Summary
The title of this, the longest section of The
Waste Land, is taken from a sermon given by Buddha in which
he encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolized
by fire) and seek freedom from earthly things. A turn away from
the earthly does indeed take place in this section, as a series
of increasingly debased sexual encounters concludes with a river-song
and a religious incantation. The section opens with a desolate riverside
scene: Rats and garbage surround the speaker, who is fishing and
“musing on the king my brother’s wreck.” The river-song begins in
this section, with the refrain from Spenser’s Prothalamion:
“Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.” A snippet from a
vulgar soldier’s ballad follows, then a reference back to Philomela
(see the previous section). The speaker is then propositioned by
Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris’s tarot
pack. Eugenides invites the speaker to go with him to a hotel known
as a meeting place for homosexual trysts.
The speaker then proclaims himself to be Tiresias, a figure
from classical mythology who has both male and female features (“Old
man with wrinkled female breasts”) and is blind but can “see” into
the future. Tiresias/the speaker observes a young typist, at home
for tea, who awaits her lover, a dull and slightly arrogant clerk.
The woman allows the clerk to have his way with her, and he leaves
victorious. Tiresias, who has “foresuffered all,” watches the whole
thing. After her lover’s departure, the typist thinks only that
she’s glad the encounter is done and over.
A brief interlude begins the river-song in earnest. First,
a fisherman’s bar is described, then a beautiful church interior,
then the Thames itself. These are among the few moments of tranquility
in the poem, and they seem to represent some sort of simpler alternative.
The Thames-daughters, borrowed from Spenser’s poem, chime in with
a nonsense chorus (“Weialala leia / Wallala leialala”). The scene
shifts again, to Queen Elizabeth I in an amorous encounter with
the Earl of Leicester. The queen seems unmoved by her lover’s declarations,
and she thinks only of her “people humble people who expect / Nothing.”
The section then comes to an abrupt end with a few lines from St.
Augustine’s Confessions and a vague reference to
the Buddha’s Fire Sermon (“burning”).
Form
This section of The Waste Land is notable
for its inclusion of popular poetic forms, particularly musical
ones. The more plot-driven sections are in Eliot’s usual assortment
of various line lengths, rhymed at random. “The Fire Sermon,” however,
also includes bits of many musical pieces, including Spenser’s wedding
song (which becomes the song of the Thames-daughters), a soldier’s
ballad, a nightingale’s chirps, a song from Oliver Goldsmith’s The
Vicar of Wakefield, and a mandolin tune (which has no words
but is echoed in “a clatter and a chatter from within”). The use
of such “low” forms cuts both ways here: In one sense, it provides
a critical commentary on the episodes described, the cheap sexual
encounters shaped by popular culture (the gramophone, the men’s
hotel). But Eliot also uses these bits and pieces to create high
art, and some of the fragments he uses (the lines from Spenser in
particular) are themselves taken from more exalted forms. In the
case of the Prothalamion, in fact, Eliot is placing
himself within a tradition stretching back to ancient Greece (classically,
“prothalamion” is a generic term for a poem-like song written for
a wedding). Again this provides an ironic contrast to the debased
goings-on but also provides another form of connection and commentary. Another
such reference, generating both ironic distance and proximate parallels,
is the inclusion of Elizabeth I: The liaison between Elizabeth and
Leicester is traditionally romanticized, and, thus, the reference
seems to clash with the otherwise sordid nature of this section.
However, Eliot depicts Elizabeth—and Spenser, for that matter—as
a mere fragment, stripped of noble connotations and made to represent
just one more piece of cultural rubbish. Again, this is not meant
to be a democratizing move but a nihilistic one: Romance is dead.
Commentary
The opening two stanzas of this section describe the ultimate
“Waste Land” as Eliot sees it. The wasteland is cold, dry, and barren,
covered in garbage. Unlike the desert, which at least burns with
heat, this place is static, save for a few scurrying rats. Even
the river, normally a symbol of renewal, has been reduced to a “dull
canal.” The ugliness stands in implicit contrast to the “Sweet Thames”
of Spenser’s time. The most significant image in these lines, though,
is the rat. Like the crabs in Prufrock, rats are
scavengers, taking what they can from the refuse of higher-order
creatures. The rat could be said to provide a model for Eliot’s
poetic process: Like the rat, Eliot takes what he can from earlier,
grander generations and uses the bits and pieces to sustain (poetic) life.
Somehow this is preferable to the more coherent but vulgar existence
of the contemporary world, here represented by the sound of horns
and motors in the distance, intimating a sexual liaison.
The actual sexual encounters that take place in this section
of the poem are infinitely unfruitful. Eugenides proposes a homosexual
tryst, which by its very nature thwarts fertility. The impossibility
of regeneration by such means is symbolized by the currants in his
pocket—the desiccated, deadened version of what were once plump,
fertile fruits. The typist and her lover are equally barren in their
way, even though reproduction is at least theoretically possible
for the two. Living in so impoverished a manner that she does not
even own a bed, the typist is certainly not interested in a family.
Elizabeth and Leicester are perhaps the most interesting of the three
couples, however. For political reasons, Elizabeth was required
to represent herself as constantly available for marriage (to royalty
from countries with whom England may have wanted an alliance); out
of this need came the myth of the “Virgin Queen.” This can be read
as the opposite of the Fisher King legend: To protect the vitality
of the land, Elizabeth had to compromise her own sexuality; whereas
in the Fisher King story, the renewal of the land comes with the
renewal of the Fisher King’s sexual potency. Her tryst with Leicester,
therefore, is a consummation that is simultaneously denied, an event
that never happened. The twisted logic underlying Elizabeth’s public
sexuality, or lack thereof, mirrors and distorts the Fisher King plot
and further questions the possibility for renewal, especially through
sexuality, in the modern world.
