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Water
In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot’s characters wait for water to quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of standing water. Although water has the regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from The Waste Land. Traditionally, water can imply baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus Christ, and Eliot draws upon these traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides solace, and water brings relief elsewhere in The Waste Land and in “Little Gidding,” the fourth part of Four Quartets. Prufrock hears the seductive calls of mermaids as he walks along the shore in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but, like Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey (ca.
Read more about the seduction of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey.
The Fisher King
The Fisher King is the central character in The Waste Land. While writing his long poem, Eliot drew on From Ritual to Romance, a
Music and Singing
Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama, was in decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops. Eliot splices nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, as the title, implies a song, with various lines repeated as refrains. That poem ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowning—a scene that echoes Odysseus’s interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another way in which Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions. Elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics as a kind of chorus, seconding and echoing the action of the poem, much as the chorus functions in Greek tragedies.
