The Waste Land Section I:
“The Burial of the Dead”
The first section
of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the
Anglican burial service. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts
of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that
seems to mix the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and
Carthage (both futile and destructive wars).
The Waste Land takes on the
degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly
after the first World War.
The Waste Land opens with a
reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,
but April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. The land
should be regenerating after a long winter, a painful regeneration, reminding
of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of
forgetfulness and numbness, is preferable. Memory, particularly remembering the
dead, is of great importance, as it creates a confrontation of the past with
the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how things have decayed.
The final episode
of the first section sets the true wasteland of the poem, the modern city:
Eliot references Baudelaire’s Paris (“Unreal City”), Dickens’s London (“the
brown fog of a winter dawn”) and Dante’s hell (“the flowing crowd of the
dead”). The city is desolate and inhabited by ghosts from the past. Stetson is
a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with questions about a corpse
buried in his garden, which brings back the theme of regeneration and fertility,
but Stetson does not answer, the dead offer few answers.
The Waste Land Section II:
“A Game of Chess”
This section takes its title from two plays by the early 17th-century playwright Thomas
Middleton, in one of which the moves in a game of chess denote stages in a
seduction.
The Waste Land Section III:
“The Fire Sermon”
The title of the
longest section of The Waste Land, is
taken from a sermon given by Buddha in which he encourages his followers to
give up earthly passion (symbolized by fire) and seek freedom from earthly
things.
Tiresias/the
speaker observes a young typist, at home for tea, who awaits her lover, a dull
and arrogant clerk. The woman allows the clerk to have his way with her, and he
leaves victorious. Tiresias, who has “foresuffered all,” watches the whole
thing. After her lover’s departure, the typist thinks only that she’s glad the
encounter is done and over.
The sexual
encounters are unfruitful. Eugenides proposes a homosexual tryst, which by its
nature thwarts fertility. The impossibility of regeneration is symbolized by
the currants in his pocket—the desiccated version of fertile fruits. The typist
and her lover are barren in their way, even though reproduction is
theoretically possible for the two. The typist does not even own a bed, and she
is certainly not interested in a family. The possibility for renewal through
sexuality in the modern world is questioned.
Tiresias is an
important model for modern existence. Neither man nor woman, blind yet able to
see with clarity, he does not hope or act. He has “seen it all,” and he sees no possibility for action.
The Waste Land Section IV:
“Death by Water”
The shortest
section of the poem, “Death by Water” describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician,
who has died, apparently by drowning. In death he has forgotten his worldly
cares : the narrator asks his reader to consider Phlebas and recall his or her
own mortality.
The Waste Land Section V:
“What the Thunder Said”
The final section of The Waste Land is
dramatic in both its imagery and its events.
