The Waste Land: Rhyme

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Eliot wrote much of The Waste Land in a loose blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Yet despite lacking a strict rhyme scheme, the poem features quite a bit of rhyme. In many cases, instances of rhyme arise seemingly at random, as in this incidental couplet from “A Game of Chess” (lines 107–108):

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Other times, rhyme appears in the form of quoted material, such as the short German passage Eliot quotes from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde (lines 31–34):

   Frisch weht der Wind
   Der Heimat zu
   Mein Irisch Kind,
   Wo weilest du?

Aside from these minor examples, Eliot occasionally features rhyme in ways that subtly echo key themes in the poem. One example arises in the opening lines of “The Burial of the Dead,” which feature a cascade of words that end with -ing (lines 1–7):

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.

The rhymes in this opening passage have a curiously contradictory effect. On the one hand, all the rhyming words are verbs in present-progressive form, which indicates an action that’s under way. On the other hand, the rhyme scheme remains unchanging, refusing to move on from the -ing form. This results in a feeling of stagnancy that powerfully echoes what’s going on in the imagery, as lilacs struggle to grow from “dead land.”

Whereas rhyme plays a minor role in most sections of the poem, it features prominently in “The Fire Sermon.” Throughout this middle section, rhyme grows increasingly frequent and increasingly ironic. Rhyme first appears in a songlike passage where Eliot’s language echoes a wedding song by Edmund Spenser as well as Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress.” What results is a quatrain that rhymes AABB (lines 183–86):

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A strain of irony may be heard in this song, which pairs the soft sound of the “Sweet Thames” with “a cold blast” and “the rattle of bones.” A bit later in the section, Eliot introduces a cheeky triple rhyme as Mrs. Porter and her daughter clean their feet while awaiting a certain man’s arrival at their brothel (lines 199–201):

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water

Though metrically uneven, this rhyme has a comic undertone that seems more at home in a bawdy verse form like the limerick. Eliot pushes the irony of rhyme near to the breaking point soon after, in the section where Tiresias recounts the unenthusiastic sex between the typist and her “carbuncular” lover. As an example, consider lines 239–42, which forms a quatrain rhyming ABAB:

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

In these lines, the rhyme has an effect that’s so deadpan it essentially ceases to be funny. Even the comic mode gets hollowed out in The Waste Land’s desolate vision of modern life.