An Annotation (The Waste Land, Part 2 of 5)

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J.  Cleopatra’s Chambers : Stirred by the air

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II.  A Game of Chess 53

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, 54
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out  ---------------------------80
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion.  ---------------------------85
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid — troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended  ---------------------------90
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia, 55
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

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53 Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess 1624); and see also Middleton, Women Beware Women (1657), in which a girl is seduced while her mother in law is kept busy in the next room playing chess.  This is the “air” section, in which all the speakers – walls that talk, a husband and wife, Hamlet and Ophelia, a bartender and a maid  – utter dying words.  See The Tempest, Ibid., IV, i, 148-158: “PROSPERO: ‘Our revels now are ended. These our actors / (As I foretold you) were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air, / And like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, / And like this insubstantial pageant faded / Leave not a rack behind.’”

54 Cf. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1623), II, ii, l. 190: Cleopatra’s boat: “The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; / Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them ; the oars were silver, / Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made / The water which they beat to follow faster, / As amorous of their strokes.  ...O'er-picturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature: on each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, / With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, / And what they undid did.”

55 Laquearia. V. Virgil, Aeneid, I. 726 (19 BC): “dependent lychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt (Blazing torches hang from the gold-panelled ceiling, and torches conquer the night with flames).”  Carthagian Queen Dido’s banquet hall is described.

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K.  Walls That Talk: The rape of Philomela

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Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, ---------------------------95
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene 56
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king 57
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 58  ---------------------------100
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  ---------------------------105
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.  ---------------------------110

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56 Sylvan scene. V. John Milton, Paradise Lost, iv. 140 (137-142) (1667).  Satan describes Eden: “...and over head up grew / Insuperable highth of loftiest shade, / Cedar, and Pine, and Firr, and branching Palm / A Silvan Scene, and as the ranks ascend / Shade above shade, a woodie / Theatre Of stateliest view.”

57 V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, vi, Philomela (486-674) (AD 8): Pandion had entrusted his daughter Philomela to her brother in law King Tereus, so that she could visit her sister Procne: “As soon as Philomela was on board the brightly painted ship, and the sea was churned by the oars (see note 54), and the land left behind them, the barbarian king cried ‘I have won! I carry with me what I wished for! ...The king took her to a high-walled building, hidden in an ancient forest (see note 56), and there he locked her away, she, pale and trembling, fearing everything, in tears now, begging to know where her sister was. Then, confessing his evil intent, he overcame her by force, ...she called out, again and again, in vain, to her father, her sister, and most of all to the great gods.‘...If the gods above witness such things, if the powers of heaven mean anything, if all is not lost, as I am, then one day you will pay me for this! I, without shame, will tell what you have done. If I get the chance it will be in front of everyone. If I am kept imprisoned in these woods, I will fill the woods with it, and move the stones, that know of my guilt, to pity.’” This provoked the king to cut off her tongue, but in time she was able to tell Procne what had happened by weaving it into tapestry.  The sisters then took gruesome revenge on Tereus, and thereafter they were all changed into birds, the sisters into a nightingale and a swallow and Tereus into a hoopoe.

58 Cf. Part III, l. 204.  See also John Lyly, Alexander and Campaspe (1584): “‘Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu,’ she cries, / And still her woes at midnight rise.”

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L.  Husband and Wife: Talking of wind and nothingness

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“My nerves are bad to-night.  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 59  ---------------------------115
Where the dead men lost their bones.

“What it that noise?”
The wind under the door. 60
“What is that noise now?  What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing. 61  ---------------------------120
“Do
“You know nothing?  Do you see nothing?  Do you remember
“Nothing?” 62

I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.  ---------------------------125
“Are you alive, or not? 63 Is there nothing in your head?” 64

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59 Cf. Part III, l. 194-195. “And bones cast in a little low dry garret, / Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.”  Rat’s alley was the World War I slang for battlefield trenches.  See also Part I, Line 22: “...A heap of broken images,” and see note 79.

60 Cf. John Webster, The Devil’s Lawcase, Act 3, scene 2 (1623): “(Second Surgeon:) ‘Is the wind in that door still?’” Two surgeons had just stumbled upon a man being stabbed, ostensibly to death; the surgeons were considering how they might make money off of the perpetrator by selling their silence when the victim groans.  The second surgeon initially denies this, pretending it is only the wind, but he knows better and they quickly conclude that by healing the victim they can get money from both victim and perpetrator.

61 Cf. Part III, lines 301-302: “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” ”

62 Shakespeare, Hamlet, III. iv. 132-5 (1623): “HAMLET: Do you see nothing there? QUEEN: Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.’ HAMLET: Nor did you nothing hear? QUEEN: No, nothing but ourselves.”

63 Cf. Part I, Lines 39-40: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing...”

64 Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.  This is Eliot’s hint tying the hyacinth prince (“Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, your arms full and your hair wet”) to the drowned sailor (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”).

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M.  Hamlet and the Socialites: Dying words in disguise

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But 65

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag — 66
It's so elegant
So intelligent 67  ---------------------------130
“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?”
The hot water at ten.  ---------------------------135
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess, 68
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

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65 The spacing suggests that this line, with the single word “But” set alone and to the right, is more attached to the previous passage, but it serves in any case as an abrupt segue, suggesting that the change of subject is questionable and that the nothingness of the last passage will continue.  Thus this air section remains, with every speaker, a series of dying words.

66 Ibid. Hamlet, V. ii. (Folio edition 3841-3847): “HAMLET: O I dye Horatio: The potent poyson quite ore-crowes my spirit, I cannot liue to heare the Newes from England, But I do prophesie th'election lights On Fortinbras, he ha's my dying voyce, So tell him with the occurrents more and lesse, Which haue solicited. The rest is silence. O, o, o, o.”  This will be followed by some of Ophelia’s last words, spoken at the end of a song; see line 172.

67 Gene Buck & Herman Ruby, The Zeigfield Follies, That Shakespearean Rag (1912): “That Shakesperian rag-- Most intelligent, very elegant,...”  Socialites talk of their day plans in this passage, which is conspicuously placed between the emptiness of a husband and wife’s conversation (lines 111-126) and the barside talk of a soldier’s return to his wife (lines 139-173).  These bits are further interspersed with the subtlest references to dying words of Hamlet and Ophelia, respectively disguised as a rag song chorus and a string of pub farewells at closing time.  The socialites, meanwhile, ultimately decide to play chess and take no notice of the events around them (see note 53).  Eliot would later write in his essay Dante: II. The Purgatorio and the Paradiso (1929): “...Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.  And a further wisdom is reached when we see clearly that this indicates the equality of the two men.”

68 Cf. the game of chess in Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women.  See note 53.  See also the Tempest, Ibid., V.i., which ends with Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess.

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N.  The Maid’s Story: Lil and Albert

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When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said — 69
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,  ---------------------------140
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get herself some teeth.  He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, 70 and get a nice set,  ---------------------------145
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 for 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.  ---------------------------150
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
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 a lack of telling.  ---------------------------155
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. 71
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) -------------------------160
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 you get married for if you don't want children?

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69 To be demobbed, or demobilized, is to be discharged from military service.  According to Valerie Eliot’s notes (see note 73), this story was related to Eliot by their maid.

70 The Alphabet of ben Sira (ca. 700-900 AD): “After God created Adam , who was alone, He said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’  He then created a woman for Adam, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith began to fight. She said, ‘I will not lie below,’ and he said, ‘I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while am to be in the superior one.’ Lilith responded, ‘We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.’ But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air.  ...Said the Holy One to Adam, ‘If she agrees to come back, fine. If not she must permit one hundred of her children to die every day.’”  See also Isaiah 34:9, 10, 13-14 (NRSV): “And the streams of Edom shall be turned into pitch, and her soil into sulfur; her land shall become burning pitch. ...From generation to generation it shall lie waste; ...Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. It shall be the haunt of jackals, an abode for ostriches. Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat-demons shall call to each other; there too Lilith shall repose, and find a place to rest.”

71 To bring it off is to have an abortion.  See note 70, on Lilith’s punishment.

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O.  Ophelia and the Bartender : More dying words

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HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME 72  ---------------------------165
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon, 73
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot —
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Goonight Bill.  Goonight Lou.  Goonight May.  Goonight.  ---------------------------170
Ta ta.  Goonight.  Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. 74

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72 “Hurry up please it’s time,” is a common last call in English pubs.  See also line 260, regarding an appreciation for the music that is sometimes heard “beside a public bar.”

73 Gammon is smoked ham; it is also a Greek term for sexual intercourse.  One of Eliot’s more notorious flaws was a streak of anti-Semitism, and while we are largely spared from it in this poem, it bears mentioning how the Lil story, with its Lilith parallel from Jewish mythology, concludes with a pork meal.  The sparing of any extensions of this flaw is thanks in part to Pound’s editing.  For instance, an earlier draft of The Waste Land had contained a reference to a Jewish slur from one of Eliot’s earlier poems, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar (1920), in which Eliot had written “The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs.”  Eliot reinserted Bleistein in an early draft of the Waste Land:“Full fathom five your Bleistein lies / Under the flatfish and the squids,” and Pound prevailed in having these lines deleted.  See T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land, a Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts, edited by Valerie Eliot (1971).  See also note 90. 

74 Hamlet, IV. v. 52-54: “OPHELIA: And so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.”  These are Ophelia’s dying words, if not her last words, and thus ends the air section; Ophelia has a few more lines in the scene, but already the air about her is dying.  She has lost her mind after the death of her father, killed by her fiancé Hamlet, and soon it will be reported that she “fell in the weeping brook” and drowned.  See IV. Vii, 64-81:  QUEEN GERTRUDE: “There is a willow grows aslant a brook, / That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; / There with fantastic garlands did she come / Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them: / There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds / Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; / When down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up: ...but long it could not be / Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death.”  Ophelia's death is also alluded to by lines 173-174 in the next section (“The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank”); by the description of the hyacinth girl in line 38, (“Your arms full, and your hair wet”); by King Ludwig II’s death in shallow waters (see note 10); and by the collected currants in the merchant’s pocket (see note 89).

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