Different Voices

Every Thought...

Week 11: The Waste Land

Some years ago, I discovered an epic poem and turned it into an extended study project: Here, in regular dissections, is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, With Annotations (and other explanations). 


03/11:

TWL, Epigraph: To Be Or Not To Be

0.1 The Waste Land
0.2 by T. S. Eliot

0.3 "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in
ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σἰβυλλα τἱ
θἐλεις ; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεἰν θἑλω.”

0.1. TITLE: Eliot, in the first of his own endnotes, directly acknowledged what inspired the name of this poem (see note 0.2), but see also notes 42, 145 and 385 for other influences, and see note 111 for an inspiration to the poem’s earlier working title, “He Do The Police In Different Voices.”  Those many voices will become apparent throughout these annotations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, initially presented in 1922, is offered here in the form of its publication in Poems, 1909-1925 (Faber), the first edition in which Eliot included explanatory endnotes.  His notes and these expanded annotations  serve primarily to acknowledge the sources of the voices.  These sources are given full citations at their primary reference points.  All of the pre-poem sources  are now public domain works, and many are widely available online.  Most of the translations turned to here are also from publicly held works that would have been known in 1922. The most frequent sources for Eliot’s “voices” are:

SHAKESPEARE, surpassing Dante and the Bible (see note 130); specifically, William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1605) (notes 0.2, 4, 8, 42, 74, 76.5, 92, 112, 123, 128, 130, 131, 172, 172.5, 214, 231, 380, 393, 417, 432, 433); The Tempest (1611) (7, 12, 15, 26, 48, 76.5, 111, 125, 138, 167, 172.5, 182, 186, 191, 257, 266, 276, 291, 321.5, 393); Anthony & Cleopatra (1623) (8, 34, 42, 77, 80, 111, 172, 227, 293, 420); Cymbeline (1623) (8, 77, 80, 197); MacBeth (1623) (141, 308, 318, 321.5); and Coriolanus (1608) (417).

THE BIBLE, cited  here and throughout these notes, with rarest exception, from the King James Version (1611), with references to Genesis (note 374), Job (22, 321.5), Psalms (184, 311), Ecclesiastes (13,23, 141), Isaiah (25, 145 (Darby Translation), 184, 426), Jeremiah (27, 385), Ezekiel (20, 22, 116, 186), Daniel (361), Matthew (184, 311, 311.5, 322, 324, 393), Luke (322, 366), John (0.5, 184, 201, 219, 298, 321.5, 322), Romans (307, 319), 1 Corinthians (71), Philippians (434) and Revelation (209, 248, 250, 321.5).

DANTE Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (ca. 1321; tr. Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, 1867), including Inferno (notes 12, 34, 40, 61, 63, 64, 68, 76.5, 126, 131, 246, 321.5, 343, 412 and 430); Purgatorio (0.4, 41, 182, 221, 293 and 428); and Paradiso (41).

VIRGIL, Aeneid (19 BCE, tr. John Dryden 1697): see notes 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 12, 26, 34, 70, 80, 92, 231, 276, 293, 307 and 388.

OVID, Metamorphoses (AD 8; tr. John Dryden, Samuel Garth, Alexander Pope et al, 1717), with stories of the Sybil (notes 0.3, 55, 63, 76.5, 111, 253) the Lethe River (4, 214, 266), the rape of Philomela (8, 99, 198, 202, 209, 242, 253, 280, 429), the Hyacinth prince (36, 39, 42, 71, 74, 76.5, 111, 125, 138, 176, 209, 214, 227, 311.5, 312, 323, 378, 429 ), Actaeon and Diana (77, 197, 198, 248, 276) and Tiresias (54, 208, 218, 219, 243, 248). See also Ovid’s Tristia at note 276.

ELIOT’S OWN VOICE, and the voices of those immediately around him, are also heard through several key resources:

“Eliot”: Eliot’s 1925 endnotes, from Poems, 1909-1925 (Faber).
“F&T”: T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land, a Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited and with an Introduction by Valerie Eliot (1971).
“Letters”: Valerie Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922 (1988).
“Letters II”: Valerie Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. 2: 1923-1925 (2011).

PRESENTATION: Preceding these annotations, the poem is offered to the reader as Eliot first intended, without interruption and with the line spacing intact, but with several typographical fixes to the 1925 edition, two of which Eliot would later endorse, at lines 42 (changing Od’ to Oed’) and 131 (deleting an extra quotation mark). Line numbers are also adjusted, without the poet’s endorsement, to fix an earlier miscount at line 347.  Following Eliot’s lead, the poem is then offered to the student, with the endnotes interspersed and the line numbering increased for easier cross-referencing.  Thus, the reader is encouraged to study and the student is encouraged to read.  And so we begin...

0.2. WESTON AND FRAZER:  Eliot: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge).  Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommendit (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.”

Thomas Stearns Eliot gets top billing for The Waste Land, but the first of his endnotes spotlights the work of two anthropologists, Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920) and James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic & Religion, 3d Ed (1914).  Anthropology (see also note 218), the study of humanity across cultures and time and discipline, was reaching a new level of popular appeal in the early 1920s, thanks in part to the works of Weston and Frazer.

THE GRAIL LEGEND, Weston’s key focus, is alluded to at lines 31-35, 201, 266-306, 386-390 and 424-426, and discussed at notes 8, 31, 46, 201, 209, 266, 388 and 425.  See also Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913): “In Arthurian legend, a Fisher King (the fish being an ancient symbol of life) has been maimed or killed, and his country has therefore become a dry Waste Land; he can only be regenerated and his land restored to fertility by a knight (Parsifal) who perseveres through various ordeals to the Perilous Chapel and learns the answers to certain ritual questions about the Grail.” And from Ritual to Romance 2: “...the story postulates a close connection between the vitality of a certain King, and the prosperity of his kingdom; the forces of the ruler being weakened or destroyed, by wound, sickness, old age, or death, the land becomes Waste, and the task of the hero is that of restoration.”

RENEWAL, shown through revegetation and the effects of spring, is also the theme of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which considered the traditions of ancient fertility cults and ritual sacrifice that have influenced our modern culture.  Volumes V & VI of this work, also credited in Weston’s Ritual to Romance,offered a two part study of Adonis, Attis and Osiris, respectively Greek, Phrygian and Egyptian gods of vegetation who were said to live and die annually.

THE ESCORT CYCLE of Aeneas’s Sybil, Virgil’s Aeneas and Dante’s Virgil (and in turn, Eliot’s Dante and our Eliot) is also introduced by Frazer’s book, which opens with the “sylvan landscape” (see line 98) of J. M. W. Turner, The Golden Bough (1834), also featured in the 1856 H. Graves & Co. edition of Virgil, Aeneid.  For the painting’s story, see Virgil, Aeneid 6.  Aeneas, in search of a new home after leaving his destroyed city of Troy, encounters the Sybil at Cumae. The Sybil agrees to act as his escort into hell, where Aeneas hopes to find the ghost of his father, but to enter he first must give Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld, the bough of a golden tree that replenishes itself as branches are taken from it.  Compare Virgil escorting the poet through the circles of hell in Dante, Inferno 1.130-135.  See also Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.1.127-138, for another father and child ghost scene.  But first, before the guidance of Shakespeare and Dante and Virgil, it was the Sybil who escorted Aeneas, leading him not just to write but to relate.  See Aeneid 6.116-119:

 “...Commit not thy prophetic mind
To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind,
Lest they disperse in air our empty fate;
Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate."

J. M. W. Turner, The Golden Bough (1834)

0.3. THE SYBIL: We have met “Syballum,” the Sybil, as an escort to Aeneas, but it is the Sybil’s untranslated words from another setting that give this poem its opening epigraph.  For a translation, see Trimalchio, in Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, 48 (ca. AD 50, tr. Michael Heseltine 1913):

“Yes, and I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage; and when the boys cried at her: ‘Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?’ ‘I would that I were dead,’ she used to answer.’”

Apollo had granted the Sibyl a wish in exchange for her virginity; she asked for eternal life but in time she shriveled up, having forgotten to ask for eternal youth. See also Ovid, Metamorphoses 14:122-133 (AD 8; tr. John Dryden, Samuel Garth, Alexander Pope et al, 1717):

“I am no deity, reply'd the dame,
But mortal, and religious rites disclaim.
Yet had avoided death's tyrannick sway,
Had I consented to the God of day.
With promises he sought my love, and said,
Have all you wish, my fair Cumaean maid.
I paus'd; then pointing to a heap of sand,
For ev'ry grain, to live a year, demand.
But ah! unmindful of th' effect of time,
Forgot to covenant for youth, and prime.
The smiling bloom, I boasted once, is gone,
And feeble age with lagging limbs creeps on.”

ETERNITY, or the thought of never dying, is abhorrent to the Sybil, and her sentiment of a living hell also resonates in an alternative epigraph Eliot had once considered from Kurtz’s dying words in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902):

“The horror! The horror!”

See F&T, and note 298. But just as Marlow would call Kurtz’s cry a moral victory, Eliot, even as he relates the Sybil’s wish to be dead, appears to be actively yearning for something beyond the metaphorical grave. See note 298 for the poet’s eventual appreciation of a “new start.” More immediately, see note 0.5 for the first of several allusions to the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead and given a more positive promise of eternal life.

CONRAD: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is alluded to several times in this poem; see notes 0.3, 41, 76.5, 123, 266, 272 and 298.  See also an allusion to Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands at note 395.

EPHEMERALITY: Counterposed to eternity, and rejecting the Sybil’s predicament, is the thought that nothing lasts forever.  This too is reflected throughout The Waste Land, most notably in its sensitivity to the season cycle (see note 141) and its observation of the rise and fall of cities and civilizations (see note 376), but also within the poem’s many substories, built on memories and relationships, and in one of its final conclusions (see note 410).


03/12:

Semitemos

Sometimes, we tell our stories backwards:
The burial precedes the funeral, and
mourning anticipates departure.

Semitemos, the plot stands still
while we move on to the denouement:
It will not until Friday be that I begin to wonder
when might have happened on Whatsday.
Lifetimes some is just a foreword

and I want to skip to the afterlife,
but suchtimes the book will make no sense
without the author’s explanation.
So here we are, dear, you not saying a word
and I just filling in the blanks,
but we’re both telling the story as it occurs.


03/13:

A Call To Cheer

I'd rather learn from 
   one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand 
   stars how not to dance.
       — e. e. cummings

Dad was a Card fan raised by radio:
No matter who was playing he wore red
And fondly reminisced of Stan the Man,
Jack Buck and Harry Caray on the air,

The classic steal of Brock for Broglio—
As home teams changed still Dad was born and bred
To tune each game in from a distant stand
And cheer the Redbirds on, no matter where.

I’ve been a Cub fan all my life, by Joe,
Been cut so many times and always bled
A shade of blue that’s hard to understand
Unless you’ve lived and breathed the Wrigley air

Where “Let’s play two” means never let it go
And keep on root, root, rooting them ahead
Until they win the big one.  That’s the plan,
No matter when it happens.  I’ll be there.

Mid-March is when I miss him most, you know:
As winter melts away, thoughts fill my head
Of spring and what it means to be a fan
With songs of resurrection everywhere.

Young cubs shake off their sleep and start to play,
Seeing the fields turn greener every day
And hearing the cardinals’ call to cheer, cheer, cheer;
And from a distant stand, my dad is here.


03/14:

Journal, Middle Of March, 1990

you shall above all things be glad and young
       — e. e. cummings

March 2:  Josh up from Champaign for eye exam. Says vision is jumpy. I suggest he get glasses that jump in reverse.  Considering his earlier concern about dehydration, I write this symptom off as psychosomatic. The doctor, as if to concur, rates his vision as 20-20.

March 14:  Josh is back up. Says he has had a CAT-scan in the morning after more symptoms of double vision, and has come to Chicago at the urging of the doctors in Champaign. He looks very glary-eyed. We bring him to the hospital at 9:00 pm. After about an hour in the emergency room —relatively un-tense! —we meet Dr. Raj, who suggests (strongly) that Josh be checked in that evening. He is left there in the emergency room, and we all go home. (“We” being Mom, Parul, Josh’s friends John Valusas, Dave ____ and Keith ____, and me, with a visit from Pastor Gimmi; Don is home with Annie).

March 15:  Josh has an MRI exam in the morning, and Dr. Raj proceeds in the evening with a neural operation, placing a permanent shunt from Josh’s brain to his abdominal area. He has one fourth of his head shaved and he has holes in his head and in his abdomen. The operation is done in an hour and a quarter, and Josh wakes up in intensive care with an IV in his arm —standard fare for brain surgery; this one went very smoothly. I am at work during the operation, but I somehow manage to get in to see him at 10:30 pm —only three hours afterwards. Josh is awake, watching a basketball game.


03/15:

Squirrels

Squirrels chewed a hole in the wall of my brother’s room: the east wall, right next to the bed. After years of hearing them scurrying around in the attic, and of thinking their actions harmless, these cousins of rats found a way into the wall, and shortly thereafter, a way out. My father put poison by the hole, and in a few days the box was empty and the squirrels —we hoped —had disappeared back into the wall, back up to the attic and maybe even out of the house where they could die without raising too much of a stink.

Josh, my brother, was not home for this. If he had been, it wouldn’t have bothered him, he says. He would have slept next to the hole, as if to prove something. As it was, he was the one to point out that no one had actually seen any squirrels in the house. “I bet you you’ve been fooled all along,” he said. “I bet you they were rats.” Josh was in school, several miles away.

But the squirrels, or whatever they were, finally busted in. Just a crack was all they needed to get started, and in no time —one, two days —they had a hole big enough to caravan a whole family through. We had heard them scuttling behind the plaster for at least as long as we’ve owned this house —fourteen years that would be, which in squirrel generations is practically forever. Then, suddenly, they were in and out of the room. Dad put some D-Con by their new doorway, and they ate that up and started chewing on the cardboard box. And the hole in the wall got bigger. “But D-Con,” explained Dad, “will eventually make them go off and die somewhere. “Won’t they start smelling?” I asked. “No,” said Dad. “They just go off somewhere.”

Next the birds found their way in. They must have had to go through the squirrel tunnel to get to the hole, which doesn’t seem like a birdlike thing to do, but anyway they did it. Mom opened up the door one day and literally scared the shit out of them, two big crows. She was pretty scared too, but the birds were going nuts, banging themselves against the windows and flying all around the room like the floor was on fire. Mom tried to gather up courage to walk across the room to open the window, but the birds didn’t want to allow her; apparently changing their birdish minds, they started getting defensive about their new home. So Mom closed the door and hoped that maybe the dummies would somehow rediscover that gaping squirrel portal and go back the way they came in.

The doctor, meanwhile, said that you now had a hole in your head, but that you’d be fine. But he apparently decided not to tell you that they’d have to keep waking you up every hour, all night long, to test your neurological functions. Maybe that’s why they didn’t mind opening your door for me at 11:30 in the evening. “This is against hospital rules, you know,” they said to me, but they didn’t seem to be listening to themselves.

Mom told me about the crows, so I went upstairs and opened the door to your room. Nothing was happening —one bird was awake but had retreated, apparently worn out, to a corner. I opened a window and it took about a second to shoo that bird out. The other bird —“I think it was a baby,” Mom said —was nowhere to be found. I suppose we’ll run across it someday, dead in some cranny and rotting away. Or maybe it found its way back out through the hole.

And look at you, brother, lying there like nothing happened. No, you’re tickled over the whole experience. “I just had brain surgery,” you brag with a dull smile.

You had promised, before you went in, that you would wake up five hours after surgery, in order to not miss any of your college’s televised football game, and now here you are. “How are you feeling?” I ask. “The pain’s bearable,” you say. “Aw, look, they’re three points behind. If I’d only have been there, cheering the defense just a little louder!”


03/16:

Journal, 1990, Continued

March 16

Josh must pee in a cup and stay in bed, and he doesn’t have much of an appetite. He will have to sleep at a forty five degree angle. But his spirits, despite the inconvenience, are high. I finally reach Aunt Grace and Uncle Willard and tell them the news.  I call Josh at the hospital to inform him of this. It is 8:15 pm, and he sounds very groggy. That's natural — but it disturbs me.

March 17

Saturday. I am at the hospital from 11:00 to 6:30. There are lots of visitors. Josh insists he is not overwhelmed. I am. I am testy, with Parul especially. But later, at home, on the phone, I tell her that I need her. I have called her after a wrenching cry. “Josh is going to be okay, one way or another,” I keep saying —but what about me? Parul helps me, reassures me. Later, I’m saying it again: “Josh is going to be okay, one way or another,” and I say this to Anneliese. And she cries.

The hairy brother said,
“They’re gonna shave my head
and have a look inside.”
His little sister cried:
“But you’re not gonna die,
are you?” Her giant tears
fell full of lonely fears.
“No, I’m not gonna die,”
big brother smiled. “Hey,
what’s with you anyway?
It’s just brain surgery!
—So don’t give up on me.”
“You’re gonna be okay?”
  she asked, with one more tear.
And brother said, “Come here,
I’m gonna be fine.”

March 18

Sunday. Parul and I visit Josh after church, at 10:30. I promise to pace myself so that I won’t be overwhelmed. But I want to be with Josh, because he’s said he doesn’t want to be alone. Ha! There was never less than three people in the room all day, and often more than five. Good! Good for Josh, and for his spirits. And they are rubbing off on all of us. He is able to walk around now, and the IV is no longer needed.

March 19

We still don’t know what is in Josh’s head. There is a spot, 1.69 centimeters in diameter, on the CAT-scan, but it could still be a blood clot or an aneurism (are they the same thing?). We will know more this afternoon. First, Josh is put through one more test: a cerebral angiogram, in which a catheter is inserted into an artery at his groin and pushed up to his neck, where it releases a dye into his head. Josh will have to keep flat again for eight more hours, from 10:00 am when the test was administered.

At 3:30, Dr. Raj comes in with his reports. It is a tumor, at the stem of Josh’s brain, a position more commonly seen in younger children. Dr. Raj describes a biopsy procedure, but says the risk —of brain damage, primarily —outweighs the advantage of knowing malignancy or benignity. Instead we can find out what we are dealing with —there are four kinds of tumors, or “nomas” —by how easily it is removed. There is radiation, with 3,000 rads, which can wipe out the simplest benign tumor. A higher dosage will eradicate a more complex tumor. Surgery is possible, but this presents the most risk. And finally there is a new procedure, only done in three facilities nationwide, called a “gamma knife.”

We will learn more in the days and consultations to follow. ....It was scary hearing all this, and especially hearing no certain solution nor even a specific problem. And everyone seems to have heard different things. Most optimistically, Don concludes that the tumor is simply not malignant. Perhaps I am the most pessimistic, although I believe I am being objective. At any rate, we must all continue to pray. And we will watch to see whether Josh’s spirits need our help for a change.


03/17:

Moleskin 2.3: Placement

There are different prototypical personalities a child can take on, depending on his or her placement in the household, and my brothers and later my sister would demonstrate this to me, as I would to them. They can tell their own tales of being middle children and babies of the family, and they each, in turn, were the baby, getting primary attentions and given increments of freedom. But I was the oldest, and for four years the only, which means my own attentions and freedoms were, at first, exclusive. I do not remember the transition; or maybe I willfully denied it and, surely, continue to do so. I did not, and do not deny, my siblings’ rightful attentions and defining freedoms, but a part of me believes, perhaps irrationally, selfishly, but, yes, willfully, that my place has never diminished.