The waste land. The desert. This is the vision of the modern world that T. S. Eliot presents to us in his poem The Waste Land. The poem is both incredibly elusive to comprehension and alludes to a range of works throughout history, some quite obscure. As I read the poem for the first time, I was a little overwhelmed with the rapid perspective changes and radical changes in form that characterise the poem. Furthermore, Eliot frequently inserts lines in various other languages, as though we are all multi-lingual. In my opinion, these are intentional barriers to understanding that Eliot erects, preventing you from getting any sort of concrete understanding of the poem’s meaning, that is, if Eliot wrote the poem with one clear meaning in mind. In this way, the poem has come to be the figurehead for everything that the high modernism movement stood for.
The obscuring of understanding present in the poem begins immediately, even before the poem proper commences, with the epigraph. Written in Latin and Greek, and referencing Sybil, a mythical figure from ancient Roman history, the short passage establishes the sombre tone of the poem – “when those boys would say to her ‘Sybil, what do you want?’ she would reply, ‘I want to die.’” According to legend, Sybil was a priestess who possessed the power of immortality, but was not immune to the devastating effect of aging. Sybil can be seen as a metaphor for the world or which humans inhabit, in that it is always here, but the damage waged upon it accrues over time, until, in Eliot’s opinion, we get the destroyed society of modern times. This epigraph is confronting for dual reasons: firstly, we must decipher the combination of languages, and subsequently, we must look up the figure of the ageless Cumaean Sybil, and realise how her story is relevant to Eliot’s literary aim.
Another reason why Eliot’s poem is so difficult to get a conceptual hold is the frequent changing of place which occurs. Moreover, not only does the location of the poem change, it is often difficult to get any kind of sense of place at all. The first passage of the first part, “The Burial of the Dead,” is one of the only places in the novel in which we are definitively located, in this case in Germany. I gathered this from the line of German, “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch,” and from the place name “Starnbergersee,” a lake south of Munich – a fact which I already knew without any assistance from the editor’s footnotes of course. For much of the remainder of the poem, we are left to speculate as to the location, with the notable exception of the beginning of part three, “The Fire Sermon.” Here we are firmly placed in London, with the mention of the River Thames. Eliot’s vision of London is a somewhat dystopian one however, adding to his central vision of the modern world which he presents, in which “the river’s tent is broken” and “the nymphs are departed.”
Ultimately, I think the aspect of The Waste Land that posed the biggest problem for my understanding and appreciation of the poem was its endless narrative perspective changes. I constantly found it extremely difficult to know whose voice a particular set of lines was in. In the first part of the poem, the very first stanza of “The Burial of the Dead,” we are given a pretty simple introduction. The stanza is narrated in the first person – “I was frightened” – and there is even a character name for us to latch on to: “He said, Marie, / Marie, hold on tight.” At this point things are under control. Unfortunately for my simplicity desiring brain, in the very next stanza the reader is thrown into narrative turmoil. It appears to me that this stanza is from the perspective of an outside narrator, someone quite different from the Marie who was first introduced. This narrator has a menacing tone, in keeping with what was established in the epigraph, delivering lines such as “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” and “the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.” These radical shifts in perspective occur through the whole poem, with other examples being the “clairvoyante” in the third stanza of part one, narrated in third person – “Here, said she, / Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor” - and Tiresias in part three, stanza four, a blind prophet from Greek mythology represented in the writings of Ovid, among others – “I Tiresias, though blind...” Above all else, I believe this constant perspective shifting by Eliot is the largest barrier to understanding in the poem’s entirety.
Discussion point: Is it more important that these “barriers to understanding” aid Eliot’s ultimate literary achievement, or are they negated by the difficulty they present to audiences?
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