T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 266-295
The river sweats
Eliot’s note: “The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here. From line
292 to 306 inclusive they speak in turn. V. Götterdammerung, III. I: the
Rhine-daughters.”
THE RIVER THAMES is central to this section of the poem, but see also TWL
173-184. For London Bridge, see TWL 62 and 427. For other river allusions, see
TWL 4 (the Lethe), 25 (Isaiah’s river), 41 (the Congo), 77 (the Cydnus), 172
(Ophelia’s river), 266 (the Rhine), 293 (the Arno) and 396 (the Ganges).
Eliot's Thames-daughters follow the nymphs of Edmund Spenser, Prothalamion
(1596) (and see also TWL 176, 183 and 184):
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song...
There, in a meadow, by the river's side,
A flock of nymphs I chanced to espy,
All lovely daughters of the flood thereby....
The Thames-daughters’ song, however, is more directly derived from that of the
Rhinemaidens in Richard Wagner, Götterdammerung (The Twilight of the
Gods, 1876, tr. Frederick Jameson, ca. 1916). The chorus lines "Weialala leia,
Wallala leialala" (TWL 277-278) and the more terse “la la”(TWL 306) are Wagner’s
own, and Eliot also uses gold forging (lines 282-284) and assimilates Wagner’s
clipped pace and spritely tone (TWL 266-289) to contrast the song’s grimmer
content. In the opera, the nymphs take turns singing one line at a time, with some
of the same curse and restoration motifs of the Grail legend. See Twilight
3.1.81-92:
From the Rhine's pure gold
was the ring once wrought.
He who craftily shaped it
and lost it in shame
laid a curse thereon
for time to come to doometh
its lord surely to death
...if thou the ring wilt not yield
to rest for aye in the waters
this stream alone stayeth the curse!
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
See Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1 (1902)
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an
interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together
without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting
up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked,
with gleams of varnished sprits.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Greenwich Reach is a straight section of the Thames south and east of the Isle of
Dogs, at London’s East End just north of Greenwich. The Isle of Dogs, once an
island, is now a peninsula at one of the larger meanders in the Thames River. The
royal dogs of King Henry VIII, and later Queen Elizabeth I, were said to be kenneled
here, although there is no record of the name being used prior to 1588, when it first
appeared on a map. It is, in any case, just across the river from the erstwhile
grounds of the Palace of Placentia, the royal residence where Elizabeth was born
in 1533 and where her Privy Council later met. In 1597, Ben Jonson and Thomas
Nashe wrote a satirical play called The Isle of Dogs, which allegedly offended the
queen and crossed lines of propriety to the point that Jonson and two of his fellow
actors were arrested and all copies of the play were destroyed. The matter was
referred to the Privy Council, which found the actors guilty of “leude and mutynous
behavior” and recommended a three month prison term and a ban on all public
plays for the rest of the summer. Queen Elizabeth was generally a supportive
patron of London’s theater scene, but she carried out the Council’s
recommendations, effectively imposing a ban usually reserved for the lenten
season.
The image of DOGS occurs only one other time in The Waste Land, when the poet
bids his friend to keep the dog from digging up a corpse (TWL 74), but there are
other seemingly related references within the poem’s principal allusions: From
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.376-402 (1611) (see TWL 26, 48,
119-123, 125, 182, 192, 257 and 393) Ariel’s song refers to barking watchdogs;
from Ovid, Metamorphoses 3:206-312 (AD 8) (see TWL 77-81 and TWL
197-198) Diana turns Actaeon into a stag to be hunted by his own dogs; from
Jesus ben Sira, Alphabeta (ca.AD 700-900; tr. M. Steinschneider, 1858) (see
TWL 139-161) Lilith is sent to the desert where the wild dogs dwell; and from
Sophocles, Antigone 5: 79-83 (441 BC, tr. Francis Storr, 1912) (see TWL
243-246) Tiresias speaks of
mangled warriors who have found a grave
I' the maw of wolf or hound
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester
Eliot's note: "V. Froude, Elizabeth, vol. I, ch. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of
Spain..." See James Anthony Froude, The Reign of Elizabeth (1911):
In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. (The
queen) was alone with Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to
talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot
there was no reason why they should not be married if the queen pleased.
In his 1561 letter to King Philip, Spanish Ambassador Alvaro de la Quadra
supported talk that Elizabeth I, known as the Virgin Queen, and Lord Robert
Dudley, later the Earl of Leicester, were lovers who would rendezvous at the
Queen’s home in Greenwich, past the Isle of Dogs. A year earlier, Lord Robert’s
first wife, Amy Robsart, had died from a fall down a flight of stairs. The coroner
officially ruled her death an accident, but rumors persisted that he had arranged for
her death in order to be free to marry the Queen. In 1564, four years after the
accident the Queen appointed him Earl of Leicester, but she never did marry Lord
Robert or anyone else, and Lord Robert did not remarry for eighteen years.
Beating oars
The BEATING OARS motif is presented twice in the poem, here and at TWL 420,
but there are also several indirect references, first through the adapted description
of Cleopatra’s chambers (see TWL 77) and then in the allusion to Philomela’s
abduction (see TWL 99).
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
Red and gold are the colors of the Spanish flag. In 1588, the Earl of Leicester
ostensibly defended the Thames to keep the Spanish Armada from advancing
towards London.
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
The peal of bells and white towers suggest the festive trappings of a wedding,
forever out of reach for Elizabeth and Leicester; bells also characterize the Tower
of London and St Paul’s Cathedral, once white before taking on the dinge of time,
pollution and war. See also lines 383-384: “...towers tolling reminiscent bells.” See
also Walt Whitman, Memories of President Lincoln 6 (1892):
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang.
“Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”
This is the first of the three Thames-daughters' songs. The three singers relate
losses of virginity, each one having a different perspective.
Eliot's note: "Cf. Purgatorio, V. 133: 'Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia; / Siena mi fe',
disfecemi Maremma.'" This refers to Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio 5:118-136
(1321, tr. Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, 1867):
...Down fell the rain, and to the gullies came
Whate'er of it earth tolerated not;
And as it mingled with the mighty torrents,
Towards the royal river with such speed
It headlong rushed, that nothing held it back.
My frozen body near unto its outlet
The robust Archian found, and into Arno
Thrust it, and loosened from my breast the cross
I made of me, when agony o'ercame me;
It rolled me on the banks and on the bottom,
Then with its booty covered and begirt me.
‘Ah, when thou hast returned unto the world,
And rested thee from thy long journeying,’
After the second followed the third spirit,
‘Do Thou remember me who am the Pia;
Siena made me, unmade me Maremma
He knoweth it, who had encircled first,
Espousing me, my finger with his gem.
The speaker is Pia de Tolemei, wife of a thirteenth century Tuscan captain who had
her killed to facilitate his marriage to another woman (compare similar allegations
against Lord Robert above). Pia was born to a noble family in Siena; her husband
was the lord of Castel di Pietra in Maremma.
See also William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.208 (1623):
...and what they undid did.
In the present passage, Highbury is a working class London suburb; Kew and
Richmond are communities along the River Thames in southwest London, with the
Royal Botanic Gardens, commonly called Kew Gardens, situated between them.
Eliot’s use of this allusion and its tie to London neighborhoods may have been
initially inspired by Ezra Pound, Ode to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), an
autobiographical London satire with eighteen separate poems, the seventh called
“Siena mi fè, disfecemi Maremma.”
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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