T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 215-248
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human
engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two
lives,
Eliot's note:
Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ’character’, is yet the
most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-
eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the
latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women
are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in
fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great
anthropological interest: Cum Iunone iocos et ‘maior vestra profecto est /
Quam, quae contingit maribus’, dixisse, ‘voluptas.’ / Illa negat; placuit quae sit
sententia docti / Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota. / Nam duo
magnorum viridi coeuntia silva / Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu /
Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem / Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus
eosdem / Vidit et ‘est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae’, / Dixit ‘ut auctoris
sortem in contraria mutet, / Nunc quoque vos feriam!’ percussis anguibus
isdem / Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago. / Arbiter hic igitur sumptus
de lite iocosa / Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto / Nec pro materia fertur
doluisse suique / Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte, / At pater omnipotens
(neque enim licet inrita cuiquam / Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto /
Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore.
See Ovid, Metamorphoses III: 412-443:
Twas now, while these transactions past on Earth,
And Bacchus thus procur’d a second birth,
When Jove, dispos’d to lay aside the weight
Of publick empire and the cares of state,
As to his queen in nectar bowls he quaff’d,
‘In troth,’ says he, and as he spoke he laugh’d,
‘The sense of pleasure in the male is far
More dull and dead, than what you females share.’
Juno the truth of what was said deny’d;
Tiresias therefore must the cause decide,
For he the pleasure of each sex had try’d.
It happen’d once, within a shady wood,
Two twisted snakes he in conjunction view’d,
When with his staff their slimy folds he broke,
And lost his manhood at the fatal stroke.
But, after seven revolving years, he view’d
The self-same serpents in the self-same wood:
‘And if,’ says he, ‘such virtue in you lye,
That he who dares your slimy folds untie
Must change his kind, a second stroke I’ll try.’
Again he struck the snakes, and stood again
New-sex’d, and strait recover’d into man.
Him therefore both the deities create
The sov’raign umpire, in their grand debate;
And he declar’d for Jove: when Juno fir’d,
More than so trivial an affair requir’d,
Depriv'd him, in her fury, of his sight,
And left him groping round in sudden night.
But Jove (for so it is in Heav’n decreed,
That no one God repeal another’s deed)
Irradiates all his soul with inward light,
And with the prophet's art relieves the want of sight.
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
See John 9: 25:
Whether [Jesus, by healing on the Sabbath] be a sinner or no, I know not:
one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.
Compare Tiresias's PERCEPTIVENESS with that of Madame Sosostris
(TWL 54); the one-eyed merchant with his allusion to the one-eyed Odin
(TWL 52, 54 and note, TWL 208); and the pearly-eyed sailor (TWL 48).
For another perspective, see Eliot, Gerontion (1920), which begins:
Here I am, an old man in a dry month
and concludes with
...Tenants of the house,
thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
Gerontion had been part of The Waste Land but was cut at the suggestion of
Ezra Pound. 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).. For more of the eye's
limitations, see note, TWL 308.
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
Eliot's note:
This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, but I had in mind the
'longshore' or 'dory' fisherman, who returns at nightfall.
See Sappho, fragment 95 (ca. 600 BC, tr. Henry Thornton Wharton, 1895):
Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered;
thou bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother.
See alsoRobert Louis Stevenson, Requiem (1879):
Home is the sailor, home from the sea.
See also Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio 8:1-2:
Twas now the hour that turneth back desire
In those who sail the sea...
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast,
lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Typists, the two-career household and ready-to-serve meals, were part of the
war and post-war trend. See note, TWL 256.
BREAK TIMES: Compare the typist’s teatime with Countess Marie’s coffee
break (TWL 11), the bar talk at last call (TWL 139), or lunch with the Smyrna
merchant (TWL 213). See also note, TWL 263, and note how time moves here
from evening to breakfast to teatime.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last
rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
Combinations are undergarments; stays are corsets. Contrast the piled up
bed and the hyacinth girl's hair and clothes in need of drying (TWL 38) with
Cleopatra’s chambers (TWL 77).
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest —
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
Carbuncular: Pimpled. The expected guest,a young house clerk or a typist
home at teatime, is "one of the low." See also Shakespeare, Hamlet
2.2.401: Hamlet recites Aeneas’s description to Queen Dido of Achilles’s son
Pyrrhus; while avenging the death of his father, Pyrrhus is said to have “eyes
like carbuncles.” Compare these to the sailor’s pearly eyes (TWL: 48).
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
Compare the socialite chess players at TWL 137.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which are still unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
See A.C. Swinburne, Tiresias (1885):
I, Tiresias the prophet, seeing in Thebes / Much evil...
In the end, though merely a spectator (see note, TWL 218), Tiresias has
nonetheless “foresuffered” the scene and, being blind, “gropes his way” out of
the room.
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
Beyond Metamorphoses (see note, TWL 218), TIRESIAS also appears
in Homer, Odyssey 11: 561-565 (ca. 800 BC, tr. A. T. Murray, 1919), where
Odysseus tells his crew,
Ye think, forsooth, that ye are going to your dear native land; but Circe has
pointed out for us another journey, even to the house of Hades and dread
Persephone, to consult the spirit of Theban Tiresias;
in Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 468-474 (429 BC, tr. Francis Storr, 1921),
where Tiresias curses Oedipus:
Thus then I answer: since thou hast not spared
To twit me with my blindness--thou hast eyes,
Yet see'st not in what misery thou art fallen,
Nor where thou dwellest nor with whom for mate.
Dost know thy lineage? Nay, thou know'st it not,
And all unwitting art a double foe
To thine own kin, the living and the dead;
in Sophocles, Antigone 5: 79-83 (441 BC, tr. Francis Storr, 1912), where
Tiresias curses King Creon for threatening to bury his niece Antigone alive
I prophesy. For, yet a little while,
And sound of lamentation shall be heard,
Of men and women through thy desolate halls;
And all thy neighbor States are leagues to avenge
Their mangled warriors who have found a grave
I' the maw of wolf or hound;
and in Dante Alighieri, Inferno 20: 34-42, where Tiresias, being one who sees
the future, is consigned to walk backwards in the eighth circle of hell.
See, he has made a bosom of his shoulders!
Because he wished to see too far before him
Behind he looks, and backward goes his way:
Behold Tiresias, who his semblance changed,
When from a male a female he became,
His members being all of them transformed;
And afterwards was forced to strike once more
The two entangled serpents with his rod,
Ere he could have again his manly plumes.
(1880, tr. Constance Garnett 1912): In Ivan’s dramatic “poem,” Christ’s only
answer to his inquisitor is a kiss:
The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.
Christ, like Tiresias, then leaves into “the dark alleys of the town.”
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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