The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (Literary Allusions)

 

The Waste Land

by T.S. Eliot

(Literary Allusions) 

One of the most delightful and at the same time difficult aspects of Eliot’s poetry is its complex echoing of multiple sources. It has been said of some writers that they write as if no one has ever written before. Of Eliot it is the reverse which is true. He was a strong believer in tradition and he believed that the ordinary reader will be equipped with a moderate familiarity with the classics so that allusions to situations and events in them will only strengthen his power of appreciation. The Waste Land is full of allusions which illustrate Eliot’s manipulation of “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.” This rich allusiveness is also illustrative of his conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written.

The scenes of modern life are set against the memories of the myths related in “From Ritual to Romance” and “The Golden Bough”. The whole experience is prefaced by an epigraph from the ‘’Satyricon’. In the words, ‘I want to die.’ the emotional pattern of the poem is suggested. They reflect both the scornful attitude of the contemporary world towards ‘tradition’ and the despairing personal death-wish which is the chief aspect of the poem’s emotional pattern.

In the opening movement of the poem, the coming of death is suggested by the reference to ‘Ecclesiastes’. ‘When fears shall be in the way—and desire shall fail because man goeth to his long home.’ Then shall the dust return to earth as it was. There is an ironic echo of Isaiah:

‘And a man shall be as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land as rivers of water in a dry place.’ Or as the redness of the rock suggests it may be a reference to the Mount of Purgatory reddened by the setting sun in Canto III of the “Purgatorio.” Even without the reinforcement of these literary references, these lines may be read purely in terms of emotion and sensation.

As the water-image breaks in (lines-30-40), two quotations are given from the first and third Acts of Tristan and Isolde. The first is from the Sailor’s song: “The wind blows fresh from the homeland, My Irish child, where are you lingering?” and the second “empty and blank the sea.” Tristan is the glorification of adulterous love; The sea proves traitor; it is the arrest of consummation. Between the two quotations there is the suggestion of another frustrated love, an arrested spring, a thwarted fulfilment.

The sailor symbol in the Madame Sosostris passage is suggestive of the temptation to drown out the moral and spiritual problems of the personal life by the creative activity of art. This is borne out by the quotation from The Tempest which follows. The line, ‘Those are

pearls that were his eyes’ from Ariel’s song, is associated in Eliot’s mind with the transmuting of life into art. It points to the change of the living symbols of the past into inanimate, inorganic matter; the vision commemorated in the whole western tradition has become opaque and lifeless as the pearl—In its creative song, Ariel’s song reminds us of a supposed death by drowning which in reality led to a regeneration through ‘sea change’ and a metamorphosis from blindness to new vision. Thus, it stands as the central symbol in the poem for the whole process of metamorphosis in both its destructive and creative aspects.

In line 60, the reference to Baudelaire widens the limits to our vision of the unreal city. It is twentieth century London, Baudelaire’s ‘Paris’, La Forgue’s ‘City’ and it has taken on the character of a scene in a nightmare. This is followed in line 63 by an allusion to Dante’s ‘Limbo’ to those wretches, who were never alive, who lived without praise or blame, the neutrals, the Mrs. Equitones. This reference to Book III of the Inferno, is closely followed by the description of one who made, through cowardice, the great refusal. The couplet, “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!” takes us to a dirge sung over a corpse in Webster’s ‘White Devil. ’There the dramatist calls to “The ant, the field-mouse and the male To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm” and there has already been the mention in the opening lines that Winter kept us warm and that Winter symbolizes the living death of The Waste Land itself. The song in Webster continues. “But keep the wolf far thence that’s foe to men.” Eliot’s, changes in the texts, carry on the painful ambivalence of attitudes. The dog was a common symbol of aid to rebirth Or the ‘Dog’ with the capital ‘D’ might suggest the Dog Star, Sirius, who was the the herald of the rising of the Nile Waters, a true friend to man. May be there is a hint to the Hound of Heaven. The total emotional effect of the allusion is horror towards the living death of the crowd flowing under London Bridge.

The Game of Chess deals directly with the artificiality and lack of human or mythical meaning in the central ‘fertility’ situation, the marriage relation of men and women. It opens with a reminiscence of Cleopatra on the stately burnished throne of Egypt. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra lavishes all the luxury and stateliness of her infinite variety on the scene but the vitality of the contemporary woman in the dramatic glimpses that follow is futile and their games with men are nothing but an empty pastime or an open hostility ending in a stalemate.

There is also the reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost in the line—

“As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene.”

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Middleton’s play, Women Beware Women are also alluded to. The former referring to the story of Philomela recreates the world where the physical and temporal is transcended by the spiritual and eternal, her song gave meaning to her moral pain. Here lust still triumphs, her voice is vulgarized. The reference to Middleton’s play suggests the meaningless sexual intrigue where one after another people fall a victim to the maneuvers of the opponents until finally death conquers all.

The Fire Sermon opens with memory of Spenser’s marriage song and its scenes of nymphs and lovers preparing gaily for a wedding on the river bank, haunting the picture of autumn desolation. Spenser’s river and the sea in the tempest shrink to the dull canal and its dirty water, The Grail Castle to the gashouse. The protagonist, the Fisher King and Ferdinand melt into a single figure.

The river nymphs of the opening section now change to the three Thames daughters, whom Eliot associates with the Rhine daughters of Wagner’s opera. The Thames-daughters compare the pollution of the river in the present day and its sluggish movement and cluttered surface with the colour and liveliness and music and brightness of the Elizabethan scene. The river or the sea at the scene of violation have no cleansing power. It is part of the emptiness of life in general.

The reference to St. Augustine’s ‘Confession,’ “to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears,” winds up the section with a collocation of Eastern and Western asceticism.

What the Thunder Said is based on a fable of the meaning of Thunder found in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. “Datta, Daya-dhvam and Damyata, Shantih, Shantih, Shantih,” these words which are in foreign tongues and not translated into his own inner experience leave the poem with no conclusive, but only a formal ending In line 427, there is a reference to Purgatorio; “And so I pray you, by that virtue which leads you to the topmost of the stair, be mindful in due time of my pain. Then dived he back into that fire which refines them.” There is the suggestion of purification hinted at in ‘Fire Sermon’.

‘Why then I’ll fit you” is a quotation from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and “Hieronymo is mad again” is the sub-title of that play. Hieronymo has been asked to provide a `show’ for the entertainment of the king. He intends to use a tragedy he has written in his youth, fitting the actors to the parts he wants them to play in real life. Another strange aspect of this play is that “Each one of us must act his part In unknown languages…..

In parts of the play, Hieronymo feigns madness and postpones taking action to revenge his Son’s death. He says :

“I am never better than when I am mad;

Then methinks I am a brave fellow

Then I do wonders, but reason abuseth me;

And there’s the torment, there’s the hell.”

Eliot’s mind is filled with associations of all these fragments. Like Hieronymo he is casting himself, fitting himself in the parts, in ‘sundry languages’ of those other poets who have suffered and struggled to achieve new life. It is when he is mad, that he is better, and feels able to say the concluding words of the poem: “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih.” It cannot be denied that the continuous use of often obscure literary allusions has rendered the poem obscure and that the average reader, already puzzled by the preliminary knowledge of myths and romance, might turn away with diffidence. To those who consider it worth the trouble, the rich allusiveness of the poem will unfold fresh delights, much more rewarding than the power, general effect of which will be felt even by those who do not bother to understand it all. “Given intrinsic value, the average reader will find an adequate significance in the most reconditeallusions, and most of Eliot’s quotations make this possible.”