April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

These lines constitute the famous opening of The Waste Land. The image presented here is complex, but the general sense of pessimism is clear. If April is cruel, it’s because it encourages hope for a reanimating “spring rain” that won’t come. The poem indicates as much in its many images of desiccated landscapes and overflowing rivers. In the face of having either not enough water or too much of it, we are left with little more than “dead land.” Eliot makes the struggle to survive in such conditions palpable both through the imagery and through the stagnant rhyme scheme. Despite suggesting action in progress, the incessant nature of the -ing rhymes also communicates a lack of progression. Many critics have read the pessimistic opening of The Waste Land as a twentieth-century response to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The prologue of that work begins with a more celebratory vision in which April showers pierce “the droghte of March . . . to the roote.” Whereas Chaucer’s pilgrims begin their journey to Canterbury at a time rich in promise, we readers begin our journey by entering a land to which spiritual drought has laid waste.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
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 . . .

Tiresias speaks these lines (235–48) in “The Fire Sermon.” The scene he depicts here is the sexual liaison that transpires between an unnamed typist and her lover, a low-level clerk with a “carbuncular” face (line 231). In excruciating detail, Tiresias describes the profoundly joyless sex that unfolds. There is nothing of what we, in the twenty-first century, would call enthusiastic consent. The typist doesn’t reprove her lover’s advances, but it’s equally clear that she isn’t into it. Tiresias implicitly condemns the young man for not worrying about her pleasure and for “mak[ing] a welcome of indifference.” Tiresias even refers to his treatment of the typist as an “assault.” The young man makes the exchange yet more humiliating with the “patronising kiss” he delivers before awkwardly—and somewhat perversely—“grop[ing]” his way out of the typist’s apartment. This extended scene of joyless sex lacks all human intimacy, and it may be read as metaphor for the spiritual barrenness of modern life. Significantly the fourteen lines that make up this passage form a hidden sonnet that rhymes ABAB CDCD EFEF GH. The lack of a concluding couplet effectively “breaks” the sonnet, which reflects the larger breakdown that characterizes modernity.

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

Perhaps no passage in The Waste Land conjures the sense of disorientation as effectively as these lines (331–40), which appear near the beginning of “What the Thunder Said.” Whereas other passages in the poem may disorient with their mix of languages or references, this one creates its disorienting effect from a powerful use of repetition. The words water, rock, road, mountains, and stop recur here again and again, reflecting the sense of desperation that comes with profound thirst. In this rocky mountainscape, there is no water. The maddening intensity of a desire for something to drink culminates in the disturbing image of the mountain as a dry and rotten mouth “that cannot spit.” Aside from the effectiveness of language in this passage, it’s also significant to note that the imagery offered here recalls a reference to the mountains that first appeared in “The Burial of the Dead.” There, a speaker named Marie recalls her fondness for the mountains as a place of retreat from civilization: “In the mountains, there you feel free” (line 17). By the poem’s end, however, the mountains cease to offer liberation. They are as degraded as everything else.

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

This is the famous final stanza of The Waste Land (lines 426–33). The poem ends with something of a textual collage made up of fragmentary quotes from nursery rhymes, poems, plays, and sacred texts in five languages. This burst of allusions may certainly be read as a final dissolution of all sense in a shattered and maddened world. However, it’s also possible to interpret this polyglot collage as a final attempt at coherence. Drawing varied bits and pieces together, the speaker at once acknowledges their fragmentary nature and pledges to “fit” them together. Notably, the word fit has three key meanings here: (1) to put in place; (2) an uncontrollable outbreak, as in a “fit” of madness; and (3) a section of a poem. However maddening it may be, the fragments from the Western tradition can still be collaged in such a way as to make a new form of art. This new form of art, as readers will have seen throughout The Waste Land, demands new strategies of reading that develop meaning not in a linear way, as with a traditional narrative. Rather, we must make meaning by finding connections between shards of language that otherwise seem completely disconnected.

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