The Waste Land by T.S Eliot Summary and analysis

 

Epigraph:

“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις; respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω.” – From the Satyricon by Gaius Petronius

 

(I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”)

 

The Sibyl of Cumae was a prophetess in service to Apollo and a great beauty. Apollo wished to take her as his lover and offered her anything she desired. She asked to live for as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust. Apollo granted her wish, but still she refused to become his lover. In time, the sibyl came to regret her boon as she grew old but did not die. She lived for hundreds of years, each year becoming smaller and frailer, Apollo having given her long life but not eternal youth.

 

The Waste Land presents itself immediately as a difficult poem, blocking entrance with an epigraph in Latin and Greek followed by a dedication in Italian. The dedication to Pound, calls him “the better craftsman.” The epigram, from the Satyricon of Petronius, alludes to the Cumaean Sibyl, the seer who was granted a wish by Apollo and asked for immortality. She neglected to ask for eternal youth. Her immortality thus became a process of continual increased debilitation, and her wish became a longing to die. Her condition reflects the condition of the civilization Eliot leads the reader through in The Waste Land, a culture of living death.

 

 

The first line, “April is the cruellest month,” takes hold of the reader’s attention. It is a simple and a baffling assertion. It indicates an implicit or rather contradictory reference to the famous Chaucerian glorification of April with its sweet showers at the beginning of The Canterbury Tales.

 

“April is the cruellest month” the poet asserts because, he explains by an image, it breeds lilacs out of the dead land; it brings life. Poet’s  suggestion is  that it would be better to allow death to be final. But April undoes death by reinstating life. What then is there about life that should make it undesirable? The answer is that the process of revivification mixes memory and desire. It causes the past and the future to clash with each other. This juxtaposition has the effect of provoking longing. It stirs dull roots with spring rain. Paradoxically, “Winter kept us warm” because it covers “Earth in forgetful snow” and feeds “A little life with dried tubers.” It seems that winter is as close as one can get to death while still alive.

 

The first a few lines of the poem force to think about some actions “Breeding,” “mixing,” and “stirring,” all such processes are disturbing  for modern people.

 

The scene glides into Starnbergersee (a lake near Munich, west Germany).  The transition is smoothed by the continuing reference to the characteristics of the seasons.

 

 

"Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour."

 

These lines contain thoughts of Tiresias, the spokesman of the poem, who is a representative of the modern world. Tiresias and his girl friend Marie were travelling in Germany, when they were overtaken by summer They took shelter under the rows of the trees and thereafter walked in the sun-shine the Hof-garten, where they gossiped for an hour. says: "I am not Russian at all; I come Lithuania; I am a German." When Marie was a child, she stayed with her cousin, the Arch-duke. He took her out on a sledge and she was much frightened.

 

He asked her to hold the sledge tightly and they travelled down together They felt quite free when they wandered into the mountains. Now, she spends her time reading till late in the night. During winter, she goes to the south to enjoy her holidays.

 

 

Taken literally, this fragment of a conversation Eliot actually had with Countess Marie Larisch, niece of the Austro-Hungarian Dukes.  The assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand leads to the sudden outbreak of first world war.

She becomes too nostalgic as we know nostalgia is a denial of painful present.

 

 

 

Eliot now presents another scene in The Waste Land of the modern civilization. The old civilization with its values and conventions is dead and gone, leaving only a heap of broken images. Nothing seems to grow out of its stony waste land. There is an old tree lying on the ground. It represents the good individual who once functioned like a shady tree and proved beneficial to others, but is no more. The barren land is full of crickets but their music gives no satisfaction. The stony wilderness is symbolic of the spiritual barrenness. An angelic voice tells the protagonist to stand under the great rock (the Christian church) which represents God's strength. The shadow of the rock is unchanging. It is an embodiment of eternity. The shadows of the mortals. however, keep changing. The shadow falls behind the man in his youth as his career opens out in front. But with the passage of time the shadow falls in front of him, in the evening of life. This shows that man is essentially a heap of dust. The fear of death keeps man under great tension. It is only pure love which rids man of fear. The godless man is always in the grip of fear. The poet gives an example of fear in love or the pangs of unrequitted love (one sided love). He refers to the story of Tristan who had a guilty passion for Isolde. This guilty love proved fatal. The song in the poem refers to Tristan, who mortally wounded, awaits the arrival of his beloved. He is punished by king Mark, to whom Isolde was to be married. Tristan inquires of the watchman if the ship is bringing his beloved. The reply of the watchman is negative: "Empty and desolate is the sea" sums up the despair and the grief of the guilty lover.

Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?

 "The wind blows fresh
 To the Homeland
My Irish Girl
Where are you lingering?"
  ~Tristan und Isolde, i, verses 5-8

 

The poet then gives the story of the Hyacinth girl. This is the first experience of a young lover. The lover is terribly excited. Like the love of Tristan, the love of this young man is also a guilty love as he makes love to the girl secretly in the garden. This sort of love is not free from fear and anxiety. The feeling of the lover is summed up in the line: "I was neither living nor dead and I knew nothing." so love offers no joy or relaxation under the conditions of modern life. Eliot is essentially Puritan and he condemns the laxity in sexual relationship, so common in the modern age.

Oed’ und leer das Meer.

Empty and desolate is the sea. [V. Tristan und Isolde,] III, verse 24. By Richard Wagner