170 The Waste Land
The dedication: Ezra Pound was Eliot’s friend and fellow poet. He edited The Waste Land, deleting whole sections from the original, when he thought they added little to the poem’s intensity. Eliot agreed with Pound’s changes, hence Pound is “Il miglior fabbro,” the better craftsman.
Part One: The Burial of the Dead: Part One contains four brief narratives, their plots and characters disparate, but united by the presence in each of unregenerative death.
Line 1: One of the great works of English literature, The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343?-1400), opens with lines in praise of the restorative powers of April, bringing the spring rain, which will bring nature back to life, and encourage the citizens of London to set out on their religious pilgrimage to Canterbury, England’s holiest city. But in the waste land of post-war Europe, spring lilacs and the romantic feelings they inspire seem out of place compared to the more desirable “forgetful snow” of winter.
Line 5: The pronoun “us” likely refers to Countess Marie Larisch, cousin of the Bavarian King Ludwig, who, in 1886, drowned in the Starnbergersee, a lake just south of Munich. Death by water is a recurring image throughout the poem. Marie’s pride in her German heritage, expressed in line 12 (the translation is “I am not Russian, at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German”) suggests the nationalism that was a contributing cause of World War I.
Line 13: The archduke, to Eliot’s contemporary readers, would bring to mind Franz Ferdinand (1875-1914), heir to the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire; his assassination triggered World War I.
Lines 31-34: Part of a melody from Wagner’s opera, Tristan and Isolde, about lovers who long to be reunited but fail to do so. The German translates as “Fresh blows the wind to the homeland; my Irish child, where are you waiting.” The inability to consummate true love is a recurring motif in the poem.
Line 35: Apparently the narrator gives hyacinths to a young woman, as a romantic gesture, but, in a waste land, love cannot be fulfilled. In Greek mythology, Apollo, god of music and poetry, loved Hyacinth, a handsome young man, whose accidental, untimely death Apollo venerated when hyacinth flowers grew from the boy’s spilled blood. Note, again here, the motif of death and rebirth.
Line 42: “Waste and empty is the sea.” Continues the Tristan and Isolde story from lines 31-34. Here a shepherd tells Tristan there is no sign of Isolde’s arrival.
Line 43: The inhabitants of a waste land put more faith in fortune tellers than in holy men. The future foretold my Madame Sosostris references death, especially death by drowning. Water brings life back to nature and purifies Christians in baptism, but in the waste land it destroys. In Eliot’s own note for this section, he admits he invents Tarot cards and uses real ones arbitrarily to foreshadow later events in the poem. Madame Sosostris echoes the Cumaean Sybil of the poem’s epigraph.
Lines 63-75: He