The Waste Land: Motifs

Classical Myth

References to Classical myth appear at several points in The Waste Land, and in most cases these references reaffirm the poem’s pessimistic outlook, particularly as it relates to sexuality. The poem begins with an epigraph that Eliot takes from the Satyricon by the Roman novelist Petronius. The epigraph features the Cumaean Sibyl, an oracle who appears in several works from Classical antiquity. According to the tradition, Apollo granted the Sibyl of Cumae one wish. She wished for an extraordinarily long life, but she didn’t ask to remain eternally youthful. Thus, as she grows increasingly decrepit, she longs for death. It is this death-wish that the epigraph describes:

For on one occasion I myself saw, with my own eyes, the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a cage, and when some boys said to her, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die.”

Another key reference to Classical myth appears in “A Game of Chess,” in the vignette with the anonymous wealthy woman. Her richly ornamented home features a depiction of “the change of Philomel” (line 99). This phrase refers to an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses where King Tereus rapes his sister-in-law, Philomela, then cuts out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone. She’s later transformed into a nightingale. Though the allusion links the wealthy woman to Philomela, her fate turns out not to be sexual violence but sexual frustration. Her lover, upon returning, refuses to speak to her, much less touch her.

Medieval Legend

The Waste Land prominently features references to medieval legends of the Holy Grail. The key figure for Eliot is the Fisher King, who, according to Arthurian lore, comes last in a long line of British kings charged with the responsibility of guarding the Holy Grail. As Britain’s protector, he is also the symbolic embodiment of its land. However, the Fisher King has sustained a sexual wound that makes him impotent and renders his entire kingdom barren. References to the Fisher King arise at two key points in The Waste Land. In “The Fire Sermon,” a first-person speaker describes an experience of fishing in a “dull canal” (line 189) while “musing” (191) on shipwrecks and death. Eliot affirms the connection to the Fisher King in the line that concludes the section (line 202), which quotes a poem by Paul Verlaine called “Parsifal.” Verlaine’s poem references a legend that narrates the recovery of the spear that pierced Christ’s side, and which may be used to heal the Fisher King. When the Fisher King returns at the poem’s end, however, he appears to remain wounded and hence still impotent. He expresses resignation in the face death and the end of his line (lines 423–25):

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

Water

References to water abound in The Waste Land, and they almost universally bode ill. Water should be life-giving, but from the very beginning it’s associated with death (lines 1–4):

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Evidently, “spring rain” does nothing to revive “the dead land.” Throughout the rest of the poem, water is linked to death either through its lack or its overabundance. The second vignette of “The Burial of the Dead” emphasizes lack. There, the speaker evokes the image of a desiccated landscape where “the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief / And the dry stone no sound of water” (lines 23–24). In contrast to this desiccated scene, the following vignette describes a tarot reading in which the card of “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” (line 47) figures prominently. The appearance of this card leads the tarot reader to caution her client: “Fear death by water” (line 5). Her warning foreshadows the poem’s fourth section, “Death by Water,” which describes a drowned Phoenician sailor named Phlebas. The poem’s tension between the lack of water and its overabundance comes to a climax in the final section, where the image of another rocky landscape gives way to a sudden storm that overflows the banks of the Ganges River. Water always signifies death.

Rats and Bones

The Waste Land repeatedly returns to images of rats scavenging among skeletal remains. The first reference comes in “A Game of Chess,” when the anonymous wealthy woman interrogates her lover, and he seems to respond only in his thoughts (lines 113–16):

“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.

Whereas the woman longs for companionship and sexual intimacy, her lover can think only of death, made vivid here by the image of a kind of boneyard filled with rats. A similar confluence of rats and bones appears in “The Fire Sermon,” where a speaker identified with the Fisher King of Arthurian legend muses on wreckage and death (lines 187–95):

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.

As he fishes on the bank of “the dull canal,” the Fisher King sees a rat. Then, as he thinks about the tragedies that befell his brother and father, his imagination generates an image of rats crawling over bones “in a little low dry garret.” Taken together, the poem’s two key references to rats scavenging among the bones offer a powerful image of modern existence. Following the enormous destruction of the First World War, many people felt that Western civilization had fallen into ruins. To live in the aftermath of this wreckage was thus to be a scavenger, salvaging usable fragments from the “heap of broken images” (line 22) that remained.

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