The Waste Land: Themes

The Barrenness of Modern Life

The Waste Land offers a profound reflection on the barrenness of modern life. In Eliot’s imagining, World War I had irreparably damaged Western civilization, reducing it to a smoking ruin. This damage shattered the cultural and aesthetic inheritances of the Western tradition and effectively halted social and economic development. The result was a metaphorical barrenness that affected all levels of life and culture. Eliot represents this barrenness most centrally through the well-known figure of the Fisher King. According to Arthurian legend, the Fisher King 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. In Eliot’s hands, he becomes the poster child for modernity’s impotence. The appearance of Tiresias in “The Fire Sermon” also references barrenness, albeit more obliquely. Tiresias plays a significant role in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, in which a curse falls upon the city of Thebes, rendering both land and people infertile. Tiresias’ gift of insight enables him to realize the curse is the result of Oedipus having killed his father and slept with his mother.

Eliot also reflects this theme of barrenness by referring to instances of sexuality that are either violent or joyless, and hence always nonreproductive. In “A Game of Chess,” for instance, the anonymous wealthy lady is implicitly linked to Philomela, a woman from Greek myth who suffers a violent rape by her sister’s husband. The wealthy woman doesn’t suffer such a brutal fate. However, she does suffer the pain of longing for sexual companionship, only to be met with her lover’s morose silence. Another key scene of sexual frustration comes in “The Fire Sermon,” where Tiresias recounts the tryst between the typist and her lover. Their encounter is excruciatingly joyless, and Eliot’s language transposes the sexual violence of Philomela into a more modern key (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.

Other references to joyless or unwanted sex appear in the same section, as when Queen Elizabeth recounts having awkward sex with Leicester on a boat (lines 292–305) and when Mr. Eugenides propositions the speaker for a homosexual getaway (lines 209–214). Finally, Eliot references the barrenness of modern life more abstractly in the poem’s various descriptions of desiccated and infertile land.

The Failure of Language to Communicate Properly

In a world shattered by political violence, institutional collapse, and ideological instability, language loses its capacity to communicate as it once did. Eliot reflects on the failure of language to communicate properly in several ways. Perhaps the most straightforward example occurs in “A Game of Chess,” when the anonymous wealthy woman pleads with her lover to tell her what he’s thinking (lines 111–14):

“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

He meets her pleas with silence, remaining imprisoned in thoughts of death he can’t communicate: “I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones” (lines 115–16). The lovers’ silent dialogue continues for another twelve lines, where they communicate “nothing [and] again nothing” (line 120).

In addition to this general failure to communicate, Eliot signals the challenge of language in several other ways. For example, he dramatizes how radically different registers of language often conflict with one another. In contrast to the refined iambic pentameter used to describe the wealthy woman’s ornamented home, the second half of “A Game of Chess” makes a disorienting shift to the speech of a working-class woman. Her cadences strain iambic rhythm in a way made yet more jarring by the constant interruptions of the bartender’s all-caps call: “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” (lines 141, 152, 165, 168, 169). Another type of register shift occurs in the perverse sexualization of language. This occurs when Tiresias uses a phallic simile to describe “a taxi throbbing waiting” (line 217), or when “dirty ears” hear the phrase “Jug Jug” (103) not as the sound a nightingale makes, but as slang for “sex.”

Finally, language also fails to communicate properly because it has become too multiple. Readers will likely feel this instinctively through the way the poem itself has an overwhelming abundance of meaning. This abundance results in part from Eliot’s use of hundreds of references and quotations from a plurality of literary, historical, and religious contexts. The poem’s multiplicity also results from the way it speaks in different languages. For one thing, the poem features numerous speakers, though because the distinctions between them aren’t always clear, it’s not always obvious who is communicating what to whom. For another thing, the poem literally communicates in a range of different languages, including English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, and Sanskrit. Eliot’s fragmentation of language powerfully recalls the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. According to this story, humans were once united as a single race with a single language. Enabled by their unity, they decided to build a tower that would reach the heavens. But God, who saw their construction as an act of hubris, topped the tower, scattered the people, and cursed them all to speak different languages. After Babel, people were divided because they no longer spoke each other’s language.

The Irreversibility of Decline

Eliot’s vision in The Waste Land reflects a world in irreversible decline. References to death and dying are frequent in the poem, starting with the title of the first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” which relates to the burial rites of the Anglican Church. The poem also features numerous images of bones, and the fourth section, “Death by Water,” focuses on a drowned sailor. There are also many oblique allusions to death, dying, and even suicide. For instance, Eliot features many allusions to Dante’s epic poems about the Christian afterlife. Additionally, the anonymous wealthy woman in “A Game of Chess” is implicitly linked both to Cleopatra and Dido, two queens who took their own lives. If such images and allusions weren’t enough to communicate an overwhelming sense of pessimism, the poem is saturated with the language of descent. Referencing a sledding trip, one speaker says simply: “And down we went” (line 16). Later, another speaker describes how bats “crawled head downward down a blackened wall” (line 381). Even birdsong implies decline (lines 356–58):

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

The whole world, it would seem, is dropping, dropping, dropping.

Eliot also emphasizes the theme of decline through the apocalyptic tone communicated through the poem’s many references to biblical language. Yet Eliot doesn’t just cite biblical tradition; he also revises that tradition. For instance, whereas the New Testament recounts the Resurrection of Christ and predicts his Second Coming, The Waste Land implicitly questions the prophecy of salvation. “What the Thunder Said” opens with a passage that recalls the Crucifixion, but which seems to insist that Christ is dead and never to be resurrected (lines 322–28):

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead

Unable to envision the future salvation described in the Bible, the speaker of the poem’s final section chooses resignation: “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” (line 425). They further reflect this resignation by turning to the Hindu Upanishads, which emphasize the cultivation of personal responsibility rather than salvation. As the poem’s closing lines (432–33) suggest, it is through the principles of generosity (datta), compassion (dayadhvam), and self-control (damyata) that we may arrive, in the future, at some form of inner peace (shantih):

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

At the end, there isn’t hope, only resignation in the face of decline.

The Torment and Comfort of Memory

The work of memory is central to The Waste Land, and it involves equal measures of torment and comfort. Eliot indicates as much in the poem’s opening lines, where April “mix[es] / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain” (lines 2–4). Here, the speaker sets up an opposition between memory and desire: memory is associated with the past, and desire with the future. Yet memory and desire are further linked, respectively, with “dull roots” and “spring rain.” Compared to the reanimating power of the coming spring rain, the dull roots of the past seem dead and depressing. In this way, desire is preferable to memory. However, the speaker began by insisting that “April is the cruellest month” (line 1). If April is cruel, it’s because it encourages hope for a future that won’t come. Indeed, as the poem’s images of desiccated land suggest, the spring rain won’t arrive. And if rain does arrive, as it will in “What the Thunder Said,” it will come as an overwhelming deluge. In short, the future marked out by desire is fraught and can’t be satisfied. The only recourse is to return to the past, and to the work of “memory.”

For a poet like Eliot, the work of memory inevitably relates to literary and cultural tradition. Here, too, memory is both a torment and a comfort. For many, the First World War threw the authority of cultural and political institutions into question, effectively shattering the traditions that had previously felt so sustaining. It was no longer possible to resort to the naïve Victorian idea that Greco-Roman civilization was a font of “sweetness and light,” as Matthew Arnold once put it. Yet even after being shattered into fragments, the Western tradition continues to offer some kind of sustenance. Eliot implies as much in his reliance on allusions and quotations from this tradition, which he quietly celebrates at the poem’s end (lines 426–31):

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.

Drawing together bits from English nursery rhymes as well as Italian, Latin, and French poetry, the speaker at once acknowledges their fragmentary nature and pledges to “fit” them. 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.