The Waste Land: Symbols

Unreal City

The phrase “Unreal City” appears twice in The Waste Land, and it has multiple symbolic meanings. Most generally, the phrase conjures the surreal quality of urban life in the early twentieth century. In this regard, the phrase reflects the poem’s overall atmosphere of degradation and disorientation. However, the phrase “Unreal City” also has more specific meanings. For one thing, this phrase is partly an allusion to a poem by Charles Baudelaire. Eliot adapts Baudelaire’s phrase, “Fourmillante cité,” which means, “City swarming with people.” The adaptation is apparent in the first passage where “Unreal City” appears (lines 60–63):

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

This is indeed city swarming with people, and Eliot’s description here further references a scene in Dante’s Inferno where the poet looks about the swarming denizens of Hell. In this way, the “Unreal City” symbolizes the infernal nature of modern existence, where people walk around as though already damned. Finally, it’s important to note that Eliot always capitalizes the word “City.” He does this to reference the financial district of London, which is known as “the City.” In this way, Eliot’s surreal depiction of England’s economic center symbolically links the poem’s images of civilizational degradation to capitalist accumulation.

Tarot Cards

Tarot cards appear early in the poem, where they introduce the symbolism of fortune telling and prophecy. Tarot cards are used as part of divination practice known as cartomancy. The third vignette in “The Burial of the Dead” recounts a tarot reading performed by “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante” (line 43). Though certain details make us readers skeptical of Madame Sosostris’s prophetic prowess, her card reading does accurately predict several incidents that occur later in the poem. For instance, the first card she pulls is “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” (line 47), a figure that reappears in the poem’s fourth section, “Death by Water.” Likewise, she pulls the card with “the one-eyed merchant” (line 52). This figure also shows up later, in the form of “Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant” (209), who propositions the speaker for a homosexual tryst. Indeed, many of Madame Sosostris’s predictions come true, and these predictions are all undesirable. Even when she says, “I see crowds of people, walking around in a ring” (line 56), she’s prophesying the Dantesque vision of the damned that appears in the very next vignette (62–63):

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many.
I had not thought death had undone so many.

Madame Sosostris’s tarot cards don’t just symbolize fortune telling; they specifically symbolize bad fortune.

The Change of Philomel

“A Game of Chess” opens with the description of an anonymous wealthy lady who is waiting for her lover to return. Her richly ornamented home features a depiction of “the change of Philomel” (line 99). This phrase refers to an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that describes how King Tereus raped his sister-in-law, Philomela, then cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone. Nonetheless, Philomela devised a way to inform her sister, Procne. Enraged by her husband’s actions, Procne kills her own son, boils him, and serves him to Tereus. When Tereus realizes what he’s eaten, he chases Procne and Philomela, intending to murder them. The women pray for the gods to transform them into birds, and their wish is granted. Procne becomes a swallow, and Philomela becomes a nightingale. This tale of sexual assault stands as a powerful symbol for the barrenness of modern life, where sexuality is often equated with violence. Indeed, the story of Philomela prefigures the scene with the typist and her lover in “The Fire Sermon,” where Tiresias describes a scene of unenthusiastic consent (lines 239–42):

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

In The Waste Land, sex is always unreproductive and completely divorced from pleasure.

Phlebas the Phoenician

The first section of The Waste Land features a scene where, during a tarot reading, Madame Sosostris pulls a card that she calls “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” (line 47). No such card exists in real tarot decks, but Eliot invented this one to serve a larger symbolic purpose in his poem. The appearance of this card leads Madame Sosostris to caution her client: “Fear death by water” (line 55). This warning that anticipates the poem’s fourth section, titled “Death by Water,” which describes a drowned Phoenician sailor named Phlebas (lines 312–14):

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.

Eliot apparently made up the name Phlebas, which he likely derived from the Latin adjective flebilis, meaning “lamentable, to be wept over.” Eliot departs from the Classical poetic tradition, which might have depicted Phlebas at the moment of his death, both as a mark honor and a recognition of tragedy. By contrast, Eliot depicts Phlebas after he’s been floating in seawater for two weeks. He has long since “forgot” what it is to be alive. Likewise, the world has forgotten him, abandoning him to “a current under sea [that] / Picked his bones in whispers” (lines 315–16). If Phlebas is indeed to be wept over, it’s because he symbolizes the absoluteness and irreversibility of death.