T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 331-359
331 Eliot wrote to Ford Madox Ford in 1923 that there were “about thirty good lines in The Waste Land, can you find them?” Ford declined to take the bait, so Eliot answered himself in a subsequent letter: “As for the lines I mention, you need not scratch your head over them. They are the 29 lines of the water-dripping song in the last part.” See Letters II**. A few years earlier, Eliot had called Ford’s poem Antwerp (1917) “the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war.” See Eliot, Reflections on Contemporary Poetry, Egoist (November 1917). Ford’s poem graphically describes “the trench of gray mud ...turned to a brown purple drain...” See note 62 for references to the war within this poem.
343 See Brooks**, comparing the descriptions of no silence, no solitude, but dry sterile thunder and red sullen faces in lines 341-344 to the different sounds and presences to come, when a third will begin to walk beside the travelers (lines 360-366) and the thunder will bring rain and words with meaning (lines 400-423).
357 Eliot: This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) “it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats.... Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.” Its “water-dripping song” is justly celebrated. Frank M. Chapman, Handbook (1896). Lines331-359 present the longest stretch of the poem in Eliot’s own voice without apparent allusions or the need for translation, but the hermit thrush's call at the end of this passage represents the hint of, or the longing for, a third voice. This itself alludes to Whitman, Memories 13 (Appendix A): “Sing on, sing on, you gray-brown bird / ...Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines / ...O liquid and free and tender!”
343 See Brooks**, comparing the descriptions of no silence, no solitude, but dry sterile thunder and red sullen faces in lines 341-344 to the different sounds and presences to come, when a third will begin to walk beside the travelers (lines 360-366) and the thunder will bring rain and words with meaning (lines 400-423).
357 Eliot: This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) “it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats.... Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.” Its “water-dripping song” is justly celebrated. Frank M. Chapman, Handbook (1896). Lines331-359 present the longest stretch of the poem in Eliot’s own voice without apparent allusions or the need for translation, but the hermit thrush's call at the end of this passage represents the hint of, or the longing for, a third voice. This itself alludes to Whitman, Memories 13 (Appendix A): “Sing on, sing on, you gray-brown bird / ...Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines / ...O liquid and free and tender!”
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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