OBLIQUE MODERNIST POETRY (2) – “The Waste Land”: Close Text Analysis to

Deduce Anagogic Composition Principles

I.THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

After declaring, in the previous lecture, that the rambling/shell-shock syndrome gives the
particularity of the oblique modernist poetry voice, it is important to explore the
towering, anagogic artistry of “The Waste Land”, which is capable of containing chaos
(the chaos caused by the destructive, benumbing, bereaving war). The first three
anagogical principles of composition in the paradigmatic modernist poem “The Waste
Land” are:
 the dramatic monologue voice
 discontinuity – as in non-figurative art collages
 intertextuality

Not only does T.S. Eliot borrow from Jules Laforgue the clownish and elitist dramatic
monologue mask to speak obliquely from, but also, as could be seen in the last words of
‘The Burial of the Dead’, he borrows more obviously from other internationally
representative voices. “You hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable – mon frère” are the
opening words of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857), lifted from the introductory
poem titled “To the Reader”. These words, which indict and contaminate the reader, do
not only announce the connection of “The Waste Land” to guilt, but they also indicate the
two further revolutionary compositional principles, discontinuity and intertextuality:
discontinuity, since the dash transcribes/connotes interruption and the utterance
contains the breath of the speaker and intertextuality – the need to quote another writer’s
text as a comment inside one’s own text. 1

The retrospective application of these three compositional/anagogic principles to ‘The

Burial of the Dead’ shows:

(a)that all the dramatic monologue voices in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ convey/emphasize
the theme of evil and, moreover, configure it into a strong meaningful subtext subsumed
to the theme of evil (as had been already announced by the title of the first part and the
general epigraph of the poem). The potentially happy feminine reminiscence scenes, with
Marie in famous metropolitan settings (from Munich: the Hofgarten, the Starnbergersee) and
with the girl in the hyacinth garden, end unhappily, in fear and disorientation, being connected
to the cursed war started by Germany; the prophetic voice (which conflates Ezekiel’s, the
1
Intertextuality shall be explored in more detail while proceeding with the lecture(s), but for the moment
suffice it to say that the comment is either one made by the quoting text (also called the echo by André
Topia 1984), or a comment about the quoted text (also called by Topia the matrix), or both. This is in
keeping with the explanation in the “Glossary” to British Literature in the Twentieth Century (BLTC) about
“the sustained dialogue of literary authors and texts with one another as the pre-requisite of meaningful
literary communication and its processes” (Zirra 249).

1
Ecclesiastes’ and Isaiah’s voices) is disturbing with the “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”; the Wagner opera transcriptions
from Tristan and Isolde announce the Liebestode theme and the devastation of the sea with the
final words “Öd’ und leer das Meer”; Madame Sosostris’s voice, the voice of petty
modern/urban prophecy, announces evil, while its high-mimetic or divine prophetic words are
belittled by the ridiculous, low-mimetic “bad cold”; the postwar reminiscences about the City
of London make it unreal, like a hell inhabited by ghostly nine to five workers.2

IT IS WORTH NOTING THAT THE TRUNCATED DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES IN ‘THE

BURIAL OF THE DEAD’ ARE ORDERED NOT ONLY BY THE FACT THAT THEY
BELONG TO THE SAME SEMANTIC FIELD OF DEATH/SUFFERANCE SEMANTIC
FIELD (see the common denominator of the elements in the enumeration above) BUT THEY
ARE FURTHER ORDERED BECAUSE THEY ARE GATHERED, AT THE BEGINNING
OF THE FIRST PART, BY THE PAINFUL COLLOCATION OF MEMORY AND DESIRE
(since April is recorded as “mixing/Memory and desire, stirring dull roots/With a shower of
rain” at the beginning of the poem), AND BECAUSE THEY ARE GATHERED, AT THE
END OF THE PART, UNDER THE UMBRELLA OF WAR (the narrating voice’s encounter
with Stetson, an English soldier’s name, is assimilated to a miles (soldier) in the ships at
Mylae, a famous, prototypical battle of antiquity; there is an analogy in the modern war
reminiscence with the Punic war and the Roman naval victory of 260, which is assimilated to
the imperial battles of the First World War). In this way, we learn indirectly why the pre-war
earth (even capital letter, for the whole planet!) is covered in forgetful snow. The trauma of
war which all the voices express submerges memory and desire in forgetfulness; the
forgetfulness of a humanity which had experienced a world war resembled the forgetfulness
and neurotic repetition of pain which Freud announced. Or else, the poem confines post-war
humanity to the Jungian shadow archetype, submerging it in an analytical psychology depth
and compelling it to confront this archetype collectively. This may well be the source for the
next anagogical feature, discontinuity as the difficulty of reminiscing or reassembling desire.
THIS IS LIKE A PICTURE FRAME WHICH ‘ THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD’
ESTABLISHES.

(b) DISCONTINUITY Since the reader must identify with the dramatic monologue speaker,
2
When you learn for the exam, one mnemonic device may well be the collocation, with different meanings
and different literary values, of the numerals “nine” and “five” in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ and in “Dulce et
Decorum Est”!

2
his task is to assimilate (find the common denominator of) the older (prewar), and the newer
(postwar) reminiscences. Reading “The Waste Land” means grappling with discontinuity, with
the subliminal associations that dramatize by free association the deep psyche of speaking
voices). Reading means engaging with gaps and creating links, by interpretation.3
Discontinuity/free association thus becomes an overriding compositional principle of
anagogic modernism.

© INTERTEXTUALITY The opening words of the poem rewrite with a difference the
beginning of Chaucer’s Caterbury Tales:
When April’s gentle rains have pierced the drought
Of March right to the root, and bathed each sprout
Through every vein with liquid of such power
It brings forth the engendering of the flower; There is,
contamination with evil in the general Waste Land narrator’s voice which opens the poem with
the words “April is the cruelest month”; this sets the tone of the poem and generates an
undercurrent which compensates for the formerly noticed syntactic discontinuities of the
individual dramatic monologuists’ voices. Because “April is the cruelest month” rephrases and
reminisces with a significant difference the beginning of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it is an
intertextual announcement about spring in reverse in “The Waste Land”: the month of spring
ordinarily known as one which gratifies us, even in cities, but which has turned spring into yet
another opponent for the shell-shocked postwar humanity. 4 The rephrasing prompts the
reading rule for understanding “The Waste Land” as an exploration – with dramatic, ironic,
revolutionary anagogical devices – of the new postwar world laid waste. The possibility of
ordering the unbearable modern chaos is obliquely supported by very carefully orchestrated
intertextual comments and ineffable analogies buried beyond the surface of the text, while the
fundamental discontinuity of the poem is sustained by the multiple truncated dramatic
monologue voices. The intertextual comments, ineffable analogies and truncated
dramatic monologues place side by side several instances of new chaos with old patterns
of order. The old patterns of order end up showing how present memory and desire
3
The tendency to find analogies by jumping over gaps substitutes, as an anagogical reading rule, the
logical/orderly syntactic associations which used to dominate traditional writing.
4
The turning upside down of the happy effects of spring in nature represents an instance of demonic
modulation of apocalyptic (i.e. gratifying) imagery, according to Northrop Frye’s Third Essay, the myth-
criticism essay, in the Anatomy of Criticism.

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make a big difference when compared to the way memory and desire ordered the world
in the past.

There are new, local themes which emerge from the articulation of voices, discontinuities and
intertextualities will be seen both to express and to contain the themes of modern chaos
(death, forgetfulness, bereavement which are the evil consequences of war and evil).5 It is
interesting to see how they develop in the other parts of “The Waste Land” and what “The
Waste Land” cryptogram hides/promises.

II. ‘A GAME OF CHESS’

Of the set of compositional principles already mentioned, ‘A Game of Chess’ foregrounds
INTERTEXTUALITY, in so far as the title alludes to an Elizabethan play, A Game of Chess
by Thomas Middleton, and in so far as it continues by rewriting a scene from Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra (Act II, Scene ii, as the “Notes to the Waste Land” added by T.S. Eliot
himself show). The matrix scene, set in the boudoir of the play’s famous feminine protagonist,
is intertextually distorted (since “it echoes ironically Enobarbus’s speech”, as the Norton
annotator shows on p. 2298) yet it serves as the source for producing some of the poem’s
modern themes. The decorations of the boudoir walls, with the rape of Philomel, are used as
an ancient source for the modern theme of rape, one of the forms of modern promiscuous,
sterile, disquieting sexuality. This theme harks back firstly to the title of the part, which
alludes not only to one, but to two plays by Middleton, and it introduces the theme of sexual
corruption (seduction) mediated by a feminine go-between; secondly, it alludes to the
disturbing love scenes already encountered in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ and which featured
neurotic feminine voices reminiscing about prewar urban life and the hyacinth garden after
the war; thirdly, threatening femininity and sex connects in a collage the three discontinuous
chunks which ‘A Game of Chess’ consists in: the (Elizabethan) boudoir description; the
depressing (because loveless, even inimical) domestic exchange between a neurotic woman
and her husband 6; the talk between two women in a pub about a third woman’s loveless
marriage and the other depressing domestic life whose protagonists are the husband, a war
veteran, the wife Lil, who is a ruin, and the hypocritical feminine friend of the couple who
ends up replacing the undesirable wife in the husband’s bed. There is something evil,
sickening in the richly decorated boudoir (which is infected by the excruciating rape of
Philomel depicted over the mantelpiece); it is akin to the evil background of the loveless
scenes that follow.
5
In the printed course, the end result of the articulation which requires that the voices, discontinuities and
intertextualities that foreground death, forgetfulness and bereavement be regarded as elements of a
meaningful yet ineffable configuration has been called A CRYPTOGRAM (a cryptogram encrypts
according to its own local rules a series of textual elements, but has everything that is required for decoding
its rules of the game).

6
The loveless scene may well be the rewriting of a Victorian poem, Tennyson’s “Godiva”.

4
 In addition to having already been annunciated in the theme of Liebestod with Wagner’s opera
Tristan and Isolde, the same theme will close ‘A Game of Chess’ with an intertextual
reminiscence of Ophelia. The echo of the matrix serves to intensify the sense of love in crisis
which pervades “The Waste Land”. ‘A GAME OF CHESS’ ADDS THE THEME OF
DEFILED LOVE TO ‘THE WASTE LAND’ THROUGH THE ELIZABETHAN
INTERTEXT.

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

“What is that noise?”

The wind under the door.

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What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?”

I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?”
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

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 III. ‘THE FIRE SERMON’

‘The Fire Sermon’, Part III, returns to the religious theme (already announced in the title
of Part I) and grafts it upon the literary allusions, once the reader’s attention has been
called to the intertextual articulation rule. The return to the religious theme is also one
with a difference, since it is the Buddha’s Oriental religious sermon against the fires of
lust that is alluded to, rather than death, whose centrality in the Western religious scenario
of Christianity is a distinctive mark. With the allusion to the fires of lust, Part III of “The
Waste Land” is also a sequel to the defiling love theme/defiled love theme. Critics have
justly regarded this part of Eliot’s epic as central, since it contains the generalization of
defiling love in the Tiresias scene, a scene set in hell. By analogy, this means that the
setting in hell, the descent ad inferos, is the core of the poem, and the culmination of the
[musical/vertical/overall] theme already announced in the poem’s first part, with its title.
III. The Fire Sermon

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses 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 ends
Or 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 hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

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Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

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.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

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The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

“This music crept by me upon the waters”

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats

Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester

Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream

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 The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

“Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”

“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’
I made no comment. What should I resent?”

“On Margate Sands.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

The close text analysis reveals numerous repetitions of previously encountered

themes. They become another anagogical rule which Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
resorts to
 the musical structuring of themes with variations in the three-fold sonata
form: exposition, development, recapitulation
After noticing that the themes with variations are articulated by a kind of relay race
which leads from one variation to the next and from one configured theme to the
next, it is important to discover the Sonata form of “The Waste Land” as a literary
epic (whose ambition is to contain all the important texts and cultural segments in it
and make them relevant for the present by articulating them conclusively) that
borrows the compositional economy/form of music.

In ‘The Burial of the Dead’, the sonata form knits together the theme of memory
which connects the prewar with the postwar reminiscences of stifled desire and
develops the theme of death announced in the title; ‘A Game of Chess’ combines and
develops the theme of defiled love by illustrating it in three episodes, one from the
past, two from the postwar present; according to the Sonata form, ‘The Fire Sermon’
develops defiled love INTERTEXTUALLY in several ways: by the longer ironic

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quotation/echo of Spenser’s Prothalamion wedding song (with the refrain “Sweet
Thames run softly, till I end my song” applied to the images of promiscuous love
scenes on the Thames in war time); by associating in a gruesome way the princely,
innocent figures who “feared death by water” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and
embodied young love with the image of the rat dragging its slimy belly on the bank.
The latter is also an image INTRATEXTUALLY CONNECTED, as a sequel to the
male voice silently musing instead of answering the hysterical woman :“I think we
are in rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones” (in ‘A Game of Chess’).
Death, sterile, promiscuous love, intertextual reminiscences that collocate the
present with the past and with the overriding theme of prophecy converge in the
episode featuring Tiresias – which has been justly interpreted as the climactic scene
(the core) of “The Waste Land”, where all the themes and all the techniques are
merged. The sterile (wasted) love of Elizabeth I and Leicester, set on the Thames, is
a development of the theme announced as early as the tableaux with Marie and the
hyacinth girl in ‘The Burial of the Dead’, and it is continued by the voice of the girl
undone in Richmond and Kew and on Margate Sands: she “can connect/ Nothing
with nothing”: the finality of the word “nothing” in this context echoes the lines at
the beginning of the poem, in the hyacinth girl’s voice, “Yet when we came back,
late, from the Hyacinth garden….I could not/ Speak, and my eyes failed, I was
neither/ Living nor dead, and I knew nothing…”
IV. ‘Death by Water’
This part gives the objective correlative (or formula of the entire poem,
creating the cryptogram of its emotion). It moves to the metatextual level - from
the intertextual one (since the raw material of the poem is the already seen
intertext of cultural allusions: “The Waste Land” is “a literary echo-chamber”, cf.
Dame Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot) and from the intratextual evocation
of the poem’s first title (I. ‘The Burial of the Dead’). The movement of the poem
as a whole is summed up and analytically exhibited in an emblem: the mise-en-abîme
of the fourth part “Death by Water” represents a metatextual (critical/self-reflexive review
of the poem’s movements).
 THE FIRST METATEXTUAL INDICATION IS DUE TO THE COMMON
DENOMINATOR, DEATH, OF THE TWO TITLES (I. ‘The Burial of the Dead’//IV.
‘Death by Water’)
 THE SECOND METATEXTUAL INDICATION IS A MERGER WHICH
EXPLAINS THE PROGRESS OF THE POEM FROM ONE THEME TO
ANOTHER: the theme enunciated at the beginning of the poem (“mixing memory
and desire”) is evoked and explicitly linked to the threshold of death (l. 312-315); the
deep sea swell (l.313) connects with “the whirlpool” (in line 318) in addition to
rhyming with “fell”, in line 316; death becomes the explicit subject of prophecy,
which echoes at the same time Sibyl’s speech of the poem’s epigraph in Greek, the

11
 old prophecy of the Ecclesiastes and the crooked prophecies made by the modern
Sibyl, Madame Sosostris, ironically looked down upon in the poem’s part one).
 THE THIRD METATEXTUAL INDICATION IS ONE ABOUT THE
ENGLISH/ELIZABETHAN HUB OF THE POEM. The allusions in the second
tercet work intertextually, referring to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (l. 316), making
the reader aware of the local, British relevance of the scraps of Shakespearean
memory handled (managed?) by the poem .
The apparently mildly lyrical fourth part, ‘Death by Water’, is also an architextual
indicator about the kinds of discourse which keep the epic thread in motion.
 chunks of life stories are mysteriously concentrated in the poem’s bunch of
proper names (Phlebas the Phoenician sailor’s and the story of a Prince who
reminisces about the King, his father and is the Prince Charming, Ferdinand, in
The Tempest (the first and second tercets configure a narrative skeleton, with
the individual broken stories just as pegs on which to hand discursive
fragments)
 gnomic/aphoristic discourse which merges philosophical/metaphysical/archetypal
ideas (about youth and age, life and death) in an underlying gnomic, sermonic
 religious discourse that merges the Old Testament prophecies with the New
Testament sermonic
IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. ‘What the Thunder Said’

The expectation raised by the title: a voice from above conveying a message to
humanity. One of Eliot’s Notes indicates three new themes at the beginning of this
part: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (in an initiatory
journey, the pathos/sparagmos moment, the greatest challenge to the quester), the
present decay of eastern Europe.
Yet, in the order of the collage fragments: 1)Humanity on the battle-field – soldiers’
deadly march as in “Dulce et Decorum Est” – in a desert with no water (a sequel to

12
the prophetic Son of Man voice in ‘The Burial of the Dead’); 2) or perhaps the
rambling of someone near death and hallucinating, because of the lack of water =
the approach to the Chapel Perilous 3) the road to Emmaus 4) the present decay of
eastern Europe (Jerusalem Athens Alexandria) and of the West, Vienna, London =
another battlefield scene. NOTICE HOW THE INTERTEXTUAL PAST IS NOW IN
THE FOREGROUND/NOW IN THE BACKGROUND OF THE IMPLIED
COMPARISON WITH THE PRESENT, AND VICEVERSA: THE SAME HOLDS TO
FOR THE PRESENT BY COMPARISON TO THE PAST IN THE INTERTEXT.

The coda/recapitulation/cadenza sonora of fragments shored against the ruins

The myth criticism and archetypal interpretation brings to the fore the
poem’s epic dimension because of the collective disruption of the mythical
metanarratives by the war’s post-traumatic (or shell-shock syndrome) which
delivers modern humanity in the hands of the Jungian shadow archetype.

The poem’s last part oscillates between the Chapel Perilous episode (the sparagmos
phase of romance and initiatory stories) as presented by Jessie Weston’s book From
Ritual to Romance, on the one hand, and the Biblical Journey to Emaus. The fifth
part also evokes the legend of the Fisher King 7 whose sinful predicament (tragic
flaw, like Oedipus’s) puts a curse on his lands and people, also.

The above analyses prove that there is enough logical accountability (cohesion
rather than coherence) in the subtext of “The Waste Land”, which makes of this
poem an epic and an object of wonderment, since, as shown at the beginning, it
manages to pour chaos in an enduring artistic form. Consequently, it is one of the
“literary wonders” of the modernist world.

7
THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY: In Arthurian legend the Fisher King, or the Wounded King, is the last in a long line charged
with keeping the Holy Grail. Versions of this story vary widely, but he is always wounded in the legs or groin and incapable of
moving on his own. In the Fisher King legends, he becomes impotent and unable to perform his task himself, and he also
becomes unable to father or support a next generation to carry on after his death. His kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence
affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren wasteland. All he is able to do is fish in the river near his
castle, Corbenic, and wait for someone who might be able to heal him. Healing involves the expectation of the use of magic.
Knights travel from many lands to heal the Fisher King, but only the chosen can accomplish the feat. This isPercival in earlier
stories; in later versions, he is joined by Galahad and Bors.

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