Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand not lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

                                                       If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water 

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

This text is an extract taken from "What the Thunder Said", the fifth and final section of T.S.Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land.  To be precise, it corresponds to lines 331-358.

Looking at the layout, the reader understands there is no metrical pattern. Lines have various lengths. Therefore, the poem is written in free verse.

On a denotative level, the text describes the journey through the waste land. The questing knight in his search for the Grail has to travel through an inhospitable territory, where water, the source of life, is totally absent.  Therefore, the wish for water somehow becomes a real need. Accordingly, the knight dreams of water, and ends up imagining its sound ("Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop" ). "But there is no water ": in conclusion, the journey seems bitterly unprogressing and unending, and a sense of spiritual death wafts throughout.

After a first reading, it is clear that there is a total absence of punctuation. Despite this, the text has a distinctive rhythm. Rhythm is given by sound patterns, such as repetitions, anaphoric constructions, parallel phrases  and alliterations. The word "water" occurs eleven times, "rock" nine times and "mountain/s" five times. The five conditional clauses beginning with "if" are answered by five statements beginning with "but". Furthermore, negations are strongly present.

Mountains highlight the sense of aridity and dryness. The "Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth" opposing the dream of water is no longer the same mountain of Marie's youth ("in the mountains, there you feel free"); in this waste land "red, sullen faces sneer and snarl". A possible interpretation of the color red can be found taking into consideration the four elements: water, earth (rock), wind (" The road winding above among the mountains ") and fire. Red recalls fire, and Eliot thereby includes this element in the text in an indirect way.

Excellent