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Faculty of Letters

Seminar: Twentieth Century English Literature


Seminar instructor: Assist. Dr. Daniela Crstea
Student: Dumitru Andreea Mdlina, group II
E-mail: and.dumitru@yahoo.com

Spiritual Decay in the Waste Land by T.S. Eliot


The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.1

Taken into consideration the changes that have been brought by the new post- World
War I climate, the literature of this century reflects a disorderly world which is found at the
edge of the spiritual decay. That is to say the deep feelings and beliefs concerning religion,
literature and culture became gradually damaged. Reflecting upon this, I have made from
my paper a mirror whose part-role is to picture Eliots optimistic attitude towards Englands
future, his allusions to deep beliefs and hope amidst a backdrop of stony rubbish and
broken images.

The optimistic attitude towards Englands future is accomplished by mixing up


Christian myths and archetypes. In Eliots terms, myth becomes a way of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is modern history (Eliot qtd. in Moorman 518). In this sense, it can be made
the deduction that the central matter of the poem is the spiritual revitalization of modern
history. Eliot also gives one of the main clues to the theme and to the structure of the poem
in a note in which he states that not only the title, but also the plan and a good deal of
symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie Westons book on the Grail legend,
From Ritual to Romance (1920).
What Weston did was to interpret the story of Fisher King as an archetypal fertility
myth. According to the introduction to The Waste Land from The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, in Arthurian legend, the Fisher King is the latest in a long line charged
1

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro.

with keeping the Holy Grail. Because he is wounded, he becomes impotent, so not only
unable to keep his sacred charge with respect to the Holy Grail, but also unable to provide a
new generation to propagate his line. So his kingdom suffers, too; his impotence is affecting
the fertility of the land and it reduces it to a barren wasteland. But there is still hope because
this symbolic Waste Land can be revived only if a Questor helps the Fisher King by going to
the Chapel Perilous and asking certain ritual questions about the Holy Grail, the symbol of
female fertility and the Lance, the symbol of male fertility. Therefore, this ritual revives the
King and restores fertility to the land. (2294). in the last section of the Waste Land, there is a
passage which reminds of Weston Chapel Perilous and which suggests that the ritual was
successfully completed and a thunder will announce the rain:
There is the empty chapel, only the winds home.
It has no winds, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain (388-394)
The connection of Fisher Kings myth and Christian myth is that Jesus died and
resurrected in order to redeem humanity from Original sin, and if Christ be not risen, then
our preaching vain, and your faith also vain.2 What is more, Jesus actions are associated
with fish: He chose several fishermen to be His disciples and declared he would make them
fishers of men.
This Christian myth can be linked further with the beauty archetype, that is to say the
nature which dies in winter and revives in spring, shaped from the very beginning of The
Waste Land. April is the cruellest month because it tortures people with vain recollections,
but in the same time, April forces people to stop living their lives at the lowest level, in dried
tubers, to start hoping again in revival. Still, in the Waste Land, the nature is also
unbalanced: it needs water to blossom and the hope of hearing a sound of water will be
another way of shaping ideas about life, death and resurrection.
In The Burial of the Dead, the water which should have been brought by an April
spring rain does not fall in a barren land, full of stony rubbish and roots that do not clutch
and branches that do not grow. So, firstly, the water symbolizes the infertility of the land, the
reason because of which the land died and then, it receives the shade of the other extreme:
death can be caused also by too much water, like the Phoenician sailor, who died drowned.
2

From [1 Cor. 15:14], qtd. in Stagg, Frank, New Testament Theology.

Fear death by water encompasses both extremes: people could die because of lack of water
or because there is too much of it. The water as a symbol of death is brought to a climax in
Death by Water, which deals with the drowned Phoenician sailor:
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
On the other hand, in the last section, What the Thunder Said, water symbolizes the
hope in revival of the Waste Land, because there are signs that the rain is going to begin.
Firstly, there is a Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop line. Secondly, the black clouds/
Gathered far distant, over Himavant. and then the thunder, personified, speaks: DA DA
DA. In What the Thunder Said, the drought from the other sections becomes a thirst for the
waters of healing. With respect to the final stanza, Harold Bloom states that the process of
rebirth is complete:
I sat upon the shore, Eliot writes, focusing on himself,
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me. Behind me suggests
both geographical and spiritual position. The arid plain is
behind him the way one might say an unhappy event is behind
me, after it is finished. Shall I at least set my lands in order?
he asks then, as if he were making preparation for death. Death,
according to the dominant myth of The Waste Land, is the precondition
for life: the god dies so that the god can be reborn;
the seasons of the earths fertility turn: the earth dies so that it
can be reborn and produce a new harvest. (51)
Along with myths and archetypes, the aesthetic design of the poem plays the role of
unifying all the other chunks of beauty and contemplation that art can forge in the teeth of
universal disaster3 Old religious sacred writings and literary writings of the past, glorious
ages which influence constantly the present, are captured in a maelstrom that interpellates
modern humanity. To illustrate, there are reminiscences of the Old and New Testament in the
sense that Ezekiel, the Ecclesiastes, Isaiah and the Psalms are quoted: Son of man, And
the dry stone no sound of water and in part V, line 360: But when I look ahead up the white
road with a reference to the encounter of Jesuss disciples with the resurrected Christ on the
road to Emmaus. Another two old religion are evoked by the title of the poem third part,
prompted by a Buddhist sermon and respectively, the last part of the poem revolves around
three sacred syllables from the Upanistrads: Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata.4
3
4

From Ioana Zirras lectures, University of Bucharest, 2014.


Idem.

To the idea mentioned above, another factor can be added, namely that of the literary
background, which seems to suggest that The Waste Land can not remain a barren land
having that plentiful literary writings, that at least for that cultural richness, The Waste Land
should hope of a rebirth. There are echoes from Petroniuss Satyricon, which alludes to the
Cumean Sybil, one of the ten sibyls whom Greeks and Romans consulted about the future
and who wished to live forever, without asking from Apollo eternal youth, as well. There is
also a line which sends back to Chaucer, the dedication alludes to Ezra Pound, allusions to
Dante, to Baudelaire mon semblable, mon frre, to Shakespeare Anthony and Cleopatra
and to The Tempest in the lines I remember/Those are pearls that were his eyes. from
Ariels song. In addition, there are music fragments from Wagner, which accompany parts
one and three of The Waste Land with resonant musical scores from Tristan and Isolde,
Twilight of the Gods.
Lastly, Tiresias, as Eliot himself designates in a note, although a mere spectator and
not indeed a "character," is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.
Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the
latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one
woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. (23) According to the Greek legend, Tiresias was
given by Zeus the second eyesight, the spiritual one, after he had been blinded because of
Heras revenge, and that is the reason why Tiresias bear the essence of the poem. Because it
ends with a thunder as a storm anticipation, whose rain should regenerate the Waste Land.
In conclusion, beyond the idea of modern mans rootlessness, in a barren, sterile,
devoid of life land, is just a heap of broken images in which no branches grow, there is a
subliminal optimistic attitude which takes shape because of the faith in Jesus, in redemption
and in rebirth, in the thought that the literary and cultural background should be an impulse to
the inhabitants to achieve again those standards, in the hope that rain will fall eventually and
will revive the Waste Land. The bright opening from the end of the poem suggests mans
salvation by himself, by his interior, spiritual force.

Bibliography:

Abrams et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, sixth edition, vol. 2. New York,
1993.
Bloom, Harold, T.S. Eliots The Waste Land (Blooms guides), 2007.
Brooks, Cleanth,Jr, The Waste Land: An Analysis in North, Michael, T.S. Eliot.The Waste
Land. Norton Critical Editions, 2000.
Marcus, Laura, Nicholls, Peter, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English
Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Moorman, Charles, T.S. Eliot.The Grail: A Casebook, Ed. Dhira Benn Mahoney, New York,
2000.
North, Michael, T.S. Eliot.The Waste Land. Norton Critical Editions, 2000.
Stagg, Frank, New Testament Theology, Broadman Press, 1962.
Zirra, Ioana, Lectures, University of Bucharest, 2014.

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