LONDON IN
THE WASTE LAND
SEEING AND VISIONING LONDON
The representation of London in
The Waste Land blends “seeing
London” and “visioning it,” a
documentary registering of the
here-and-now, including actual
street names and other local
features, alternated with a
historical or even mythological
“London”
UNREAL CITY
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.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Stetson!
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!"
ST. MARY WOOLNOTH
A CITY OF THE DEAD
At the time of the writing of The Waste Land, each morning
Eliot went to work crossing London Bridge Station
among thousands of other commuters, feeling that he
was entering a city of the dead
St. Mary Woolnoth was just close to the Lloyds office
where Eliot worked
Eliot escapes from the commercial “unreal city” of the dead
by entering a visionary landscape, projecting onto both
London’s past and other times and places, such as
Mylae, where the Romans vanquished the Carthaginian
fleet in 260 BC
MADAME SOSOTRIS
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS
(LONDON VERSION, 1508 CA.)
THE DEGRADATION OF THE PAST
The passage in which Madame Sosostris figures
somehow ironically reverses this
superimposition of an envisioned past over the
present. Madame Sosostris is a mock Egyptian
name suggested to Eliot by “Sesostris, the
sorceress of Ecbatana, “in Aldous Huxley’s
novel Chrome Yellow, who dresses up as a
gypsy to tell fortunes at a fair.
The anticlimactic effect of “had a bad cold” is
deliberate; it is intended to be ironic and
debunking. Madame Sosostris has fallen a long
way from the high function of her predecessors.
She is engaged merely in vulgar fortune telling –
merely one item in a generally vulgar civilization.
THE TAROTS
But the symbols of the Tarot Pack of Cards
are unchanged. The four suits of the Tarot
pack of cards are the cup, lance, sword,
and dish – the life symbol found in the
Grail story. As Weston has shown, the
Tarot Pack of Cards was originally used to
determine the event of the highest
importance to the people, the rising of the
waters.
THE TAROT SYMBOLS
“Belladonna” means beautiful lady. The word suggests
Madonna (the Virgin Mary) and, therefore, the Madonna
of the Rocks as in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting. The
rocks symbolize the church. But there are other rocks – the
rocks of dryness of the waste land. Belladonna is also an
eye-cosmetic and a poison – the deadly nightshade. In the
next line, the woman-figure of the Virgin becomes “the lady
of situations” – the woman in the waste land. The “man
with the three staves” is the Life-Force symbol associated
by Eliot with the Fisher King. The “wheel” is the Wheel of
Fortune, whose turning represents the reversals of human
life. “The Hanged Man” represents the hanged god of
Frazer (including Christ). He symbolizes the self-sacrifice
of the fertility god who is killed in order that his resurrection
may bring fertility once again to land and people. That he is
“hooded” accounts for Madame Sosostris’ inability to see
him.
17°-CENTURY LONDON
“This music crept by me upon the waters"
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
ST. MAGNUS THE MARTYR
A BETTER TIME
In the passage from “The Fire Sermon” the poetic
self envisions Elizabethan London, and the
London of the metaphysical poets, recalled by
the reference to St. Magnus the Martyr,
another church in the City, rebuilt by
Christopher Wren in the 1670s, after the
London Fire had destroyed most of the city. For
Eliot, the “new” churches built (or rebuilt) under
Wren’s supervision embodied the ideal
integration between intellect, emotion, and the
senses before the “dissociation of sensibility”
set in.
THE RIVER OF DEATH
The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
THE THAMES NYMPHS
The Thames river-nymphs (now chased away by modern
degradation and pollution) are connceted with the Rhinedaughters of Richard Wagner’s Gotteradamerung. In
the passage in Wagner’s opera to which Eliot refers in
his note, the opening of Act III, the Rhine-daughters
bewail the loss of the beauty of the Rhine occasioned by
the theft of the gold. They then beg Siegfried to give
them back the Ring made from this gold, finally
threatening him with death if he does not give it up. Like
the Thames-daughters, they too have been violated; and
like the maidens mentioned in the Grail legend, the
violation has brought a curse on gods and men.
FALLING CITIES
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
AN UNREEDEMABLE
STERILITY
Section V is full of the reminders of physical and spiritual
dying
After the description of the sterility of the waste land, the scene
becomes inhabited by the “hooded hordes swarming / over
endless plains” and it is transformed into an almost surrealist
hallucination of Old Testament lamentation and prophecy.
The hordes represent the general waste land of the modern
world with a special application to the break-up of Eastern
Europe, the region with which the fertility cults were
especially connected and in which today traditional values are
thoroughly discredited (but the “sound high in the air” refers to
London under German air attacks during World War I)
The falling cities are the symbols of the recurring crises in the
history of human civilization.
FRAGMENTS AND RUINS
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
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 a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
DATTA, DAYADHVAM,
DAMYATA
The Thunder emits three orders. The protagonist answers the
first one, “Datta” (“Give”), with the statement: “The awful
daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence
can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed.”
Here the larger meaning is stated in terms that imply a sexual
meaning. Man cannot be absolutely self-regarding. Even the
propagation of the race – even mere “existence” – calls for
such a surrender. The comment on “Dayadhvam”
(“Sympathize”) implies that the surrender to something
outside the self is an attempt (whether on the sexual level or
some other) to transcend one’s essential isolation. The third
order, “Damyata” (“Control”), seems to have be obeyed by
the boat, and everything seems to finally end in peace and
reconciliation. But the final lines suggest that the protagonist
does not witness a revival of the waste land.
AN ANTICLIMAX
The effect of the final lines is almost one of bathos, of
anticlimax. The focus narrows to a solitary figure in
the foreground, fishing, with arid plains behind him.
So the long-promised rain has not fallen. “Shall I at
least set my lands in order?” is a desperate attempt
to resist chaos, with a biblical allusion to King
Hezekiah, the ailing monarch who was told by
lsaiah to set his lands in order; who did so and was
blessed by God. So there’s a faint note of hope. But
the next line, “London Bridge is falling down falling
down falling down,” echoing the theme of the decay
and destruction of civilisations.
THE ESCAPE OF MADNESS
The various quotations from different sources (and different
languages) that end the poem clash one with the other in a
Babel-like confusion
The Tower of Babel is implied by “Le Prince d’Aquitane a Ia tour
abolie,” a line from Nerval’s “El Desdichado”
With “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” the
poetic self describes what The Waste Land is finally about: an
attempt to collect the fragments of a fallen civilization.
The words “Why then lie fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe” are
taken from Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy, and
they dramatically contradict the final, “Shantih shantih
shantih” (“The peace which passeth understanding”). Maybe
transcendent peace may be reached only by escaping into
madness.
A MYTH OF DISORDER
The search for order through myth in The Wast Land battles with
the poem’s manner of utterance, its sound, feel and impact. After
the relative lucidity and assurance of the Damyata lines about the
boat and the controlling hands, it sounds as though there is a
sudden veering away from assurance and lucidity into the
cryptic, the confused and twittering; a regression from public
utterance to the more private and delphic. The ending is highly
ambiguous and equivocal. It offers garbled hints of
consolation, of hope, of peace, while the manner of the
garbling suggests disorder, confusion and near-madness.
But it is precisely this disordered myth that fascinated readers
throughout the world, giving them new insights into their own
fragmented human condition. The desolate London of The Waste
Land is the capital of this collapsing world, but also the centre
of dissemination for Eliot’s prophetic vision.