Pathways

The Waste Land is a poem of some four hundred and thirty lines, published in 1922 by T. S. Eliot, an American from St Louis who had settled in London and was working in a bank. It is the most famous poem of the twentieth century, and it has a reputation for difficulty that it has earned: it has lines in German, French, Italian, Latin and Sanskrit as well as English, and Greek before it even starts, it quotes the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Wagner, a Roman novel, a Sanskrit scripture, a nursery rhyme and a ragtime song, mostly without saying so, and it changes speaker without warning. But the difficulty is the surface. Underneath it the poem is about things everyone knows: what it is like to be alive without quite living, to have memory and desire stirred when you would rather stay numb, and what it is like to be in a crowd of people who cannot speak to each other. That is where the poem begins, with April, cruel because it wakes things up.

The Grail legend as Eliot took it from two books. They are Jessie L. Weston’s study of it, From Ritual to Romance (1920), and the anthropologist J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The note at the head of Eliot’s notes credits the title, the plan and “a good deal of the incidental symbolism” to Weston and names The Golden Bough as well. In 1956 Eliot regretted having sent readers on a “wild goose chase” after the Tarot and the Grail. Weston argued that the Grail romances preserve an old rite. In it the Fisher King’s wound leaves his land waste and its waters dry. When a knight asks the right question, the king is healed and the waters flow. In Frazer’s account the god of that rite (Adonis, Attis, Osiris) dies with the year and is buried or drowned so that he may return in spring. In 1939 the critic Cleanth Brooks made the legend the key to the poem.

The Bible and the Book of Common Prayer in the poem. Part I is named after the Prayer Book’s burial service. The desert of lines 19 to 30 speaks in words from Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes, and its red rock is usually set beside Isaiah’s “great rock in a weary land”. Part V opens with the arrest and death of Christ told without his name, as the critic Cleanth Brooks read it in 1939, and goes on to the road to Emmaus, where the risen Christ walks unrecognised beside two disciples. Eliot’s last note glosses “Shantih” with “The Peace which passeth understanding”, a phrase from the blessing that ends the Communion service. Eliot was baptised into the Church of England in June 1927, five years after the poem.

The Indian texts in the poem, the Buddha’s Fire Sermon and an Upanishad. An Upanishad is one of the Sanskrit scriptures. Eliot studied Sanskrit at Harvard for two years from 1911 with Charles Rockwell Lanman. He also spent a year on the metaphysics of the ancient Indian philosopher Patañjali with James Haughton Woods, a study that left him, he wrote in 1934, in “a state of enlightened mystification”. Part III takes its title from the sermon in which the Buddha says that all things are on fire. The sermon is heard at line 308, beside St Augustine’s Confessions, a pair Eliot’s note on line 309 calls “representatives of eastern and western asceticism”. Part V’s title and line 433 come from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, where the thunder’s one syllable is heard as three commands. “Shantih”, repeated, is the formula that closes an Upanishad.

The poem’s dead, and what they keep of Dante’s. Five of Eliot’s notes send the reader to Dante, more than to any other writer. Two send the crowd on London Bridge (63 and 64) to the Inferno, and a third sends line 412 there, to Count Ugolino, starved in his tower. Two send the reader to the Purgatorio, for La Pia, a murdered wife (293), and for the troubadour Arnaut Daniel in the refining fire (428). The dedication to Ezra Pound, who cut the poem, is taken from the canto in which Arnaut Daniel appears. Dante’s dead, met and known by name, tell the living who they were and ask to be remembered. This pathway follows the poem’s dead in order and asks what each passage keeps of Dante’s dead. Eliot wrote on Dante in The Sacred Wood (1920) and in his Dante of 1929, and in 1950 gave a talk, “What Dante Means to Me”.

The loves in the poem, and how each of them fails. Eliot’s note on line 218 says “all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias”, the blind seer who has lived as both. The note at the head of Eliot’s notes credits Jessie Weston’s book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance, with the poem’s plan. In the legend as she tells it the Fisher King is wounded. His wound is “the loss of virility”, and because of it nothing grows in his land, “a suspension of the reproductive processes of Nature”, until he is healed. The critic Cleanth Brooks (1939) read the poem through that legend, in which the Fisher King, the lord of the land, has been “rendered impotent by maiming or sickness”. The pathway takes the couples in order, from the hyacinth garden to the thunder, and sets each beside that wound.

Prophecy in the poem, and the sight it depends on. The poem is full of people who claim to see what others cannot. Its epigraph, from the Satyricon of Petronius, is spoken by a man who says he saw the Sibyl of Cumae, a prophetess, with his own eyes, hanging in a jar; when boys asked her what she wanted, she said that she wanted to die. Eliot’s note on line 218 calls the blind prophet Tiresias the poem’s most important personage, and says that what he sees is the substance of the poem. What he foretells is a scene he says he has “foresuffered”, enacted before on the same bed. The thunder near the end says one syllable, and each hearer must make out the word for himself. Between the seers come the eyes that fail, from the hyacinth garden to the road to Emmaus, where two disciples walk beside the risen Christ and do not know him.

The poem’s changed bodies, from Ovid and from The Tempest. Ovid’s Metamorphoses gives it Philomel, raped and turned into a nightingale (99), and Tiresias, who was a woman for seven years (218). The spirit Ariel’s song in The Tempest gives it a drowned king whose eyes are turned to pearls and whose body suffers “a sea-change / Into something rich and strange”. The poem quotes the pearls at 48 and 125, and never the sea-change. This pathway follows what Ovid’s and Shakespeare’s bodies are turned into, what becomes of the poem’s own people, the drowned Phlebas among them, and the change the Latin of line 429 asks for, when shall I be like the swallow. The critic Cleanth Brooks (1939) read the clairvoyante Madame Sosostris’s warning, “Fear death by water”, as the words of one who, like the poem’s other people, does not know that “the way into life may be by death itself”.

Old poems and modern scenes in the same lines. In November 1923, reviewing Joyce’s Ulysses in The Dial, Eliot wrote that “in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him”, and that the method gave “a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”. He was writing about another man’s book, but the critic F. O. Matthiessen was applying the sentences to Eliot’s own work by 1935. This pathway follows the places where the parallel is plainest, where Chaucer, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, John Day or Goldsmith is set beside a modern scene in the same lines, so that the reader sees both at once. The critic Cleanth Brooks (1939) wrote that the poem’s surface parallels are really contrasts and its surface contrasts really parallels.

The war of 1914–1918 and its aftermath, as the poem carries them. Eliot wrote the poem in 1921, three years after the Armistice, and published it in October 1922. At Lloyds Bank, where he worked, he had been put in charge in 1920 of settling the bank’s pre-war debts with Germany. The poem never names the war. Eliot’s own note at the head of Part V names “the present decay of eastern Europe” as a theme. The pathway follows the war’s traces in the poem’s order. Some are in the poem’s own words, and others are critics’ readings.

Three of Wagner’s operas are in the poem. Tristan und Isolde is quoted twice in German: the sailor’s song that opens it (lines 31–34) and the shepherd’s report from its last act that the sea is empty (42). The Rhine-daughters’ cry from the last act of Götterdämmerung is set twice on the Thames (277–278, 290–291) and, as it is usually read, worn down to “la la” at 306. Parsifal, Wagner’s Grail opera, enters at line 202 through a sonnet on it by the French poet Paul Verlaine. Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance is the book on the Grail legend that the note at the head of Eliot’s notes credits with the poem’s plan. Its preface says that conversations at the Bayreuth Festival of 1911, the festival of Wagner’s operas, gave her some of her evidence. Jean Verdenal, Eliot’s friend in Paris, wrote to him in 1912 that Tristan at a first hearing “leaves you prostrate with ecstasy.”

The places the poem names, in the order it names them. It begins at the Starnbergersee, a lake near Munich, and the Hofgarten in the city, and spends its middle in London, with the bridge, the streets and churches, a public bar in Lower Thames Street and the river at Greenwich and at Richmond. Its people come from or remember Lithuania, Mylae, Leman, Smyrna, Thebes, Margate and Carthage. Part V names five cities in two lines, “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London” (375–376), and then the Ganges and Himavant (396–398).

Places and dates from Eliot’s life that lie behind particular lines of the poem, from the summers of his boyhood at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Munich in 1911 to Margate and Lausanne in the autumn of 1921 and Paris in January 1922, each set beside the lines it bears on.