April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the
dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots
with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow,
feeding a little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee with a
shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, and went on in
sunlight, into the Hofgarten, and drank coffee, and talked
for an hour.
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, my
cousin's, he took me out on a sled, and I was frightened.
He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight.
And down we went.
In the mountains--
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go South in the winter.
What are the roots the clutch?
What branches grow out of this stony rubbish?
Son of man, you cannot say or guess, for you know only a
heap of broken images where the sun beats, and the dead
gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, and the dry stone
no sound of water.
Only, there is shadow under this red rock.
Come in under the shadow of this red rock.
And I will show you something different from either your
shadow at morning, striding behind you, or your shadow at
evening rising to meet you.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Eliot once wrote to me that he was greatly influenced by
Beethoven's late quartets.
That he'd play them on the gramophone again and again.
And I can remember what he said in his letter--
"I wish that I could attain in poetry the same kind of
suffering as Beethoven expresses in his last
quartets."
T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," is the most famous poem
written this century, and the high point of the modern
movement in poetry.
On the strength of it, Eliot was to become the most
respected poet of his age, a cultural guru, who in later
life could attract audiences several thousand
strong to his lectures.
And though Eliot was to have several careers--
as dramatist, critic, publisher, and editor--
it was as the author of "The Waste Land" that he was always
primarily known.
I can't think of any poem really as great as "The Waste
Land." It probably remains the most important poem certainly
of the early part of the 20th century
and the English language.
I think his role in 20th century poetry is absolutely
towering over everyone else.
He's much better than Yeats, much, much, more inventive,
much more brilliant, newer, simply newer.
I mean everything in 20th century poetry
is founded on Eliot.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Saint
Louis, Missouri in 1888.
He was a frail child.
And from an early age, he was cosseted and
protected from the world.
The dominant influence of his childhood was his grandfather,
William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister who
instilled in the young Eliot a sense of moral propriety and
public service.
He had a happy childhood, and yet by the time he went to
Harvard University, he found a deep and unsettling need to
break out of the provincial structures of his upbringing.
His family, the Eliots, were the aristocrats of that time
in American life.
Eliot, as he grew up in this rather large but closely-knit
family was aware that his duties--
which would devolve upon him-- were those of commitment,
public service, public law.
These were commitments he never actually eschewed.
And throughout his life, you see manifestations of them in
his various roles he chose to play.
In terms of his actual poetry, what you find in the years of
St. Louis and the years when he was at Harvard, is a poetry
which is primarily concerned with gloom, with solitariness,
with sexual unease.
He's obviously a young man who wants to break out of the very
close family situation, which was the condition of his life
at that time but didn't know how to do so.
When he was at Harvard, for example, he would go on long
lonely walks through the slums of Cambridge,
which was close by.
But all the time, you feel that he's on a lead, and that
he's going to be dragged back at any moment--
back to the family life, back to the university life, back
to all the ambitions his parents had for him.
So you get the sense of a very civilized, elegant,
aristocratic young man.
But one who was trying, awkwardly sometimes,
unsuccessfully sometimes, to rebel against that background.
Let us go then you and I, when the evening is spread out
against the sky, like a patient
etherized upon a table.
Let us go through certain half-deserted streets, the
muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night, cheap
hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells.
Street that follow like a tedious argument of insidious
intent to lead you to an overwhelming question.
Oh, do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was Eliot's first
major poem.
He wrote it when he was 23, while still
a student at Harvard.
And it immediately marked him out as a poet of unique
originality.
What Eliot gave them was irony and pathos and anti-climax,
and also this extraordinary use of imagery in his poetry.
If you take the beginning, what you have is the first of
the modernist trumps.
"Let us go then you and I, when the evening is spread out
against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a
table." What Eliot is doing here is taking an old cliche,
"the red sky at night is a sheperd's delight," and
turning it through 75, 130 degrees something like that.
I mean, just swiveling it so you didn't see it in
quite the same way.
You have here a recognizable voice, but quite an unusual
one that's never been heard before, certainly not in
English poetry.
Where his contemporaries in England, and to a certain
extent in America, were still lost in a kind of late
romantic twilight--
where expressions of public disorder were matched only by
expressions of private disorder.
There's a certain breakdown in the value system, so the
language seems thin and etiolated as a result.
Here you have a poet and a poem seems very sure of
himself, very sure of what he's trying to do, and very
sure he's got his act together, as they say.
And this came as a profound shock.
When Howard Monroe was shown the poem by Conrad Aiken, he
said it was "absolutely insane." Now what he meant by
that was that it didn't conform either melodically or
thematically with anything he was used to reading.
There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to
meet the faces that you meet.
There will be time to murder and create, and time for all
the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question
on your plate, time for you, and time for me, and time yet
for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and
revisions before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room, the women come and go talking of
Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time to wonder, do I
dare, and do I dare?
Time to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in
the middle of my hair.
They will say, how his hair is growing thin.
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
my necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin.
They will say, but how his arms and legs are thin.
Do I dare disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions, which
a minute will reverse, for I have known them all already,
known them all, have known the evenings, mornings,
afternoons.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
I know the voice is dying with a dying fall beneath the music
from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
Prufrock is a genuine creation.
He is J. Alfred Prufrock.
And this is actually slightly different from being Thomas
Stearns Eliot.
I think Eliot was a rather sophisticated human being.
Clearly a man who was reserved.
Virginia Woolf once sent in an invitation out saying T. S.
Eliot would be here in his four-piece suit.
Clearly people saw this.
But I think actually a man capable of great passion and
not ridiculous, not at times almost the fool.
Well, he was always someone who liked to play roles, even
from an early age.
People who knew him well, even people who didn't, noticed
that he was, as it were, as V.S. Pritchett said, a company
of actors within one suit.
His life, in a sense, was a continual
parading of roles or masks.
And this certainly began because of Harvard where he
posed, as it were, as the young dandy.
That was one of his great poses.
He could also pose as the religious mystic.
That was another phase in his life.
So the adoption of these dramatic personae in the early
poetry would, I think, have come quite naturally to him.
In fact, it has been said and could even be proved, that
Eliot is the greatest dramatic poet of our period.
You can interpret his early poetry, and certainly you can
read it, as a series of dramatic monologues by various
characters coming on the stage of Eliot's consciousness.
Certainly that was what immediately struck his
contemporaries about that kind of work.
And certainly that was the reason why it seemed so
different from the kind of work which was being produced
by English writers at the same period.
And would it have been worth it after all?
After the cups of marmalade, the tea, among the porcelains,
among some talk of you and me, would it have been worthwhile
to have bitten off the matter with a smile?
To have squeezed the universe into a ball, to roll it
towards some overwhelming question?
To say, I am Lazarus come from the dead.
I have come back to tell you all--
I shall tell you all.
If one settling a pillow by her head should say, that is
not what I mean at all.
That is not it at all.
And wouldn't it have been worth it, after all?
Would it have been worthwhile, after the sunsets and door
yards and sprinkled streets, after the novels, after the
tea cups, after the skirts that trail along the floor,
and this, and so much more.
It is impossible to say just what I mean.
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns
on a screen, would it have been worthwhile, if one
settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, and turning
towards the window should say, that is not it at all.
That is not what I meant at all.
Prufrock, I think, anticipates "The Waste Land" in two ways.
One is thematic and the other one is in terms of technique.
In terms of theme, it introduces what is actually
the theme of a great deal of Eliot's poetry, right up
through "The Waste Land" and into "The Hollow Men."
And it's the theme of the failure to live.
If you think about Prufrock, I mean, he's an incredibly
inhibited man emotionally, who is, whatever the turmoil
inside, very little is coming out.
I mean he's as uptight as a rolled umbrella.
In terms of technique, yes, I mean, it is an extraordinary
poem in which you have a constant use of pathos and
anti-climax.
You have the overwhelming question, which is then
refused. "Oh, do not ask what is it.
Let us go and make our visit."
Then you have the biblical pastiche of Ecclesiastes, the
meditation on time. "There will be time.
There will be time to prepare a face to meet the
faces that you meet.
There will be time to murder and create."
But by the end of that, it's "time for a hundred visions
and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea."
And the whole thing dribbles away.
By the end of the poem, this use of pathos and anti-climax
is actually deepened so it gets a tragic night.
I mean, it's not simply ironic.
No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.
I'm an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a
progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince; no
doubt an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of
use, politic, cautious, and meticulous, full of high
sentence, but a bit obtuse.
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous.
At times almost the fool.
I grow old.
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and
walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves, combing
the white hair of the waves blown back, when the wind
blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, by
sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown, till
human voices wake us and we drown.
Prufrock wasn't actually published until 1915, by which
time Eliot had left America and settled in England.
He came initially to take up a post at Oxford, but quickly
discovered in the artistic life of London a more
congenial climate for his writing.
For the first time in his life, he found himself with
people of his own age, who took poetry seriously, took
culture seriously and were able to discuss it at great
length on many occasions.
So that was one element of it.
The other element was that he was an
authoritarian by temper.
And being in aristocratic American, disdained the
American tradition in politics and society.
He found in Europe what he'd not been able to find in
America, which was a strong almost medieval cultural
tradition, an authoritarian cultural tradition to which he
went on to ascribe himself.
It's a decision he never really regretted either,
because he never actually went home to live in America again.
Avant garde life in London during the First World War was
dominated by two great energies--
Wyndham Lewis and another expatriate
American, Ezra Pound.
Pound in particular was to play a huge part in launching
Eliot's career.
Indeed, it was he who organized the first
publication of Prufrock.
Pound had joined Wyndham Lewis in founding a movement they
called Vorticism, dedicated to reforming and modernizing
English cultural life.
Inspired by cubism and futurism on the continent,
Vorticism was determinedly behind all things modern and
experimental.
It was spirited and flamboyant.
And the Vorticist magazine was appropriately called Blast.
Well as the name Blast indicates, they were really
trying to blast away the remnants of Victorianism and
English romanticism, what were called the Georgian poets.
And they were trying to introduce modernism.
What they were trying to do, as a matter of fact, was to
create a modern tradition which connected with a past.
They were against this sort of idea of tradition as simply
carrying on with what your predecessors have done.
It was a revolt against your immediate predecessors, and a
deliberate pushing yourself back into a much more remote
past but a relevant past.
What they're trying to do, people like Pound and Eliot,
is really to introduce that kind of revolution into the
history of poetry as it already had occurred in music
and painting.
And all antecedents existed in France around about the great
dates, 1870, 1880 and so on.
What they were trying to do, trying to drag English into
the mainstream again, not just the mainstream of modern
poetry but the mainstream of modern art.
The antics of the Vorticists were one of the few colorful
aspects of life in wartime London.
As the war dragged on and the enormity of what was happening
in the trenches began to sink in at home, the capital took
on a blighted mood.
And the bleak reality of the modern city found its way
memorably into Eliot's verse, when in 1916 he began the poem
that was eventually to be published as "The Waste Land."
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 Williams Street, to where
Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours with a dead sound on the
final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew--
There I saw one I knew and stopped him, crying, Stetson,
you who were with me in the ships at Mylae.
That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it
begun to spout?
Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh, keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, or with
his nails he'll dig it up again.
You!
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
In relation to a poem like Prufrock, what
you have here is--
in Prufrock--
a poem which looks backward and also looks forward.
I mean, it's modernist, but it's also traditional.
It's in the tradition of the dramatic monologue.
By the time you get to "The Waste Land," you've got
something completely different.
And if you wanted an analogy, supposing you
look towards Picasso.
You'd have the rose period, then the blue period.
Both of them different, but also recognizable.
And suddenly analytical cubism--
here comes "The Waste Land."
And, boy, is it all happening?
You can't quite follow it, but it seems
very, very modern indeed.
And there's a lot of modern life in it.
In England, it was what Theo Connolly called the great
knockout up to date.
It was a poem which had jazz rhythms.
It had urban symbolism.
It had anthropological myth.
It had the whole gamut of what was then fashionable concerns
poured into this slender vessel.
And as a result, it goes to an enormous success.
"The Waste Land,", as it was published in
1922, is in five parts.
Furthermore, the whole poem is littered with a plethora of
quotes and half-quotes from sources as diverse as nursery
rhymes and Dante, all of which led some of its first readers
to attack it as being a poem of fragments.
In a sense, it is a poem of fragments.
You see, when it was originally about to be
published Eliot was quite happy to have it published in
separate issues of The Criterion.
And there was one possibility, I think, that is was going to
be published in four different issues at The Dial.
So he wasn't himself convinced about its coherence as a poem.
When everyone started saying how wonderful it was, of
course, he changed his mind and saw exactly how
good the poem was.
So on that level, I think it could be seen as it does have
a fragmentary feel about it.
On the other level, about the fragments of verse which he
introduces into the poem, fragments of the literary
tradition, that's very deeply a part of Eliot's own psyche.
That's his way of finding his own voice, by co-opting the
voices of other people.
You'll find the strange thing about Eliot's poetry is that
whenever you read it, you're constantly getting little
echoes and murmurs of other people's work.
You hear bits of Dante, bits of Baudelaire bits of
[INAUDIBLE], bits of Laforgue, bits of Tennyson, bits of
Browning all just underneath the surface of the poetry.
But that's, of course, is what gives it its strength.
These words are Eliot's words and yet not his words.
And it's that strange echoic quality, which leads to its
being so memorable.
One of the extraordinary things about "The Waste Land,"
of course, is the amount of allusion and the amount of
learning and reading that goes into the poem.
Eliot uses this, I think, quite straightforwardly in
order to show that things have been debased.
Perhaps the most significant example is the opening of the
game of chess where Eliot picks up Enobarbus' speech in
Anthony and Cleopatra.
"And the barge she sat on, like a burnished throne burned
on the water," and then on he goes.
And it becomes "the chair she sat in, like a burnished
throne, glowed on the marble." And then what you have is
instead of Cleopatra's enormous vitality, you have
this incredible sinuous syntax, which loses you and
picks you up, until finally you realize that the
sensuality here is more apparent than real.
That this is a woman who is the sum total of her
accessories, her perfumes, her jewels.
She has no real vitality.
And then, of course, as she brushes her hair, and it glows
into words, what the words say are, "my
nerves are bad tonight.
Stay with me."
The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, glowed on
the marble, where the glass held up by standards wrought
with fruited vines, from which a golden Cupidon peeped out,
another hid his eyes behind his wing.
Doubled the flames of seven-branched candelabra
reflecting light upon the table as the glitter of her
jewels rose to meet it.
From satin cases, poured in rich profusion, in vials of
ivory and colored glass unstoppered, lurked her
strange synthetic perfumes, unguent, powdered, or liquid--
troubled, confused, and drowned the sense in odors.
Stirred by the air that freshened from the window,
these ascended in fattening the prolonged candle flames,
flung their smoke into the lacquearia, stirring the
pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood, fed with copper, burned green and
orange, framed by the colored stone, in which sad light a
carved dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed as though a window
gave upon the sylvan scene the change of Philomel, by the
barbarous king so rudely forced.
Yet there the nightingale filled all the desert with
inviolable voice.
And still she cried, and still the world pursues, jug, jug to
dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time were told upon the walls.
Staring forms leaned out, leaning,
hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the fire light, under the brush, her hair spread out
in fiery points, glowed into words, then
would be savagely still.
My nerves are bad tonight.
Yes, bad.
Stay with me.
Speak to me.
Why do you never speak?
Speak!
What are you thinking of?
What thinking?
What?
I never know what you are thinking.
Think.
I think we are in rats' alley, where the dead
men lost their bones.
What is that noise?
The wind under the door.
What is that noise now?
What is the wind doing?
Nothing.
Again, nothing.
Do you know nothing?
Do you see nothing?
Do you remember nothing?
I remember those are pearls that were his eyes.
Are you alive or not?
Is there nothing in your head?
But oh, oh, oh, oh, that Shakespeherian Rag.
It's so elegant, so intelligent.
What shall I do now?
What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am and walk the street with
my hair down so.
What shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?
One of the most innovative aspects of "The Waste Land" to
its contemporary audience was the range of characters it
seemed to contain.
Eliot was deliberately trying to incorporate into the poem,
the speech and accents of London life.
Indeed, for a long time, he'd considered calling it "He do
the Police in Different Voices."
They were trying to introduce into language of their poetry
the words, which everyone used in the streets, whereas the
Georgian poets-- whom they were rebelling against--
always wanted to write poems about poetic subjects, like
the English countrysides, sunsets.
They were deliberately choosing the dirty canal near
the gas works.
They were deliberately choosing these
sordid-seeming subjects.
And as a matter of fact, creating a strange kind of
beauty for them.
Although, of course, most of their contemporaries didn't
recognize that.
Take, for instance, I think, one of the most striking
things in it must be the dialogue in the pub, the
monologue in the pub.
"You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique, and
her only 31.
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face.
It's them pills I took to bring it off, she said.
She's had five already, and nearly died of young George."
Absolutely wonderful stuff and never there in poetry before.
But suddenly one day, there you are,
right in a London pub.
And it's marvelous.
And clearly they must've loved that.
When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said, I didn't
mince my words, I said to her, myself.
[SHOUTING]
Hurry up, please.
It's time.
Now Albert's coming back.
Make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you've done with that money he gave
you to get yourself some teeth.
He did.
I was there.
You have them all out, Lil.
And get a nice set, he said.
I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
And no more can't I, I said.
And think of poor Albert.
He's been in the Army four years.
He wants a good time.
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
Oh, is there, she said.
Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a
straight look.
[SHOUTING]
Hurry up, please.
It's time.
If you don't like it, you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose, if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
And her only 31.
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face.
It's them pills I took to bring it off, she said.
Well, she's had five already, and nearly
died of young George.
The chemist said it would be all right, but I've
never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't leave you alone,
there it is, I said.
What'cha you get married for, if you don't want children?
[SHOUTING]
Hurry up, please.
It's time.
Well, that Sunday Albert was home they had a hot gammon.
And they asked me into dinner to get the beauty of it hot.
[SHOUTING]
Hurry up, please.
It's time.
Hurry up, please.
It's time.
Good night, Bill.
Good night, Lou.
Good night, May.
Good night.
Ta ta.
Good night.
Good night, ladies.
Good night, sweet ladies.
Good night.
The river's tent is broken.
The last fingers of leaf clutch and sink
into the wet bank.
The wind crosses the brown land, unheard.
The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk
handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends, or
other testimony of summer nights.
The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city
directors, departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman, I sat down and wept.
Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song.
Sweet Thames run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast, I hear the rattle of
the bones and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
When "The Waste Land" was first published in 1922, it
seemed to speak directly to the spirit of its age.
But many of its origins were far more personal.
In 1915, Eliot had met and quickly married Vivienne
Haigh-Wood.
But it was not to prove a happy marriage.
Vivienne was highly strung and given to
increasingly bizarre behavior.
Eventually, Eliot was to leave her, as she drifted further
and further into madness.
Meanwhile, the couple were not well off.
As well as his poetry, Eliot was editing a literary
magazine, The Criterion, while at the same time doing a
full-time job at Lloyds Bank in the city.
Now what happened was he suffered something close to a
nervous breakdown in the year of the making of "The Waste
Land." So you have a poem which is immediately and
clearly affected by Eliot's tribulations and privations of
the period.
There's no doubt about that.
But on the other hand, you cannot read it as what he
called a private grouse or a piece of rhythmical grumbling,
I think was his word for it.
Because the genius of the man was that he made his own
obsessions and his own problems part of the symbols
of the age, as it were.
He stood in a kind of symbolic relation to his own time, and
turned his private grief into a public grief on one level.
He was able to transmogrify his own personality into
something much larger than it really was, so that he could--
his private career, as it were, could stand for the
decline of the West.
It's a very gloomy poem.
It's a poem about the imminence of some kind of
apocalypse as we get there strongly towards the end of
the poem, remember?
We're all entitled to feel that.
I sometimes think we don't feel it as strongly as people
did in the aftermath of the First World War, simply
because we've made a routine of it.
I mean, we have apocalypse for breakfast.
But the sense that the world had entered a sort of
spiritual desert, which becomes very strong in Eliot
later, that all the Christian can do--
he must have been very close to religious conversion,
obviously, when he wrote "The Waste Land," to some religion
or another.
[INAUDIBLE]
to Buddhism, but whatever it was.
He really did think that the world was going through a
period where the good man could do nothing but attempt
to redeem time.
Meanwhile redeeming the time.
It really links up with a poem of W.B. Yeats, in which the
lines occur, "the best lack all conviction, while the
worst are full of passionate intensity." Well, that's for
Yeats epitomizes our civilization.
But that's exactly what you find also
in "The Waste Land"--
this view that people had at that time of everything
collapsing, breaking down, the decline of the West, above
all, the West.
Unreal city.
Under the brown fog of a winter noon, Mr. Eugenides,
the Smyrna merchant, unshaven, with a pocket full of
currents, C.I.F. London, documents at sight, asked me
in demotic French to luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel,
followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back turn upward from
the desk, when the human engine waits like a taxi
throbbing, waiting, I, Tiresias, though blind,
throbbing between two lives, old man with wrinkled female
breasts, can see at the violet hour, the evening hour, that
strives homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea.
The typist, home at tea time, clears her breakfast, lights
her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window, perilously spread, her drying
combinations touched by the sun's last rays.
On the divan are piled--
at night her bed--
stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
According to Eliot, the key figure in "The Waste Land" is
the figure of the blind seer, Tiresias, who appears in the
third section of the poem.
He has the ability to see the whole of human history
simultaneously, and so provides Eliot with another
device for comparing the past with the present.
Tiresias symbolizes decadent aspects of the modern world of
"The Waste Land."
For instance, sexual ambiguity--
he's the old man with withered breasts.
That is important.
I mean, Eliot is writing about modern decadence.
But he's not seeing this kind of decadence as something
unique to the modern world.
There's a recurrent view of history, I think, in "The
Waste Land." And decadence is something which is concomitant
almost with civilization.
You have civilization, decadence.
They go side by side.
That's partly why the poem is not just a poem about the
collapse of Europe in modern times at a particular moment.
And I think Tiresias symbolizes all that, or
signifies all that.
I, Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs, perceived the
scene and foretold the rest.
I, too, awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man, carbuncular, arrives.
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.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses.
The meal has ended.
She is bored and tired.
Endeavors to engage her in caresses, which still are
unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once.
Exploring hands encounter no defense.
His vanity requires no response and makes a welcome
of indifference.
And I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all enacted on
this same divan or bed.
I, who have sat by Thebes below the wall, and walked
among the lowest of the dead.
Bestows one final patronizing kiss and gropes his way,
finding the stairs unlit.
She turns and looks a moment in the glass, hardly aware of
her departed lover.
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass.
Well, now that's done.
And I'm glad it's over.
When lovely woman stoops to folly and paces about her room
again alone.
She smooths her hair with automatic hand and puts a
record on the gramophone.
Now, in Goldsmith, this is a song which is sung by Olivia,
in "The Vicar of Wakefield" when she goes back to the
place where she's been seduced.
It's quite a different thing.
"When lovely woman stoops to folly, and learns too late
that men betray.
What balm can soothe her melancholy?
What charm can wash her guilt away?
The only art that guilt can cover, to hide her shame from
every eye, to grant repentance to her lover and ring his
bosom, is to die." In other words, in those days, when you
were seduced and you fell, it was something serious.
You went off and you killed yourself.
It was the only solution.
Now what do they do?
They brush their hair, "put a record on the gramophone." And
everything has been debased by the time it gets there.
"The Waste Land" that was eventually published is not
the poem Eliot originally wrote.
"He do the Police in Different Voices" was a much longer
series, which Eliot showed to Pound for his opinion, and
which Pound edited into the version that we know today.
It's small wonder that Eliot dedicated the poem to Pound,
whom he called, that wondrous necessary man, with the words,
[SPEAKING ITALIAN], "the better craftsman."
The original "Waste Land" had many other elements.
There was the element of pastiche, parody, dramatic
virtuosity.
It was to be a much larger statement than the
poem we have now.
What happened was that Eliot gave the poem to Pound, and
Pound performed upon it what he
called a cesarean operation.
He heard Eliot's music and decided that the music was the
most important thing.
So he excised the parody.
He excised the pastiche.
He excised the dramatic virtuosity.
And what was left was a much shorter poem, but a poem which
was much more clearly marshaled around the evidence
of Eliot's music.
See the thing about Eliot was that all his feelings, his
[INAUDIBLE] feelings seems to cluster around cadences,
literary cadences, largely cadences which he heard from
his childhood.
And throughout "The Waste Land" and, indeed, throughout
his other work, we hear the same music.
It's mournful, incantatory, resonant music, which is
Eliot's music, the music of his being.
And what Pound did in "The Waste Land" was to let that
music come forth, let that music be heard.
And when he did so the poem, as it were, came a unity
around that particular fact.
Other people heard the music, too.
That's why the undergraduates chanted "The Waste Land" as
they chanted Swinburne a generation before.
So in a sense, it's what Eliot called the auditory
imagination, what I would call the music of Eliot's being,
which is the formal unity of "The Waste Land."
"The Waste Land," some of the bits of it go back, right back
to 1915, in fact, when he was 27, seven years before the
poem, and possibly even earlier than that.
So as this process of gradual agglomeration and then cutting
and then saying, that's the poem-- this poem is not like
say, a dramatic monologue of Browning's, which is another,
of course, important source.
It's not like that because it hasn't got narrative
connectedness.
It's not meant to appeal to what he called
the logic of concepts.
It's meant to appeal to the logic of the imagination.
What you have to do, he said, is the most difficult thing of
all to do is to--
and this distinguishes good readers of poetry from bad in
Eliot's view--
is to see the relationships between what apparently
disparate bits of imagery and fragments of narrative and so
on and hold it all by an act of the imagination into some
kind of unity.
Very keen on its being a unity, but that unity can only
be had by particularly intense kinds of attention, which he
didn't, incidentally, think many people were capable of.
This music crept by me on the waters and along the Strand,
up Queen Victoria Street.
Oh, city, city, I can sometimes hear beside a public
bar in Lower Thames Street, the pleasant whining of a
mandolin, and a clatter and a chatter from within, where
fishman lounge at noon.
Where the walls of Magnus Martyr hold the inexplicable
splendor of Ionian white and gold.
The rivers sweats oil and tar.
The barges drift with the turning tide.
Red sails, wide to leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash drifting logs down Greenwich reach past the
Isle of Dogs.
[CALLING]
Weialala leia!
Wallala leia la la!
Elizabeth and Leicester beating oars, the stern was
formed, a gilded shell, red and gold.
The brisk swell rippled both shores.
Southwest wind carried downstream the peal of bells,
white towers.
[CALLING]
Weia la la, leia!
Wall la la leia la la!
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.
My feet are at Mooregate, and my heart under my feet.
After the event, he wept.
He promised a new start.
I made no comment.
What should I resent?
On Margate Sands, I can connect nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands, my people, humble
people, who expect nothing.
When the poem was first published in book form, Eliot
added three pages of notes, scholarly references, and
clues to the way the poem should be read.
In particular, he acknowledges a debt to two anthropological
works, From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough.
In later life, Eliot was to claim that he only added the
notes because the poem as it stood was too short to be
published as a book.
But whatever the truth, the notes have spawned a
considerable academic industry.
The notes should be taken with a lot of grains of salt.
They are rather illuminating, especially in
pointing out Tiresias.
But I think Eliot himself once said about the poets, the poet
is like a burglar, who throws the watch dog a
large lump of meat.
And while the watch dog is eating the meat, he gets away
with a burglary.
Well, what's that mean?
I think it means in the case of "The Waste Land," that
Eliot liked to think of all these scholars, and teachers,
and people occupying themselves with explaining
what "The Waste Land" was about, and following all these
false trails that he had laid down in the notes.
Eliot, as a poet, emerged at a time when English literature
as a university discipline was becoming more and more
prominent, with critics in England like I.A. Richards and
in American like Cleanth Brooks, who were, as it were,
becoming the new gurus in the academic establishment.
Now Eliot, I think, who was nothing if not astute,
realized this fact.
And it could be said, I think, without overstating the case,
that Eliot started to write poetry which would be not only
approved of by the academic establishment, but could be
studied by that academic establishment.
I think he realized that immortality as such it was to
be, or at least fame, was to be garnered from the
universities as much as from the newspapers.
And I think he started to pitch his
poetry in that direction.
And there has been a huge industry.
These must be the 17 or 19 most annotated pages in the
history of English literature.
And it seems to me, that in the end, we're actually
getting there.
It's very important that we do understand the poem properly.
And every time one reads it, one discovers something new,
something fits better.
And I think actually what's happened is the explanations
have, in fact, got simpler.
It is clear now, after all this mulging
around, after all the--
every cupboard has been turned upside down.
Every bed has been looked under in English literature.
After all of this, it's clear that there are three main
strands in the poem that we have to bear in mind.
Fertility myths, though these are much less important than
we originally thought they were.
And then Elliott in the 1956 lecture in Minnesota actually
said that he was sorry he'd sent people off on a wild
goose chase.
Fertility myths, Christ and the Resurrection, and the
Buddhist notion of reincarnation, which is also
clearly there in the poem, and has been rather ignored to
date, but helps to explain the whole ambiguity of the poem.
Because in the Buddhist religion, what you want to do
is not to be reborn.
You want to achieve nirvana, a state of enlightenment.
But at the same time, you have a tremendous urge to be reborn
because you want to go on living.
So throughout the poem, there are these two impulses,
running side by side.
I think to say that one can explain the poem is a bit like
saying that you can explain Cezanne or Picasso.
There are things you can say about it
that might be helpful.
Because you can't explain it in a sense of, unfold it, and
make it simpler to apprehend.
But in the end, what you've got to do is to stand in front
of it, really, and attend to it, in the best way that you
can manage.
I don't think there's any way of having it explained to you.
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces, after the frosty
silence in the gardens, after the agony in stony places, the
shouting and the crying, prison and palace and
reverberation of thunder, of spring over distant mountains,
he was living is now dead.
We who were living are now dying, with a little patience.
Here is no water, but only rock, rock, and no water, and
the sandy road.
The road winding above among the mountains, which are
mountains of rock without water.
If there were water, we should stop and drink.
Amongst the rock, one cannot stop or think.
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand.
If there were only water amongst the rock.
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit.
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit.
That is not even silence in the mountains, but dry,
sterile thunder without rain.
There is not even solitude in the mountains, but red sullen
faces sneer and snarl from doors of mud-cracked houses.
If there were water and no rock, if there were rock and
also water, and water, a spring, a pool among the rock,
if there were the sound of water only, not the cicada and
dry grass singing.
But sound of water over a rock, whether the hermit
thrush sings in the pine trees, drip, drop, drip, drop,
drop, drop.
But there is no water.
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together.
But when I took ahead, up the white road, there is always
another one walking beside you, gliding, wrapped in a
brown mantle, hooded.
I do not know whether a man or a woman.
But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air, murmur of maternal
lamentation?
Who are those hooded hoards swarming over endless plains,
stumbling in cracked earth, ringed by the
flat horizon only?
What is that city over the mountains?
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air?
Falling towers, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna,
London, Unreal.
Five years after "The Waste Land" was published, Eliot was
received into the Church of England.
And he remained a convinced believer, for
the rest of his life.
He became an eminent publisher with Faber and Gwyer, now
known as Faber and Faber, and an increasingly respected poet
and critic.
After publication of four quartets during World War II,
he largely abandoned poetry in favor of verse drama.
And plays, like Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail
Party, introduced his work to a whole new audience.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948.
Despite the acclaim, however, Eliot remained a lonely and
isolated man.
It was only on his marriage to his secretary, Valerie
Fletcher, in 1957, that he enjoyed at the end of his
life, the happiness he'd not known since childhood.
He died in 1965.
And after her husband's death, Valerie Eliot declared that he
felt he had paid too high a price to be a poet, that he
had suffered too much.
His achievement is very difficult to summarize.
The fact is, he never repeated himself.
I mean, this is the main thing.
And he was enormously inventive.
I mean, he went from one thing to another, whereas other
poets repeat themselves.
Eliot didn't.
And his great achievement, actually, of course, is to
make this a myth of how the poet should behave.
Eliot's triumph was not just that he wrote poetry, which
will probably be remembered as long as the English language
is read, but also that he in his own person represented and
sustained the culture, which was on the
point of falling apart.
He put together what you might call as the last vestige of a
European, international, literary culture.
He represented in his own person.
And he gave it shape through his own obsessions, which is
most remarkable thing.
He, as it were, came to represent it, because you
needed to represent it.
He wanted that authority, so he provided it himself.
So on that level, it's a most remarkable achievement.
On another level, he made his poetry the music of the age.
But he only managed that by borrowing--
co-opting--
the voices, the cadences, and the tones of
other previous poets.
So we have this strange paradox of a man who sustains
the culture through his own obsessions, and creates the
music of our age through borrowing the music of other
people's periods.
A woman drew her long black hair out tight, and fiddled
whisper music on those strings.
And bats with baby faces in the violet light, whistled and
beat their wings, and crawled head downward
down a blackened wall,.
And upside down in air were towers tolling reminiscent
bells that kept the hours, and voices singing out of empty
cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains, in the faint
moonlight the grass is singing over the tumbled graves about
the chapel.
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings.
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the roof tree.
[CALLING]
Co co rico!
In a flash of lightning, then a damn gust, bringing rain.
The central despair of "The Waste Land" is really
religious despair.
And I suppose the central inspiration is the Old
Testament, is the Bible, "what are the roots that
clutch" and so on.
The vision all the way through is--
Christ and Emmaus and so on--
the vision is ready a religious vision.
Ganga was sunken.
And the limp leaves waited for rain while the black clouds
gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder.
Da--
Datta.
What have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart.
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, or under seals broken by the lean
solicitor in our empty rooms.
Da--
Dayadhvam.
I have heard the key turn in the door once
and turn once only.
We think of the key, each in his prison,
thinking of the key.
Each confirms a prison only at nightfall, aetherial rumors,
revived for a moment, a broken Coriolanus.
Da--
Damyata.
The boat responded gaily to the hand expert
with sail and oar.
The sea was calm.
Your heart would have responded gaily when invited,
beating obedient to controlling hands.
I set up on the shore fishing, with the arid plain behind me.
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
Oh swallow swallow.
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
[SHOUTING]
Why then I'll fit you!
Hieronymo's mad again.
Datta.
Dayadhvam.
Damyata.
Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.