T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 296-306:
“My feet are at Moorgate and my heart
Under my feet. ...
Moorgate is an Underground stop in London’s financial district.
...After the event
He wept.
“He wept” repeats the convalescent’s lament (see TWL 182: “By the waters of
Leman I sat down and wept...”) but also recalls Jesus weeping after the event of
Lazarus’s death (John 11:35). See Section 1, “Burial of the Dead,” alluding to
The Order for the Burial of the Dead in The Church of England, Book of
Common Prayer (1662), which begins with a passage at the heart of the Lazarus
event, John 11:26 (KJV, 1611):
...whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.
See also the poem’s epigraph, from Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, 48 (ca.
AD 50, tr. Michael Heseltine 1913):
TRIMALCHIO
Yes, and I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage; and when
the boys cried at her: “Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?” “I would that I were dead,”
she used to answer.’
Eliot had considered an alternative epigraph in Kurtz’s dying words, from
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3 (1902):
The horror! The horror!
The spectrum of DYING WORDS in The Waste Land ranges from the
deathless speech of the Sybil wanting to die to literal dying words of Hamlet
and Ophelia (TWL 128 and 172) to the speechless death of the drowned
sailor/hyacinth girl (see TWL 38-40 and 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
(TWL 253, alluding to Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield 24 (1766)).
From Goldsmith:
When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover
And wring his bosom, is—to die.
But there is hope.
...He promised ‘a new start.’
See again John 11:26 from the account of Lazarus, and see also Marlow’s
comment on Kurtz’s last words in Heart of Darkness 3:
Better his cry—much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by
innumerable defeats ...But it was a victory!
Compare Herman Hesse, A Glimpse of Chaos: The Brothers Karamazov, or
The Downfall of Europe (1920; tr. Sydney Schiff, 1922):
Those who cling definitely to the past, those who venerate time-honoured cultural
forms, the Knights of a treasured morality, must seek to delay this Downfall and
will mourn it inconsolably when it passes. For them the Downfall is the End; for the
others, it is the Beginning.
Eliot met Hesse in Switzerland in 1922 and published this translation of Hesse’s
essay in the first issue of his magazine The Criterion (October 1922), the same
issue that offered his debut of The Waste Land.
See also Eliot’s later poems, East Coker (1940):
In my beginning is my end...
...Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure...
...In my end is my beginning.
and Little Gidding (1942):
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.
For more on epitaphs, see TWL 404-408 (“The awful daring of a moment's
surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we
have existed / Which is not to be found in our obituaries / Or in memories draped by
the beneficent spider”), which relates to John Webster, The White Devil (1612)
5.6.181-189:
FLAMINEO
...they'll remarry
Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider
Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.
Eliot would take the East Coker bookends,“In my beginning is my end... In my
end is my beginning,” as his own epitaph.
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
'On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
Margate is the southern England coastal town along a seaside cliff.
Eliot began a course of RECUPERATION at Margate in the fall of 1921
after suffering from mental exhaustion. He followed this with more formal
treatment in Switzerland (see TWL 182).
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
Compare the nails of the corpse-digging dog at TWL 75.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.'
la la
Images of BROKENNESS, EMPTINESS AND NOTHINGNESS pervade
this poem. See note, TWL 115 and TWL 22, 40, 119-126, 173, 177, 385,
389, 409, 410, 417 and 427 and here at TWL 300-305. Compare these
lines with the humble thoughts of Kurtz’s “last disciple” in Conrad, Heart of
Darkness 3:
I am a simple man. I have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody.
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