T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 19-30
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
Eliot’s note: Compare Ezekiel 2:1:
And [the LORD] said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet,
and I will speak unto thee.
See also TWL 186, alluding to Ezekiel 37:3:
Son of man, can these bones live?
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
See Ezekiel 6:4:
And ...your images shall be broken.
For brokenness, see note at TWL 303. See also Job 8:13,17 (likening the
hypocrite who forgets God to a plant without earth and water):
His roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones.
ROOTS appear at TWL 4, 7 and 19; see also the notes at TWL 12, 71 and 324.
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
Eliot’s note: Compare Ecclesiastes 12:5. See also TWL 13, alluding to Ecclesiastes
12:1 and 5 and the transition from youthfulness to dying days:
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not,
nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; ...when
they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond
tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because
man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
See Isaiah 32:2:
And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest;
as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
See William Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.376 (1611):
ARIEL
Come unto these yellow sands...
Ariel’s song is repeatedly alluded to here. See William Shakespeare,
The Tempest 1.2.376-405, and note these references to Ariel's song
throughout the poem:
Enter Ferdinand [,] and ARIEL, invisible, playing and singing.
ARIEL [Sings].
Come unto these yellow sands, (see TWL 26)
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have and kissed
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there,
And sweet sprites bear
The burden.
(burden dispersedly)
SPIRITS
Hark, hark! Bow-wow,
The watch-dogs bark, bow-wow. (see TWL 276)
ARIEL
Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, Cock a diddle dow. (see TWL 393)
FERDINAND
Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth? (see TWL 119)
It sounds no more, and sure, it waits upon
Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck, (see TWL 182, 192)
This music crept by me upon the waters, (see TWL 257)
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. Thence I have followed it
(Or it hath drawn me rather) but 'tis gone.
No, it begins again.
ARIEL [Sings]
Full fathom five thy father lies, (see note at TWL 166)
Of his bones are coral made; (see TWL 186)
Those are pearls that were his eyes, (see TWL 48 and 125)
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
SPIRITS
Ding-dong
ARIEL
Hark! now I hear them.
SPIRITS
Ding-dong, bell.
See also Virgil, Aeneid 5.89, where Aeneas, having sailed through a
tempest, lands on the yellow sands of hospitable Sicilian shores.
Shakespeare’s Ariel, a spirit “which art but air” (5.1.21), causes a passing ship
to run aground, then brings all its passengers safely to shore. In Thomas
Heywood, Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels 4 (1635), another Ariel
converges the elements of earth, water and air as “earth’s great Lord” and
one of the princes who rule the waters. See also Heirarchy 1, echoing lines
from Augustine’s Confessions later alluded to at TWL 307:
I sought Thee round about, O Thou my God,
To finde thy aboad.
I said unto the Earth ‘Speake, art thou He?’
She answer'd me,
‘I am not.’
...I askt the Seas, and all the Deepes below,
My God to know.
...I askt the Aire, if that were hee? but know
It told me, No.
...I askt the Heavens, Sun, Moone and Stars; but they
Said ‘We obey.
...We are not God, but we by Him were made.’
And I will show you something different from either
See Jeremiah 33: 2-3, 10, 11:
Thus saith the LORD the maker thereof, the LORD that formed it, to
establish it; ...Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee
great and mighty things, which thou knowest not. ...Again there shall
be heard in this place, ...even in the cities of Judah, and in the streets
of Jerusalem, that are desolate, without man, and without inhabitant,
and without beast, The voice of joy, and the voice of gladness ...For
I will cause to return the captivity of the land, as at the first...
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
See T.S. Eliot, The Death of Narcissus (1915):
Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or
Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock...
See also Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Philaster 3.2 (1620):
Preach to birds and beasts
What woman is, and help to save them from you;
How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts
More hell than hell has; how your tongues, like scorpions,
Both heal and poison; how your thoughts are woven
With thousand changes in one subtle web,
And worn so by you;
...How all the good you have is but a shadow,
I' the morning with you, and at night behind you
Past and forgotten.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
See John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: 4. The Physician
Is Sent For (1638):
What’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself
and consumes himself to a handful of dust; what’s become of his soaring thoughts,
his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, to the
thoughtlessness, of the grave?
GRAVES AND BURIAL SCENES recur at TWL 71-75, 193, 246 and 388;
see also the allusions of the epigraph and TWL 2, 7, 71, 74, 186, 214, 246,
276, 296 and 378.
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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