The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot – The deep sea swell

Of the many language-based epiphanies I’ve had in my life, two stand out clearly in my memory right now: one is when I heard someone say the word “mores”, as in “social mores” on the radio and realised that it was pronounced MAW-REYS and not MOARS, as I’d always thought; the second is when I read The Waste Land for the first time.

It’s a lesson in keeping an open mind, because I’d never have believed for a second that a 3000-word long poem with multiple references to the prophet Tiresias would appeal to me at all. And yet the jumble of languages, the sudden page breaks, the shifts in tone and narration, somehow cohere into the most beautiful, musical lines of poetry ever published.

There is also something for everyone. Depressed on your long commute home from your boring job in the City? T.S. Eliot knows how you feel:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

It may seem as if the one thing lacking in The Waste Land is a sense of humour, though Eliot does make merciless fun of the “young man carbuncular” (we all know one; in modern parlance, he’d be a “mansplainer”):

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

Funnier, though, is that the “notes” at the end-supposedly straightforward annotations- are, as Louis Menand wryly notes:

…written in a sendup of academic citation: “The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen’s Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p.489.” Good to know the next time you are in a German library.

So one of the most famous-and famously portentous- poems in the English language has been playing a subtle practical joke on literature students all over the world for generations. What’s not to like?

I know that If I’d ever had to formally study this poem I wouldn’t have felt the same way about it, since the vast body of academic criticism on this seminal work of modernist literature is primarily concerned with chasing down its every quotation, allusion and metaphor, which to me is besides the point (Eliot himself called it a “wild goose chase”).

The point is to be moved by lines like this:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
                             A current under the sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                                    Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.