Thoughts on Eliots The Waste Land

Eliot does a lot with The Waste Land. The footnotes in the Norton Critical Edition are a hindrance to Waste Land virgins. The footnotes become the focus rather than the poems and are very distracting, although, the footnotes and Eliot’s notes do make it evident that Eliot was writing for a very restricted audience. Even though one can read and on some level comprehend The Waste Land without critical help, most of the allusions would be lost on one who lacks scholarship and critical help. That parts of the poems are written in German, French, Italian, Sanskrit, and Latin indicates that Eliot wrote The Waste Land for a very select target audience. This wasn’t for the Leonard Basts of his world. Once again, Eliot’s poems are fairly small but have the density of lead. However, I do miss the creative language of his earlier poems. For instance, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot designs memorable lines such as “like a patient etherized upon a table,” “Streets that follow like a tedious argument,” “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” “When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,” and “…I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker.” The Waste Land does not have the same line per line impact as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” however, it does have a couple memorable lines:

That corpse you planted last year in your garden
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? (71-72)

and

But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. (185-186)

Aside from language, I enjoyed the parallels and repetition of images. I probably enjoyed these devices because I found them useful for interpreting the collection of poems. For example, in “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot says, “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” (60-64). The footnote ties this as a reference to Dante’s Inferno, but the reader can sense the devastation from the line itself and from a later mention of London. At the very end of the collection of poems, in “What the Thunder Said,” Eliot draws from a popular nursery rhyme singing, “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down” (426). Considering the earlier image, of the bridge beginning crowded with people, with the later image of it falling, one understands that Eliot is communicating a massive disaster. That the disaster is spiritual comes from other recurring images.

As for the hopeful redemption that you, Brooks, and Headings see in “What the Thunder Said,” I could not see it until Brooks points it out “In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust/ Bringing rain (393-394). This is the only image that I consider hopeful in The Waste Land and it took me many readings and a little critical coaching to notice that diminutive indicator.