Summary
This section takes its title from two plays by the early 17th-century
playwright Thomas Middleton, in one of which the moves in a game
of chess denote stages in a seduction. This section focuses on two
opposing scenes, one of high society and one of the lower classes.
The first half of the section portrays a wealthy, highly groomed
woman surrounded by exquisite furnishings. As she waits for a lover,
her neurotic thoughts become frantic, meaningless cries. Her day
culminates with plans for an excursion and a game of chess. The
second part of this section shifts to a London barroom, where two
women discuss a third woman. Between the bartender’s repeated calls
of “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” (the bar is closing for the night)
one of the women recounts a conversation with their friend Lil,
whose husband has just been discharged from the army. She has chided
Lil over her failure to get herself some false teeth, telling her
that her husband will seek out the company of other women if she
doesn’t improve her appearance. Lil claims that the cause of her
ravaged looks is the medication she took to induce an abortion;
having nearly died giving birth to her fifth child, she had refused
to have another, but her husband “won’t leave [her] alone.” The
women leave the bar to a chorus of “good night(s)” reminiscent of
Ophelia’s farewell speech in Hamlet.
Form
The first part of the section is largely in unrhymed iambic
pentameter lines, or blank verse. As the section proceeds, the lines
become increasingly irregular in length and meter, giving the feeling
of disintegration, of things falling apart. As the woman of the
first half begins to give voice to her paranoid thoughts, things
do fall apart, at least formally: We read lines of dialogue, then
a snippet from a nonsense song. The last four lines of the first
half rhyme, although they are irregular in meter, suggesting at
least a partial return to stability.
The second half of the section is a dialogue interrupted
by the barman’s refrain. Rather than following an organized structure
of rhyme and meter, this section constitutes a loose series of phrases
connected by “I said(s)” and “she said(s).” This is perhaps the
most poetically experimental section of the entire poem. Eliot is writing
in a lower-class vernacular here that resists poetic treatment.
This section refutes the prevalent claim that iambic pentameter
mirrors normal English speech patterns: Line length and stresses
are consistently irregular. Yet the section sounds like poetry:
the repeated use of “I said” and the grounding provided by the barman’s
chorus allow the woman’s speech to flow elegantly, despite her rough
phrasing and the coarse content of her story.
Commentary
The two women of this section of the poem represent the
two sides of modern sexuality: while one side of this sexuality
is a dry, barren interchange inseparable from neurosis and self-destruction,
the other side of this sexuality is a rampant fecundity associated
with a lack of culture and rapid aging. The first woman is associated by
allusion with Cleopatra, Dido, and even Keats’s Lamia, by virtue
of the lushness of language surrounding her (although Eliot would
never have acknowledged Keats as an influence). She is a frustrated,
overly emotional but not terribly intellectual figure, oddly sinister,
surrounded by “strange synthetic perfumes” and smoking candles.
She can be seen as a counterpart to the title character of Eliot’s
earlier “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with whom she shares
both a physical setting and a profound sense of isolation. Her association
with Dido and Cleopatra, two women who committed suicide out of
frustrated love, suggests her fundamental irrationality. Unlike
the two queens of myth, however, this woman will never become a
cultural touchstone. Her despair is pathetic, rather than moving,
as she demands that her lover stay with her and tell her his thoughts.
The lover, who seems to be associated with the narrator of this
part of the poem, can think only of drowning (again, in a reference
to The Tempest) and rats among dead men’s bones.
The woman is explicitly compared to Philomela, a character out of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses who is raped by her brother-in-law the
king, who then cuts her tongue out to keep her quiet. She manages
to tell her sister, who helps her avenge herself by murdering the
king’s son and feeding him to the king. The sisters are then changed
into birds, Philomela into a nightingale. This comparison suggests
something essentially disappointing about the woman, that she is
unable to communicate her interior self to the world. The woman
and her surroundings, although aesthetically pleasing, are ultimately
sterile and meaningless, as suggested by the nonsense song that she
sings (which manages to debase even Shakespeare).
The second scene in this section further diminishes the
possibility that sex can bring regeneration—either cultural or personal.
This section is remarkably free of the cultural allusions that dominate
the rest of the poem; instead, it relies on vernacular speech to
make its point. Notice that Eliot is using a British vernacular: By
this point he had moved to England permanently and had become a
confirmed Anglophile. Although Eliot is able to produce startlingly
beautiful poetry from the rough speech of the women in the bar,
he nevertheless presents their conversation as further reason for
pessimism. Their friend Lil has done everything the right way—married,
supported her soldier husband, borne children—yet she is being punished
by her body. Interestingly, this section ends with a line echoing
Ophelia’s suicide speech in Hamlet; this links
Lil to the woman in the first section of the poem, who has also
been compared to famous female suicides. The comparison between
the two is not meant to suggest equality between them or to propose
that the first woman’s exaggerated sense of high culture is in any
way equivalent to the second woman’s lack of it; rather, Eliot means
to suggest that neither woman’s form of sexuality is regenerative.
