T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land has earned itself a place in the canons of important and revolutionary literature, despite alleged obscurity that many argue renders it inaccessible and without any sort of narrative coherence. However, that incoherence which is often dismissed as a side effect of Eliot’s nervous breakdown is more than coincident with the poem; it is in fact essential as a poetic and structural device. Moreover, a serious analysis of the poem reveals underlying structural mechanics which reveal an organization based not on mental instability, but rather on a more sublime understanding of incoherence as foundational to the natural condition in an elemental and spiritual sense. Understanding The Waste Land in context of its former title, “He do the Police in Different Voices,” we find that perspective shifts, situatedness, and narrative incoherence are as essential to Eliot’s understanding of the human condition as they are to our understanding of The Waste Land.

The opening of the poem with “April is the cruelest month” and the change to the title “The Waste Land” are products of Eliot’s revision process and the edits made by Ezra Pound, which dropped substantial material from the poem. The movement of the title internalizes the poem and changes the focus somewhat (Fornero 3), but is valuable in the consideration of the poem in that it reveals some of Eliot’s vision for the layout of the work writ large. Specifically, it is illuminative of the concept of a diversity of voice, a broad semiotic intertextualism that is consistent with the changes of speaker, mood, and method throughout the body of the work. The Waste Land significantly dodges any theme of unifying consciousness or real thematic cohesion, and the resultant work must be examined by way of “submit[ting] one’s own experience to its embodied ‘meaning’” (Easthope 331). It is, in the words of Bernard Bergonzi, “an anguished reliving of subjective experience,” a postsymbolist analogue of the lived experience as much in form as it is in content.

The five sections of the poem roughly correspond to the natural elements – earth, air, fire, water, and mystical aether (V. Eliot 414), respectively. “The Burial of the Dead” deals explicitly with spring and birth, earth, and burial (1, 19-30, 60-76), and introduces London as the surreal and superreal/Unreal City. The movement in the next section begins to pose interesting questions for a broader-spectrum interpretation of the poem. As noted by Fornero, the revisions in “A Game of Chess” point towards a movement distinctly away from anthropomorphic and mimetic descriptions and towards a functional symbology which describes the chess board and by analogy the lived condition in terms of systems and their interconnections. Fornero argues that the changes in the game of chess from the draft versions to the final version rule out a mimetic interpretation of the text (Fornero 3), but in fact this movement seems to be not away from a mimetic reading, but rather towards a mimetic analogy focused on a semiotic perspective on the human condition.

The “Game of Chess” passage gathers an eclectic set of references, from the figure of Cleopatra to the legend of Philomel to the cockney woman in 139-172. Read as an incoherent set of individual narratives collected loosely by the themes of death and tarnished glory, “A Game of Chess” is functional as a mimetic commentary on human networks and their segregatedness in a world that is “tarnished.” In many ways we have a useful antithesis in “that Shakespearian Rag” mentioned in 128-130. The clean, staccato tempo of “It’s so elegant / so intelligent” stands contrary to the relatively formless whole of the section, in keeping with the section’s emphasis on past over present and on modernity as a tarnished and disconnected thing. Philomel’s rape (98-100) by the king is the triumph of chaos as a calamitous force over order as a lost norm; it is a disorder “rudely forced.”

Eliot’s resistance to traditional order is made incarnate specifically in his use of temporality. Time in The Waste Land is far from strictly linear. Rather, time is relative to the subject, and past and future coexist as intimation and intuition in the reader’s present (Singh 35). The sexual connotation of “jug jug” in 204-205, “so rudely forc’d,” recalls the rape of Philomel and looks ahead to the exploitation of the Thames daughters. The Thames’ rape is in some ways reported in a subdued tone by comparison to the repeated hypersexual “jug, jug, jug” of Philomel’s, but simultaneously the underreported tone emphasizes the pitiable duplicity of the rapist himself, who “promised a ‘new start.’” This notion of complex identity is central to the protagonist, who here is analogued to Tiresias – he has been variously male and female, and the protagonist’s androgeny is cemented in Tiresias’ pan-sexuality and his own homosexual encounter in 213-214. Here manifested in the protagonist is the casualness of the most intimate and deviant of intercourse; later (and thematically simultaneous) is the likewise casual sexual encounter of the typist with the young man in 225-256. The removal of significance from sexuality is equally present in the undramatic rape of the Thames (299’s “what should I resent?”) as in the flippant sexual encounters of the protagonist and Mr. Eugenides, or the typist and the young man. Thus lust over meaning and alienation over commonality emerge as the direct descendents of the Fisher King’s fertility legends.

The entrance of fire literally as a generalized sterilizing and purifying force, as well as a sort of moral catharsis, is a deus ex machina to destroy disorder. The unification in 308-309 of western and eastern asceticism calls not for any particular deity, but rather sends out in broad spectrum a call for purging fire to end what Eliot vilifies as the decayed modernity. “The Fire Sermon” then serves as an especially useful artifact in studying the structure of the poem as a whole, as it is effectively the same technique of semiotic incoherence in microcosm. The section is unified by lust as a thematic device, yet in every instance different. The opening by allusion to the rosy-in-retrospect past offers contrast to the following string of disastrous sexual experiences. It is in the network of Philomel, Eugenides, the young man and his typist, and Thames that we encounter rape and casual sexual experiences as isolated symbols for chaos and apathy which together frame the mimetic commentary of “The Fire Sermon” as a whole. It is in the space between rape and a weekend homosexual encounter, between exploitation and apathy, that Eliot exposes the faded veneer of modernity for sanitization and reinvigoration by fire. As Singh notes,

It is absolutely necessary while reading The Waste Land to remain alart to the concealed correlations among different scenes, situations, events, incidents, symbols, images, phrases, and words.” (Singh 38)

For the reader to lose sight of Eliot’s contextuality is to lose the naturalistic webbed nature of the poem as a whole.

Returning to the overall elemental containers for the poem, namely the five sections, the same connectivity emerges in macrocosm. The poem defies linear presentation (Tomlinson); thus “Death by Water” immediately recalls “The Burial of the Dead” and the dry stone which “gives no sound of water” (24). Likewise even without explicit mention in the text, connections to a regenerative flood of Biblical proportions are inevitable, and the suggestion of resurrection in Phlebas further extend the contextual significance of the water image. Yet as much as water offers invigorating life to the dry rocks in I, it is inevitably the enemy of the purifying fire of III. It looks associatively forward to “What the Thunder Said,” where the paradox is further explored. 345-359 explore water as life-giving, offering a plea for the “drip drop drip drop drop drop drop” – a plea that is textually simultaneous to “Death by Water.”

In that the fifth section is identified with aether, it is from the outset set apart from the other four, as a recapitulation of the ideas presented in microcosm in each element and as a consummation of those ideas cumulatively into a new whole. The idea of rain falling is traditionally rejuvenative, and in this context serves as an artifact symbolizing potential – something that is seriously considered for the first time in “What the Thunder Said.” The mention of lightning and “a damp gust / Bringing rain” (394, 395) comes syncronous with a treatment of the Chapel Perilous as the terminus of the Arthurian knight’s quest for the Grail. Thus rejuvenation and spiritual renewal in a cosmic sense (as the possibility of new patterns for civilization) come at the expense of myth; life postdates the death of the Fisher King.

The cock’s crowing as the harbinger of dawn – “Co co rico co co rico” (394) – explicitly contrasts with the more guttural onomatepoieas of the poem – the oblivious “O O O O” of the Shakespearean Rag (128) and the bestial “Jug jug jug jug jug jug” of sex and exploitation (204); likewise it is distinct from the apathetic and droning sonority of the Thames’ song,

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala (276-77, 290-91, 306)

Eliot establishes meaning by way of associative contrast; in this example, the onomatepoetic sounds are phonally linked and thus at least in some way cotemporal. These passages connected and contrasting by sound and attitude – optimistic versus bleak, sonorous versus guttural – hold a place within a larger lattice of meaning. Extrapolated to the scope of the entire poem, it takes shape not as a linear procession of parts, nor as a set of thematically unified ruminations, but rather as a semantic web of associations and relationships between parts.

“What the Thunder Said” provides finality and summation to the ideas latticed in the four elemental sections prior. The protagonist speaks of the Unreal City’s collapse, of plundering bountiful sea with desert in the past, of refining fire and the journey out from Inferno. In the swallow (429) the reader is exposed again to Spring, not now as the cruellest month, but as a more typical symbol of rebirth and infusal of life. In Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata (give, sympathize, control), the Hindu Upanishad dialogue, the voice of thunder itself becomes a call to actionally embrace spiritual renewal (Ramazani, Ellmann and O’Clair 486). Thus water, earth, air, and fire all collide and are redistributed in the final passage, which alleges to offer shantih, the “Peace which passeth understanding” – yet as Chandran argues, this is like “the wise men of Judah whom the Lord rebukes” for saying “Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Chandran 683). The irony of this as a capstone to the poem is that the fragmentary essence of the poem is as inescapable in art as it is in nature.

Eliot’s work in The Waste Land exposes hierarchies of relationships and angles of seeing, and it is in this sense that the work is as much a Cubist piece as it is a stream-of-consciousness poem. Yet this perspective on the poem contributes to the poem’s integrity; form is part and particle of any artifact’s whole, and The Waste Land is no exception. It is a mistake to dismiss The Waste Land as inaccessible or amimetic, when in fact it strives to be the most genuine kind of accessible by directly emulating the human condition even in form. Eliot’s own words describe th epoem as “the relief of a personal grouse against life” (V. Eliot 1), putting to death any notion that the poem is somehow apersonal or transcendant, and emphasizing that it is basically human. As an associative set of symbols, cultural memes, and anthropological commentary, it is narrative in the same sense that anything genuinely human is narrative; loosely at best. This makes Eliot’s acheivement here not “abstruse,” but rather genuine; not “modern,” but rather animal; not “significant,” but rather sublime.

Bibliography of Works Consulted

Beagle, Donald. “T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” Explicator (2002): 40-41.

Bergonzi, Bernard. “Maps of The Waste Land.” Encounter 38 (1972): 81.

Chandran, K. Narayana. “”Shantih” in The Waste Land.” American Literature 61 (1989): 681-683.

Easthope, Anthony. “”The Waste Land” as a Dramatic Monologue.” English Studies (1983): 330-344.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “The Waste Land.” 1998. Bartleby.com. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. 1 May 2007 <www.bartleby.com/201/>.

Eliot, Valerie, ed. The waste land: a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, 1971.

Fornero, Caterina. “Chess is the Game Wherein I’ll Catch the Conscience of the King: The Metaphor of the Game of Chess in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” Yeats Eliot Review 22 (2005): 2-7.

Fowler, D.C. “The Waste Land: Mr. Eliot’s “Fragments”.” College English 14 (1953): 234-235.

Helmling, Steven. “The Grin of Teresias: Humor in The Waste land.” Twentieth Century Literature 36 (1990): 137-154.

Miller, James E. T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.

Nanny, Max. “‘Cards are Queer’: A New Reading of the Tarot in The Waste land.” English Studies 62 (1981): 335-348.

Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Edition. Vol. I. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. II vols.

Singh, Sukhbir. “T.S. Eliot’s concept of time and the technique of textual reading: A comment on “cross” in The Waste Land 3, line 175.” ANQ 14 (2001): 34-40.

Tomlinson, David. “T.S. Eliot and the Cubists.” Twentieth Century Literature 26 (1980): 64-80.

Walker, Richard J. “Blooming Corpses: Burying the Literary Corpus in the Modern City.” Gothic Studies 4 (2002): 1-14.

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