The Waste Land Allusions Part Iii

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THE FIRE SERMON

Back 1

• From the Buddhist Pali Canon
• Longest section of The Waste Land
• Buddha’s sermon – he encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (fire) and seek freedom from earthly things
• Liberation from suffering through detachment
• burning=passion, delusion, aversion, signs of suffering: birth, aging and death, sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses and despairs.
• Delivers the sermon to fire-worshipping ascetics – after hearing the sermon, they become fully awakened
• The Fire Sermon corresponds with the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:7) in which Jesus of Nazareth climbs up a mountain and preaches to his disciples
• Original title of Part III was also going to be “He Do the Policemen in Different Voices”
• Also, more rhyme in this section – unity

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the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank.

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• Alludes to Ophelia’s death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
• Act 4, scene 7 – Queen Gertrude reports that Ophelia has climbed into a willow tree, and then a branch broke and dropped Ophelia into the brook, where she drowned
• Ties back into the previous part

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Crosses the brown land, unheard.

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• Lilith is a mythological Mesopotamian storm demon associated with wind – she was thought to be the bearer of disease, illness, and death
• Also the first wife of Adam who was banished to the desert for being so domineering
• “Brown land” is the desert, she is “unheard” by Adam

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The nymphs are departed.

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• Gives a very desolate riverside scene

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Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

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• Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion” – 1596 – refrain of the marriage song
• “Against the Brydale day, which was not long: / Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my song.”
• The sweet Thames is contrasted with the barren, desolate river scene
• Spenser also wrote The Faerie Queen about Queen Elizabeth I of England – compare with King Ludwig II, the Fairy King
• Thames River flows through London
• Refrain is repeated in lines 183-184

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The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

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• Very sexual connotation, evidence of sinful nights
• Barren, like a wasteland
• In Roman culture, men swore oaths in court while holding their testicles – “testimony”

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the loitering heirs of city directors

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• Refers to the financial district of London; these are the managers. Eliot used to work on King William Street

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Front 8

Leman

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• Frazer’s Golden Bough
• “leman” is an archaic English word for lover or mistress
• Frazer used this word in his chapters on Adonis (who spent one-third of his time with Aphrodite, one-third of his time with Persephone, and the last third of his time with whomever he chose), Attis (who was the god of growth and fertility and became a eunuch attendant of Cybele, the earth goddess, after she cut off his genitals for refusing her love), and Osiris (whose genitals were lost when his brother Set cut him into multiple pieces) – contrast between mythology and religion
• Adonis was fought over between Aphrodite and Persephone. Zeus decided that he had to spend one-third of his time with Aphrodite and one-third of his time with Persephone. The other third of his time was for his own choosing.
• Attis was a god of vegetation and fertility. Agdistis, a hermaphroditic demon, had his male parts torn off by the gods who feared his power. He became Cybele , the earth goddess, as a female, and his male parts grew into an almond tree after they fell to the ground. Nana, a virgin, supposedly conceived Attis by placing an almond or a pomegranate on her bosom. After Attis grew up, Cybele fell in love with him. At some point, he went mad from Cybele’s suasions and castrated himself and became the eunuch chariot driver of Cybele. Cults worship Cybele and ritually castrate themselves,
• Osiris was cut up into many pieces by his brother Set. His wife Isis sewed his body parts (except for his genitals) back together. He is the Egyptian god of life, death, and fertility.
• Lac Leman is the name by which Lake Geneva is known in Lausanne, Switzerland. Eliot finished The Waste Land while undergoing psychiatric treatment at Lausanne
• Psalm 137, verse 1
• “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
• Hymn expressing the yearnings of the Jewish people in exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. The early lines of the poem are very well known, as they describe the sadness of the Israelites, who were asked to “sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.” They refused to do this, leaving their harps hanging on trees. The poem then turns into self-exhortation to remember Jerusalem. It ends with violent fantasies of revenge, telling a “Daughter of Babylon” of the delight of “he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
• The Tempest by Shakespeare
• Act I, scene 2
• Ferdinand says “sitting on a bank, weeping again the king my father’s wreck” – mourning the drowning of the king
• Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Book IV
• Rousseau wrote of a walk at Lake Geneva (Lac Leman) where he remembered, among other things, “Miss Vulson, who had been my first love.” He wrote that he wept often and “How often, stopping to weep more at my ease, and seated on a large stone, did I amuse myself with seeing my tear drops into the water.”
• Eliot taught an extension course on Rousseau prior to writing The Waste Land
• Wittelsbach family history
• 1898 assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria
• Empress Elisabeth was the aunt of Countess Marie Larisch and the mother of Archduke Rudolf and the cousin of King Ludwig II of Bavaria – she was said to be the most beautiful empress of Austria, but she was obsessed with her appearance
• Lac Leman, as was the Starnbergersee (where Ludwig was found dead), was connected with the death of a royal figure
• Elisabeth, while staying on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, was stabbed right under the heart with a needle file by an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni
• She and her lady-in-waiting did not fully realize what had happened until they boarded the steamer to cross the lake. On the boat, she saw the patch of blood that had been pressed by her corset. After the pressure of the corset had been removed, the injury worsened and Elisabeth died soon after. Her last words were “What happened to me?”
• Luigi Lucheni had been trying to kill a prince from the House of Orleans, but when he failed to find him, he directed his attention to Elisabeth. He said, “I wanted to kill a royal. It did not matter which one.”

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But at my back in a cold blast I hear

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• Lines 21 and 22 of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”
o “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;”
o Also alluded to in 196
o Written in the point of view of a gentleman who is trying to persuade a woman to engage in sexual intercourse with him although she is allegedly acting coy. He attempts to convince her that time is running out and that they must seize the day. Considered one of the finest and most concise carpe diem arguments ever put in verse.
• Ovid Metamorphoses: Diana Acteon

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Front 10

rat

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• Eliot often refers to himself as a rat
• “rat” is also used the way “crab” is used in Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
• They are both scavengers which take from higher-order creatures. This image is paralleled in the way Eliot sets up The Waste Land. He uses earlier, grander allusions to sustain the poetic life.

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While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

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• From Ritual to Romance by Weston
• Compare with elements of the Grail myth – the Fisher King, the Grail Castle, and the river passing by
• Weston notes that the Grail castle is always near water, often on the bank of an important river. The presence of water is also an important feature in the Adonis cult, the effigy of the dead god being thrown into the water
• Gashouse is a plant that produces flammable gas from coal – the gas was typically used for lighting

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Front 12

And on the king my father's death before him.

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• Shakespeare’s Tempest, Act I, scene ii – just before Ariel’s song
• “Sitting on a bank, / Weeping again the king my father’s wreck, / This music crept by me upon the waters, / Allaying both their fury and my passion / With its sweet air: thence I have follow’d it, / Or it hath drawn me rather.”
• Ferdinand believes that his father, Alfonso, King of Naples, has drowned in a shipwreck. In The Tempest, Ferdinand and Miranda unite Milan and Naples. Marie Larisch also had an aunt Marie Sophie who married the King of Naples.

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And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

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• Building motif
• Refers back to the previous bones allusion in The Waste Land

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But at my back from time to time I hear

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• Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” – lines 21-22
• “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”

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The sound of horns and motors

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• John Day’s Parliament of Bees – mentions the story of Acteon and Diana
• Acteon, a hunter, saw Diana bathing. The goddess turned him into a stag, and he was killed by his own hunting dogs.
• Horns = hunting symbol

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Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

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• Eliot knew several Sweeneys in his life, including a Harvard professor, a bartender, and a Boston boxing teacher
• “It happens that I know many Sweeneys, some of them among friends of mine. I happen to like the name. It has a pleasant sound.”
• Sweeney, as a fictional character, is usually portrayed as brutish and very lustful
• He wrote three poems featuring Sweeney, including “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” which alludes to Philomela
• Mrs. Porter owned a brothel in Cairo which was well-known among Australian troops

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Front 17

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

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• The Australian troops that visited Mrs. Porter’s brothel parodied a popular song of the time called “Red Wing”
• These lines are the modified lyrics of “Red Wing”
• “They wash their feet in soda water” is also a parody on Luke 7:37 – A woman who was a great sinner weeps as she washes Jesus’ feet with her tears – “feet” is the polite wording as the soldiers are referring to something else
• French translates to “And, O those children’s voices, singing in the dome!” – from Parsifal, a sonnet by Paul Verlaine
• Wagner’s last opera Parsifal was also inspired by the sonnet – it was first debuted in 1882, relates to Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein palace
• In the Grail legend, the children sing during the foot-washing of the Knight Parsifal. The knight later saves the Fisher king.

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Front 18

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.
Tereu

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• The Story of Procne and Philomela
• Twits, jugs, and tereus were all used as sounds to describe the nightingale’s song. John Lyly uses a combination in “Trico’s Song,” part of his play Campaspe
• Campaspe was a mistress of Alexander the Great. He commissioned a painting of her by Apelles, a renowned Greek artist of the time. They fell in love, and when Alexander found out, he decided to be nice and gave her to him as a reward.
• The original stanza was much longer and contained a varying number of twits, jugs, and tereus. This was edited out.

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Front 19

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon

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• Charles Baudelaire’s “Des Sept Viellards” (Seven Old Men) from the collection Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) – negative things become beautiful, decadence, lust
• “Swarming city, city full of dreams / Where the spector in full daylight accosts the passerby.”
• Refers to London, the city of ghosts and dreams (due to the heavy fog)
• The word “noon” instead of the previously used “dawn” shows the passage of time

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Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

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• “Eugenides” means well-born – Smyrna was a trading city in Turkey, now called Izmir
o Eugen: Well-done, bravo
• Eliot intended this to be a reference to the Phoenician sailor and/or the one-eyed merchant (Odin) in Part I
• Eliot had met a man named Mr. Eugenides who had a pocket full of currants
• Smyrna is in the middle of the Greco-Turkish War – the Greek army occupied Smyrna, but the Turkish army fought back and retook the city, burned it, and massacred the people in 1922

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Front 21

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

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• Whitman’s “These I Singing in Spring” from the Calamus section of his Leaves of Grass – section about homosexual love
• Currants are seedless berries – infertility, also aphrodisiac
• Whitman mentions several symbols by which homosexuals could identify each other from the hostile society at large – currant is one such symbol

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Front 22

C.i.f.

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• Eliot believed it to mean “carriage and insurance free”
• Actually means “cost insurance for freight”
o Seller is organizing and paying insurance/freight, and this is included in price
• It’s possible that Eliot intended to deliberately mislead the reader.

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Cannon Street Hotel

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• Next to a London train station
• In the financial district, across the Thames from the Globe Theater

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Front 24

Metropole.

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• A luxury hotel on the shore in England – sexual implications – the rich went there for affairs
• Mr. Eugenides may be suggesting a homosexual affair with the speaker

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Front 25

At the violet hour

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• Nighttime
• More passage of time since noon

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Front 26

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts

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• According to Eliot, Tiresias is the most important character in The Waste Land
• Myth about Tiresias: Tiresias came upon two snakes copulating one day; when he struck them, he was turned into a woman. Seven years later, he struck two snakes copulating again and was turned back into a man.
• When Jupiter and Juno were arguing about whether men or women received greater pleasure out of sex, Tiresias, having been both woman and man, said that women enjoyed it more. In some versions of the story, Juno was angered by his answer (as she lost the argument with Jupiter) and struck him blind. As compensation, Jupiter gave him the gift of prophecy and the lifespan of seven men.
• In another version, Tiresias stumbled across Aphrodite bathing and was blinded by her beauty/glory.
• In Oedipus Rex, Tiresias revealed that Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother. He foresaw the destruction of Thebes and died when it fell.
• Tiresias is the speaker and observer in this entire stanza

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brings the sailor home from sea

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• “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson, verses 6-8, from A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods – “Home is the sailor, home from the sea/ and the hunter, home from the hill”
• Also an allusion to the Greek poet Sappho who lived on the island of Lesbos and wrote about female-female love. Sappho also wrote about day-fishermen and the island that she lived on – in Middlesex, Sourmelina was described as “one of those whom they named the island after” – Eliot tried to copy her description of the fisherman who returns at nightfall – “Hesperus, you bring home all the bright dawn disperses, / bring home the sheep, / bring home the goat, bring the child home to its mother.”

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dugs

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• Mammary glands
• Echo of 218-219
• Tiresias was once a woman

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carbuncular

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• A man who is carbuncular has sores all over his body, and from these sores pus oozes
• In the original version, five stanzas described the young man as carbuncular. He was described as a “youth of twenty-one” with greasy hair, and he flicked his cigarette ashes onto the young lady’s floor as he tilted back in his chair

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one bold stare

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• Alludes to Odin, the Norse god of all gods who sacrificed his eye for wisdom – the “Hanged God” – found in The Golden Bough by Frazer

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Front 31

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

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• Bradford is a manufacturing city located in Yorkshire, England. It had many nouveaux riches (new money) at this period. These nouveaux riche businessmen became wealthy during WWI
• Eliot did not approve of these businessmen.
• In this time period, the wealthy traditionally wore top hats. The newly rich adopted this style as well. Silk hats refer to silk-covered top hats.

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Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

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• Refers back to line 218 because Tiresias was assaulted

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Front 33

Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

Back 33

• The typist is mechanical and apathetic
• Entire stanza reflects the mechanization of life – “human engine” (216)
• Routine and unchanging daily activities

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Front 34

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

Back 34

• Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King) by Sophocles
• Oedipus, the Greek king of Thebes, fulfilled a prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother. When he first heard the prophecy, he fled his hometown (where he was actually being raised by foster parents) to go to Thebes. On the way, a dispute arose in a chariot he met and he wound up killing the man inside, Laius (his true father). Continuing on his journey, Oedipus came upon the Sphinx, who asked him the riddle: “What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?” Oedipus responded that the answer was man. As reward, the Thebans appointed Oedipus as their king and gave him the newly-widowed Jocasta (his true mother). They had four children together, including Antigone. Afterward, a plague struck the city, and Oedipus is told by the Delphic oracle that the wasted city is polluted by the presence of the former king’s murderer. The blind prophet Tiresias told Oedipus the truth, resulting in Jocasta killing herself and Oedipus blinding himself.
• Also alludes to Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare based on

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Front 35

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Back 35

• Although he had the lifespan of seven men, Tiresias, the Theban prophet, eventually died and went to Hades, but he still retained full reason (because Jupiter owed him). In The Odyssey, he advised Odysseus on how to get back to Ithaca and allowed him to communicate with the other souls in Hades.

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Front 36

Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

Back 36

• The original draft had: “Bestows one final patronizing kiss, / And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit; / And at the corner where the stable is, / Delays only to urinate, and spit.”
• Removed the last two lines at Ezra Pound’s advice
• Stairs are figured prominently in Eliot’s works, which can be attributed to the quest motif on psychological, metaphysical, and aesthetic levels
• The entire thing from lines 215 to 248 was originally 17 stanzas of 4 lines each.

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She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Back 37

• Glass is like window or a mirror
• Refers to lines 78 and 98

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Front 38

Hardly aware of her departed lover; [250]
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."

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• After her lover had his way with her, all she could think was how glad it’s over
• More mechanization of human life

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Front 39

When lovely woman stoops to folly

Back 39

• The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith, Chapter 24
When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe 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.
• The novel is mentioned in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Jane Austen’s Emma, Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Bronte’s Professor, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Woman, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther as well as his Dichtung und Wahrheit.
• Reverend Primrose and his family live happily in the countryside; the father is well off because of an inheritance from a dead relative and donates the money he makes every year to orphans and veterans. A local merchant disappears with the inheritance, and the family is poor. They live in the humble parish of an evil Squire Thornhill, who is a womanizer. The family goes through much hardship and suffers through a chain of dreadful occurrences. The vicar’s daughter Olivia is cheated by the squire, runs away, and is reported dead. Sophia is abducted and George is also brought to jail in chains and covered with blood, as he had challenged Thornhill to a duel when he heard about his wickedness. Eventually, the landlord’s very rich uncle (Sir William Thornhill) in disguise as Mr. Burchell solves all their problems. He marries Sophia, George marries his fiancée, and Olivia discovers that the sham marriage to the landlord was real. The bankrupt investor who ran off with the family’s money is discovered and returns the stolen fortune.

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Front 40

"This music crept by me upon the waters"

Back 40

• From The Tempest, Act I, scene ii – just before Ariel’s song (as always)
• “Sitting on a bank, / Weeping again the king my father’s wreck, / This music crept by me upon the waters, / Allaying both their fury and my passion / With its sweet air: thence I have follow’d it, / Or it hath drawn me rather.”
• The quote is literally being played from the gramophone.

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the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

Back 41

• Refers to an old area of London in the financial district
• There was a Queen Elizabeth Street and a Queen Victoria Market on Queen Elizabeth Street – combination of the old art and literature with the new industrialization and technology
• Original draft: “‘This music crept by me upon the waters’ / And along the Strand, and up the ghastly hill of Cannon Street, / Fading at last, behind my flying feet” – refers to lines 209-213

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Front 42

O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

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• The Strand, Queen Victoria Street, King William Street, Cannon Street, and Lower Thames Street are real streets in the old section of London known as “The City”

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Front 43

mandoline

Back 43

• Musical instrument played by plucking with a pick
• Vivienne Eliot gave T.S. Eliot a mandolin when they went to Margate in October of 1921

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Front 44

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Back 44

• Fishermen get fish, fishmen sell fish

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Front 45

Magnus Martyr

Back 45

• St. Magnus Martyr is a church on Lower Thames Street in The City – designed by Sir Christopher Wren
• When he worked at Lloyd’s Bank, Eliot would have visited this church
• Eliot may have noted this because the church was proposed to be demolished; this area, once residential, is now commercial, and attendance of the church has dropped. The churches in The City were all proposed to be demolished – growth of industry
• Possibly intended to get people involved in saving the churches

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Front 46

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

Back 46

• Describing the interior of St. Magnus Martyr – Eliot once said, “The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren’s interiors.”
• The columns of the church were Roman; ionic order – many of the white columns were fitted with gold capitals
• Lines 264-265 may also allude to the Choruses from The Rock, which was a pageant play that Eliot was asked to write to raise money for forty-five London churches
• “I journeyed to London, to the timekept City,
Where the River flows, with foreign flotations.
There I was told: we have too many churches,
And too few chop-houses. There I was told:
Let the vicars retire. Men do not need the Church
In the place where they work, but where they spend their Sundays.
In the City, we need no bells:
Let them waken the suburbs.”

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Front 47

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails [270]
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.

Back 47

• Many of Jack the Ripper’s murders took place at the Greenwich Reach of the Isle of Dogs
• This area was very industrial in Eliot’s time. In Queen Elizabeth’s time, it was a very idyllic setting. Contrast of past and present, rustic and industrial

• The Isle of Dogs is a peninsula surrounded by the Thames River
• The Spanish Armada was defeated at the Isle of Dogs in the 1500s – the British burned the Spanish ships that came around the Isle. Fire imagery
• Lines 266-276 compare with the first two paragraphs of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
“The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.”
• “Red sails” in line 270 parallels the red clusters of canvas

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Front 48

Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Back 48

• Begins the song of the three Thames-daughters – Eliot changed from Rhine-daughters to Thames-daughters to make it more English
• The “Lala Songs” from Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), the first part of Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), which also includes Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung – a tetralogy – loosely based on Norse myth (Oden was also from Norse myth)
• The duty of the Rhine-daughters, nymphs who sing these songs, is to guard the Rhine gold – the gold may be formed into a Ring that will allow its owner to rule the World (sounding familiar?), but the possessor must give up love forever and live in eternal desolation
• Instead of protecting the gold, the maidens sing lighthearted songs and play games
• Alberich, a hideous gnome who is teased and taunted by the maidens, curses love, steals the gold, and forges the Ring of power
• Eventually, this ring comes into the possession of the great warrior Siegfried, the hero of the series
• The song is repeated three times for the three Rhine-daughters – signifies the relinquishing of love

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Front 49

Elizabeth and Leicester

Back 49

• Refers to the love affair between Queen Elizabeth I of England and Robert Dudley, the 1st Earl of Leicester
• “V. Froude, Elizabeth, vol. I, ch. iv – letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain” – as written in Eliot’s own notes
• Actual book was History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada by James Anthony Froude – Volume 7 (part 1 of the six volumes subtitled Reign of Elizabeth)
• The letter was dated June 30, 1561 – Alvarez de Quadra, Bishop of Aquila and Ambassador to England, sent it to King Philip II of Spain
• De Quadra writes about how he warns the Queen not to be led by “heretics” – he also mentions that Lord Robert brings up marriage (Elizabeth and Dudley never do marry)
• Catholics in England opposed to the Protestant Queen – Eliot’s own indecision about faith

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Front 50

Red and gold

Back 50

• Colors of the Spanish flag
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Front 51

The peal of bells

Back 51

• Image of bell tower repeated in Part V
• “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” – allusion to John Donne’s Meditation 17 from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

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White towers

Back 52

• Referring to when the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral were still white and new, not dirty from the coal fire pollution
• Image of towers repeated in Part V
• Also, Froude wrote about Leicester and Elizabeth just following the description of the Great Fire of London in 1666 that burned down Old St. Paul’s Cathedral

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Front 53

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me.

Back 53

• Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto V, line 133 – “Born in Siena, died in Maremma”
• Spoken by La Pia de’ Tolomei to Dante – she was born in Sienna and murdered by her husband in Maremma – in this part of Purgatory, Dante encounters those who died by violence but were repentant
• Also, an epitaph often attributed to Vergil: “Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet Parthenope” (Mantua bore me, Calabria was the death of me, now Naples holds me)
• Highbury is a lower middle-class London suburb – “high borough”
• Richmond and Kew are ports on the Thames near London – site of the Kew Gardens, which was a popular excursion spot for city-dwellers
• The description in this stanza is also very sexual in nature – “undid me,” “supine on the floor of a narrow canoe”

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Moorgate,

Back 54

• One of the old gates of London
• Heart of the financial district, including Lloyds Bank, for which Eliot worked for a time

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He wept

Back 55

• John, Chapter 11, Verse 35
• Shortest verse in the entire Bible

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Front 56

Margate Sands.

Back 56

• Eliot stayed at a resort at the end of the Thames River called Margate Sands from October 11 to November 12, 1921
• He was there under doctor’s orders to rest from mental exhaustion
• Right before he went to the mental institute at Lausanne and finished The Waste Land

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Front 57

Nothing with nothing.

Back 57

• Goes back to line 120 in The Waste Land – alludes to Webster’s White Devil, Act IV, scene v, verse 407
• Flamineo says, “Nothing, of nothing: leave thy idle questions. / I am i’ th’ way to study a long silence:”
• Ludovico asks Flamineo for his last thoughts as he is about to run him through with a sword for killing their brother Marcelo

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Front 58

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

Back 58

• Note the multiple uses of the word “broken” to describe things in The Waste Land
• “a heap of broken images” (22), “the river’s tent is broken” (173), “seals broken by the lean solicitor” (408), “a broken Coriolanus” (416)

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Front 59

My people humble people who expect
Nothing."

Back 59

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• “They are simple people – and I want nothing.” – Part III

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Front 60

Lines 292-305

Back 60

• (lines 292-305) The Song of the (three) Thames Daughters – each stanza signifies a different speaker
• Eliot’s note refers to the Three Rhine-daughters from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods), Act III, scene 1, where they, singing two refrains of “Weialala leia, wallala leialala” and one of “la la,” plead with Siegfried to give back the Ring. He refuses and is later killed by Hagen, the son of Alberich, the original thief of the gold. Brunnhilde orders a funeral pyre for Siegfried and takes the ring from his dead hand. She promises it to the Rhine-daughters and, placing the ring on her finger, rushes into the fire. The river overflows and consumes the Gibichung hall, where the scene is taking place. The Rhinemaidens drag Hagen to his death and regain their gold, which has at last been purified of its curse. Flames engulf Valhalla, leaving a human world redeemed by love.
• The Gotterdammerung contains much fire imagery – Brunnhilde riding her horse into Siegfried’s funeral pyre and Valhalla, the abode of the gods, being destroyed by flame – relates back to Buddha’s Fire Sermon
la la

Front 61

To Carthage then I came

Back 61

• Confessions, Book III, Chapter 1, Section 1 – by St. Augustine
• Augustine came to Carthage and speaks about “unholy loves” in his youth – “To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.” – unholy loves in this part could also refer to the lovers on the riverside, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Eugenides, and the typist (also all the other lovers in the rest of the poem)
• Augustine also “came” to Carthage a second time in Book IV, Chapter 4 in order to escape the misery into which he had plunged from the death of a very close friend
• He, like Buddha, later writes about the temptation of the eyes (Book X, Chapter 34)
• Carthage is also the site of the love affair between Dido and Aeneas in Vergil’s Aeneid

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Front 62

Burning burning burning burning

Back 62

• Alludes to Buddha’s Fire Sermon (specifically Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations)
• Buddha instructs his priests that all things are on fire – they must free themselves from reliance on the five senses and on impressions of the mind
• Also refers to the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 5-7

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Front 63

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

Back 63

• Confessions, Book X, Chapter 34, Section 54 – by St. Augustine
• Juxtaposition of the west following the east – at some point, Eliot studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy and became rather mystical, almost Buddhist
• Also a reference to Zechariah 3:1

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