T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 111-138
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me...”
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
See William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.1.127-138 (the son addressing the ghost of
his father):
HAMLET
Speak to me.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
People are forever ASKING QUESTIONS, aren’t they? The question is left
unmarked in TWL 112 above (Why do you never speak), but questions are
regularly punctuated at TWL 20, 34, 72ff, 113ff, 131ff, 164, 299, 360ff, 402 and
426. Questions are also alluded to by the epigraph and by TWL 26, 30, 48, 118,
182, 186, 309, and 400.
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
See TWL 194-195: “And bones cast in a little low dry garret, / Rattled by the rat's
foot only, year to year.” Rat’s alley was a World War I slang term for battlefield
trenches. For more on RATTLING BONES, see TWL 22, 116, 195, 316 and 391,
and see Ezekiel 37:1-9:
The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the
LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And
caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in
the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man,
can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest. Again he said
unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear
the word of the LORD. Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will
cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you,
and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you,
and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD. So I prophesied as I was
commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and
the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews
and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there
was no breath in them. Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy,
son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four
winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
Eliot’s note: “Cf. Webster: ‘Is the wind in that door still?’” See John Webster, The
Devil’s Lawcase 3:2 (1623). Two surgeons come upon a man being stabbed,
ostensibly to death; the surgeons consider how they might make money off of the
perpetrator by promising to keep quiet, when the victim groans. They first pretend it
is only the wind they hear, but they know better and quickly realize that by healing
the victim they can profit from both sides.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
“Nothing?”
See Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.4.128-131:
HAMLET
Do you see nothing there?
QUEEN
Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.
HAMLET
Nor did you nothing hear?
QUEEN
No, nothing but ourselves.”
Images of BROKENNESS, EMPTINESS AND NOTHINGNESS pervade this
poem. See TWL lines 22, 40, 119-126, 173, 177, 303-305, 385, 389, 409, 410,
417 and 427. Compare these lines with the humble thoughts of Kurtz’s “last
disciple” in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3:
I am a simple man. I have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody.
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Eliot’s note: “Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.” This is Eliot’s quiet hint tying the hyacinth prince
of TWL 37 (“Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, your arms full
and your hair wet”) to the drowned sailor of TWL 48 (“Those are pearls that were
his eyes,” alluding to Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.402).
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
Wondering about being “alive, or not” follows TWL 39-40: “I was
neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing...” which alludes to Dante Alighieri,
Inferno 34:25:
I did not die, and I alive remained not.
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
See Shakespeare, Hamlet, 5.2.342 (Folio ed., 1623):
HAMLET
O, I die, Horatio.
The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit,
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th'election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice.
So tell him with th’occurrents more and less
Which have solicited – The rest is silence.
O, o, o, o.
In the earlier Quarto editions, Hamlet’s words end with “silence” (compare TWL
434, ending this poem with “Shantih shantih shantih”). See also TWL 172 for an
allusion to Ophelia’s farewell words ("Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies,
good night, good night"), from Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5.70-73.
It's so elegant
So intelligent
See Gene Buck & Herman Ruby, The Zeigfield Follies, That Shakespearean
Rag (1912):
That Shakespearian rag-- Most intelligent, very elegant,...
See also Clive Bell, Since Cezanne (1922), crudely criticizing what he called a
“RAGTIME LITERATURE” adopted from the Jazz Movement by, among others,
Eliot, “whose agonizing labours seem to have been eased somewhat by the
comfortable ministrations of a black and grinning muse.” But here Eliot's "rag"
passages are dissonant and the comforts superficial, as socialites talk of their day
plans (TWL 131-138) in a snippet conspicuously placed between the emptiness of
a domestic difference (TWL 111-126) and the barside talk of a soldier’s return to
his wife (TWL 139-172). These uneasy bits are interspersed with a brief chorus
that disguises Hamlet’s fading breaths (TWL 128) and a string of pub farewells at
closing time that echoes Ophelia’s morbid goodbyes (TWL 172). There will be
more songs in the poem’s next section, and they will become less oblique, but this
is, for now, as musical as it gets.
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?
More questions, and more Hamlet allusions. See Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.4.57,
for the son's reaction after his father’s ghost appears:
HAMLET
Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?
See also Hamlet 3.4.178, when the Queen fails to see or hear her late husband’s
ghost, even after her son challenges her:
QUEEN
What shall I do?
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
“What shall we ever do?”
Eliot would later pose a SHAKESPEARE VS. DANTE comparison in his essay
Dante: II. The Purgatorio and the Paradiso (1929):
...Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent
and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper
degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation. And a further wisdom
is reached when we see clearly that this indicates the equality of the two men.
For a similar take, see Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of
Ulysses, 1934:
...When the question, often put, ‘If on a desert island what one book?’ was again
raised, Joyce said: ‘I should hesitate between Dante and Shakespeare but not for
long. The Englishman is richer...’
But see Joyce's recapitulation in Richard Ellman, James Joyce (1959):
‘I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is
ballast.’
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
Eliot's note:
Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women Beware Women.
See Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess 1624); and see also
Middleton, Women Beware Women (1657), in which a girl is seduced
while her mother in law is kept busy in the next room playing chess.
For lidless eyes, see Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Inclusiveness (1881):
The changing guests, each in a different mood, Sit at the roadside table and arise: And every life among them in likewise Is a soul’s board set daily with new food. What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?— Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes, Of what her kiss was when his father wooed? May not this ancient room thou sit’st in dwell In separate living souls for joy or pain? Nay, all its corners may be painted plain Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well; And may be stamped, a memory all in vain, Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.
For other GAMES OF CHESS, see Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.172,
where Ferdinand and Miranda are discovered playing chess; and see
also Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isolde, tr. Jessie Weston
(1899), in which a young Tristan seems to impress the masters of a merchant
ship with his chess skills, but as he loses himself in the game they steal him
away to sea.
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with Annotations (and other explanations): Talk of Wind and Nothingness, Hamlet's Rag and What Shall We Do?
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