The Waste Land

  While Red Wing’s weeping her heart away.

  She watched for him day and night,

  She kept all the camp fires bright,

  And under the sky each night she would lie

  And dream about his coming by and by;

  But when all the braves returned

  The heart of Red Wing yearned,

  For far, far away, her warrior gay

  Fell bravely in the fray.

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  Eliot, in a note to these lines which may not be serious, reports that lines

  199–201 derived from a ballad “reported to me from Sydney, Australia.”

  According to one scholar, who cites no evidence for his claim, this soldiers’

  ballad originally had the word “cunts” instead of feet.

  201 [soda water]: bicarbonate of soda, or baking soda, used for cleaning.

  202 [ Et O ces voix d’enfants . . . ]: The last line of a sonnet by the French poet Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), “Parsifal,” first published in the Revue Wagnérienne

  (6 June 1886).

  Parsifal a vaincu les Filles, leur gentil

  Babil et la luxure amusante—et sa pente

  Vers la Chair de garçon vierge que cela tente

  D’aimer les seins légers et ce gentil babil;

  Il a vaincu la Femme belle, au coeur subtil,

  Étalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante;

  Il a vaincu l’Enfer et rentre sous sa tente

  Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril,

  Avec la lance qui perça le Flanc suprême!

  Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même,

  Et prêtre du très saint Trésor essentiel.

  En robe d’or il adore, gloire et symbole,

  Le vase pur où resplendit le Sang réel.

  —Et, o ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole!

  The French can be translated as follows:

  Parsifal has overcome the maidens, their pretty

  Babble and alluring lust—and the downward slope

  Toward the Flesh of the virgin youth who tempts him

  To love their swelling breasts and pretty babble.

  He has overcome fair Woman, of subtle heart,

  Holding out her tender arms and thrilling throat;

  He has overcome Hell and returns under his tent

  With a heavy trophy at his youthful arm,

  With the lance which pierced the Savior’s side!

  He has healed the King, he himself a king,

  And a priest of the most holy Treasure.

  In a robe of gold he worships the vase,

  Glory and symbol, where the actual Blood shined.

  —And O those voices of children singing under the cupola.

  Verlaine’s poem refers to Richard Wagner’s opera, Parsifal (1882), in which

  the innocent knight Parsifal overcomes first the temptations of the flower

  maidens in Klingsor’s magic garden, then the temptations of the beautiful

  Kundry, who acts under a spell cast by Klingsor. Parsifal recovers the sacred

  spear with which Christ’s side had been pierced and returns to the Castle

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  of Monsalvat, where the Knights of the Holy Grail are waiting, and Anfortas,

  the Fisher King, will be healed by a touch from the spear. Before he heals

  Anfortas, Kundry (now free from Klingsor’s spell) washes his feet (compare

  with Mrs. Porter and her daughter), and after Anfortas is healed a choir of

  young boys sings.

  204–206 [Jug . . . Tereu]: See note to line 103.

  209 [Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant]: In both ancient Greek and Latin,

  euge means “well done” or “bravo!” In ancient Greek, eugeneia meant “high descent, nobility of birth,” and eugenes “well-born.” The word persists in the modern term “eugenics.” Smyrna, modern day Izmir, is on the western coast

  of modern Turkey, or Asia Minor, and until 1914 was part of the Ottoman

  Empire. Like other cities on the coast, it had had a heterogeneous population

  and was divided into Turkish, Jewish, Armenian, Greek, and Frankish quar-

  ters. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire had supported the Central

  Powers (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire), while Greece had

  allied itself to the Entente (France, Britain, Russia). With the end of the

  war, obtaining Smyrna became Greece’s primary goal. In May 1919 a Greek

  occupation force, protected by allied warships, disembarked in the city.

  Meanwhile, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and allied occupation of

  Constantinople had begun to produce support for the Turkish nationalist

  movement headed by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), which had declared itself the

  successor to the Ottoman Empire. In February 1921 an international confer-

  ence was held in London to resolve the problem of Asia Minor, but no agree-

  ment was reached. The Greeks launched a major o¤ensive in March and by

  the end of the summer were only forty miles from Ankara. But in August,

  Mustafa Kemal launched a countero¤ensive which completely routed the

  Greeks. On 8 September the Greek army evacuated Smyrna; the next day the

  Turks entered it and engaged in a full-scale massacre of the city’s Christian

  inhabitants, killing some thirty thousand. The conflict was not resolved until

  July 1923, with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, in which Greece ceded

  all territories in Asia Minor to the newly created Republic of Turkey. In short,

  Greece and Smyrna were much in the news throughout the period that Eliot

  was writing The Waste Land.

  212 [demotic]: As spoken by ordinary people, versus correct or learned speech.

  213 [Cannon Street Hotel]: Cannon Street runs westward from King William

  Street (see notes to lines 66, 67). The Cannon Street Station was designed by

  John Hawkshaw, the South Eastern Railway’s consulting engineer, and built

  between 1863 and 1866; it became a terminus for suburban commuters and

  businessmen traveling to and from the Continent. The massive, glass-roofed

  shed yawned over the north bank of the Thames. Though the station was

  remodeled in 1926 and badly damaged by bombs in World War II, its two

  distinctive towers, a familiar City landmark, were reconstructed as part of a

  redevelopment in 1969. Attached to the station was the City Terminus Hotel,

  later renamed the Cannon Street Hotel (see Fig. 10), designed by Edward

  Middleton Barry (1830–1880) and opened in May 1867. The building pre-

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  sented an uneasy mixture of Italianate and French Renaissance styles. The

  Cannon Street facade had its east and west corners, each crowned with a

  mansard roof and spirelet brought forward from the main building line.

  The hotel closed in 1931, due to a decline in business; its public rooms were

  kept open for meetings and banquets, but the remainder were converted to

  oªces, and the building was renamed Southern House. It was demolished

  in 1963 and replaced with a fifteen-story oªce block of sterile appearance.

  The architect, Edward Middleton Barry, is best known for having designed

  several notable buildings in London, including the railway hotel at Charing

  Cross, and Floral Hall in Covent Garden, Royal Opera House.

  214 [a weekend at the Metropole]: The Metropole is a hotel in Brighton (see Fig.

  11), a holid
ay resort on the southern coast of England. Designed by Alfred

  Waterhouse (1830–1905) and opened in July 1890, it was the largest in Brit-

  ain outside London, with 328 rooms of various sizes. The seven-story build-

  ing, erected in red brick and terra-cotta, was also the first to break with the

  traditional cream color of buildings on the seafront; at the time it was called

  the ugliest building in Brighton. Today it is rather plain, adorned largely by

  ironwork balconies, since alterations made in 1959 included removing the

  distinctive bronze spire and several turrets, cupolas, and pinnacles.

  218 [I Tiresias . . . two lives]: A legendary blind seer from Thebes. One day, when

  he saw snakes coupling and struck them with his stick, he was instantly

  transformed into a woman; seven years later the same thing happened again

  and he was turned back into a man. Since he had experienced the body in

  both sexes, he was asked by Jove and Juno to settle a dispute concerning

  whether men or women had greater pleasure in making love. Tiresias took

  the side of Jove and answered that women had more pleasure. Juno, an-

  gered, blinded him. In compensation, Jove gave him the gift of prophecy

  and long life. The story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, III, 316–338 (Eliot, in his notes, gives the original Latin for lines 320–338), given here in

  Rolfe Humphries’s translation:

  So, while these things were happening on earth,

  And Bacchus, Semele’s son, was twice delivered,

  Safe in his cradle, Jove, they say, was happy

  And feeling pretty good (with wine) forgetting

  Anxiety and care, and killing time

  Joking with Juno. “I maintain,” he told her,

  “You females get more pleasure out of loving

  Than we poor males do, ever.” She denied it,

  So they decided to refer the question

  To wise Tiresias’ judgment: he should know

  What love was like, from either point of view.

  Once he had come upon two serpents mating

  In the green woods, and struck them from each other,

  And thereupon, from man was turned to woman,

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  And was a woman seven years, and saw

  The serpents once again, and once more stuck them

  Apart, remarking: “If there is such magic

  In giving you blows, that man is turned to woman,

  It may be that woman is turned to man. Worth trying.”

  And so he was a man again; as umpire,

  He took the side of Jove. And Juno

  Was a bad loser, and she said that umpires

  Were nearly always blind, and made him so forever.

  No god can over-rule another’s action,

  But the Almighty Father, out of pity,

  In compensation, gave Tiresias power

  To know the future, so there was some honor

  Along with punishment.

  Tiresias also figures prominently in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, in which

  he recognizes that the curse on Thebes has come about because Oedipus has

  unknowingly committed incest with his mother Jocasta and killed his father.

  Thebes has been turned into a waste land, its land and people infertile.

  221 [Homeward . . . the sailor home from sea]: Eliot’s note refers to Fragment 149

  by Sappho, a Greek poet of the seventh century b.c.: “Hesperus, you bring

  home all the bright dawn disperses, / bring home the sheep, / bring home the

  goat, bring the child home to its mother.” For many readers the entire pas-

  sage on “the violet hour” (lines 215–223) recalls Dante, Purgatorio VIII, 1–6: Era già l’ora che volge il disio

  ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core

  lo dí c’han detto ai dolci amici addio;

  e che lo novo peregrin d’amore

  punge, s’e’ ode squilla di lontano

  che paia il giorno pianger che si more.

  The passage can be translated as follows:

  It was now the hour that turns back the desire

  of sailors and melts their heart

  the day that they have bidden dear friends farewell,

  and pierces the new traveler with love

  if he hears in the distance

  the bell that seems to mourn the dying day.

  222 [The typist . . . ]: It is diªcult today to appreciate just how innovative Eliot was in making a typist a protagonist in a serious poem. Prior to The Waste

  Land typists had appeared almost exclusively in light verse, humorous or

  satirical in nature. Their ever increasing presence in oªces after 1885 was

  registered instead in fiction and early film. While they were sometimes inte-

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  grated into genre fiction (the thriller, detective fiction), often they were

  shown being tempted by unscrupulous bosses or fellow workers. Early nov-

  els about typists, from 1893 to 1908, were often melodramatic and lurid (see,

  for example, Clara Del Rio, Confessions of a Type-Writer [Chicago: Rio, 1893]), but these vanished after 1910. Instead, typists became a subject increasingly

  explored by writers working in the tradition of realism. American writers

  who did this were David Graham Phillips (mentioned by Eliot in the London

  Letter, March 1921, 137), The Grain of Dust (New York: D. Appleton, 1911);

  Sinclair Lewis, The Job (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1917); and Winston

  Churchill, The Dwelling Place of Light (New York: Macmillan, 1917). In Great Britain authors who did this were Ivy Low, The Questing Beast (London:

  Secker, 1914); Arnold Bennett, Lilian (London: Cassell, 1922); and Rebecca

  West, The Judge (London: Hutchinson, 1922). In four of these novels the

  heroine engages in what would now be termed consensual premarital sex.

  225 [Her drying combinations]: A “combination” was the popular term for a

  “combination garment,” so-called because it combined a chemise with draw-

  ers or panties in a single undergarment. Combinations were introduced in

  the 1880s and vanished after World War II.

  234 [a Bradford millionaire]: Bradford is located in the western part of Yorkshire,

  a county in the northeast of England; it has always been a woolen and textile

  center, and during the nineteenth century it experienced fantastic growth, its

  population rising from 13,000 in 1801 to 280,000 by 1901. In Eliot’s era the

  town was still known for its textile industries, which employed more than

  33 percent of the city’s workers. Its mills prospered during World War I by

  manufacturing serge, khaki uniforms, and blankets for the armed forces.

  After the war there were charges of wartime profiteering.

  246 [And walked among . . . the dead]: See Homer, Odyssey, book XI, which

  recounts Odysseus’s journey to the underworld, where he consults Tiresias.

  253 [When lovely woman . . . ]: Eliot’s note directs the reader to a novel by Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774), The Vicar of Wakefield (1762), chapter 24. The chapter begins with the song of Livia, which is introduced thus:

  The next morning the sun rose with peculiar warmth for the season;

  so that we agreed to breakfast together on the honey-suckle bank: where,

  wile we sate, my yongest daughter, at my request, joined her voice to the

  concert on the trees about us. It was in this place my poor Olivia first

  met her seducer, and every object served
to recall her sadness. But that

  melancholy, which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by

  sounds of harmony, soothes the heart instead of corroding it. Her

  mother too, upon this occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and

  loved her daughter as before. “Do, my pretty Olivia,” she cried, “let us

  have that little melancholy air your pappa was so fond of, your sister

  Sophy has already obliged us. Do child, it will please your old father.”

  She complied in a manner so exquisitely pathetic as moved me.

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  When lovely woman stoops to folly,

  And finds too late that men betray,

  What charm can sooth her melancholy,

  What art can wash her guilt away?

  The only art her guilt to cover,

  To hide her shame from every eye,

  To give repentance to her lover,

  And wring his bosom—is to die.

  257 [“This music . . . upon the waters”]: See note to line 192.

  258: The Strand, three-fourths of a mile long, is one of the busiest and most con-

  gested streets in London. It runs northeast from Trafalgar Square parallel to

  the Thames. Together with its prolongation, Fleet Street, it connects the City

  (or financial district) with Westminster (the political district). The street con-

  tains many restaurants, theaters, pubs, and hotels. Queen Victoria Street

  runs from Bank Junction, the very heart of the City, southwest and then west

  to Blackfriars Bridge (see Fig. 9). See also ll. 180, 207.

  260 [Lower Thames Street]: This street runs eastward from London Bridge along

  the north bank of the Thames (see Figs. 9, 12, 13). At this time the eastern end

  of it still housed Billingsgate Market, and “fishmen” were laborers who carried

  or wheeled the fish from docks to the market. At its western end still stands

  the church of St. Magnus Martyr (see below, line 263). In Eliot’s time the

  area was still lively with colorful fishmen and local tradespeople (see Fig. 13).

  264 [St. Magnus Martyr]: Built between 1671 and 1676 by Sir Christopher Wren,

  it is one of fifty-one churches which Wren built in the wake of the fire of

  London of 1666. Wren is best known as the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  Eliot refers to the slender Ionic columns which grace the church’s interior

  (see Figs. 12–14).