Review of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
By: Michael A. Arnold

I too have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

It is very understandable to feel drawn to existentialism, especially when you are young. It can even be thrilling too – finally, I understand, there is not really any inherent meaning in the world. Everything is, in a sense, only subjective interpretation, or an illusion we create to comfort ourselves. It is also quite difficult to argue against.

I was thinking about this in a café in the city center, with a 2015 hardback copy of T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land. Like Prufrock, the protagonist of one of Eliot's earlier poems, I was in a city surrounded by people but I was alone. A hard light was coming in through the slightly frosted windows. It was a cold day, 'under the grey fog of a winter dawn', which made the buildings behind the leafless trees outside seem somehow hollow and industrial – depressingly Soviet. Elliot's poem came to life there, I had found the right mood.

Generally, when writers age their work becomes more mature in its themes – building off of their earlier work. This is absolutely true of Eliot. In a sense, we can see the protagonist of his earlier major poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' as responding to the personal anxieties brought on by modern life. As Prufrock wonders around the city (probably Boston or London, it is never said where) trying to avoid going to a party with socialites he does not want to talk to, he thinks about growing old, how he will look to other people, and many other things that is still giving us anxiety today. With 'The Waste Land', Elliot is no longer focusing on just one person. The poem jumps around in time and location, literary registers, and between a number of different narrators, but the theme is always the same throughout. No matter which voice is speaking, the existentialism of modern life is always the focus. Instead of a protagonist, like Prufrock, we are all in some way the narrator of The Waste Land, because we are still living in it. In 1922, when Eliot published this poem, the world had seen the horrors of WW1, and political movements were rising and destabilizing the world. It was a frightening place, and so is ours. Not to suggest some kind of cyclical nature to history, but it was hard to not relate Eliot's world with our own, even only vaguely.

'The Waste Land', the name itself has an intensity around it. When Elliot wrote this poem the horrors of the atomic bomb were little over 20 years in the future, and yet now (perhaps because of media like the Fallout franchise, and other forms of media) it would be hard to not hear the title and imagine a world that has been utterly devastated. In Elliot's poem, the 'Waste Land' is an extended metaphor. There is a Waste Land in the poem alongside the general 'waste land' of post WW1 Europe, and the actual Waste Land in the poem (even if that is itself metaphorical) is eerily similar to what we often imagine the world would be like after a total nuclear exchange:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is 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 evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

This is a hopeless place, much like an early morning in London, when people are going to work – a scene described in the final stanza of this first part. The Waste Land, and the London scene are the only locations described in detail in this first part, which is inviting us to compare the two landscapes:

Unreal 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 hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

In the italics (which are mine) Eliot compares this scene to Dante's Hell, in an allusion to Canto 3 of Inferno. The death seen in WW1 has apparently not just 'undone' the dead, but has also undone the living as well. There is a sense from these lines that the living are similarly trapped in a kind of Hell.

Put simply, we have created The Waste Land, and yet we cannot understand it because we know 'only a heap of broken images'. And yet, we are surrounded by The Waste Land without noticing it for what it is. Even in the first stanza of part 1, which opens on quite a pleasant recollection by someone (presumably called Marie) staying with 'the archduke' in an Alps retreat, we can see some suggestions of The Waste Land described in the next stanza. I will italicize the images of dryness in these first lines:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

The rain is only a temporary relief, which seems somehow suggestive of so many other distractions and conveniences that modern life offers us. But they are not fulfilling distractions, we will always need more rain to feed our crops, our flowers, or whatever else. In The Waste Land, as seen above, there is no water left – no life. This Waste Land is not a place that any of the characters go to in the poem, it is a metaphor for the spiritual and existential desolation all around us.

It is important that straight after our encounter with The Waste Land we get more memories, and then we meet Madam Sosotris – the 'world famous and wise clairvoyant with a bad cold'. She is the character who starts dealing out the tarot cards that frames a lot of what comes after. One of these cards is of the drowned Phoenician Sailor which will be talked about in more detail in the next paragraph. This reference to spirituality and Spiritualism through clairvoyance and tarot cards seems to be in direct contradiction with the apathy, and even irreligiosity of The Waste Land – but could it also a symptom of it too? Did people not use such things in a search for meaning? How anyone feels about that will probably be entirely subjective, and that is perhaps the point. We need to find our own escape from 'The Waste Land'.

Water is an interesting image in The Waste Land. There are constant symbols of dryness throughout the poem, and the metaphorical Waste Land is dying because of a lack of water, but there is also the drowned Phoenician Sailor, and a section (the shortest section of the whole poem) called 'Death by Water'. This section calls back to the Phoenician Sailor tarot card, and so this image of a man drowning is also important: while there is danger in being too 'dry' – there is an equal danger in being too 'wet', and so for The Waste Land to bloom again, there needs to be a harmony between these two things.

The poem culminates in the final section 'What the Thunder Said', which is quite a strange way to end the poem. The section is focused primarily on thunder and the sound it makes, which is something primal and natural. There is a sense as the section goes on that the thunder is trying to communicate, in an almost Old Testament way. However, it seems to be struggling, all it seems to be able to say is: 'Da, Da, Da' over and over – at least at the beginning. This is a primal sound, but it is also the sound of something just learning to speak. It sounds like a child trying to pronounce their first word – like 'Daddy'. But, in the end, something else comes through, 'Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata', which translated into English (Elliot helpfully gives us in his notes) means 'give, sympathize, control'.

This is nature itself telling us a way of getting out of The Waste Land. As thunder always promises rain and water to heal the wounds of the present. But this is a commandment as well as a promise of water to come. We need to sympathize with each other more, and to control ourselves, finding a harmony with the world around us, like we need to find the harmony between the water and the dryness of existential misery following a titanic global war. Otherwise The Waste Land will only be more barren, and we will all suffer for it.

We see people suffering with this dryness in the other sections of the poem. From the aging women in section 2, 'A Game of Chess', drinking in a pub, joking about how their husbands will probably cheat on them after their demobilization, so the secretary in section 3 'The Fire Sermon' having an affair with her boss. Everything in these sections plays on extremes – either something is extremely important to the people in it or it is so trivial it is like a joke – either way, there is a sense that a sense of inherent meaning in the world has been lost. Perhaps it is a will to carry on despite the world of meaning that has been lost, or we have simply stopped believing in it so much the search for meaning seems like a joke. Either way, the metaphorical Waste Land of the poem is still there with us, and we still need to find our way out of it – we still need the rainwater the thunder is promising. The poem ends with the words 'Shantih, Shantih, Shantih', which Elliot again translates in his notes as 'The Peace which passeth understanding' – a peace we can only have once we have fully grasped the implication of 'datta dayadhvam damyata'.

The Waste Land is an important and brilliant work, but it is also one of the most difficult and frustrating poems too. Elliot's message is ultimately very simple, but it is the presentation of his ideas that is very complicated. Perhaps because we have a habit of overcomplicating simple things, and so find ourselves struggling with answers to questions that feel more profound than they actually are. The Waste Land is on one hand trying to show us a way out of the mental Waste Land we have let go dry, but at the same time it was something made in that Waste Land. It is our job to find the simple truth again through the complexity and confusion that the modern world is always throwing at us.