Falling Towers

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 369-385 

371  The incognizance of line 366 continues. Compare lines 54-56, where Madame Sosostriscould not find the Hanged Man (which Eliot associates with the hooded figure of Christ (see note 46 and line 364)) and saw only “crowds (now hooded hordes) of people, walking round in a ring.” 

374  The unreal city, previously seen at dawn and at noon (see lines 61 and 208), is now in Tiresias’s violet hour (see lines 215 and 220 and note 378), and at war with bombs bursting, planes whistling and towers falling.  

✭  TOWERS will appear throughout section five, and while the only towers mentioned previously were white with pealing bells (line 289), they are now falling (line 374), upside down in air (line 383), horrible (note 412) and destroyed (line 430). Compare the tale of the Tower of Babel reaching vainly to God, at Genesis 11:4-9: “And they said , Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men [built]....  And the LORD said, Behold, the people ...have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.  Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.  So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.  Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth...” 

376  London is now placed in context with Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria and Vienna, all centers of empires and cultural hubs for their time, but here they are cracking, falling apart and reforming into something unreal.  See note 207 for other unreal city references.

378  See Pierre Leyris, Poémes, 1910-1930, 155 (1947), relating this passage to paintings ofHieronymus Bosch, perhaps alluding to the baby faced bat in Bosch, Hell (1504) (below).  See also Bram Stoker, Dracula 3 (1897): “I saw the whole man... begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings.”

                                             Hieronymus Bosch, Hell (detail) (1504)


✭  Compare THE LONG-HAIRED WOMAN who fiddled whisper music on her hair with the hyacinth girl, found with “arms full, and ...hair wet” (line 38); the woman on talking walls whose “hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words” (line 108); the woman who walked the street with “hair down” (line 133); and the woman who “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (line 255).  See also hair's tie to fertility in both Frazer, The Golden Bough 3:5.6, and Weston, From Ritual to Romance 4 (see notes0.1 and 0.2).

✭  THE VIOLET HOUR alludes to the liturgical color of repentance and baptism; see Brooks(note iii). See lines 215, 220, 373 (air) and 380 (light) and notes 77 (purple sails) and 331(purple trenches).  See also Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5.177 (Ophelia’s violets withered when her father died; see Appendix C) and 5.1.229 (Laertes wishing violets would spring from Ophelia’s grave).  See also the "violet and purple morn" in Whitman, Memories 12 (Appendix A).

384  See line 67, “where St. Mary Woolnoth kept the hours.”

385  Jeremiah 2:13,14: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. ...The young lions roared upon him, and yelled, and they made his land waste...”  Compare this with the “children’s voices in the dome” (line 202).

from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)