T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 31-42
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
See Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 1.1.5-8 (1865;
tr. Richard le Gallienne 1909):
Fresh blows the wind
For home:
My Irish child,
Where tarriest thou?
This is a sailor’s song overheard by Princess Isolde, en route to her
loveless marriage to King Mark of Cornwall; Isolde wants to drink
poison to escape her fate, but her maid substitutes the poison with a
love potion. She takes the potion in front of the king’s nephew Tristan,
the potion takes its effect and they fall in love. Compare Venus
sedating Aeneas to prevent him from falling in love with the widow
Dido, at Virgil, Aeneid I.726, alluded to at TWL 92.
Tristan was, with Parsifal of the Grail legend, one of King Arthur’s
knights. See Jessie L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913),
offering this summary of THE GRAIL LEGEND:
In Arthurian legend, a Fisher King (the fish being an ancient symbol
of life) has been maimed or killed, and his country has therefore become
a dry Waste Land; he can only be regenerated and his land restored to
fertility by a knight (Parsifal) who perseveres through various ordeals to
the Perilous Chapel and learns the answers to certain ritual questions
about the Grail.
Weston concluded in From Ritual to Romance 2 (1920), that
the woes of the land are directly dependent upon the sickness, or maiming,
of the King, and in no wise caused by the failure of the Quester.
See the Grail allusions at TWL 31-35 (Tristan and Isolde), 201 (Sir
Parsifal), 266-306 (The Thames-Daughters), 386-390 (The Perilous
Chapel) and 424-426 (The Fisher King). See also Dante, Inferno 5.61-69,
where Tristan commiserates with Cleopatra (see TWL77) and the widow
Dido (see above), condemned for their lust to the second circle of hell.
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
See Ovid, Metamorphosis 10:256-323: The hyacinth, a perennial April
wildflower, was initially a Spartan prince endeared by the sun god Apollo
(and also, in other accounts, by the wind god Zephyrus). While playing
quoits in the sun the prince was killed by a wind-blown quoit; Apollo
raised a purple flower out of his blood, traced a mournful “ai, ai” on its
petals and named it Hyacinth.
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, ...
See Eliot’s note at TWL 126, tying the hyacinth girl to the drowned
sailor with pearly eyes. This as the speaker’s own eyes are failing.
AMBIGUOUS IDENTITIES recur throughout this poem; see TWL
12, 46-48, 54, 126, 207-08, 218-19, 312-18 and 320.
...I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
See Dante, Inferno 34:25:
I did not die, and I alive remained not.
See also Vyasa, Bhagavat Gita 2:11 (ca. 100 BC, tr. Kâshinâth
Trimbak Telang, 1882):
Learned men grieve not for the living nor the dead.
Compare TWL 117-126 (those who know nothing) and 182 (one who grieves).
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
See Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3: While waiting for the tide to rise on the
Thames, Marlow, “the only man of us who still followed the sea,” told
his shipmates of a past journey up the Congo,
into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.
Compare this with Dante, Divine Comedy: Paradiso 12:30-31:
Out of the heart of one of the new lights
There came a voice...
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
See Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 3.1.24:
The sea is waste and drear.
This is the report to Tristan’s henchman Kurwenal, who was keeping vigil
over his ailing master and had asked a shepherd to “Watch thou the sea” for
Isolde’s ship to arrive.
One of the more personal influences on this poem was the 1915 death of Eliot’s
friend JEAN VERDENAL. See John Peter, A New Interpretation of The
Waste Land (1952) and James E. Miller, T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste
Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977). Eliot met Verdenal in Paris in 1910,
and they kept a long-distance friendship while Eliot was studying at Harvard in
1911 and 1912. See Valerie Eliot, Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922 (1988).
In one letter to Eliot, Verdenal had expressed a deep admiration for Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde, which now bookends the hyacinth girl / drowned sailor
story. In April 1915 (the cruelest month; see TWL 1), Verdenal was among
troops sent to Gallipoli (see Mrs. Porter’s soldiers at TWL 199; see also the
Stetson friend, TWL 69), where he was officially commended for helping to
evacuate wounded soldiers:
Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate
to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist.
He died two days later. That year Eliot wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock (1915), and he dedicated his first collection, Prufrock and Other
Observations (1917) to Verdenal. In 1934, Eliot wrote in T.S. Eliot, A
Commentary, Criterion (April 1934):
I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental
sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in
the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far
as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.
See TWL 1-11. For other DROWNING references, see TWL 55, and
compare Ophelia’s death in Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.7.164-181 (see TWL
172-174) with the hyacinth girl’s demise at TWL 38 (“Your arms full, and
your hair wet”) and the shallow water death of Bavarian King Ludwig II
(alluded to at TWL 8). See also the collected currants in the merchant’s
pocket (see TWL 210) and the water deaths of the Tempest sailor (TWL
48), and, in the section entitled “Death by Water,” Phlebas the Phoenician
(TWL 312-321). Finally, note the simile of Cleopatra’s perfumes that
“drowned the sense in odours” (TWL 89).
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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