dogs (compare line 74) is a London borough on a peninsula opposite Greenwich. The ‘white towers’, Southam suggests, are ancillaries of the Tower of London, in which the young Elizabeth was confined,62 though Grover Smith cites Eliot’s ‘London Letter’ to The Dial (August 1921), where the phrase is used of London churches.63 Highbury is a residential area of north London; Richmond and Kew are further up the Thames; Moorgate is between the City and the East End (Eliot used the Moorgate Underground station regularly); and Margate is the resort on the Thames estuary where Eliot in 1921 wrote this part of The Waste Land. Eliot refers at line 279 to J. A. Froude’s History of England (London: Longman, 1870), citing Vol. I Ch. iv, the ‘letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain’ (a better reference is Vol. VI Ch. xxxix, 497; the History was reprinted several times, the Elizabethan volumes subtitled ‘Reign of Elizabeth’ and numbered I–VI; hence the discrepancy). Eliot quotes from a letter headed ‘London, June 30’ (1561), from Alvarez De Quadra, Bishop of Aquila and Ambassador to the English Court, to Philip I of Spain. De Quadra tells of being invited to a St John’s day party on the Thames given by Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose marriage to Elizabeth then seemed likely. De Quadra reports on the affair, but his concern is to exploit the tensions it created, to bring England back into the Catholic Church. The passage referred to by Eliot offers a careful analysis of the political implications of the romance. The marriage did not take place, and with its failure the Tudor line was doomed. The incident forms one more sign of fruitless sterility. The verses that follow, the song of the Thames-daughters, share the theme of sexual betrayal. Eliot’s note to the first refers to Purgatorio V.133: Dante, at the Second Terrace of Ante-Purgatory meets the unshriven (who had delayed repentance 62  Southam, Student’s Guide, 101. 63  Smith, The Waste Land, 43.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 68

until overtaken by sudden death), and he speaks with one who calls herself La Pia (Piety), whose words Eliot translated:64 ‘O pray, when you return to the world, and are rested from your long journey […] remember me, who am La Pia. Siena made me, Maremma unmade me.’ Pia dei Tolomi, of Siena, married Nello, or Paganello dei Pannocchieschi, a leader of the Geulfs and Lord of the Castello della Pietra in Maremma, Tuscany. Out of jealousy or because he wished to marry another, he took La Pia to Pietra, in 1295, and threw her from the castle window down a precipice. La Pia emphasises the solemnity of the bond uniting her to her husband; Eliot’s Thamesdaughter, casually yielding her honour ‘on the floor of a narrow canoe’, seems hardly to care. The words ‘Siena me Fe, Disfecemi Maremma’, as used by Ezra Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), were taken not from Dante but from the frame of Rossetti’s picture of La Pia, for which Jane Morris, wife of William Morris and mistress of Rossetti, acted as model: Eliot may have had this complex echo (Pound’s sense of the Tragic Generation) in mind. The second Thames-daughter expresses like non-reaction to sexual betrayal; she has nothing to say, and cannot even resent her violation. The image is one of total emotional exhaustion. In mid-October (1921) Eliot had gone to Margate, where he stayed at the Albemarle Hotel (47 Eastern Esplanade, Cliftonville; Lyndall Gordon notes [105] that the bill for sixteen pounds is attached to The Waste Land manuscript). He left on November 12 for Lausanne, admitting in a letter to Julian Huxley (26 October 1921) that he needed a specialist in psychological troubles rather than nerves (‘I can connect / Nothing with nothing’), and taking with him the parts of the poem already done. The voices of the Thames-daughters are finally heard in a dying fall (‘la la’) as they casually farewell their lost honour. The sense of sheer inertia is in marked contrast to Augustine’s struggle against illicit passion or the Buddha’s forceful denunciation of the senses. 4.3.7 To Carthage then I came Part III concludes with St Augustine’s ‘cauldron of unholy loves’ (Confessions, III.i) that sang about his ears when he came to Carthage; the poet, like Augustine at this point of his life, is not yet ready to accept Christianity, yet desires ardently to be removed from the burning lusts that assail him. As Eliot notes, the final collocation of Augustine’s Confessions and the Buddha’s Fire Sermon is not an accident, since the poet, sick at heart, is praying for the strength to leave the sexual wilderness behind, for (as the Buddha notes in his Sermon) only by the absence of 64  Eliot, ‘Dante’, 254

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land 69

passion might he be free from depravity.

Eliot’s note cites the Confessions of St Augustine of Hippo (345–430), probably his free version of E.B. Pusey’s translation (1907). Book II ends thus (31): ‘I sank away from Thee, and I wandered, O my God, too much astray from Thee my stay, in these days of my youth, and I became to myself a barren land.’ Book III tells of Augustine coming from his native city of Thagaste to Carthage, of his falling into the snares of love, and of his incipient desire to be caught by God’s love: ‘To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not.’ This expresses the plight of one who recognises his spiritual barrenness and longs to be free of the sensual temptations that assail him; yet there is a confession of sexual and spiritual inadequacy that renders the lines ambiguous, and the impulse towards spiritual love barely articulated. The emphasis on ‘Burning burning burning burning’ also suggests the end of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, where Valhalla burns and the world sinks beneath the waters. Eliot’s note, however, refers to Henry Clarke Warren’s text of The Fire Sermon, returning to the central theme: the burning of the fires of lust, and the need to divest oneself of the passions to become ‘free from attachment and delivered from the depravities.’ An ironic echo of I Corinthians 7:9 may be heard: Paul, urging celibacy and avoidance of fornication, reluctantly admits the sacrament of marriage: ‘But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.’ The final reference to Augustine is to the Confessions X.xxxiv (Pusey, 238), which stress the need to resist temptations of the senses lest they take possession of the soul: ‘And I, though I speak and see this, entangle my steps with these outward beauties; but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out; because thy loving kindness is before my eyes.’ As Southam points out (103), the force of Augustine’s words is brought out in God’s challenge to Satan (Zechariah 3:2): ‘And the Lord said unto Satan, The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan; even the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is this not a brand plucked out of the fire?’ The ‘brand’ is the High Priest Joshua, once a non-believer but now a follower of the Messiah and a type of the restored Church. A similar image is found in Amos 4:11, where the Lord reproves Israel for its idolatry: ‘I have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomarrah, and ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning: yet ye have not returned unto me, saith the Lord.’ Eliot’s Fire Sermon ends with the equivocal word ‘burning’, which suggests that the victory is far from won: the impulse towards the

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  70

flesh is still very real, and the fire not yet that which refines. Question: Eliot says in his notes that the collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism (the Fire Sermon and Augustine’s Confessions) is not an accident. Consider, too, the use of Sanskrit in Part V. Does the poem offer a balanced religious perspective or does it remain resolutely (or potentially) Christian?

4.4  Death by Water This short lyrical section, a close adaptation of the last seven lines of the earlier ‘Dans le Restaurant’, has a double articulation. It testifies to the inevitability of Death, for Phlebas, ‘once handsome and tall as you’, is now dead; and if death might seem the answer to the Sibyl’s prayer it is yet a final comment upon human vanity. Yet Death by Water may be interpreted as spiritual baptism, a first step if the poet is to move from his wilderness towards something more meaningful. The lyric is a pivotal point, combining the Western fear of death with the Eastern fear of regeneration; yet implicitly stressing the poet’s need to detach himself from his previous existence if he is to be reborn into another life.

Part IV repeats the warning to fear death by water, but that death may be seen as baptism into new life. Jessie Weston comments in From Ritual to Romance (44): the elaborate ceremonies of mourning for the dead god, and committing his effigy to the waves, preceded the joyous celebration of his resurrection, but in Alexandria the sequence was otherwise; the feat began with the solemn and joyous celebration of the nuptials of Adonis and Aphrodite, at the conclusion of which a Head, of papyrus, representing the god, was, with every show of mourning, committed to the waves, and borne within seven days by a current […] to Byblos, where it was received and welcomed with popular rejoicing. As Grover Smith notes,65 Eliot knew Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée (1902–03), in Volume 2 of which (78) the ceremony mentioned by Miss Weston is referred to in words (phénicienne, étapes, le courant emporta, passérent, une côte plus lointaine) that Eliot echoes. In particular, Bérard emphasises that the first stoppingplace of the severed head was the Phoenician coast. This passage, which links this ritual to the Mysteries of Osiris, is the source of the final lines of ‘Dans le Restaurant’ 65 

Smith, The Waste Land, 108.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  71

(below) and thus of Part IV of The Waste Land; it establishes an unequivocal link between the drowned Phoenician Sailor and the Mysteries of Part I. Part IV was originally much longer (93 lines), and largely inspired by the Ulysses canto (XXVI) of Dante’s Inferno, where Ulysses and his crew, in sight of Mount Purgatory, are sucked down, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of Tiresias that Ulysses would drown at sea. Pound, however, ‘attacked’ the typescript so savagely that only the final ten lines survived. Valerie Eliot comments (Facsimile, 129): Depressed by Pound’s reaction to the main passage, Eliot wrote: ‘Perhaps better omit Phlebas also???’ ‘I DO advise keeping Phlebas,’ replied Pound. ‘In fact I more’n advise. Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen. sailor. And he is needed ABSolootly where he is. Must stay in.’ As Peter notes (159), the effect of the passage is valedictory rather than descriptive: ‘It is as though the speaker has turned back for a last survey of the pattern of his former life before going forward into the new and unknown, and with something of the detachment from worldly passions which the Fire Sermon has urged.’ The name ‘Phlebas’ is of uncertain significance; interpretations range from the accusative plural of Gk. fleps, ‘a vein’, to the second person singular past imperfect of L. flere, ‘to weep’. Southam suggests (104) an echo of Plato’s dialogue on pleasure, the Philebas, ‘handsome and tall’ echoing Socrates’s criticism, that many men think themselves taller and more handsome than they really are. Margaret Gent suggests that Eliot derived the figure from The Life and Death of Jason (1867), by William Morris; in Book IV, the song of Orpheus to the Argonauts refers to a Phoenician sailor as victim of the sea, ‘unburied, under alien skies’.66 Eliot was familiar with the poem, having quoted from it in his essay, ‘Andrew Marvell’.67 Book IV tells of the drowning of Hylas, once so handsome, but who now lies below the stream, ‘Forgetting the rough world, and every care.’ Compare, too, the Satyricon of Petronius, #114, which describes the wreck of Lichas’s ship and his drowning: ‘But even as he shouted the wind blew him into the water, a squall whirled him round and round repeatedly in a fierce whirlpool, and sucked him down.’ The Phoenicians were renowned traders of antiquity, founding Carthage and trading for tin in Cornwall. Eliot’s note to line 218 states that ‘the one-eyed merchant, 66  Margaret Gent, ‘The Drowned Phoenician Sailor: T. S. Eliot and William Morris’, Notes and Queries 17.2 (February 1970): 50–51. 67  T. S. Eliot, Andrew Marvell (1921), in Selected Essays (1932; rev. & rpt. London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 299.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  72

seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor’ (‘profit and loss’ and the pun on ‘currents’ are surely intentional). This death unites all other references to drowning in the poem: what Phlebas experiences is the substance of the poem, a death that is equally a resurrection. The verse derives from ‘Dans le Restaurant’, a poem that Eliot had written in French a few years earlier. There, a disgusting waiter tells of a childhood sexual encounter with a young girl that made him feel a moment of ecstasy and power, until it was interrupted by a big dog; it disturbs the poet because it is too close to something in his own life: by what right does this man have experiences like his own? ‘Dans le Restaurant’ is a fascinating analogue to The Waste Land because much of its imagery (the sudden shower, the wet girl, the sense of childish fear, the flowers, the dog, and the drowned man) is related to the later poem, and its ending, though more laconic and less lyrical, is close in word, tone and feeling to the later verse. It concludes: Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé, Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille, Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d’étain: Un courant de sous-mer l’emporta très loin, Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure. Figurez-vous donc, c’était un sort pénible; Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille. (‘Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, forgot the cry of gulls and the deep sea swell of Cornwall, the profit and loss and the cargo of tin; a current under sea carried him far, passing him through the stages of his previous life. Don’t you think it was a distressing fate; still, he used to be a fine figure, and quite tall.’) The elegaic qualities of Part IV are marked, the image of the drowned man forming a traditional memento mori, and the lines a fitting farewell to the life left behind as the poet undergoes imaginatively the experience of death. The wheel of the ship becomes both the Wheel of Fortune turned by Madame Sosostris and the Buddhist Wheel of Necessity on which man is bound until he achieves the degree of detachment necessary to free him from the cycle of existence (the whirlpool as much as the wheel). The effect is to combine fear of death with fear of regeneration, two lines of thought in unresolved conflict throughout the poem. The collocation in the image of Eastern and Western traditions (a Buddhist doctrine for Gentile and Jew) is not an accident, but underlines for all mankind the universality of Phlebas’s fate.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  73

Question: Pound insisted that Phlebas must stay, as he was an integral part of the poem. In what ways is Phlebas important to the wider poem?

4.5  What the Thunder Said The final section of the poem depicts the crossing of the Waste Land: beginning on a spiritual Easter Saturday, after the Crucifixion but before any Resurrection; a long dry journey across an arid plain, towards an uncertain destination. Eliot noted three themes: the journey to Emmaus, where the disciples see but do not recognise the risen Christ; the Chapel Perilous, where the questing knight is assailed by nightmare visions; and the ‘present decay of eastern Europe’, whereby the Russian Revolution and the chaos of post-War civilisation act as metaphors for forces of disorder that assail the poet’s mind. In Eliot’s opinion, Part V was ‘not only the best part, but the only part which justifies the whole at all’ (Facsimile, 129). Written in remarkably short time while Eliot was in Switzerland, it was left virtually untouched by Pound. As Valerie Eliot notes (129), Eliot was describing his own experience of this part of the poem when he wrote in ‘The Pensées of Pascal’ (1931): it is a commonplace that some forms of illness are extremely favourable, not only to religious illumination, but also to artistic and literary composition. A piece of writing meditated, apparently without progress for months and years, may suddenly take shape or word; and in this state long passages may be produced which require little or no retouch. The identification of the Voice of Thunder with the Voice of God is a commonplace, but Moody refers (336) to Jane Harrison’s ‘The Rite of the “Thunders”’ in Chapter III of Themis (1911), ‘on the association of thunder with the voice of God and with purification in initiation and fertility rites’, which Eliot had mentioned in a 1913 Harvard essay, ‘Is a science of religion possible?’ The association is present in John 12:29; in Dryden’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (noted in Mark van Doren’s Dryden [35], which Eliot had reviewed); and in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster I.ii.147–48: ‘When thunder speaks, which is the voice of God, / Though I do reverence, yet I hide me not.’ In the Vedas the Thunder is the voice of Vishnu, speaking from the holy mountain Himavant. The blending of Eastern and Western asceticism, noted in Eliot’s comment on line 309, continues into the final section of the poem.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  74

4.5.1 After the torchlight Part V begins with the agony of the crucifixion of Christ: His betrayal and arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, after a cold and stony night of prayer; the ‘shouting and crying’ of His trial; and the ‘reverberation’ of the earth at the moment of His death. One thing alone seems certain: He who was living now is dead, and with that death the promise of Eternal Life that He embodied seems very much in abeyance. It is with no real hope of salvation but rather with a grim sense of resolution that the poet begins his journey.

The opening of Part V alludes to various events from Christ’s betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane until his death, and places the poet (and so the reader) in the position of the disciples on Easter Saturday, knowing that the Crucifixion has taken place but scarce daring to believe in a Resurrection lest it prove a delusion; conscious only of the fact of Christ’s death and of their own mortality. The ‘torchlight red on sweaty faces’ pictures the moment of betrayal; ‘torches’ are mentioned in John 18:3, but the Gospels do not refer to sweaty faces, and the image may derive from the many paintings of the scene. The ‘frosty silence’ suggests the cold night Christ spent in prayer; the ‘agony in stony places’ that lonely vigil (Luke 22:44) and the passion at Golgotha, ‘place of a skull’. The ‘prison’ is that in which Christ spent what was left of the night before being taken to the palace of Caiaphas, the High Priest (John 18:15), and led before Pilate; the ‘shouting and the crying’ is that of the multitude, demanding His crucifixion. At the moment of Christ’s death, the veil of the temple was torn in twain, ‘and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent’ (Matthew 27:51). The darkness that covered the earth merges with Waste Land thunder, as a reminder that April is still the cruellest month. The words, ‘He who was living is now dead’, mock Revelation 1:18, John’s vision of the risen Christ: ‘I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.’ The ‘little patience’ is more akin to resignation than hope, the words echoing Christ’s rebuke to Peter (Matthew 14:31): ‘O thou of little faith.’ In this subdued frame of mind, then, the poet begins his journey across the Waste Land. 4.5.2 Here is no water The Waste Land is evoked in its arid desolation: no water but only rock, and a sandy road winding through dry mountains likened to a mouth of carious teeth that

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  75

cannot even spit. There is thunder, but it is a dry sterile thunder that brings no rain; for the poet has not yet reached the point of his pilgrimage where the waters may be freed for him; his quest has only begun. He longs for a pool among the rocks, and for the ‘water-dripping song’ of the Hermit Thrush with its promise of relief. But there is no water.

Valerie Eliot cites Eliot’s letter to Ford Madox Ford (14 August 1923): ‘There are I think about 30 good lines in The Waste Land. Can you find them? The rest is ephemeral.’ He answered himself (4 October 1923): ‘As for the lines I mention ... you need not scratch your head over them. They are the 29 lines of the water-dripping song in the last part’ (Facsimile, 129). Nowhere in the poem is there such an intense sense of dryness or the need for relief. The journey across the Waste Land forms an objective correlative of the spiritual quest because the sensory experience is so powerful that the emotion is immediately evoked. The syntax winds its way without punctuation through the dry sentences, recording image after image (‘red sullen faces’) in the hallucinatory sequence of apprehension. The conjunction of water and rock invokes Exodus 17:2–6, when Moses smites the rock with his staff, but here no water comes forth. There is little literary allusion, though Hands notes (106) a passage from Doughty’s Arabia Deserta (I.353), quoted in The Athenaeum (11 February 1921), evoking the desert’s giddy heat; and an echo of Kipling’s Kim (Ch. 13), describing the mud huts and Esquimaux-like faces in the mountain passes. Eliot’s note to line 357, the Hermit Thrush, is his most frivolous, defining the locale of the Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, and celebrating its ‘water-dripping song’ as unequalled in purity, sweetness and exquisite modulation. The note is precisely accurate, Eliot on his fourteenth birthday (Moody, 184) having been given a copy of F.M. Chapman’s Handbook (1895): ‘385. Eastern Hermit Thrush.’ Later editions cite the name as Hylochichla Guttana Faxoni (there have been many re-classifications), but agree about its retiring disposition and high distinction among songbirds. No mention is made in Chapman of any ‘water-dripping’ song. The poetic source of the image is Whitman’s elegy on the death of Lincoln, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’. The hermit thrush, from deep secluded recesses amidst cedar and pine (Chapman mentions ‘mossy forests’ but not pine) sings a carol of death and a verse for its lost love. The poem concludes: Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  76

Lilac and the thrush are charged with emotion. In an autobiographical note (1933) to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (148), Eliot includes ‘the song of one bird’ and ‘scent of one flower’ among a personal list of images that represent ‘the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer’. The voice of the hidden singer is invested with such feeling, and then transformed into the hermit himself, who, escaping from civilisation, sings his solitary song as the darkness closes in. Eliot uses a similar image in ‘Marina’ (1930), where the voice of the bird calling through the fog as the leaking boat approaches the New World becomes a token of new life that the Waste Land poet, at this point, cannot discern. 4.5.3 Who is the third who walks always beside you? The poet experiences the illusion of a hooded figure walking beside him; a figure he does not recognise, but which, dimly, he sees (for he asks again) as relevant to his quest. Could he but recognise the figure as the risen Christ, or the Hanged Man of Madame Sosostris, he might know that a sign of salvation is present. But the sign remains unread.

Eliot said that these lines were stimulated by one of the Antarctic expeditions, where a party of explorers, at their extremity, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could be actually counted. Ernest Shackleton’s South (1919) is the account of his attempt to achieve the first crossing of Antarctica; the disaster that befell his ship, the Endeavour; the heroic escape from Antarctica in small boats, first to Elephant Island and then to South Georgia; and the final crossing on foot by Shackleton and two companions of the rugged and uncharted mountain ridge of South Georgia. Eliot’s specific reference is to Chapter X (209), where Shackleton reflects upon the arduous crossing of the desolate interior, from Haakon Bay in the west to the uncertain destination of the whaling station at Husvik: When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Warsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  77

another person with us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts. This should not obscure the principal allusion to Luke 14:13–31, the journey to Emmaus of two of the disciples on Easter Sunday. They were joined by an unrecognised third figure, who does not immediately reveal himself as the risen Christ. Eliot identified this story as one of the three themes of Part V, his point being that the ‘sign’ of the Resurrection (the guidance of Divine Providence) is at this point present, though it remains unrecognised. Eliot may have been aware of the exchange between Ivan Karamazov and Smerdyakov in Book XI.viii of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, where Smerdyakov confesses to having murdered Fyodor Karamazov, and Ivan, suddenly aware of his own complicity, sees the other as a phantom: ‘Do you know, I am afraid that you are a dream, a phantom sitting before me,’ he muttered. ‘There’s no phantom here, but only us two and one other. No doubt he is here, the third, between us.’ ‘Who is he? Who is here? What third person?’ Ivan cried in alarm, looking about him, his eyes hastily searching in every corner. ‘The third is God HimselfProvidence. He is the third beside us now. Only don’t look for Him, you won’t find Him.’ Grover Smith suggests another parallel in #62 of Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations (297–98).68 Entitled ‘Beauty is but Skin-deep’ and concerning ‘The Impurities’, it tells of a woman who had quarrelled with her husband, and, dressed in her finery, was returning home, when she met an elder who begged alms of her: And no sooner had she seen him, than the perversity of her nature caused her to laugh loudly. The elder looked up inquiringly, and observing her teeth, realised the impurity of her body, and attained to saintship. Therefore it was said: ‘The elder gazed upon her teeth, 68 

Smith, Poetry and Poems, 94.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  78

And thought upon impurity; And ere that he had left that spot, The stage of saintship he attained.’ Then came her husband, following in her footsteps, and seeing the elder, he said: ‘Reverent sir, have you seen a woman pass this way?’ And the elder said: ‘Was it a woman, or a man, That passed this way? I cannot tell. But this I know, a set of bones Is traveling on upon this road.’ 4.5.4 What is that sound high in the air? The vision of the hooded figure turns into one of hooded hordes swarming like a vast Asiatic tide over Western civilisation. The poet has glanced into chaos, and sees the insubstantiality of cities that fall and reform in the twilight of existence. London and the Unreal City of the poet’s imagination will share their fate, and the poet, like the Christian fathers of old, feels the urge to retreat into the desert.

Eliot refers to Hermann Hesse’s Blick in Chaos (1920): ‘Already half of Europe, already at least half of Eastern Europe, is on the way to Chaos, driving drunkenly in spiritual frenzy along the abyss, and singing as it goes, singing drunkenly and in a hymn-like manner, as Dmitri Karamazov sang. The offended Bourgeois laughs at these songs; the Saint and the Seer hear them with tears.’ The reference is to the end of Hesse’s essay (1919), ‘Die Brüder Karamasoff oder der Untergang Europas’ (‘The Brothers Karamazov, or the Downfall of Europe’), where Hesse draws a parallel between the drunken singing of Dmitri Karamazov, the unruly and turbulent spirit of Dostoevsky’s novel, who dreams (Bk. III. Ch. Iii) of falling in ecstasy down a precipice and into a pit, and who is later identified (Bk. XII. Ch. V) with the spirit of Mother Russia and a Europe that, after World War I, the Russian Revolution and other upheavals, seemed equally determined to throw itself down the abyss. The essay was published with another (‘Gedanken zu Dostojewskijs Idiot’) in Blick ins Chaos (1920); Southam notes (29) that Eliot’s copy was dated ‘Berne Dec. 1921’. Eliot was introduced to the essay by Sidney Schiff, whose translation In Sight of Chaos

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  79

appeared in 1923. Intrigued, Eliot visited Hesse at his Montagnola retreat in May 1922 and enlisted him as a contributor to The Criterion; Hesse’s one article, ‘New German Poetry’, appeared in the first issue, as did The Waste Land itself. Hesse saw in Dostoevsky an intuitive anticipation of a widespread descent into anarchy and an ensuing new morality. He regarded the Karamazov brothers as symbols of the ancient Asiatic impulse towards the destruction of Europe and, at the same time, as embodiments of a new (or more ancient) impulse, mystical and Christian in its essential force, that would give birth to a new saintliness, a new morality, and a different conception of humanity. For Eliot, too, the vision of the hooded hordes is not simply destructive (though it is that as well), but symbolic of that explosive force needed to turn a tired and weary Europe back to its ancient sources and towards a new beginning. Eliot was attracted by Hesse’s identification of the poet and the prophet, and by his assertion (immediately preceding his citation, and paraphrased in the June 1922 edition of The Dial) that what might appear to be in others hysteria and mental illness is, in the soul of Dostoevsky (and, perhaps, in that of the Waste Land poet) an enhanced awareness of this destructive new vision. The immediate image is that of the sorrowing Mary at the foot of the Cross (‘And a sword shall pierce thy heart / Thine also’), but as in ‘A Song for Simeon’ the certain hour of maternal sorrow is associated with a wider vision of destruction, ‘When the time of sorrow is come’. Her sorrow is a lament for the destruction of one civilisation after another, an association further asserted in Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos, where the downfall of Europe is described as a turning towards the Asiatic mother. The image of the hooded figure on the road to Emmaus gives way, suddenly and ominously, to that of Mongol invasions or other Asiatic immensities (as described in Hesse’s essay) threatening the demise of Western civilisation. The poet associates the hooded hordes with the faceless crowd flowing over London Bridge, and in a moment of intense vision he sees the ruin of all things, the nightmare of history and the unreality of civilisation as reflected in the mirage of the City of God that cracks and reforms in the violet air. Cities of the earth shatter one by one: Jerusalem, City of David and the Via Dolorosa, destroyed in 587 BC by Nebuchadnezzar and razed by the Romans in 70 AD (the ‘time of sorrow’ in ‘A Song for Simeon’); Athens, monument to the glory that was Greece, but under constant threat from the Persians in the East, and whose subjugation by the Romans in 146 BC ended its lingering cultural supremacy; Alexandria, city of Alexander the Great, falling into the hands of the Arabs and Turks, its great library, a monument of civilisation, destroyed by Caliph Omar in 646 AD on the grounds that everything in it was either

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  80

in the Koran (hence redundant), or was not (hence blasphemous); Vienna, City of Dreams and home of Freud, centre of civilisation and capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire that was shattered by the Meyerling tragedy and World War I; London, centre of Conrad’s civilisation (‘The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires’), but also ‘one of the dark places of the earth’, Eliot’s Unreal City, its phantasmagorical existence about to dissolve into the shades. Missing is Rome, which despite its temporal destruction by the barbarians, remains the Eternal City. In his 1951 essay, ‘Virgil and the Christian World’,69 Eliot comments that the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire, and that ‘We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire.’ The attitude of his pilgrim is not unlike the Christian Fathers after the fall of Rome, who, feeling little hope for civilisation, retreated into the desert. 4.5.5 A woman drew her long black hair out tight The vision of universal decay gives way to a surrealistic picture of empty horror inspired by the school of Hieronymus Bosch: a woman drawing her long black hair out tight (like the woman in Part II); bats with baby faces (harbingers of the Chapel Perilous); blackened walls and tolling bells (mocking any successful quest); and empty cisterns and exhausted wells (holding neither water nor the promise of grace foretold by John the Baptist when, captive in Herod’s cistern, he proclaimed the imminent coming of the Messiah).

Eliot admitted that the surrealistic imagery of these lines was inspired in part by a painting from the fifteenth-century school of Hieronymus Bosch; Grover Smith suggests a panel entitled ‘Hell’, sometimes called ‘The Sinful World’, which forms a diptych with ‘The Deluge’;70 noting that it depicts a bat-like creature with dull human features crawling down a rock wall, and adding that Bosch ‘was the painter, par excellence, of degradation translated into nauseous anatomical horror.’ Others have pointed out such echoes as: the penultimate stanza of Browning’s ‘Childe Roland’; Tennyson’s ‘Gareth and Lynette’ (line 251: ‘And solid turrets topsy-turvy in the air’); Kipling’s simile of a banjo-string drawn tight, in ‘The Finest Story in the World’; Ernest Dowson’s ‘Terre Promise’ (‘the fragrant darkness of her hair ... What things unspoken trembled in the air!’); Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with its image (Ch. 3) of the Count slowly emerging from the window and beginning ‘to crawl down the cas69  T. S. Eliot, ‘Virgil and the Christian World’, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 130. 70  Smith, Poems and Plays, 95.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  81

tle over the dread abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings’; various Biblical images of empty wells that signify the drying of faith (Jeremiah 2:13: ‘broken cisterns that can hold no water’); and the story of Salomé, the voice of Jokanaan arising from the cistern in which he is imprisoned, telling of the delinquency of the land and the degeneracy of women, and foretelling the coming of Christ. According to Conrad Aiken, this passage existed as an independent poem before being ‘inserted into The Waste Land as into a mosaic’ (Facsimile, 113 & 130). The lines explore an unbalanced state of mind, in which things seem inverted; and this sense of demonic inversion is an integral part of the Waste Land poet’s initiation. 4.5.6 In this decayed hole among the mountains In this ‘decayed hole in the mountains’, which seems at first an empty travesty of the Chapel Perilous, with a swinging door and no windows, grass and dry bones, the sign that the poet has been seeking is partially revealed: the cock crows, reminding him of Peter’s lack of faith at the time of Christ’s affliction (but also signalling relief from the horrors of the night); a damp gust comes, bringing rain (not enough to relieve the Waste Land, but an intimation of such relief); and the thunder speaks (at a distance, but nevertheless clearly).

Chapter XIII of From Ritual to Romance is entitled ‘The Perilous Chapel’ and tells the ordeals that the questing knight must survive during a night of horrors. These may include (details vary): a dead body on the altar; a Black hand that extinguishes all the tapers; strange and threatening voices; a great wind; and the Devil in full form. The task of the knight is to put an end to the enchantment by fighting with the Black Hand and sprinkling the wall with holy water. In some versions, the episode in the Chapel Perilous is a necessary step in the healing of the wounded King; in others it is tangential. Eliot used this account in a general way: there are such details as the ruined chapel, the wind, the ‘tumbled graves’ and the bell that rings to signal the end of the ordeal; but the more graphic details are omitted. More important is Miss Weston’s insistence (171–72) that the episode consists in a contact with physical death that acts as an initiation into a higher mystery: ‘For this is the story of an initiation (or perhaps it would be more correct to say the test of fitness for an initiation) carried out on the astral plane, and reacting with fatal results upon the physical.’ To the extent that the final ‘triumph’ of The Waste Land is that of the spirit over the lusts of the flesh, this emphasis accounts for the otherwise indefinite relationship between Eliot’s poem and this part of Jessie Weston’s book.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  82

The ‘decayed hole among the mountains’ echoes the ‘Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth’ (line 339) and the ‘present decay’ of eastern Europe. There may be a suggestion of the Inner Station of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ‘a long decayed building ... half buried in the high grass.’ This is the empty chapel, and the poet experiences first a feeling of relief in response to its emptiness and the need to strive no more; compare the response of the dry bones in Part II of Ash-Wednesday: ‘We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other.’ But relief is short-lived: the cock crows, intimating the moment of shame experienced by Peter after having thrice denied his master before the crowing of the cock, which recalls him to his mission. The cock announces the end of the nightmares at the perilous Chapel, but also (as in Act I of Hamlet) a new dawning, the ‘extravagant and evil spirit’ fading upon the crowing of the morn. The challenge made by the cock to the dry bones is unequivocal (as the hint of the Cross in ‘rooftree’ intimates): we have not yet reached conclusion. The passage ends with a gust of rain: by no means enough to revive the parched Waste Land, yet a distinct affirmation of relief that may lie ahead. This is the sign that the poet has been seeking, and this time (unlike his failure to respond to the hooded figure on the white road) it is apprehended as such. 4.5.7 Ganga was sunken The voice of the Thunder is traditionally the voice of God, and the reference to Himavant, sacred mountain of the Vedas, confirms its authority. The poet is told, beyond any dispute, what he must do to bring relief to his wasted existence: he must Give, Sympathise and Control. He examines each command in turn. Datta: what has he given? ‘The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract.’ These lines refer to a moment in the past: either a surrender not made; or a moment of awful daring when a commitment to another was made. Either way, it is a moment which irrevocably (‘By this, and this only’) determines the poet’s present existence. Its truth remains concealed from others, who will detect only a reference to the inconstancy of women, but the commitment was given. Now, it seems, an entirely different kind of giving is required. Davadhvam: can he sympathise? The image of Ugolino locked in the tower and devouring his children before himself starving to death is that of the horror of being locked in the self. If the poet is to escape that prison of self, a new sympathy for others will be essential (though given the force the poet’s incipient urge to retreat to the desert, such an escape may prove difficult, if not impossible). Damyata: has he control? The image of the boat responding gaily is one of the joyous discipline that is a condition of freedom; and the poet’s reflection: ‘your

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  83 heart would have responded / Gaily, when invited’ suggests what might have been had the poet been able to control his emotions and those of the one he was with. The Thunder has spoken, and its message is clear: Give, Sympathise, Control. Only through the exercise of these virtues can the poet escape from the self and offer compassion to others. This may not be an ultimate revelation (the mysteries of the Holy Grail are by no means manifest), but it is a confirmation the poet has been seeking and one that indicates the direction his life must take.

Ganga is the sacred river Ganges, issuing from the foot of Vishnu and flowing through the luxuriant locks of Siva, God of destruction but also of regeneration and sexuality. Himavant is the personification of the Himalaya Mountains, as distinct from Meru, the abode of the gods and centre of the universe, whence the sacred Ganges flows. Chapter III of From Ritual to Romance is entitled ‘The Freeing of the Waters’ and concerns various Indic traditions of the imprisoning of the seven great rivers of India by the evil giant Vritra, whom Indra slew, ‘thereby releasing the streams from their captivity’ (24). Jessie Weston contends that the task of the Grail hero is an inheritance of this Aryan tradition. The fable of the Thunder, Eliot notes, is from ‘the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, 5, 1’, with a translation in Paul Deussen’s Sechzig Upanishads des Veda (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1897, 489), the standard authority. The reference should more accurately be to the fifth Adhyaya, second Brahmana, but as Southam has noted (107) Eliot seems to have been misled by an error in Deussen, which gives the running head as V, 1. ‘Upanishad’ means a sitting at the feet of a master, with the sense of listening, and taking advice. In 1912 Eliot obtained a copy of Phansikar’s Sanskrit edition of The Twenty-Eight Upanishads, by Charles Lanham, his Sanskrit teacher at Harvard; now in the T. S. Eliot Collection at King’s College, Cambridge, it contains a note from Lanham to Eliot listing passages for the latter’s attention, including one that reads ‘Brihadaranyaka 220, (v.1, 2, 3), Da-da-da = damyata datta davadvam’.71 Vincent Daly suggests that Eliot’s immediate source was neither the Sanskrit original nor Deussen, but rather a 1913 Harvard festschrift, Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kitteredge (Boston: Ginn, 1913), including an article by Charles Lanham entitled ‘Hindu Law and Customs as to Gifts’, which offered this retelling of the Thunder:72 71 

Robert Bluck, ‘T. S. Eliot and What the Thunder Said’, Notes and Queries 24.5 (October 1977): 450–51. 72  Vincent Daly, The Immediate Source of the Thunder Fable: The Waste Land 396–413 , Yeats–

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  84

Three kinds of children of Praja-pati, Lord of Children, lived as Brahmanstudents with Praja-pati their father: the gods, the human beings, the demons. Living with him as Brahman-students, the gods spake. ‘Teach us, Exalted One.’ Unto them he spake this one syllable Da. ‘Have ye understood?’ ‘We have understood,’ thus they spake, ‘it was dámyata, control yourself, that thou saidest unto us.’ ‘Yes,’ spake he, ‘ye have understood.’ Then spake to him human beings, ‘Teach us, Exalted One.’ Unto them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. ‘Have ye understood?’ ‘We have understood,’ thus they spake, ‘it was dattá, give, that thou saidest unto us.’ ‘Yes,’ spake he, ‘ye have understood.’ Then spake to him the demons. ‘Teach us, Exalted One.’ Unto them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. ‘Have ye understood?’ ‘We have understood,’ thus they spake, ‘it was dáyadhvam, be compassionate, that thou saidest unto us.’ ‘Yes,’ spake he, ‘ye have understood.’ This it is which that the voice of god repeats, the thunder, when it rolls ‘Da Da Da,’ that is, dámyata dattá dáyadhvam. Therefore these three must be learned, self-control, giving, compassion. Eliot varies the commands, and changes the emphasis of two of them slightly: ‘giving’ implies alms and ‘control’ is self-restraint; but the fable and its teaching is central to everything the poet must learn. Kenner comments:73 The thunder’s Da is one of those primordial Indo-European roots that recur in the Oxford Dictionary, a random leaf of the Sibyl’s to which a thousand derivative words, now automatic currency, were in their origins so many explicit glosses. If the race’s most permanent wisdom is in its oldest, then Da, the voice of the thunder and of the Hindu sages, is the cosmic voice not yet dissociated into echoes. It underlies the Latin infinitive ‘dare’, and all its Romance derivatives; by a sound-change, the Germanic ‘geben’, the English ‘give’. The pun on ‘dare’ (with its echoes of ‘Prufrock’) may not be intentional, but ‘datta’ (Sanskrit for ‘give’) is interpreted by the poet in the sense of the giving of the self, as he searches his soul and asks how much of such giving has existed in his past. 73 

Eliot Review 5.2 (1978): 31–32. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (London: W.H. Allen, 1960), 150.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  85

Lines 403–04, ‘The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract’, are perhaps the most important in the poem, for at this moment and this moment only the poet looks back at his life (as revealed in the poem) and sees it with a clarity free from emotional distortion. Sencourt has argued (86) that behind these lines in Eliot’s life is ‘the recollection of that rash moment when he had rushed to the Registry Office and pledged himself in a bond which neither prudence nor patience could unloose’ (26 June 1915). In the poem, this becomes the memory of a moment of commitment to another: either the moment of failure in the Hyacinth garden (a surrender not made), or (with reference to part II) a moment that has bound the poet forever to another. Underlying this is the reference in Canto V of the Inferno, as cited in Eliot’s essays on Dante in 1920 and 1929, to the unhappy love of Paolo and Francesca, who, having succumbed to the temptation of the moment, are bound together eternally in hell. In Eliot’s 1929 translation:74 ‘One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him; we were alone, and without all suspicion. Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he, who shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling’. Eliot commented in his 1920 essay that Francesca’s ecstasy, with the thrill at the present memory of it, is part of the torture, for ‘it is part of damnation to experience desires that we can no longer gratify.’ Like the poet, she is in the torment, and part of that torment is the memory of happier times. Yet, as the poet sees clearly, it is by such moments and such moments alone that s/he can be said to have existed; and though others may not find this in his life (the following reference to Webster stresses only the inconstancy of the howling wife), such moments are his destiny. Eliot’s note to line 407, ‘memories draped by the beneficent spider’, refers to Webster’s White Devil V.vi.148–66, where Flamineo rails against the inconstancy of women. He has entered into a pact with Vittoria and Zanche that they will die together, and tests their faith by pretending to be dead. When the women fail to honour their promise Flamineo arises and vents his fury: O men That lie upon your death-beds, and are haunted With howling wives, ne’er trust them! They’ll remarry Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider 74 

Eliot, ‘Dante’, in Selected Essays, 245–46.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  86

Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs. .

How cunning you were to discharge! do you practise at the Artillery Yard?Trust a woman! never, never! Brachiano be my precedent. We lay our souls to pawn to the devil for a little pleasure, and a woman makes the bill of sale. That ever a man should marry! The ‘lean solicitor’ is like the lean and rusty figure of Mr. Tulkinghorn of Dickens’s Bleak House, his countenance ‘imperturable as death’ [Ch. xxxiv], indifferent to everything but his calling, the ‘acquisition of secrets’ [Ch. xxxvi]; who in probing the secret of Lady Dedlock’s past finds only his own death. The second command of the Thunder is ‘Dayadhvam’, Sympathise: that is, break out of the circle of the self and enter into communion with others. Eliot’s note directs his reader to Dante’s Inferno XXXIII.46: ‘ed io senti chiavar l’uscio di sotto / all’ orribile torre’ (‘And from below I heard the door of the horrible tower being locked’). This is the story of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, imprisoned in 1288 with four of his sons and grandsons by his enemy, the Archbishop, in a tower, which was locked, and the keys thrown into the river. When it was opened, the horror was revealed: all were dead from starvation, but Ugolino, starving in captivity, had devoured his children. For this he was condemned by Dante to the ninth circle of hell, where, frozen in ice, he gnaws forever the grisly head of the Archbishop. As Geoffrey Carter has noted, chiavar means to nail rather than to lock; Eliot seems to have derived his image not from Dante’s original but from the Temple Classics translation, where this error is made.75 Eliot also refers to F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (306): My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it.... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul. In 1913 Eliot acquired a copy of Appearance and Reality and chose Bradley for his doctoral thesis, which he worked on at Harvard before continuing (under Harold 75  Geoffrey Carter, ‘The Question of T. S. Eliot’s Erudition’, Notes and Queries 24.5 (October 1977): 451–52.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  87

Joachim, a disciple of Bradley) at Merton College, Oxford. The dissertation was completed, and accepted by Harvard, but the degree was not granted because Eliot, living in London during the war, could not defend it. The thesis, ‘Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley’, was published by Faber in 1964 as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley (by which time Eliot confessed that he no longer pretended to understand it). Moody (73–74) summarises the relevance of Bradley for Eliot: Bradley’s philosophy, in Eliot’s account of it, is concerned with the self that is composed in the mind as it experiences and knows. This self, in its beginnings, is not self-conscious; but simply experiences its world as an immediate reality; and exists simply in its immediate experience. With the advance to self-consciousness, its world breaks down into separated objects [....] The life of the conscious soul becomes a painful struggle to reintegrate its world: to unify what has been dissociated; and to return to the state of immediate experience [...] The ideal end of this process would be ‘an all-inclusive experience outside of which nothing shall fall’; ‘a timeless entity’, a complete being, Bradley’s absolute… Bradley’s appeal for Eliot lay in the way that he combined a strong conviction of the Absolute with a sense of the fragmented and finite existence of the phenomenal world, and of the compatibility of Idealism with religion. But whereas Bradley was content to accept the gap that separates the Absolute from everyday experience, Eliot was not. Bradley might assert ‘my experience is not the whole world’; but Eliot (as Chapter VI of his thesis reveals) was more willing to indulge in solipsistic speculation. He takes Bradley’s notion of ‘finite centres’ and considers the question, given the primacy of such centres, of ‘how do we yoke our divers worlds to draw together’ (Knowledge and Experience, 141). He admits (143) that ‘we feel obscurely an identity between the experiences of other centres and our own’; but the thrust of his argument is to doubt the sufficiency of that impulse. Hence the note in The Waste Land: for Eliot interprets Bradley’s insistence on the closed circle of the self and the private nature of experiential reality to meant that every individual is of necessity locked within the tower of the self, unable to escape, and hence, perhaps, incapable of any meaningful kind of sympathy at an ordinary human level. On philosophical grounds alone, then, the challenge made by the Thunder is immense. This abstract discussion is grounded in the final image of a broken Coriolanus,

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  88

Shakespeare’s Roman general, who, haughty towards the common people of Rome, was banished from the city. In revenge, he raised an army to attack Rome, but with victory in his grasp he heeded the pleas of his wife and mother to spare the city, and was in turn broken and destroyed by the mob he despised. Eliot commented in his 1919 essay on Hamlet that Coriolanus, along with Antony and Cleopatra, was ‘Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success’;76 he later used the figure of Coriolanus in the unfinished ‘Coriolan’ to represent the difficulties of the individual caught up in public affairs. The broken Coriolanus in The Waste Land may be an emblem of the pride that cuts off the individual from man and God, or the type of those who sacrifice themselves for the good of others; Eliot, however, uses him primarily as a correlative of the struggle between sympathy and self-interesta struggle that, rightly resolved (by acceding to human sympathies), leads to inevitable downfall. The ambiguity embodied in such a figure is central to the poet’s present feeling. The third command of the Thunder is ‘Control’. In the original Upanishad the emphasis is on self-control rather than the control of others, and the poet appreciates the force of that distinction. The image that follows is that of a boat responding gaily to expert hands (Eliot was a skilled sailor), but the verb is past conditional (‘would have responded’), and implies a criticism of that self which did not (perhaps in the Hyacinth garden, certainly in Part II) exercise such self-control. Eliot expresses the classicist emphasis upon form and restraint, discipline and authority; and these values clash with the impulse towards sympathy. The words of the Thunder are clear, yet the tension of this passage, and thus of the ending of the poem, arises from the conflict of two irreconcilable categorical imperatives. 4.5.8 I sat upon the shore The poet finds himself still in the Waste Land, but with the arid plain behind him. Earlier, he had wished only to die; but there has been a change: the tone is not entirely optimistic, but it is positive in that the worst is over and there is at least a future to look towards. The fishing is also positive, for there is no sense of the earlier dull canal and polluted waters. Moreover, the poet can at last ask a meaningful question, the magnitude of which may be sensed by recalling that his failure to do so (in the Hyacinth garden) had contributed to his state of despair. The question is active: ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order?’ The reference to Isaiah confirms the promise of relief: the sick king, Hezekiah, told to set his lands in order since he must die, prays to God for mercy and is answered. 76  T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), 88.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  89

Eliot’s note refers, somewhat vaguely, to Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, her ‘chapter on the Fisher King’; this is a diffuse account of various legends about the Fisher King, affirming the Fish as ‘a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity’ (119). This being so, Fishing must be seen as something very different from the hopeless activity in the dull canal behind the gashouse in Part III. The Christian sense is by no means explicit, but the arid plain is now behind the poet. The contention that the poem ‘exhibits no progression’77 seems entirely out of sympathy with Eliot’s intention and achievement; for there is at the least a sense of relief from an intolerable burden. The question is asked at line 425: ‘Shall I at least put my lands in order?’ The direct reference is to Isaiah 38:1–7: In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death. And Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came unto him, and said unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live. Then Hezekiah turned his face toward the wall, and prayed unto the Lord. And said, Remember now, O Lord, I beseech thee, how I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done that which is good in thy sight. And Hezekiah wept sore. Then came the word of the Lord to Isaiah, saying, Go, and say to Hezekiah, Thus saith the Lord, the God of David thy father, I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will add unto thy days fifteen years. And I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria; and I will defend this city. And this shall be a sign unto thee from the Lord, that the Lord will do this thing that he hath spoken. The emphasis is positive: a sick king healed, his lands restored, and a sign given (that, no doubt, for which Gerontion awaited in vain). The words form a question, and this, in terms of the underlying Grail Legend, should betoken a fruitful answer (Wagner’s Parsifal, likewise, sets the failure of the quester in the first act of the opera against the healing of the Fisher King in Act III). This is not to imply that the poet has been granted a miraculous cure, or that all manner of thing shall be well; but there is a sense that the worst is over as the act of asking implies that there is now something 77  For instance, F. R. Leavis, ‘The Waste Land’, in New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932): 75–132 [103]. This opinion has been influential, but has, I believe, little to justify it.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  90

to look forward to. Yet it might be queried (given the dramatic movement of the poem as a whole), in what sense the ending can be positive; for if it represents a triumph of the spirit over the flesh, the cost in human terms is considerable. Eliot returned to this dilemma in the last sentences of his 1931 ‘Thoughts After Lambeth’:78 The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but nonChristian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide. While it is dangerous to read too much into a poem written earlier, this sentiment seems to underlie the Waste Land poet’s retreat from civilization but equally his unwillingness to enter into human intimacy. Lyndall Gordon’s conception of Eliot’s life as an interrupted pilgrimage towards saintly renunciation of the flesh is to the point, for the movement towards psychic and spiritual wholeness is at the expense of normal human sympathy: in Wagner’s Parsifal, the hero’s renunciation of the flesh constitutes his victory and determines his fitness to heal the wounded king; but that victory takes place only after the young knight understands the full meaning of ‘Mitleid’ (sympathy) and sees God’s creation as good. To this extent, then, the poet’s achievement is an ambiguous one, and doubts must remain as to how far and in what sense the commands of the Thunder have been heeded. 4.5.9 London Bridge is falling down The poem ends in a heap of fragments, which are often interpreted as the sign of a failed quest, or a civilisation lying still waste: London Bridge falling down, a soul in Purgatory, the poet lamenting that his song is unheard, the disinherited Prince at the ruined tower. Yet the poet states that these are fragments shored against his ruins, and the lines may intimate a mind that has come through a harrowing psychological experience, aware of the mess in which it finds itself and hence of the need to seek order in the apparent chaos around him. There are signs of hope as well as of despair: the reference from Dante is not from the Inferno, nor are the refining fires those of lust burning earlier; the poet’s lamentation at least contemplates the coming of Spring; and if the Prince at the ruined tower is ‘inconsolable’ as he mourns his dead love, he is yet aware of 78  T. S. Eliot, ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’, in Selected Essays (1932; rpt. London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 387.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  91 the flowers that once pleased his desolate heart. The reference to Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy explicitly invokes a mind grown mad again, for the poet is only too well aware of his fragile mental condition, and of the danger of relapsing into chaos once more, but that awareness is itself positive. Doubts may remain about the poet’s understanding of ‘compassion’, but the poem ends with a blessing (‘Shantih shantih shantih’) that is also a prayer, as the poet looks forward to the Peace which passeth understanding, but which has so far eluded him.

The final lines are a set of apparently unrelated images and allusions, ending on a note of peace. They are initiated by the rhythm of London Bridge falling down, the nursery-rhyme consolidating other references to London throughout the poem and challenging the poet’s newly-gained composure. They reflect psychic disintegration, and indicate confusion in the poet’s life, bits of a lost tradition gathered to set his life in order. The point is clear: he must do something about his situation (‘Build it up with sticks and stones’), or suffer the trauma of a further lapse into chaos. The first fragment derives (Eliot informs his reader) from the final lines of Canto XXVI of Dante’s Purgatorio; Eliot translating the Italian and Provençal thus:79 ‘“I am Arnold, who weeps and goes singing. I see in thought all the past folly. And I see with joy the day for which I hope, before me. And so I pray you, by that Virtue which leads you to the top of the stairbe mindful in due time of my pain.” Then he dived back into that fire that refines them.’ Dante has met at the seventh cornice of Purgatory the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel (il miglior fabbro), now suffering with the lustful amidst the purifying flames. Arnaut speaks to Dante in his mother tongue, telling him how he weeps for his past folly, and looks with joy to its ending. In his 1929 essay on Dante, Eliot noted how the flames of purgatory differ from those of hell, for in hell ‘the torment issues from the very nature of the damned themselves, expresses their essence’; whereas in purgatory ‘the torment of flame is deliberately and consciously accepted by the penitent.’ He states that the souls in purgatory suffer because they wish to suffer, and that in their suffering is hope. The poet here expresses his wish to undergo such torment (the antithesis of his earlier ‘burning’), and by implication looks forward to climbing the purgatorial stairway. As I. A. Richards noted,80 the persistence of Canto XXVI of the Purgatorio in Eliot’s work is curious (Richards added that it illuminates his concern with sex, and Eliot, responding to this shrewd insight, implicitly linked that problem to religion).81 79  Eliot, ‘Dante’ (1929), 256. 80  I. A. Richards, ‘The Poetry of T. S. Eliot’, in his Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1926), 291. 81  T. S. Eliot, ‘The Modern Mind’, in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber &

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  92

Eliot had entitled his third volume of poems Ara Vos Prec (1920), and would later use the image of climbing the staircase in Ash-Wednesday, Part II of which he intended to call ‘Jausen lo Jorn’ and Part III ‘Som de l’Escalier’. In Part III, the poet joyfully embraces his purgatorial suffering as he rises above the temptations that assail the flesh; in Part IV, as he enters the Earthly Paradise, the phrase ‘Sovegna vos’ reminds him of Arnaut Daniel’s prayer. In Little Gidding Part II, when the poet meets his ‘familiar compound ghost’, he is reminded again of the refining fires that will restore his ‘exasperated spirit’. The poet’s future hopes, as well as his present sufferings, are thus suggested by the reference. In the next line, ‘Quando fiam uti chelidon’ (‘When shall I be as the swallow?’), Eliot refers his reader to the Pervigilium Veneris, ‘The Vigil of Venus’, an anonymous Latin poem of uncertain provenance (probably fourth century), which combines a hymn to Venus with a description of spring, and ends on a mysterious note of sadness as the voice of Philomela is heard (Eliot’s note reminds the reader of his use of the same legend in Parts II and III of his poem). The Pervigilium Veneris consists of 93 trochaic lines, divided into 22 sections separated by a one-line refrain: Stanzas 21 and 22 accentuate the theme of lost love but the hope of finding it anew. A translation is offered in Ezra Pound’s The Spirit of Romance (20–21), and Pound, having cited the lines alluded to by Eliot, argues that they indicate a significant change of sensibility from the poetry of their day, and that the ‘song’ did not awake again until the Provençal viol aroused it. The fragment thus hints at a lost tradition. This is the song of Philomela, mourning her loss; but her lament becomes that of the poet, hearing the song and wishing to find his own lost voice. ‘Amyclas’ refers to the town of Amyclae in Laconia where there was a sanctuary to Apollo Amyclaeus and the tomb of Hyacinth that was the centre of an annual festival mourning the dead youth. Like many of the final fragments in Eliot’s poem, this line from the Pervigilium Veneris mixes memory and desire with loss and longing; but even though the poet sees himself as one cast off by Apollo (God of Poetry as well as the lover of Hyacinth), he has moved far from his earlier wish to die, for he tacitly recognises the need to love, and senses that there is at least a tomorrow to look to. The voice of the swallow continues, echoing the ‘O City city’ of line 259, and endorsing earlier references to Procne and Philomel. The underlying anguish and desolation may be sensed in Swinburne’s ‘Itylus’ (1864), where the voice of Philomela envies her sister Procne’s ability to forget their terrible tragedy: Faber, 1933), 127.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  93

Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow, How can thine heart be full of the spring? A thousand summers are over and dead. What hast thou found in the spring to follow? What hast thou found in thine heart to sing? What wilt thou do when the summer is shed? And, mourning the bloody death of Itylus,82 the nightingale concludes: Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow, But the world shall end when I forget. The tragic overtones shade into a sense of longing and yearning, and perhaps even the wish to go south for the winter, as in the song of the Prince (disguised as a girl student) in Tennyson’s medley ‘The Princess’ IV.75–77: O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South, Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves, And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee. The poem laments that life is brief but love is long; and Tennyson’s Prince, soon to rescue his beloved from drowning and then to be wounded ‘well-nigh close to death’, is at the end of the poem rewarded by her love. The most poignant fragment is ‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie’ (‘The Prince of Aquitaine at the ruined tower’), from Gérard de Nerval’s ‘El Desdichado’ (‘The Disinherited’). The poet laments his lost love and sees himself as the disinherited heir to the once glorious tradition of troubadour poetry, destroyed by the Albigensian Crusades and symbolised by the ruined tower in Aquitaine. The Waste Land poet here identifies himself with the Prince of Aquitaine as one whose life is in ruins, and whose inheritance is destroyed. One of the Tarot cards is the tower struck by lightning, symbolizing a lost tradition, ‘the end of a dispensation’ (Waite, 135). This, in esoteric thought, is the Tower of Babel, symbolic of man’s separation from God, the destruction of which (Genesis 11:1–19) confounded the languages of the earth; and, in historical tradition, the Albigensian Crusade (1209), which brought an end to Provençal culture (as World War I threatened to do to the European tradition of 82  This is a different tale: Procne’s son was Itys; but Itylus was killed by her mother Aedon by error for one of Niobe’s. However, the shared tragedy, the similarity of the names, the like transformation of Aedon into a nightingale and the reference to Itys in Swinburne’s ‘Itylus’ encourages the association.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  94

Eliot’s time). The final lines of ‘Prufrock’ also make reference to this poem. The line about the fragments shored against the poet’s ruins was originally placed at the end of the sequence (Facsimile, 81), but the final ordering better reflects the poet’s response to them, as he contemplates the possibility of a relapse into chaos. The words have a bearing on his state of mind, and intimate his need to create order from the rubble about him; but they make a public as well as a private statement, for ‘ruins’ picks up ‘abolie’ and develops it in the direction of the poet coming to grips with the tradition he finds in ruins. In his 1919 essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot defined the historical sense as ‘indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year’, and as that which involves a perception ‘not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’ This, he asserts, is what makes a writer traditional, and, at the same time, most acutely aware of his place in time, his contemporaneity. Coinciding with his newly-gained psychological assurance, then, is the poet’s awareness of his duty to both the past and the present: a duty, which, like that imposed on Aeneas (the comparison was dear to Eliot), may involve moral responsibility and choice, even the rejection of those close to him, but entails the rebuilding of the ruined tower. Eliot’s note referring to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy hints at the poet’s dangerously fragile state of mind: Hieronymo, driven mad by the murder of his son Horatio, is asked in Act IV.i to write an entertainment, to which he agrees (‘Why then Ile fit you’, that is, accommodate you). He writes the play in ‘sundry languages’, but contrives that in so doing his son’s murderers are killed. Eliot’s control and sanity are shown in the way that the allusion wittily reflects not only Kyd’s dissembling, but his own ‘entertainment’: Hier. Is this all? Bal. I, this is all. Hier. Why then, ile fit you: say no more. When I was yong, I gaue my minde And plide my selfe to fruitles Poetrie; Which though it profite the professor naught, Yet is it passing pleasing to the world. The poem ends with a final rumble of the Thunder. Yet a tension remains from the conflict of human and spiritual values within the poet’s mind as he weighs the need for his own psychic reintegration against the necessity to go beyond the self in his

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  95

dealings with others. Despite the quiet ending this tension is not entirely resolved. The final words, ‘Shantih shantih shantih’, Eliot noted, are a formal ending to an Upanishad (a poetic dialogue or commentary affixed to the Hindu Vedas). The words offered as equivalent (in early editions Eliot termed them ‘a feeble translation’, but they became stronger in time) are ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’, from St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians 4:7. They are used as a Blessing at the end of the Anglican service of Holy Communion: ‘And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.’ The poet thus ends, as he did Part III, with the synthesis of Eastern and Western teaching, on a note of prayer for the peace that has so far eluded him. Question: consider, in the light of the argument above (that the ending of The Waste Land is best read as the depiction of a mind aware of the danger of relapsing into chaos), the contention by F. R. Leavis that the poem shows no progression.

Part 5: Bibliography 5.1  Selected Works by Eliot (of relevance to The Waste Land) Prufrock and Other Observations. London: Egoist Press, 1917. The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, 1920. The Waste Land. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922. Poems 1905–1925. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1925. Selected Essays. 1932; rev. & rpt. London: Faber & Faber, 1951. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London: Faber & Faber, 1933. After Strange Gods. London: Faber & Faber, 1934. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber & Faber, 1957. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley. London: Faber & Faber, 1964). To Criticise the Critic. London: Faber & Faber, 1965. Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. The Waste Land: a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1971. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol 1, 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1988. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems, 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. 5.2  Background Works Aiken, Conrad. Ushant. 1952; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Chapman, Frank M. Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America. 1895; 2nd ed., rev. New York: Dover, 1966. Dryden, John (translator). Virgil’s Aeneid [1693–1700]. New York: Airmont, 1968. Frazer, Sir James. The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion. 3rd ed., rev., 12 vols, London: Macmillan, 1911–15. Hastings, Michael. Tom and Viv. London: Royal Court Theatre, 1984. Hesse, Hermann. ‘Die Brüder Karamasoff oder der Untergang Europas’ (1919). In Gesammelte Schriften 7. Berlin & Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1957. Huxley, Aldous. Crome Yellow. 1921; rpt. Chatto & Windus, 1949. Larisch, Marie. My Past. London: George Bell, 1913. Pound, Ezra. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1952.

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  97

Russell, Bertrand. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. 3 vols, London: Allen & Unwin, 1967, 1968, 1969. Shackleton, Sir Ernest. South: the Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914–1917. London: Heinemann, 1919. Waite, A.E. A Pictorial Key to the Tarot. London: William Rider, 1910. Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. 5.3  Biographies Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: a Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. (Sound, despite Ackroyd being refused permission to cite unpublished materials). Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1977. (A useful complement to Ackroyd). Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s New Life (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1988. (Deals lucidly with the post-conversion years). 5.4  Critical Works Note: works referred to in the text, but relating to specific points only, are detailed there rather than listed here. I offer a small selection of the literally hundreds of studies on Eliot, some attempt having been made to choose a representative range. Ackerley, C.J. ‘“Who are These Hooded Hordes...”: Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos.’ AUMLA 82 (November 1994): 103–06. Bush, Ronald. T. S. Eliot: a Study in Character and Style. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Crawford, R. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. (An excellent study of the barbaric element in the early poetry). Hands, Anthony. Sources for the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Hadrian Books, 1993. (Useful notes) Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. London: W.H. Allen, 1960. Leavis, F.R. ‘The Waste Land.’ In New Bearings in English Poetry. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932: 75–132. (Historically significant). Manganiello, D. T. S. Eliot and Dante. London: Macmillan, 1989. Miller, James E., Jr. T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons. University Park & London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. (Identifies the poetry too closely with the life). Moody, A.D. Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979. (Magisterial).

‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land  98

North, Michael, ed. The Waste Land: a Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Peter, John. ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land.’ Essays in Criticism 2 (July 1952): 242–66; rpt., with a new ‘Postscript’, Essays in Criticism 19.2 (April 1960): 140–75. (Still controversial, and rejected by many scholars). Rainey, Lawrence. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. New Haven & London, 2005. (Lucid and sensible, if somewhat uneven with respect to annotation. A useful compendium of Eliot’s other writings of the period, with excellent photographs and other materials). Rainey, Lawrence. Revisiting ‘The Waste land’. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005. (Good on matters of chronology and composition). Ricks, Christopher. T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. London: Faber, 1988. (Insightful) Sherry, Vincent. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Schwartz, R.L. ‘Broken Images’: a Study of ‘The Waste Land’. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989. (Annotations that are not quite in proportion). Sencourt, Robert. T. S. Eliot: a Memoir, ed. Donald Adamson. London: Garnstone Press, 1971. (Much reviled, pompous, but occasionally insightful). Shusterman, R. T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. London: Duckworth, 1988. (Excellent) Soldo, John J. The Tempering of T. S. Eliot. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983. (Useful insights into Eliot’s early mode of working). Southam, B.C. A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. 1968; 4th ed., rev., London: Faber & Faber, 1981. (Later editions add little to the fourth). Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: a Study in Sources and Meanings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. Smith, Grover. The Waste Land. London: Allen and Unwin, 1984. (Sometimes useful, sometimes erratic) Stead, C.K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement. London: Macmillan, 1986.

Part 6: Hyperlinked texts: key works in The Waste Land The following pages contain additional materials linked from hyperlinked phrases in the text.

4.1.1  Chaucer, the opening of The Canterbury Tales

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yong sonne Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So pricketh hem nature in hir corages); Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages... CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.1.1 Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ (lines 1–6)

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilacs blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.1.4 T. E. Hulme, ‘Conversion’

Light-hearted I walked into the valley wood In the time of hyacinths, Till beauty like a scented cloth Cast over, stifled me, I was bound Motionless and faint of breath By loveliness that is her own eunuch. Now pass I to the final river Ignominiously, in a sack, without sound, As any peeping Turk to the Bosphorus. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.1.5 Ariel’s song in The Tempest 1.ii.396–404

Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Burden: Ding-dong. Hark! now I hear themDing-dong bell. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.2.1 Cleopatra sailing up the Nile (Antony and Cleopatra II.ii.190–204)

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, Burn’d on the water. The poop was beaten gold; Purple the sail, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, It beggar’d all description. She did lie In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold, of tissue, O’erpicturing that Venus where we see The fancy out-work nature. On each side of her Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid did. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.2.1 laquearia (Virgil, Aeneid II.723–27)

Postquam prima quies epulis, mensaeque remotae, crateras magnos statuunt et vina coronant. Fit strepitus tectis, vocemque per ampla volutant atria; dependent lychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt. (‘After the first lull in the feast and the removal of the tables, they set up large drinking bowls and crowned the wine. Loud talk broke out in the palace, and they sent their voices rolling through spacious halls; flaming torches hang from the golden-panelled ceiling, and torches conquer the night with flames.’) CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.2.2 That Shakespeherian Rag That Shakesperian rag,— Most intelligent, very elegant, That old classical drag, Has the proper stuff, the line ‘Lay on Macduff,’ Desdemona was the colored pet, Romeo loved his Juliet— And they were some lovers, you can bet, and yet, I know if they were here today They’d Grizzly Bear in a diff’rent way, And you’d hear old Hamlet say, ‘To be or not to be,’ That Shakesperian Rag. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.2.1 sylvan scene (Milton, Paradise Lost IV.137–42)

So on he fares, and to the border comes Of Eden, where delicious Paradise Now nearer, Crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound the champaign head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, Access deni’d; and over head up grew Insuperable highth of loftiest shade, Cedar, and Pine, and Fir, and branching Palm, A Silvan Scene, and as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody Theatre Of stateliest view. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.3.1 Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’ (Stanza 2)

There, in a Meadow, by the Riuers side, A Flocke of nymphs I chaunced to espy, All louely Daughters of the Flood thereby, With goodly greenish locks all loose untyde, As each had been a Bryde, And each one had a little wicker basket, Made of fine twigs entrayled curiously, In which they gathered flowers to fill their Flasket: And with fine Fingers, cropt full feateously The tender stalkes on hye. Of euery sort, which in that Meadow grew, They gathered some; the Violet pallid blew, The little Dazie, that at euening closes, The virgin Lillie, and the Primrose trew, With store of vermeil Roses, To deck their Bridegromes posies, Against the Brydale day, which was not long: Sweet Thames runne softly, till I end my Song. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.3.2 Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (lines 21–32)

But at my back I alwaies hear Times winged Chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lye Desarts of vast Eternity. Thy Beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound My ecchoing Song: then Worms shall try That long preserv’d Virginity: And your quaint Honour turn to dust; And into ashes all my Lust. The Grave’s a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.3.2 Verlaine’s ‘Parsifal’

Parsifal

à Jules Tellier

Parsifal a vaincu les Filles, leur gentil Babil et la luxure amusanteet sa pente Vers la Chair de garçon vierge que cela tente D’aimer les seins légers et ce gentil babil; Il a vaincu la Femme belle, au coeur subtil, Étalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante; Il a vaincu l’Enfer et rentre sous la tente Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril, Avec la lance qui perça le Flanc suprême! Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même, Et prêtre du très saint Trésor essentiel. En robe d’or il adore, gloire et symbole, Le vase pur où resplendit le Sang réel, Et, ô ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole! (‘Parsifal has conquered the Girls, their pleasant chatter and their amusing lustand the virgin boy's attraction towards the Flesh which tempts him to love small breasts and this pleasant chatter; he has conquered the beautiful woman with the subtle heart, displaying her young arms and provoking neck; he has conquered Hell and comes back to his tent with a heavy trophy in his boyish arms; with the lance that pierced the Supreme Side! He has healed the Kinghere he is, a king himself, and priest of the sacred essential Treasure. In a golden robe he worships, as glory and symbol, the pure vessel in which the sacred blood shinesbut, oh, those children’s voices, singing in the dome!)   CLOSE HYPERLINK        

4.3.5 The music upon the waters (Shakespeare, The Tempest I.ii.387–94)

Where should this music be? I’th’air or th’earth? It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon Some god o’th’island. Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wreck, This music crept by me on the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air; thence I have follow’d it, Or it hath drawn me rather. But ’tis gone. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.3.6 The song of the Rhein-maidens (Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Act III)

Frau Sonne sendet lichte Strahlen; Nacht liegt in der Tiefe: einst war sie hell, da heil und hehr des vaters Gold noch in ihr glänzte. Rheingold! klares Gold! wie hell du einstens strahlest, hehrer Stern der Tiefe! Weialala, weialala, leialal, walla la, la lei, la la la lei, la la la la, leila, lalei, walla la la la weia la walla la, weila la la wallala la la leia leia leia lei la la. Frau Sonne, sende uns den Helden, der das Gold uns wieder gäbe. Leis’ er es uns, dein lichtes Auge neideten dann wir nicht länger. Rheingold! klares Gold! wie froh du dann strahlest freier Stern der Tiefe! (‘Lady Sun send us beams of light; in the depths it is night: once it was bright when, safe and splendid, our Father’s gold glistened therein. Rheingold! pure gold! how brightly you once shone, fair star of the deep! Weilala, weilala.... Lady Sun, send us the hero who shall give us back the gold. If he would let us have it, we should no longer envy your bright eye. Rheingold! pure gold! how joyously would you then shine, free star of the deep.’)

CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.3.6 Froude’s History of England, Vol. VI, Ch. xxxix, 497:

In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. She was alone with the Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be married if the Queen pleased. She said that perhaps I did not understand sufficient English. I let them trifle in this way for a time, and then I said gravely to them both, that if they would be guided by me they would shake off the tyranny of those men who were oppressing the realm and them; they would restore religion and good order; and they could then marry when they pleasedand gladly would I be the priest to unite them. Let the heretics complain if they dared. With your Majesty at her side the Queen might defy danger. At present it seemed she could marry no one who displeased Cecil and his companions. I enlarged on this point, because I see that unless I can detach her and Lord Robert from the pestilential heresy with which they are surrounded, there will be no change. If I can once create a schism, things will go as we desire. This therefore appears to me the wisest course to follow. If I keep aloof from the Queen, I leave the field open to the heretics. If I keep her in good humour with your Majesty, there is always hope—­especially if the heretics can be provoked into some act of extravagance. They are irritated to the last degree to see me so much about the Queen’s person. Your Majesty need not fear that I shall alienate the Catholics. Not three days ago, those persons whom your Majesty knows of sent me to say that their party was never so strong as at this moment, nor the Queen and council so universally abhorred. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.5.8 The refining fire (Purgatorio XXVI.142-48)

‘Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan; consiros vei la passada folor, e vei jausen lo jorn, qu’esper, denan. Ara vos prec, per aquella valor, Que vos guida al som de l’escalina, Sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor.’ Poi s’acose nel foco che gli affina. CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.5.8 The Pervigilium Veneris, Stanzas XXI & XXII

         XXI iam loquaces ore rauco stagna cynci perstrepunt: adsonat Terei puella subter umbram populi, ut putes motus amoris ore dici musicos, et neges queri sororem de marito barbaro. cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit cras amet          XXII illa cantat, nos tacemus: quando ver venit meum? quando fiam uti chelidon ut tacere desinam? perdidi musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit: sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium. cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit cras amet. (‘Now the swans squawk with raucous voices over the pools; the maid of Tereus sings under the shade of a poplar, so you might think the musical trills of love were from her mouth, and you would not think a sister was complaining of a barbarous husband. Tomorrow may he love who never has loved, and he who has loved tomorrow may he love. She sings, we are silent: when will my spring come? When shall I be as the swallow that I may cease to be silent. I have lost the muse by my silence, and Apollo regards me not: thus Amyclas, by being silent, perished by silence. Tomorrow may he love who never has loved, and he who loved tomorrow may he love.’) CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.5.8 Gérard de Nerval, ‘El Desdichado’

Je suis le ténébreux,—le veuf, —l’inconsolé, Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie: Ma seule étoile est morte—et mon luth constellé Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie. Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé, Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie, La fleur qui paisait tant à mon coeur desolé, Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie. Suis-je Amour ou Phébus? —Lusignan ou Biron? Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine; J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène... Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron: Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée. (‘I am the dark one, the widower, the inconsolable, the Prince of Aquitaine at the ruined tower: my only star is dead, and my starred lute bears the black sun of Melancholy. You who consoled me, in the night of the tomb, give me back Posilpo and the Italian sea, the flower which so much pleased my desolate heart, and the trellis where the vine joins with the rose. Am I Love or Phoebus? Lusignan or Biron? My face is still flushed with the queen’s kiss; I have dreamed in the grotto where the mermaid swims... And twice I have crossed the Acheron victoriously, playing in turn on the lyre of Orpheus the sighs of the saint and the cries of the fairy.’) CLOSE HYPERLINK

4.3.2 Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (lines 21–32) But at my back I alwaies hear Times winged Chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lye Desarts of vast Eternity. Thy Beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound My ecchoing Song: then Worms shall try That long preserv’d Virginity: And your quaint Honour turn to dust; And into ashes all my Lust. The Grave’s a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.