T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 60-68
Unreal City,
Eliot’s note: “Cf. Baudelaire: ‘Fourmillante cite; cite; pleine de rêves,
/ ‘Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.“ From Charles
Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal: Les Sept Vieillards (The Flowers of
Evil: The Seven Old Men, 1867, tr. James Huneker, 1919):
O Swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where in full day the sceptre walks and speaks.
The UNREAL CITY recurs at lines 60, 207, 259 and 377. Unreal or
not, the City is the popular name for London's long-standing
financial district.
For other nods to LONDON, the City and beyond, see the notes at
TWL 66 and 67 below and at TWL 208, 214, 258, 259, 264, 275,
276, 289, 293, 296 and 376, and see TWL 180, 207 and 260.
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
The brown fog may allude to “the embrowned air” in Dante
Allighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno 2.1 (ca. 1321; tr. Henry
Wordsworth Longfellow, 1867).
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
The crowd of lifeless city workers flows over the bridge, up the
hill and down the street, with no mention of any water flowing
under the bridge and only a brown fog above them. The human
flow also reflects the “silent sea of faces” in Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass, Memories of President Lincoln 6 (1892),
suggesting a metaphor for the stream of dead and injured soldiers
being sent home after the war. The shadow of WORLD WAR I is
cast throughout this poem; see also the notes at TWL 18, 70, 115,
139, 199, 289, 331, 374 and 418.
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Eliot’s note: “Cf. Inferno III, 55-57: ‘si lunga tratta / di gente,
ch’io non avrei mai creduto / che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.’”
From Longfellow’s translation:
... so long a train
Of people, that I ne'er would have believed
That ever Death so many had undone.
As he writes this, the poet is at the gates of hell; see Inferno
3:35-36, where he notes:
...the melancholy souls of those
Who lived withouten infamy or praise.
Death has undone them by denying them; see Inferno 3:43-46:
And I: ‘O Master, what so grievous is
To these, that maketh them lament so sore?’
He answered: ‘I will tell thee very briefly.
These have no longer any hope of death...’
Compare this with the Sybil’s wish to die in the epigraph of
The Waste Land:
‘I would that I were dead.’
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
Eliot’s note: “Cf. Inferno IV, 25-27: ‘Quivi, secondo che per
ascoltare, non avea pianto, ma’ che di sospiri, che l’aura
eterna facevan tremare.’” Again, from Longfellow’s translation:
There, as it seemed to me from listening,
Were lamentations none, but only sighs,
That tremble made the everlasting air.
Dante and Virgil have now passed through the gates of hell and
are entering Limbo and an even lower level of hopelessness; see
Inferno 4:41-42:
Lost are we and are only so far punished,
That without hope we live on in desire.
Compare Eliot, Little Gidding 2:60-61 (1942):
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.
See also Heracleitus, On Nature (ca 475 BC):
Fire lives in the death of air; water lives in the death of earth;
and earth lives in the death of water.
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
Eliot worked near King William Street as a Lloyd’s Bank clerk from
1917 to 1926, a “stopgap” to make ends meet. See Valerie Eliot,
Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922 (1988).
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
St Mary Woolnoth Church is at the corner of Lombard and King
William Streets. The current structure was built in 1666, but the
first Wilnotmaricherche dates back to 1191 and evidence of even
earlier Roman and pagan worship at the site has been discovered
beneath the building’s foundation. For references to other
CHURCHES, see TWL 202 and 389 and the notes at TWL 71, 76a,
264, 388 and 389.
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
Eliot’s note: “A phenomenon which I have often noticed.” Nine is,
among many other numerological curiosities, the hour of Jesus’s
death, the start of the workday, Beethoven’s ultimate symphony and
the final circle of Dante’s Hell.
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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