The Waste Land Allusions Part Ii

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A Game of Chess

Back 1

• A Game at Chesse – play by Thomas Middleton (1624)
• No specific character names, just chess pieces
• Allegory for the stormy political relationship between Spain and Great Britain – White King represents the king of England, James I; Black King represents the king of Spain, Philip IV
• Philip wanted to marry Queen Elizabeth
• Spain’s plan to marry off the Infanta Maria Anna to Prince Charles was like a chess game
• Satirizes political marriage
• First staged by the King’s Men at the Globe Theatre – relates to Shakespeare
• Also alludes to Middleton’s play Women Beware Women (also see lines 137-138)
• As men try to seduce the women, there is a game of chess
• Each chess move parallels how the men try to seduce the women
• In one scene, a mother-in-law knows a man tries to seduce her daughter-in-law, and she makes sure her son finds out to get rid of the daughter in law
• In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, rival kingdoms, Milan and Naples, are united in the marriage of Prince Ferdinand and Miranda. They are discovered together playing a game of chess.
• Chess game – reduction of war to a game between lovers, man’s mortality
• Kings are generally the weakest players in a chess game
• Original title was “In the Cage” – alludes to a story by Henry James
• An unnamed telegraphist sits and types messages in her “cage” in the post office.
• Gets involved with others’ lives as they send messages through her.
• A woman held in a glass – Sybil of Cumae (epigraph)
• Relates to the first part of Part II: Girl in her room.
• Edited out because it was too obvious of an allusion
• Original poem had more obvious references to chess that alluded to Vivienne’s affair, but she made Eliot take them out

Front 2

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble,

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• Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare
• Enobarbus describing Cleopatra floating on her ship down the Cydnus River to greet Antony
• Act II, scene ii, line 190 – “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne / Burned on the water”
• Antony and Cleopatra is also alluded to in Cymbeline by Shakespeare – Act II, scene ii
• Iachimo pretends to seduce Posthumus’s wife Imogen in her sleep – the room is decorated with tapestries of Antony and Cleopatra and chaste Diana bathing
• Lines 45-46 – he sees that she is reading about the rape of Philomela (whom he refers to as Philomel) – “The tale of Tereus; here the leaf’s turn’d down / Where Philomel gave up.”
• The Chair also refers to the story of Cassiopeia (see notes for lines 83-90)
• Queen of Ethiopia, beautiful but vain
• Hated by the gods-declared more beautiful than nereids (50 sea nymphs) ---and was punished by having to hang upside down for the rest of eternity.
• Her constellation is made up of seven stars
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Front 3

Cupidon

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• A naked, infantile figure
• Allusion to William Andophe Bougureau, who painted Cupidon in 1875, androgynous painting – he also painted Dante’s Inferno
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Front 4

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

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• Allusion to Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” – “why should the aged eagle stretch its wings
• Ash Wednesday is Eliot’s first poem after his conversion to Anglicanism
• The quote from “Ash Wednesday” alludes to Solomon’s Mind by Hill – “anything to have done the eagle flapped to the sun”
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Front 5

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

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• Doubled flames – symmetry, love
• Sevenbranched candelabra relates to the chair in the story of Cassiopeia – her constellation is made up of seven stars
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Front 6

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 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

Back 6

• The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope – mock epic about gods and poems, satire on courtly love – Act I, line 129-134 – a nobleman snips off two locks of hair from a coquette
• Parody of Helen of Troy, Aneas
• The details are a description of a makeup table – alludes to Belinda, a character in The Rape of the Lock, as she sits primping on the day of her “rape” (actually Baron snatching of her hair – Latin word for snatch)
• Takes place in London (Reference to Part I)
• Also refers to the story of Cassiopeia – Cassiopeia, queen of Ethiopia, claimed that she was more beautiful than all the sea nymphs. The gods were angry and sent her to the heavens to sit in a chair upside down for all eternity, caused famine and floods in Ethiopia – desolate wasteland.
• Her daughter Andromeda was supposed to be eaten by a sea monster, but Perseus killed it for her
• Another constellation, Sirius and Orion, brought yearly floods to the Nile – relates to Cleopatra and Antony – fertility
• Unguent = ointment
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Front 7

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

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• Book I of The Aeneid by Vergil – The Aeneid is about Aeneas, son of Anchises and Venus, who flees from burning Troy. Juno, who fears that he will destroy her cherished city of Carthage, attempts to thwart his journey to Italy, where he will found the Roman race, by creating a storm that blows him to Carthage. There, he meets Dido, the Carthaginian queen, and Venus and Juno try to match-make the two by replacing Ascanius, Aeneas’s son, with Cupid at the feast that Dido serves for her Trojan guests.
• Vergil describes the rich halls at this feast – “burning lamps hang from the gold-panelled ceiling, and torches dispel the night with their flames” (line 726)
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Front 8

Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

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• Goes back to the ocean
• Much color imagery
• The fireplace is made of multi-colored stone
• Copper salts burn in different colors
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Front 9

a carved dolphin swam.

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• Dolphin is a symbol of man and love
• Venus was also born from the sea-foam – metamorphosis

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Front 10

sylvan scene

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• John Milton’s Paradise Lost – Book IV, verse 140 – description of paradise where Adam and Eve live; Satan comes to seduce them away from God – he makes Eve eat the fruit and then seduces Adam through her
• Innocent love
• Also refers to many scenes in The Aeneid
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Front 11

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale [100]
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.

Back 11

• Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI – The Story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela
• Philomela, the daughter of Pandion, king of Athens, went to visit her sister Procne and Tereus, king of Thrace and Procne’s husband
• Tereus went to bring Philomela to her sister, but he was consumed by lust. He brought her to a ramshackle hut in the middle of the woods and brutally raped her. When Philomela threatened to tell everyone about the rape, Tereus cut off her tongue, locked her away in the hut, and told Procne that her sister had died.
• A year later, Philomela sent a tapestry that she had made telling her story to Procne. The sisters vowed revenge on Tereus. They took Itys, Procne and Tereus’s son, killed him, and cut him up into many pieces. They then cooked and served his flesh to Tereus. Philomela then brings out Itys’s head and throws it at Tereus. The sisters then flee with Tereus chasing after them in a fury.
• He continued to pursue them, and they changed into birds. Tereus changed into a hawk, Procne into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale
• Philomela as a nightingale sings a plaintiff song with her breast always pressed to a thorn
• “Philomel” is a term for a nightingale – also androgynous
• “Jug Jug” – the sound of a nightingale – Elizabethan poets also used this for its crude sexual connotation
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Front 12

withered stumps of time

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• Refers to the tapestry that Philomela creates in order to tell her story to Procne
• Also, Ludwig II had scenes from Wagner’s operas decorating the walls of his castles
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Front 13

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

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• Shows the motif of the psychological, metaphysical, and aesthetic
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Front 14

Spread out in fiery points

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• Vergil’s Aeneid Book VII, line 638
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Front 15

"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."

Back 15

• Echoes Shakespeare’s Hamlet Act III scene iv – Gertrude is speaking to her son Hamlet, who sees the ghost of his father. The ghost tells him to take revenge for his mother marrying his brother (her brother-in-law) Claudius. Gertrude does not see the ghost and asks who he is talking to.
• Lady Macbeth or Gertrude Stein or Mrs. Dalloway; or Prince Hamlet's reaction to Gertrude's strange behavior when he talks to her about how he thinks of this incestuous relationship between mother and uncle. Gertrude marries Henry (husband) brother.

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Front 16

rats' alley

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• Rat-infested trenches of World War I
• Eliot uses the rat in a lot of his works to portray himself – could refer to his own poems

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Front 17

Where the dead men lost their bones.

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• Could be a sexual symbol of fertility/beyond the flesh
• Biblical allusion to Matthew 23:27 – “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness”
• “hypocrites” – alluded to in Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
• “whited sepulchres” – alluded to in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
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Front 18

"What is that noise?"
The wind under the door.

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• The Devil’s Law-Case by John Webster – Act III, scene ii -- “Is that wind in the door still?”
• Lord Contarino wants to marry Jolenta, but her brother, Romelio, disapproves. Later in the play, Contarino gets in a duel and is wounded. Romelio disguises himself and bribes two surgeons to give him private access to Contarino. He stabs Contarino but his guise is discovered by the surgeons so he has to bribe them again. They believe that Contarino will die shortly but actually discover that the stabbing improved his condition (by releasing infection in a wound)
• “The wind under the door” is his breathing/moaning
• A revenge play
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Front 19

"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"

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• Dante’s Inferno, Canto V;
• Dante brings the reader to the second circle of Hell where wind violently blows without end.
• Circle of lust – Cleopatra and Antony, Dido, Tristan and Isolde
• Possible allusion to the story of Paolo and Francesca – Paolo was the brother of Francesca’s husband. They had an affair, and Francesca’s husband murdered both of them when he discovered it. Francesca and Paolo were condemned to the second circle of hell for their uncontrollable sin of lust.
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Front 20

Nothing again nothing.

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• The White Devil by John Webster, Act V, scene vi, verse 407 – Flamineo kills Isabella, the wife of the Duke of Brachiano, to advance his own career. He is tied to a pillar and about to run through by a sword. Lodovico, his and Marcelo’s brother, is taking revenge for the murder of Marcelo. Lodovico asks Flamineo what he is thinking, and Flamineo replies, “Nothing, of nothing: leave thy idle questions.”

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Front 21

I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.

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• Original version had “the hyacinth garden” at the end of the line
• The next few lines refer to the Hyacinth girl and the Phoenician sailor found in Part I
• The two objects were joined
• Shakespeare’s Tempest – Act I, scene ii, line 398 – Ariel’s song about how the Tempest washed over the ship. Ferdinand thinks that his father, Alfonso, died.
• Line 48 of The Waste Land (Part I)
• (, yes!)-Original edition
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Front 22

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag –
It's so elegant
So intelligent

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• “That Shakespearian Rag” was an American ragtime tune from 1912 by Joseph W. Stern & Co, David Stamper
o Extra “he” added to make it more lyrical
o Lowercase “t” in “that”
• Repeated O’s are found often in Shakespeare’s works – usually uses four in a row – found in Hamlet, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Othello
o Draft text: Hamlet sighed this phrase at the end of his dying words
o Not in “That Shakespearian Rag”
• Lyrics from “That Shakespearian Rag”
• Actual line is “most intelligent, / very elegant”
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Front 23

"What shall I do now? What shall I do?"

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• Refers to Gertrude again in Hamlet, Act III, scene iv – Gertrude is asking Hamlet what she should do about Claudius and her marriage
• Hamlet tells her to repent
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Front 24

"I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
"With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?

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• Refers to prostitutes in 1922
• Only prostitutes would wear their hair down then
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Front 25

And we shall play a game of chess,

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• The moves of the chess game parallel the moves in the seduction
• Echoes the title of Middleton’s A Game at Chess
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Front 26

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

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• Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women – Act II, scene ii
• The Duke of Florence is seducing Bianca while Livia and Bianca’s mother-in-law are distracted playing a game of chess in another room
• Lidless eyes – eyes that see everything and never close
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Front 27

When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said –

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• Lilith was Adam’s first wife in the Apocryphal books
• She was made equal to him – made from the sediment of the earth instead of the dust
• She refused to be submissive (even in sex) – Adam complained to God, and He kicked her out of Eden
• Lilith then spawned many demon children – became the first succubus
• Lilith is the only one who knows God’s name
• “demobbed” – released from military service (reference to part I)
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Front 28

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

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• Typical British bartender call to close the bar
• Present in Part III (195-196)
• Also alludes to Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress

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Front 29

And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

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• Queen Victoria is married to Albert, Saxe-Coburg-Gotach
• They had nine children, and Albert had gene for hemophilia
• Passed on to Leopold, one of their 9 children (Louise, Leopold, Alice, Albert-Edward (King Edward VII), Alfred, Arthur, Beatrice, Victoria, and Helena)
o Duke of Albany and married to Helene
o Daughter named Alice of Albany who was married to Prince Alexander of Teck
 Princess May of Teck is their daughter, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria
• Victoria’s husband is William of Prussia
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Front 30

He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

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Four years=WWI
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Front 31

Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

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• If Albert (just a common man) has an affair, Lil will suspect the speaker
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Front 32

It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

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Birth control/abortion pills
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Front 33

(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George

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Relates to Queen Victoria’s lineage. Edward VII (Albert-Edward) married to Alexandra and their child is young George
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Front 34

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

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• Gamos = Greek for sexual encounter
• Gammon – (v.) to trick
• Gammon – (n.) ham
• Backgammon (relating back to the title)
• Misleading dialogue
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Front 35

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. [170]
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

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• Dialect
• What is often spoken to children
• Children of Queen Victoria
• Purposely omit “D” in “goodnight,” trying to make it seem childlike or drunk
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Front 36

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

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• Hamlet by Shakespeare – Act IV, scene v, lines 70-72
• Right before Ophelia kills herself by drowning – relates to the other drownings in Part I
• Ophelia was Polonius’s daughter, and she was in love with Hamlet
• Lost her father by her lover’s hand, lost her lover to his insanity
• Dies with a handful of flowers in her hands (Hyacinth Girl)
• Also from a song “Goodnight Ladies” from 1865 – typically used to end a social event
• T.S. and Vivian had dinner with Virginia Woolf, but Vivian always embarrassed Eliot.
• Virginia Woolf drowns herself
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