LONDON INTHE WASTE LAND

SEEING AND VISIONING LONDON

The representation of London in The Waste Land blends “seeing London” and “visioning it,” a documentary registering of the here-and-now, including actual street names and other local features, alternated with a historical or even mythological “London”

UNREAL CITYUnreal City,Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many.Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hoursWith a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Stetson!"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!"You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!"

ST. MARY WOOLNOTH

A CITY OF THE DEAD

At the time of the writing of The Waste Land, each morning Eliot went to work crossing London Bridge Station among thousands of other commuters, feeling that he was entering a city of the dead

St. Mary Woolnoth was just close to the Lloyds office where Eliot worked

Eliot escapes from the commercial “unreal city” of the dead by entering a visionary landscape, projecting onto both London’s past and other times and places, such as Mylae, where the Romans vanquished the Carthaginian fleet in 260 BC

MADAME SOSOTRISMadame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,Had a bad cold, neverthelessIs known to be the wisest woman in Europe,With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,The lady of situations.Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,Which I am forbidden to see. I do not findThe Hanged Man. Fear death by water.I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:One must be so careful these days.

LEONARDO DA VINCI, VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS(LONDON VERSION, 1508 CA.)

THE DEGRADATION OF THE PAST

The passage in which Madame Sosostris figures somehow ironically reverses this superimposition of an envisioned past over the present. Madame Sosostris is a mock Egyptian name suggested to Eliot by “Sesostris, the sorceress of Ecbatana, “in Aldous Huxley’s novel Chrome Yellow, who dresses up as a gypsy to tell fortunes at a fair.

The anticlimactic effect of “had a bad cold” is deliberate; it is intended to be ironic and debunking. Madame Sosostris has fallen a long way from the high function of her predecessors. She is engaged merely in vulgar fortune telling – merely one item in a generally vulgar civilization.

THE TAROTS

But the symbols of the Tarot Pack of Cards are unchanged. The four suits of the Tarot pack of cards are the cup, lance, sword, and dish – the life symbol found in the Grail story. As Weston has shown, the Tarot Pack of Cards was originally used to determine the event of the highest importance to the people, the rising of the waters.

THE TAROT SYMBOLS“Belladonna” means beautiful lady. The word suggests

Madonna (the Virgin Mary) and, therefore, the Madonna of the Rocks as in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting. The rocks symbolize the church. But there are other rocks – the rocks of dryness of the waste land. Belladonna is also an eye-cosmetic and a poison – the deadly nightshade. In the next line, the woman-figure of the Virgin becomes “the lady of situations” – the woman in the waste land. The “man with the three staves” is the Life-Force symbol associated by Eliot with the Fisher King. The “wheel” is the Wheel of Fortune, whose turning represents the reversals of human life. “The Hanged Man” represents the hanged god of Frazer (including Christ). He symbolizes the self-sacrifice of the fertility god who is killed in order that his resurrection may bring fertility once again to land and people. That he is “hooded” accounts for Madame Sosostris’ inability to see him.

17°-CENTURY LONDON“This music crept by me upon the waters"And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.O City city, I can sometimes hearBeside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,The pleasant whining of a mandolineAnd a clatter and a chatter from withinWhere fishmen lounge at noon: where the wallsOf Magnus Martyr holdInexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweatsOil and tarThe barges driftWith the turning tideRed sailsWideTo leeward, swing on the heavy spar.The barges washDrifting logsDown Greenwich reachPast the Isle of Dogs.Weialala leiaWallala leialala

Elizabeth and LeicesterBeating oarsThe stern was formedA gilded shellRed and goldThe brisk swellRippled both shoresSouthwest windCarried down streamThe peal of bellsWhite towers

ST. MAGNUS THE MARTYR

A BETTER TIME

In the passage from “The Fire Sermon” the poetic self envisions Elizabethan London, and the London of the metaphysical poets, recalled by the reference to St. Magnus the Martyr, another church in the City, rebuilt by Christopher Wren in the 1670s, after the London Fire had destroyed most of the city. For Eliot, the “new” churches built (or rebuilt) under Wren’s supervision embodied the ideal integration between intellect, emotion, and the senses before the “dissociation of sensibility” set in.

THE RIVER OF DEATHThe river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leafClutch and sink into the wet bank. The windCrosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette endsOr other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;Departed, have left no addresses.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.But at my back in a cold blast I hearThe rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

THE THAMES NYMPHS

The Thames river-nymphs (now chased away by modern degradation and pollution) are connceted with the Rhine-daughters of Richard Wagner’s Gotteradamerung. In the passage in Wagner’s opera to which Eliot refers in his note, the opening of Act III, the Rhine-daughters bewail the loss of the beauty of the Rhine occasioned by the theft of the gold. They then beg Siegfried to give them back the Ring made from this gold, finally threatening him with death if he does not give it up. Like the Thames-daughters, they too have been violated; and like the maidens mentioned in the Grail legend, the violation has brought a curse on gods and men.

FALLING CITIES

What is that sound high in the airMurmur of maternal lamentationWho are those hooded hordes swarmingOver endless plains, stumbling in cracked earthRinged by the flat horizon onlyWhat is the city over the mountainsCracks and reforms and bursts in the violet airFalling towersJerusalem Athens AlexandriaVienna LondonUnreal

AN UNREEDEMABLE STERILITY

Section V is full of the reminders of physical and spiritual dying

After the description of the sterility of the waste land, the scene becomes inhabited by the “hooded hordes swarming / over endless plains” and it is transformed into an almost surrealist hallucination of Old Testament lamentation and prophecy. The hordes represent the general waste land of the modern world with a special application to the break-up of Eastern Europe, the region with which the fertility cults were especially connected and in which today traditional values are thoroughly discredited (but the “sound high in the air” refers to London under German air attacks during World War I)

The falling cities are the symbols of the recurring crises in the history of human civilization.

FRAGMENTS AND RUINS

Fishing, with the arid plain behind meShall I at least set my lands in order?London Bridge is falling down falling down falling downPoi s'ascose nel foco che gli affinaQuando fiam uti chelidon - O swallow swallowLe Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolieThese fragments I have shored against my ruinsWhy then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.Shantih shantih shantih

DATTA, DAYADHVAM, DAMYATA

The Thunder emits three orders. The protagonist answers the first one, “Datta” (“Give”), with the statement: “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed.” Here the larger meaning is stated in terms that imply a sexual meaning. Man cannot be absolutely self-regarding. Even the propagation of the race – even mere “existence” – calls for such a surrender. The comment on “Dayadhvam” (“Sympathize”) implies that the surrender to something outside the self is an attempt (whether on the sexual level or some other) to transcend one’s essential isolation. The third order, “Damyata” (“Control”), seems to have be obeyed by the boat, and everything seems to finally end in peace and reconciliation. But the final lines suggest that the protagonist does not witness a revival of the waste land.

AN ANTICLIMAX

The effect of the final lines is almost one of bathos, of anticlimax. The focus narrows to a solitary figure in the foreground, fishing, with arid plains behind him. So the long-promised rain has not fallen. “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” is a desperate attempt to resist chaos, with a biblical allusion to King Hezekiah, the ailing monarch who was told by lsaiah to set his lands in order; who did so and was blessed by God. So there’s a faint note of hope. But the next line, “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down,” echoing the theme of the decay and destruction of civilisations.

THE ESCAPE OF MADNESS

The various quotations from different sources (and different languages) that end the poem clash one with the other in a Babel-like confusion 

The Tower of Babel is implied by “Le Prince d’Aquitane a Ia tour abolie,” a line from Nerval’s “El Desdichado”

With “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” the poetic self describes what The Waste Land is finally about: an attempt to collect the fragments of a fallen civilization.

The words “Why then lie fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe” are taken from Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy, and they dramatically contradict the final, “Shantih shantih shantih” (“The peace which passeth understanding”). Maybe transcendent peace may be reached only by escaping into madness.

A MYTH OF DISORDER

The search for order through myth in The Wast Land battles with the poem’s manner of utterance, its sound, feel and impact. After the relative lucidity and assurance of the Damyata lines about the boat and the controlling hands, it sounds as though there is a sudden veering away from assurance and lucidity into the cryptic, the confused and twittering; a regression from public utterance to the more private and delphic. The ending is highly ambiguous and equivocal. It offers garbled hints of consolation, of hope, of peace, while the manner of the garbling suggests disorder, confusion and near-madness.

But it is precisely this disordered myth that fascinated readers throughout the world, giving them new insights into their own fragmented human condition. The desolate London of The Waste Land is the capital of this collapsing world, but also the centre of dissemination for Eliot’s prophetic vision.