The Waste Land and Other Poems (4 page)

There was one other person besides Pound who helped to shape the poem: In the margin of the draft, Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, wrote one phrase that appears in the final poem (slightly modified) as line 164: She placed an asterisk in the margin next to the passage about Lil and Albert and then wrote at the bottom of the page: ‘What you get married for if you don’t want to have children?’ This line is central to the poem in so many ways: Barrenness and the danger of a so ciety’s failure or inability to perpetuate itself in a harsh, hostile world is a prominent theme. Line 164 suggests that perhaps this failure is volitional: Are people actively choosing not to have children? Is there something about modern marriage and sexual-emotional relationships that is so dysfunctionally noncommunicative as to forestall reproduction? (Think of all the miscues and retreats in ‘Prufrock,’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ and the sexual torpor, or terror, or inertia, of the Sweeney poems and ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Lune de Miel.’)

Marriage and childbearing evoke the fusion (or here, the disjunction) between the social and the biological aspects of the most fundamental unit of society, the family. As Lil awaits her husband Albert’s return from the military and cultural devastation of the Great War, her friends in a pub discuss her readiness (or unreadiness) for the reunion. She needs to make herself a bit smart—the years have taken a toll on her (and certainly they must have on him as well): Will they be attractive to each other? Or will they recoil from the horror of their appearances? Will they endure as a couple, or will the anticipated sexual disjunction propel him into the arms of another woman? Will they have more children, or would it kill her to go through childbirth again? Does she want children, or would she abort a future pregnancy as she did her previous one? Has her life made her infertile? How do one’s personal, sexual, romantic drives weather the zeitgeist of the modern, postwar world? What and whom can one cling to? What can one expect for the future ? All these questions resonate from Vivien’s line.

I wonder if she even meant it to be a line in the poem, or rather, perhaps, just a biting aside to her husband? Possibly she meant the phrase not as a contribution to the text but a comment on it: an accusatory jab at Tom, who had gotten married and didn’t seem to want children, leaving his poor unstable wife floundering in a world that must have looked to her very much like the milieu that infiltrates
The Waste Land.
And for an even further-flung conjecture : Perhaps not only didn’t she mean for the line to be part of the poem, but Eliot actually realized this yet inserted it into the poem anyway, as his own self-abnegating, autobiographical
mea culpa
for his complicity in the perversely barren landscape he described.

 

Toward the end of the poem is a passage of surprising clarity and tranquillity: Eliot described lines 331-358 as ‘the water-dripping song’ and wrote to the novelist Ford Madox Ford about them: ‘There are, I think, about 30
good
lines in
The Waste Land.
Can you find them? The rest is ephemeral.’ It may assist our overall comprehension of the poem’s meaning, its moral, if we take Eliot at his word and try to determine what is good about this passage.

First of all, the language is less complex, and less unstable, than anywhere else in the poem. No foreign intertexts, no erudite allusions, no insane or bawdy interjections. The words are simple and calm. The rhetoric is, one might say, philosophical—logical—in a very concrete way: if-then constructions; clear assertions of reality and perception and presence/absence. The narrative expounds, in fairly graspable terms, a quest-object, and it is, simply enough, merely water: the force of life, the basic yet astounding compound that covers most of the earth. To paraphrase bluntly the tragedy of modern life, as Eliot formulates it in this passage: There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.

This seems ominous, unpromising. But there is also, in this passage, one glimmer of hope: ‘If there were the sound of water only,’ Eliot writes in line 3 5 3. The sound of water would obviously not be real water, but it might remind us of water, or inspire us to hold out hope until the water comes. And indeed the poem delivers on this hypothetical proposition just five lines later: ‘Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop.’ The line is probably the poem’s simplest, perhaps its most banal, yet it is also its most fulfilling. Eliot and all the various and sundry cultural forces he summons throughout the poem cannot elsewhere complete or fulfill the gaps, the lacunae ... but here, Eliot shows a kind of aesthetic power: If water cannot be had, then at least a poet with his tools (sounds!) can deliver an avatar of water. Lurking here is the suggestion, which one might not have expected given the cynicism about the potential of art elsewhere in the poem, that poetry can, in fact, endure and provide (or point the way toward) salvation.

There is a reiteration of this scene in lines 393-394: ‘a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust / Bringing rain.’ Again, there is no water, but there is the sound of water, the promise of water, the proximity of water, even the feel, damp, of water. The poem leaves readers, ultimately, in many ways still dry and barren at the end, but it does succeed in bringing us just about as close to water as possible without getting there—like Moses leading his people to within sight of the promised land. In this vein, I read the poem, finally, as guardedly optimistic: The poet has traversed the desert, and the burden of the poem is absorbing and conveying all the suffering and horror that accompanies this metaphorical journey through the wastes of civilization and culture and postwar Europe and the incoherent, overcharged, frighteningly hostile modern world. But there is a release, an achievement, a transcendence perhaps, a strength of having survived, that glimmers just beyond the poem’s ending, or that might even manifest itself in the last three words, ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ (‘The peace which passeth understanding’). At the end, we are left close to emergence.

 

The present collection ends with Eliot’s masterpiece, and captures a vital aspect of Eliot’s poetic, but it would be an oversight to neglect the second major phase of Eliot’s life and career. In 1927 he converted to Anglo-Catholicism and published the devoutly meditative poem ‘Ash-Wednesday,’ which betokens a shift in his philosophy. The rest of his career was marked by a significant engagement in the consummately social medium of drama—a stark change from the solipsistic individualism of his poetry—and the poetic masterwork of this phase was
Four Quartets,
a poem of acceptance and forgiveness, moments of quiet peace and beauty, and (as it appeared during the throes of World War II) stoic endurance in the face of external devastation. He even wrote a collection of poems about cats (scored and produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber as a blockbuster musical, which, to the good fortune of the Eliot estate, has garnered probably more money in royalties than all the rest of his oeuvre). This more tolerant and accepting aesthetic of Eliot’s later life is a counterpoint to the hostile, cynical tropes of his earlier work. I do not believe that Eliot meant for this later work to negate or repudiate the earlier, but rather to sit alongside it: The two parts of Eliot’s career delineate two different approaches to the world, and it seems that Eliot believed both of them can be true. If one’s inclination as a reader is to seek some ultimately affirmative insight, then one may extrapolate beyond the bleak defeatism that pervades Eliot’s early poetry and see that, finally, he came to believe that Europe and culture and the human psyche will manage to endure.

 

Randy Malamud
is Professor of English and Associate Chair of the department at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and has taught modern literature at GSU since 1989. He is the author of three books about T. S. Eliot:
The Language of Modernism
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), a study of linguistic and stylistic coherence in the work of Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf; T. S.
Eliot’s Drama: A Research and Production Sourcebook
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), a bibliographical reference work about Eliot’s dramatic career; and
Where the Words Are Valid: T. S. Eliot’s Communities of Drama
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), a critical study of Eliot’s seven plays which argues that the social impetus of this work from his later career importantly complements the solipsistic strains of his earlier poetry. Dr. Malamud’s most recent work deals with cultural studies of human-animal relationships: On this topic, he has written
Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity
(New York: NYU Press, 1998) and
Poetic Animals and Animal Souls
(New York: Palgrave, 2003). His webpage, <
http://www.gsu.edu/~wwweng/people/malamud.html
>, lists contact information and links to articles he has written.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.

 

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
²

 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the
window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from
chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
³
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days
⁴
of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

 

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

 

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to
the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a
simple pin—
(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are
thin!’)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will
reverse.

 

For I have known them all already, known them
all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
⁵
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

 

And I have known the eyes already, known them
all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

 

And I have known the arms already, known them
all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown
hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow
streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of
windows? ...