Words

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), Section II







          II. A Game of Chess

                    This is the “air” section, characterized by ostensibly meaningful words 
                    made empty in their presentation.  Several coarse seduction scenes are 
                    staged through a series of walls that talk (see note at TWL 8) and then 
                    some chatty marital advice is set to a bartender’s “last call” mantra (TWL
                    139-172). All of this follows the beat of dying words in disguise, by the last
                    gasps of Hamlet and the departing words of Ophelia (TWL 128 and 172). 
                    
                    The spectrum of DYING WORDS in this poem ranges from the 
                    deathless speech of the Sybil wanting to die (see the epigraph) to the 
                    speechless death of the drowned sailor/hyacinth girl (TWL 38-40, 47-48).
                    Rhetorical questions hang in the air (TWL 111-134), souls sigh in limbo 
                    (TWL 60-68), a riverbank weeper weeps (TWL 182) and a lovely woman 
                    sees death as her only escape (see note at TWL 253). There are allusions 
                    to the last words of Hamlet (TWL 128) and Ophelia (TWL 172), 
                    Agamemnon (TWL 198), Joseph Conrad's Kurtz (note, TWL 298), John
                    Webster's characters Flamineo (TWL 44) and the stabbed patient (TWL118),
                    and to tragic stories woven into tapestries (TWL 97-110). There are also 
                    subtle allusions to the speechless deaths of Marie’s cousin Rudolph 
                    (TWL 8-18), the Earl of Leicester’s wife Amy Robsart (TWL 279), the 
                    children of Lilith (TWL 159) and Eliot's friend Jean Verdenal (note, TWL 42). 

                    For the latter, see 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 also the “little life” allusion at TWL 7 and see the extended “little life” 
                    passage in  Shakespeare, Tempest 4.1.148-154: 

                    PROSPERO: 

                    Our revels now are ended. These our actors,                    
                    As I foretold you, were all spirits and
                    Are melted into air, into thin air;
                    And —like the baseless fabric of this vision—
                    The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
                    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
                    Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
                    And like this insubstantial pageant faded
                    Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
                    As dreams are made on, and our little life
                    Is rounded with a sleep. 

                    But there is more: see note at TWL 298 for the more enduring words of
                    epitaphs.


from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)