- Hello. I'm Victor Strandberg,
and in this session, we're going to take up at last TS Eliot's most celebrated achievement
in poetry, The Wasteland, the central poem in English
of the 20th century. The title, The Wasteland,
evidently came about when TS Eliot read Jessie Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, from which, in the first note to The Wasteland, as I said in our last session,
Eliot derived the title, the plan, and a good deal
of the incidental symbolism in this poem. Originally, the title was
from a novel of Dickens, He Do the Police in Different Voices. We'll find out as we
get into the poem that that concept remains. The poem is a study of
many voices joined together to make up The Wasteland, and a crucial part of
understanding this poem is to disentangle those
voices as they come up, one after the other. That's what we shall do
as we go into Part I. But first of all, we have the
title page, The Wasteland, with the date 1922, and with
a fragment of literature from ancient Roman times. This excerpt is from the
Satyricon of Petronius, Satyricon spelled S-A-T-Y-R-I-C-O-N, and the satyr was, of
course, a figure representing the decadence of the Roman
Empire under the Emperor Nero and other such emperors. The excerpt is written in Latin and Greek, and a rough translation
would read as follows, underneath the title of the
whole poem The Wasteland: "Now I myself with my own eyes, saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a jar." We could pause for a moment and explain that the Sybil of Cumae, a
voice of wisdom in this excerpt, asked for immortality. The gods granted immortality, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth, and so as she aged through the centuries, she got smaller as old people tend to do, and now she is so small that
she can fit inside a jar. So the exerpt shows some
young men coming to get advice from this voice of wisdom,
the Sybil of Cumae. "When I myself saw the Sybil
of Cumae hanging in a jar, those young men asked her," and that's where we go into
Greek, "What do you want?" "And she answered, I want to die." This exerpt brings up then the subject of mortality or death,
something to be desired, so far as the Sybil of Cumae goes, and something I also
think proves desirable as an alternative to the
wasteland in Part IV of this poem, Death by Water, as we'll
see when we get to that. But for now, we could say
that this issue of mortality is one of the two great issues
that dominates this poem, how to cope with one's mortality, specifically without a myth of rebirth. This theme, how to cope with mortality without a myth of rebirth evokes one of the two great dimensions of all major religious traditions, metaphysics and the other is ethics. Now metaphysics is a word
that means more than physical. In short, it refers to the supernatural in the great religious traditions, and it is through the supernatural that these traditional religions
offer a myth of rebirth. In the Christian faith, of course, it is through the resurrection of Jesus, that myth of rebirth that
all believers can share in the resurrection of Jesus
after this mortal life is over. When I use the phrase a myth of rebirth, I'm not referring to the truth
or falseness of this myth. It may be true and correlate with reality, or it may be simply a
figment of imagination. That's not the issue here. The issue is one of belief, that a myth is a belief
held by an individual or it may be shared by the entire society, that is so fundamental and
important to one's life that on it depends the
meaning of one's life, or indeed the meaning of the
existence of that society. And there is no myth more
important to any society, or we might say individual, than some form of a myth of rebirth, to satisfy this metaphysical question of attaining a satisfactory
relationship to eternity. Naturalistically, one's
relationship to eternity is that death is the permanent
extinction of the self. A myth of rebirth offers
a better alternative. The other great dimension
of all religious traditions is ethics, the conduct of
life here in this world. In The Wasteland, the first and
fourth sections of the poem, The Burial of the Dead, section one, and section four, Death by Water, take up the metaphysical issue of how to cope with the burial of the dead in a time without a myth of rebirth. And the other dimension, ethics, the conduct of life here and now, is the subject of Parts
Two, Three, and Five. These two dimensions,
metaphysics and ethics, interweave each section of the poem, but the main thrust of
sections one and four would be the issue of how to cope with the burial of the dead, and the main thrust of
Parts Two, Three, and Five, the Game of Chess, the Fire Sermon, and What the Thunder Said,
those sections mainly deal with trying to attain a
higher level of ethical conduct and thereby alleviating the
sufferings of the Wasteland. Can that happen in a time without belief? Before we leave the title page, we should note that the poem
was dedicated to Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro. That is, the greater
poet, the greater artist. There is a touch of
irony in that dedication. Eliot had every reason to
be grateful to Ezra Pound for helping him through
those formative years of his career as a poet,
helping him to get published, publishing Prufrock in 1915, and helping him above
all editing this poem, cutting out about half the poem and making it a much,
incomparably better poem through eliminating about half of it, as Ezra Pound did with
his ruthless scissors. Nonetheless, Ezra Pound
was not il miglior fabbro. Both Pound and Eliot knew
that this poem would displace Ezra Pound as the major
modern poet of the time, and Eliot himself would
ascend that throne. In fact, Pound sent a note
to Eliot when The Wasteland was published
saying,"Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies." Now as we get to the poem proper, the first thing I want
to do is say a few words about the title of section
one, the Burial of the Dead. That title comes from
the Anglican prayer book. If you go to a funeral
in an Anglican church or an Episcopal church, there is an order for
the burial of the dead in the Anglican prayer book
that the priest will follow. And the very first words that are uttered in the funeral service in an
Episcopal or Anglican church read as follows, the priest speaking, "I am the resurrection and
the life, sayth the Lord. "He that believeth on
me though he were dead "yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me shall never die." There's your myth of rebirth, the way in which Christians confront the issue of the burial of the dead. Now in The Wasteland, of course, that belief is not credible, and so we have to proceed in this poem with TS Eliot's way of handling
that issue, that problem. The opening lines of The Wasteland
are among the most famous in English poetry. They appear to be a
reply to Geoffrey Chaucer in Canterbury Tales, who famously began that magnificent work with a welcome to the springtime. "Upon that April with her shoures soote The droghte of March hath
perced to the roote." Which is to say when April,
with its sweet showers, has pierced the drought of March, when the flowers spring
up in the springtime, when the birds are making melody, then people long to go on pilgrimages, enjoying a beautiful ride
through the countryside in the springtime. TS Eliot famously rebuts that mood. Instead, he says, "April
is the cruelest month." Now, we might ask why April is cruel. I think we'd have to note
that in his personal life April was thought to be the
month when TS Eliot's soulmate, Jean Verdenal, was thought to have drowned in the Dardanelles campaign. It turned out later that it
could have happened perhaps on the first or second of May, but it also could have happened in April and was thought to have happened in April. The larger reason why
April is the cruelest month would obviously be because it is a time of the upsurge of desire, of sexuality, in all living things, including humankind. So, "April is the cruelest month," then, "breeding lilacs in the dead land, mixing memory and desire." Those are two forms of cruelty, because in Eliot's experience, memory is generally a memory
of a better life in the past. It is a memory of loss, such
as the loss of Jean Verdenal or the loss of childhood
and its innocence. I'll pit it against the
naturalistic bleakness of adult life. "Memory and desire," desire, of course, that
cannot be requited. A great hunger, I think,
dominates this poem as far as that theme is concerned. There is one other reason why
April is the cruelest month. For centuries in the past when people died in northern climates, they could not be buried
during the wintertime. The ground froze so hard that if you tried to dig a hole and, say, a swing a pick, the pick would bounce back at you as though you were trying
to chop into cast iron. So the dead would have to be
stacked up during the winter and then they might be
buried when the ground thaws in the springtime, perhaps in this month of April. Certainly that would be a reason why April is the cruelest month and it would tie in with the theme, the burial of the dead. Now as we proceed in this
opening passage of The Wasteland, we've touched on April
stirring memory and desire, forms of hunger that cannot be appeased, and therefore as, "memory and desire stirred
dull roots with spring rain," we look back with some
nostalgia on the winter which kept us warm, "covering
earth in forgetful snow," leaving memory and
particularly desire alone. "Feeding a little life with dried tubers," that is what winter did
for us to our advantage. Now those cruel unanswerable yearnings are awakened once again
with the turn of the year, the month of April. Now at this point, the opening voice in The Wasteland ceases. We remember that the original title, He Do the Police in Different Voices suggests that this poem initially was an exercise in style in multiple voices jumbled together, and in order to understand the poem, we have to disentangle the voices. It takes perhaps a trained ear or an educated eye to
do this with confidence, but I think it can be done plausibly, and here I think is where the next voice cuts into the poem. We could call that first initial voice the voice of a philosophical
meditating individual, an observer of the wasteland, and that voice, of course,
will come in and out of the poem throughout
the rest of the way. But at this point, the voice that intrudes is that of a woman, and scholars have identified her as a Princess Marie of Austria, and she is here experiencing
memory and desire, the memory of the time before the war when being a princess meant something, and she's looking back then
at a happier time in the past. During World War One, of course, the great dynasties of Europe collapsed. For that matter, the
Ottoman Empire collapsed, producing chaos that is
still going in our own time as a remnants of the Ottoman
Empire fall into civil war in places like Egypt and Syria, or go to war with each other. The voice of Princess Marie then, remembering with desire a
happier time in the past. "Summer surprised us," she says, "coming over the Starnbergersee." The Starnbergersee is a beautiful lake near Munich in Germany. You could see swans
swimming near the shore and across the far end of the lake, you could see the Alps
mountains, a gorgeous spectacle. "Summer surprised us coming
over the Starnbergersee, "with a shower of rain. "We stopped in the colonnade,
and went on into the sunlight, "into the Hofgarten, and drank coffee, and talked for an hour." Now this is a moment of human communion, and in the isolation that
affects Eliot's poetry, isolation that we saw in Prufrock or Portrait of a Lady and other poems we could point to, this is a moment that transcends
that feeling of loneliness and therefore, it is a
happier memory in the past. At this point, a voice breaks
in in a different language, someone speaking German. "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm'
aus Litauen, echt deutsch." I am not Russian, I am from Lithuania, I'm a genuine German. This jumble of voices from
different languages in the poem may be a reflection on
the Tower of Babel story in the book of Genesis, in the Bible, wherein originally all people
spoke the same language. Then when they built the Tower of Babel, God was displeased and
arranged for a break-up of that common language, so that people could no
longer have that common effort of building the tower. The theme of loneliness,
of course, is accentuated by this use of foreign
languages breaking in, French, German, Italian,
even ancient Sanskrit before the poem is over. People literally cannot
understand each other. There's one other element in
this use of foreign languages. TS Eliot wrote much of The Wasteland when he was a patient at a
sanitarium in Switzerland, trying to overcome his nervous breakdown. This was in the city of
Lausanne on Lake Geneva and there, TS Eliot would
have heard other patients from different parts of Europe
speaking different languages. It is likely that some
fragments from what he overheard turn up in this poem. Now if we ignore that interruption
in the German language, we can carry on with Princess Marie coming up with another memory of a beautiful time in her
childhood in this case. And here we have to use one of those terms that we might call jargon,
professional jargon, but I think this one we
do have to contend with, the use of the word epiphany. James Joyce made it a
secular term in his writing, but it goes back actually to sacred writs. When the three wise men
came across the desert led by the steadfast star in
the sky to the Christ child, and when they reached the Christ child, they had an epiphany, which is literally the experience of visitation with a god, the god in this case
would be the Christ child, and so we have the Feast of the Epiphany in the Christian calendar, marking that occasion
of the three wise men coming to the Christ child. James Joyce, as I say, secularized it, so that an epiphany is any
transcendent experience, elevating one above ordinary
life and its dreariness into a moment of ecstasy. Now that too is part of
the memory and desire, located in the past, a
memory of a beautiful time when Princess Marie was a princess, before the fall of these great dynasties, the Romanovs in Russia, the
Hohenzollerns in Prussia, the Hapsburgs in Austria, et cetera. And so we proceed then with
that epiphany of Princess Marie. "When we were children
staying at the archduke's, "my cousin's, he took me out on a sled "and I was frightened. "He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight, and down we went," ecstatically. Now, after the war, after
the collapse of the empires, there is no princess
or archduke any longer. Now instead we have this
meaningless routine. You might say it's one of those
motifs of the wheel turning in the individual life, a meaningless circuit of experience. "In the mountains there
you feel free," she says. "I read much of the night." She's an insomniac like
other Eliot characters, "and go south in the winter." We end that intrusion
into the original voice, that philosophical
meditative, melancholy voice that started the poem, and we go back to that voice at this point with a question that has
a religious reference. "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out
of this stony rubbish?" Now in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament as
Christians would call it, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, the prophet Isaiah, predicted
the coming of the Messiah as a root out of dry ground. Christians, of course,
think Jesus is the messiah. Is that root out of dry ground? The point of that image in Isaiah and in the life of Jesus is that a root does not
grow out of dry ground. It requires supernatural intervention. And spiritually, the
ground has never been dryer in TS Eliot's estimation than
here in the modern wasteland. So the question then can be put without any hope of a satisfactory answer. Where is this root out of dry ground? What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out
of this stony rubbish? Jesus is also called a
branch in the New Testament, so probably that's an
additional reference, what branches grow out
of this stony rubbish. The next phrase, son of man, is a decidedly biblical formulation. It's used in both the Hebrew
Bible and the Christian Bible. It's often used to refer to Jesus, who was both described as the son of man and the son of God. There is, of course, no
God in the wasteland, so there cannot be a son of God, but we can still use
the phrase son of man. Son of man, in reply to that question, what are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out
of this stony rubbish. "Son of man, you cannot know 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, the
dry stone no sound of water." There's only the wasteland in short, this naturalistic environment. "There is shadow under this red rock," the poet goes on to say, or that original and dominant voice actually in the wasteland goes on to say, "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," well, that's not so bad. It's more sinister, however. "Or your shadow at evening
rising to meet you." This after all is a section
on the burial of the dead. "I will show you fear
in a handful of dust." Well, we are told in
Genesis that God scooped up a handful of dust, puffed
on it, and made mankind, with, according to Genesis,
some spiritual dimension in his existence. That spiritual dimension
is very much in question, leaving fear in that handful
of dust in its place. The original philosophical
voice that we've heard twice now stops at this point and
a new voice breaks in in the German language. In fact, this is music. One of the greatest composers of all time, Richard Wagner is cited here, and Eliot is citing his great opera of erotic love, Tristan and Isolda. We know from Eliot's
biography, from his letters, that he and his friend Jean Verdenal attended this particular
opera, Tristan and Isolda, and for TS Eliot, it was
virtually a mystic experience, transported him to some transcendent realm above ordinary experience. So it shows up here in the poem, but what's important about that opera is that the two lovers experience memory and particularly desire,
which is never satisfied. So the two lovers here are portrayed as yearning to each other, but not being able to
arrange an encounter. The medieval story of Tristan and Isolda is that Tristan was a young
man living in Britain. Isolda was living in Ireland. Their two tribes were at war, but sort of like Romeo and Juliet, these two fell in love with each other, and we see them yearning
across the Irish Sea to be with each other. So as we look at these
lines then from Wagner, let me cite what Wagner wrote, "Frisch weht der Wind "Der Heimat zu "Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du?" Fresh blows the wind toward home. My Irish sweetheart, where are you? This fragment from Eliot's love opera is followed by another
episode of memory and desire. This could be something
close to Eliot's own life. I rather suspect it is. It is the hyacinth girl episode, and we begin with the girl speaking about a better time in the past. "You gave me hyacinths a year ago. They called me the hyacinth girl." And the man she is addressing replies, "Yes, when we came back late
from the Hyacinth garden, "your arms full and your hair wet, "I could not speak. "My eyes failed, I was
neither living nor dead, looking into the heart
of light, the silence." This was almost a mystic experience again, looking into the heart
of light, speechless, taken by the girl's beauty, when the hyacinth girl
was with him a year ago. We infer that that
relationship is gone now. We come back at this
point to Richard Wagner. We had the lover looking across the sea, Tristan looking toward Ireland
for his sweetheart Isolda. He's hoping a ship will
show up on the horizon bringing his sweetheart to England. But instead, as the opera goes on, the German reads,"Oed und leer das Meer," wide and empty the sea. There is no ship bringing my lover. Memory and desire, forms of
cruelty in this month of April. We proceed at this point with
the fortune-teller episode. "Madame Sosostris is a
fortune-teller, a famous clairvoyant. "She had a bad cold, nevertheless," perhaps she doesn't have
supernatural powers. Nonetheless, "she is known to
be the wisest woman in Europe "with a wicked pack of cards. "Here, she said, is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor." Well, this is the section
on the burial of the dead, and in Section 4, Death by Water, we will encounter that
drowned Phoenician Soldier. He's called Phlebas the Phoenician. Your card, your future. In truth, if you go to
have your future predicted, almost anyone could make the prediction you're going to die. You will be subject to
the burial of the dead or at least to drowning, as Phlebas the Phoenicians
was and Jean Verdenal, it was thought. We proceed at this point
after the reference to the drowned Phoenician Sailor. With a new myth of rebirth,
something from Shakespeare, it is not a Christian myth of rebirth, but it is something that shows up in Shakespeare's play The Tempest. And in it, the youth who was
washed ashore after the ship is wrecked in the storm
thinks his father is dead. The fairy Ariel sings to
him a song of consolation. "Yes, full fathom five thy father lies. He is drowned at the bottom of the sea." Turns out that's not so, but
at this point in the play we have that song and in the song, the myth of rebirth shows up in this line, "Those are pearls that were his eyes," that is, your father has been turned into something rich and strange. "Those are pearls that were his eyes. Of his bones is coral made." He's been transformed
into something beautiful under the sea, a myth
of rebirth as it were. Better certainly than the
naturalistic prospects in the wasteland can offer. We go on with the fortune-telling. "Here is Belladonna,
the Lady of the Rocks." Well, that formulation, the Lady, usually is a Christian reference. Our Lady of Mercy, Our
Lady of some city perhaps, Our Lady of Lourdes. When we have this formulation,
the Lady of the Rocks, capital L and capital R, well, the rocks in Eliot's work are a generic reference to the wasteland. It is a pile of rock and that's the best we can do for Our Lady in
this naturalistic setting. "Here is the man with three staves," that's one of the cards I held up in our last session from the
tarot deck, The Merchant. The man with three staves, he's looking out at sea,
looking at his ship, a tiny little figure out there of a ship, presumably carrying his
merchandise to make a profit. And here is the Wheel, another card. I consider that the single
most important symbol in all of Eliot's poetry, because it is the
fundamental design of nature, whether it is the way the atom functions with the electron, or the planets going around the Sun, or the great galaxies
whirling like a giant wheel in the cosmos, or even on our individual level, the circulation of the blood, all of which is subject to another wheel, the Wheel of Time, meaningless repetition of natural cycles. Here the Wheel, here
the one-eyed merchant, which will turn into the Jack
in our modern playing cards, and this card which is blank. Well, if that card comes up
when you want your fortune told, you are in a very bad way. "I do not find The Hanged Man." That's an extremely important
missing card from the deck, the Hanged Man, as I
mentioned in our last session, literally would refer
to one of these bodies, such as were found in
the peat bogs of Denmark, preserved by the peat, a leathery sort of a cadaver
with a rope around its neck. A number of those have been discovered from thousands of years ago, and the inference is that these
were sacrificial scapegoats, killed to provide a
benefit for the society. Perhaps to extend life for the society, to appease the gods,
whatever was necessary. In the Western heritage, of course, Jesus is the Hanged Man, a man put to death so as to provide life for his believers and followers. "I do not find The Hanged Man," there is no messiah, no
savior in the wasteland. That card is missing. "Fear death by water." Again, anticipating Part IV of this poem. We then have a quotation
from Dante's Inferno. "I see crowds of people
walking in a ring." TS Eliot said that Dante and
Shakespeare divide the world. There is no third. I can't say I would agree with that, but for Eliot, this
was how much he revered these two writers whom
he cites frequently. This quotation from Dante, "I see crowds of people
walking in a ring," is when Dante first peeped
over the edge of Hell, which is portrayed in the Divine Comedy as a gigantic pit funneling
down through the earth, and with terraces or circles
cut into the edge of the pits, and people are being punished
on these various ledges for the sins they committed
in their mortal lifetime. So we have the wheel image then applied, people going around in
that circular motion for ever and ever in Hell. We now proceed toward the end of the fortune-teller episode. "Thank you. If you see dear Miss Equitone," presumably the fortune-teller
Madame Sosostris is speaking to her client, "tell her I'll bring
the horoscope myself," to predict the future in that fashion. We turn now as we end Part I of this poem, the Burial of the Dead, we turn back to that original philosophical melancholy voice, addressing the city of
London in much the same way that Baudelaire addressed
the city of Paris, back around the 1850s. "Unreal City," he says, something I think he got from Baudelaire, "under the brown fog of a winter dawn." We remember the fog as
a motif of isolation, back in Prufrock, when he
stared at the fog out the window instead of attending to
the people at the party. "A crowd flowed over
London Bridge, so many. I had not thought death
had undone so many." That's another line from Dante's Inferno. He was astonished at how many people were crowded into these
ledges, these circles of hell. And for TS Eliot, not
believing in the supernatural, the city of London will
do very nicely as a Hell for our time. "Sighs, short and frequent, were exhaled. Each man fixed his eyes before his feet." This, of course, is a motif of loneliness. People crowded together
in the great metropolises of the 20th century, but
never have people been more isolated from each other spiritually. We proceed at the end of Part
I, the Burial of the Dead, with three kinds of
naturalistic resurrection. And these three modes of resurrection are presented in the style
of Dante's Divine Comedy. In the Divine Comedy, Dante
repeatedly meets people in the next world that
he knew in this world and when he meets them, he generally expresses surprise, "What are you doing here?" The sinner then will tell his story why he has been punished in Hell. Dante will record it as part of his poem. Now something like that happens as we end the Burial of the Dead. "There I saw one I knew and
stopped him, crying, Stetson! You who were with me
in the ships at Mylae." Mylae was an ancient sea battle. It does suggests in the
Wasteland World War One and the greatest sea battle of that war, the Battle of Jutland,
when the German Navy and the British Navy collided. They were both very powerful fleets, and after all the destruction, the slaughter, the ships going down, it ended basically in a draw. Both fleets retired to their
home base to lick their wounds. So, "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?" Well, that's one way to raise the dead. If that corpse underground
suffices to feed some flowers, when they bloom, we could say
that is the return of the dead in some fashion. It's not very satisfactory
really, but it will have to do. There is no real resurrection of the dead. We proceed to the second kind
of resurrecting the dead. "Has a certain frost disturbed its bed?" That is, the bed of that
corpse you planted last year. Now, in northern countries once again, the ground can freeze so hard, so solid, that it can crack. That does happen sometimes,
and when the ground cracks, well, something that's
buried under the surface might get pushed to the surface. Perhaps that corpse might reappear. That would be resurrection of
the dead, naturalistically. We proceed to the last
of these three kinds of naturalistic
resolutions to the problem, the burial of the dead. "Keep the dog far hence,
that's friend to men, "or with his nails,
he'll dig it up again." Well, if the dog were to
dig up its master's body, I suppose we could say that's
a kind of resurrection. It will have to do. It's all we have. We have no myth of
rebirth in The Wasteland. Part I ends with a line from Baudelaire, the flowers of evil, Fleurs du Mal. "You, hypocrite lecteur! Mon semblable, mon frere!" You, hypocrite reader,
my double, my brother. Baudelaire addressed his reader that way at the outset of his great set of poems, The Flowers of Evil. So we'll end our look at Part
I, the Burial of the Dead, with that line of Baudelaire, and in our next session,
we'll take up Part II, A Game of Chess.
