Modern Mind

concern in this great poem is the sterility that he regards as the central fact of life in the postwar world, a dual sterility in both the spiritual and sexual spheres. But Eliot is not content just to pin down that sterility; he contrasts the postwar world with other worlds, other possibilities, in other places and at other times, which were fecund and creative and not at all doomed. And this is what gave
The Waste Land
its singular poetic architecture. As in Virginia Woolf’s novels, Joyce’s
Ulysses,
and Proust’s
roman fleuve,
the form of Eliot’s poem, though revolutionary, was integral to its message. According to Eliot’s wife, the poem – partly autobiographical – was also partly inspired by Bertrand Russell. 15 Eliot juxtaposed images of dead trees, dead rats, and dead men – conjuring up the horrors of Verdun and the Somme – with references to ancient legends; scenes of sordid sex run into classical poetry; the demeaning anonymity of modern life is mingled with religious sentiments. It is this collision of different ideas that was so startling and original. Eliot was trying to show how far we have fallen, how far evolution is a process of
descent.
    The poem is divided into six parts: ‘The Epigraph,’ ‘The Burial of the Dead,’ ‘A Game of Chess,’ ‘The Fire Sermon,’ ‘Death by Water,’ and ‘What the Thunder Said.’ All the tides are evocative and all, on first acquaintance, obscure. There is a chorus of voices, sometimes individual, sometimes speaking in words borrowed from the classics of various cultures, sometimes heard via the incantations of the ‘blind and thwarted’ Tiresias. 16 At one moment we pay a visit to a tarot reader, at another we are in an East End pub at closing time, next there is a reference to a Greek legend, then a line or two in German. Until one gets used to it, the approach is baffling, quite unlike anything encountered elsewhere. Even stranger, the poem comes with notes and references, like an academic paper. These notes, however, repay inspection. For study of the myths introduces other civilisations, with different but coherent worldviews and a different set of values. And this is Eliot’s point: if we are to turn our back on the acquisitive society, we have to be ready to
work:
    At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
    Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
     
    Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
    I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
    Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
    At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
    Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
    The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
    Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
     
    It takes no time at all for the poem to veer between the heroic and the banal, knitting a sense of pathos and bathos, outlining an ordinary world on the edge of something finer, yet not really aware that it is.
    There is a shadow under this red rock,
    (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
    And I will show you something different from either
    Your shadow at morning striding behind you
    Or your shadow at morning rising to meet you;
    I will show you fear in a handful o f dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?
’ 17
     
    The first two lines hint at Isaiah’s prophecy of a Messiah who will be ‘as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shallow of a great rock in a weary land’ (Isaiah 32.2). The German comes direct from Wagner’s opera
Tristan und Isolde:
‘Fresh blows the wind/Toward home/My Irish child/Where are you waiting?’ The imagery is dense, its aim ambitious.
The Waste Land
cannot be understood on one reading or without ‘research’ or work. It has been compared (by Stephen Coote, among others) to an Old Master painting in which we have first to learn the iconography before we can understand fully what is being said. In order to appreciate his poem, the reader has to open himself or herself to other cultures, to attempt an escape from this sterile one. The first two ‘confidential copies’ of the poem were sent to John Quinn and Ezra Pound. 18
    Eliot, incidentally, did not share the vaguely Freudian view of most people at the time (and since) that art was an expression of the personality. On the contrary, for him it was ‘an escape from personality.’ He was no expressionist pouring his ‘over-charged soul’ into his work.
The Waste Land
is, instead, the result of detailed