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| Dead River, Early Spring |
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
(TWL) (1922), Epigraph
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in
ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σἰβυλλα τἱ
θἐλεις ; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεἰν θἑλω.”
See Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, 48 (ca. AD 50, tr. Michael Heseltine
1913):
TRIMALCHIO
Yes, and I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage;
and when the boys cried at her: “Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?”
“I would that I were dead,” she used to answer.”
Apollo had granted the Sibyl a wish in exchange for her virginity; she asked for
eternal life but in time she shriveled up, having forgotten to ask for eternal
youth: See Ovid, Metamorphoses 14:122-133 (AD 8; tr. John
Dryden, Samuel Garth, Alexander Pope et al, 1717):
I am no deity, reply'd the dame,
But mortal, and religious rites disclaim.
Yet had avoided death's tyrannick sway,
Had I consented to the God of day.
With promises he sought my love, and said,
Have all you wish, my fair Cumaean maid.
I paus'd; then pointing to a heap of sand,
For ev'ry grain, to live a year, demand.
But ah! unmindful of th' effect of time,
Forgot to covenant for youth, and prime.
The smiling bloom, I boasted once, is gone,
And feeble age with lagging limbs creeps on.
The Sybil also appears in Virgil, Aeneid 6 (19 BC; tr. John Dryden
1697). Aeneas, in search of a new home after leaving his destroyed city of Troy,
encounters the Sybil at Cumae. The Sybil agrees to act as his escort into hell,
where he hopes to find the ghost of his father, but to enter hell, Aeneas first must
give Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld, the bough of a golden tree that
replenishes itself as branches are taken from it. Compare Virgil escorting the poet
through hell in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno (ca. 1321); and
also Hamlet’s meetings with his father’s ghost in William Shakespeare,
Hamlet (1605). This “sylvan scene” (see TWL 98) also alludes to Satan’s
description of Eden in John Milton, Paradise Lost 4:140 (1667).
Aeneas seeks to comprehend his escort's words at Aeneid 6.116-119:
...Commit not thy prophetic mind
To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind,
Lest they disperse in air our empty fate;
Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate."
ETERNITY, or the thought of never dying, is abhorrent to the Sybil, and her
sentiment of a living hell also resonates in an alternative epitaph Eliot had once
considered from Kurtz’s dying words in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
(1902):
The horror! The horror!
But just as Marlow called Kurtz’s cry a moral victory, Eliot, even as he relates the
Sybil’s wish to be dead, appears to be actively yearning for something beyond the
metaphorical grave. See Eliot, East Coker (1940) and Eliot, Little Gidding
(1942) for the poet’s eventual appreciation of a “new start.” More immediately, see
the beginning of this poem for the first of several allusions to the story of Lazarus
being raised from the dead and given a more positive promise of eternal life.
passage and photo from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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