Teacher's notes

From: The Burial of the Dead

In his introductory note on The Waste Land T.S. Eliot stated that the title, the plan, and a large part of the symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie Weston's book on the Grail legend From Ritual to Romance.

He also acknowledged the influence of another book, The Golden Bough, by Sir James Fraser (1854-1941), which deals with the development of magical, religious and scientific thought and gives vast information about ancient religious and magical practices.

The poem, conceived as a monologue, basically presents a character going to a fortune-teller, receiving a response, and reading manifestations of these response in various episodes.

The Grail legend, to which Eliot refers, tells about a land which is barren because its King - The Fisher King - has been wounded by a spear thrust through his thighs, and sexually maimed.

A young and pure knight goes in quest of the Holy Grail - the cup  which has been used to collect the blood from the body of Christ - and reaches a Chapel where the Grail is kept.

Only if this knight asks the meaning of the Grail and of the lance that he sees during a procession will the king be healed, and the land reclaimed to fertility.

Miss Weston found close correspondence between the Grail legend and the ancient symbolism of fertility rites. The fertility King appears to be the medieval version of the pre-Christian young men or young gods slain or drowned in spring time and then symbolically revived.

The fertility of the land was associated with their youth and strength (see also the myths of Adonis, Attis, Osiris).

Moreover Miss Weston found resemblance between this ancient fertility ritual and the Christian ritual, in that the central movement was for both  EUCHARISTIC: taking the Food of Life from sacred vessels.

In this perspective Eliot inserted the description of this inserted waste land.

The Burial of the Dead

The Waste Land title conveys the idea that is a sort of living death.

The first line sets the atmosphere of the frustrated desire of regeneration.

April which conventionally is the month anticipating the arrival of spring, the first stage of a natural cycle of new life is here "the cruellest month".

Differently from G. Chaucer's incipit in Canterbury Tales, T. S. Eliot employs inter-textual references to create an allusive sardonic form of poetry which hints at the opposition between sterility and fertility.

Right from the start, the reader meets words like "cruellest, dead land, dull roots, winter". An atmosphere of death, or better life-in-death, is immediately perceivable.

The winter's sleep is disturbed by the arrival of spring, with the revival of memory and desire. The coexistence of memory and desire is worth noticing  because they both refer to something  men cannot have. Even this is a form of frustrated regeneration: one that will not come.

Fragments of conversation: the voice of the German Arch Duke and the hyacinth girl are separated by a passage of Biblical tones. "Non sono affatto Russa, sono Lituana, una vera tedesca".

The shifts are abrupt without introduction or explanation.

There is another abrupt change with the introduction of the fortune-teller, Madame Sosotris.

She uses the ancient Tarot pack.

She is the inadequate and dishonest conveyor of the truth of ancient civilization.

Explanation of intertextual references in The Burial of the Dead

Some symbols are said to derive from Egyptian inscriptions, and  have been connected with fertility rites and folklore.

The ancient Egyptians used them in the prediction of the rising or falling of the river Nile.

"Phoenician Sailor": the fertility god, whose image was thrown into the sea each year to symbolise the death of the summer without which there could be no resurrection in the spring of the new year.

Phoenicia , the area now occupied by Lebanon and Syria, was the location of the anniual ceremonies to commemorate death and resurrection of the God  Thammuz.

"Those are pearls that were his eyes"

This is a quotation from Shakespeare The Tempest. It comes from the song sung by Ariel to Ferdinando suggesting that his father, Alonso King of Naples, has been transformed by drowning into something "rich and strange". In fact Alonso has not been drowned and Ariel sings a comforting song which leads him to Miranda, with whom he falls in love.

"Man with the three staves": Eliot says that this figure is associated by him "quite arbitrarily" with the Fisher King (the king who, being wounded at a tight had lost his  virility and  as a consequence his land suffered from sterility).

The wheel represents the cycle of fortune figuring the reversal of fortune in life.

"Which is blank ... see."

The Syrian merchants acted as carriers of religious beliefs and legends such as the Holy Grail but they themselves didn't necessarily understand the significance of their stories.

Madame Sosostris had not comprehension of this misteries.

"Hanged Man"  is a figure in the Tarot pack, hanging by one rope from a T-shaped cross.

He represents the god sacrificed in order for his resurrection to be able to renew the fertility of the land and its people.

 "Thank you " is said because Madame Sosostris  has been paid by the customer. Mrs Equitone is a client of the fortune-teller.

UNREAL CITY

The passage Unreal City is taken from  The Burial of the Dead and gives the reader a ghasty description of modern London.

London is unreal, because the crowds of office workers, disgorged from the suburban train and making their way to the city, seem lifeless.

They are like people returned from the dead, and the church bell of St. Mary Woolnooth has a soombre note, more like a funeral tolling bell as it strikes the hour when work begins.

The city is unreal too because it is not described, only the people create a picture of it.

We know only that it is early on a winter's morning and the brown fog which obscures everything makes the scene doubly unreal.

The poet greets one of the crowds, Stetson, who, according to some represents the poet Ezra Pound who was with him at the battle of Mylae (260 b. C) in the first Punic war between the romans and the Carthagininas  to determine who should control trade in the Mediterranean.

Eliot disregards the time difference from the first punic war to the existence of the XX century London.

He asks him if the corpse he planted has begun to show signs of sprouting into life, if it has been disturbed by the frost and warns him to keep the dog distant who might dig it up again.

The concept, the reference as often in Eliot's poetry, is obscure. The poet's words to Stetson are jocular and irreligious and he calls him "my brother", they are all alike the poet, Stetson and the rest of Zombie-figures, all indifferent in the face of life, death or life-in-death.

They all, as in Baudelaire, Fleur du Mal, from which the last line of this passage is taken, suffer from on of the seven deathly sins, spiritual sloth, which is the negation of life and god.

Eliot's culture was so wide that he drew naturally from many sources, creating images with allusive leaps and spanning centuries as if the time were all one.

Here, in addition to Baudelaire, there is a reference to Dante's Inferno, in line 4: which gives us a clue to the characteristics of the crowd. In Dante they are the spirits who in life recognised neither the good nor the bad. And all Eliot's philosphy was directed towards condamnation of such people.

The other reference to Dante at  line 5 is related to spirit of the unbaptised who are in Limbo.

The last line but one (line 75) is a half-quotation from the dirge Cornelia sings in Webster's The White Death, but there the animal was a wolf;in the dull life of Stetson it would naturally be a dog.

The poem is written in blank verse; Blank verse, here wthout rhyme - in this extract is broken twice by rhyme. The language is Eliot's mingling of the poetic and the prosaic, a method which does not jar, but rather shocks us into comprehension.

What the Thunder Said

iIt s the last section of the poem. The feeling of desperate searching rises to fever-pitch and the total absence of punctuation of the repetitiveness contributes to the sense of lurching hopelessly forward in a waterless waste.

A calm descends with the appearance of the hooded sexless figure, who mysteriously changes position, however. Sometimes he is walking with them, and sometimes is ahead of them, he may be companion, guide or menace.

In the greater quiet of the rhythm, there is, nevertheless, a tense note of hidden terror, conveyed by the repetition of the question.

The seekers are now approaching the Chapel Perilious, the place where the Holy Grail was housed. They enter a nightmare world of horrors and dangers, which they must surmount to achieve their aim.

Again, in Eliot's symbolism, these falling cities and visions represent the devastating nightmare-haunted spirit of men, as arid and empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

The Chapel is ruined and empty signifying that the quest has been in vain; man has not found what he needs to make his life whole and sane again.

A cock crows on the roof of the chapel, perhaps signifying day-brake, when evil spirits traditionally have to return to hell, perhaps a reference to Peter's betrayal of Christ in the Gospels. Although the lightning flashes and the wind is damp, the longed-for rain does not come.

It will come, says the thunder, when has learnt datta, that is give and dayadham that is sympathise: man must come out of the prison of his egoism and treat his fellows with compassion.

The third message damyata means control.

Men must act with "control" and must accept authority. Then, as the boat responds to "hanal esperts", the heart will be obedient and provide positive responses. The end of the poem adds to these Sanskrit words a series of allusions and quotations taken from different language, symbolizing the essential unity of mankind. The final Sanskrit words foretell that it if man can obey what the thunder says, "Peace which passeth understanding", the world will be saved.