T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
(TWL), lines 8-18
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
Starnbergersee, a lake southwest of Munich, was where Bavarian
King Ludwig II was found dead in June of 1886, having drowned in
shallow waters in much the same way as Hamlet’s Ophelia (see
TWL 172). Ludwig, known as the Mad King or the Swan King,
was a dedicated patron of Richard Wagner, whose Grail legend
based operas will be referenced several times in this poem (see,
e.g., TWL 266-295); he even decorated the walls of his palace
with scenes from Tristan und Isolde (see TWL 31-34 and 42) and
Parsifal (see TWL 201).
WALLS THAT TALK will make several appearances in this poem,
through its allusions if not directly: See the painted walls of
Cymbeline’s daughter Imogen (alluded to at TWL 77-81); the walls
in Cleopatra’s chambers, retelling the story of Philomela’s
tapestries (see TWL 99 and 105); the ceiling panoramas of
Cleopatra (TWL 93) and John Day’s Vainglorious (alluded to at
TWL 197); and the painted sylvan scene of the Golden Bough (see
TWL 98 and Eliot’s first endnote).
See also Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Memories of President
Lincoln (1892):
O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
Hofgarten is a Munich park with a central pavilion dedicated to the
wood goddess Diana, the subject of Vainglorious’s ceiling and
Imogen’s walls and prominent in the myth of the golden bough.
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch
“I am not Russian, I come from Lithuania, I am really a German.”
This statement, effectively an intertwining knot of dried up roots,
appears to be an overheard fragment, contextually from someone
other than the poet or his companion. Compare Virgil’s introduction
in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno 1.66-69 (ca. 1321;
translated by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, 1867):
Not man; man once I was,
And both my parents were of Lombardy,
...Sub Julio' was I born...
See also William Shakespeare, The Tempest 2.1.82-83 (1611):
ADRIAN
Widow Dido, said you? You make me study of that.
She was of Carthage, not of Tunis.
For the recurrence of Dido and Carthage allusions, see the note at TWL 92.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
See Ecclesiastes 12:1,5:
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.
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
These lines derive from Marie Larisch, My Past (1913), and from
private visits Eliot had with her in Bavaria; see T. S. Eliot: The Waste
Land, a Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including
the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited and with an Introduction
by Valerie Eliot (1971). In 1889, Austrian Countess Marie was socially
cast out after her cousin Crown-Prince Rudolph (the archduke) and his
mistress, for whom Marie had acted as a go-between, died in a
suicide-murder scandal. Rudolph was succeeded as crown-prince by
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination triggered
World War I, an event that seems to have contributed greatly to the
mood of this poem. Meanwhile, another Prince Ferdinand, from
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, will be given repeated attention,
beginning with the next passage (see TWL 26).
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
Marie’s mountains inspire freedom but also fear and withdrawal.
MOUNTAINS reappear throughout the poem. See the Lenten
“thunder of spring over distant mountains” (TWL 327); the desperate
sense of “no water, only rock” (TWL 331-359); the unnamed range
surrounding Ernest Shackleton’s march (alluded to at TWL 361);
the inverted mountains beneath a city of decaying earth (TWL 372),
a mountain hole that hides an empty chapel (TWL 386), and finally
the snowy Himavant, a holy mountain in the Himalayas (TWL 398).
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
Several key events may have converged to set the poem’s MOOD:
see above and TWL 62 (the war), as well as allusions noted at
TWL 42 (the loss of a friend), TWL 92 (the pain of a marriage) and
TWL 300 (mental exhaustion), and generally, the loss of innocense.
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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