1. 'Alas, I am struck with a mortal blow within' 3. The constellation Corvus. (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1343); the voice of 4. The gates of horn, in Hades, through which Agamemnon heard crying out from the palace as true dreams come to the upper world. he is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra. 5. For Sweeney and his female friend, the gate of 2. Or Rio de la Plata, an estuary on the South vision is blocked and the great myth-making con- American coast between Argentina and Uruguay, stellations?'Orion and the Dog'?are 'veiled.' formed by the Uruguay and Parana rivers.
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2294 / T. S. ELIOT
25 She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,
Leaves the room and reappears
30 Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;
The host with someone indistinct Converses at the door apart, 35 The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud6
And let their liquid siftings fall
40 To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
1918,1919
The Waste Land In the essay 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth' (1923), Eliot hinted at the ambitions of The Waste Land when he declared that others would follow James Joyce 'in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. .. . It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art.' Eliot labeled this new technique 'the mythical method.'
He gave another clue to the theme and structure of The Waste Land in a general note, in which he stated that 'not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance [1920].' He further acknowledged a general indebtedness to Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough (thirteen volumes, 1890?1915), 'especially the . . . volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris,' in which Frazer deals with ancient vegetation myths and fertility ceremonies. Drawing on material from Frazer and other anthropologists, Weston traces the relationship of these myths and rituals to Christianity and especially to the legend of the Holy Grail. She finds an archetypal fertility myth in the story of the Fisher King, whose death, infirmity, or impotence (there are many forms of the myth) brought drought and desolation to the land and failure of the power to reproduce themselves among both humans and beasts. This symbolic- Waste Land can be revived only if a 'questing knight' goes to the Chapel Perilous, situated in the heart of it, and there asks certain ritual questions about the Grail (or Cup) and the Lance?originally fertility symbols, female and male, respectively. The proper asking of these questions revives the king and restores fertility to the land. The relation of this original Grail myth to fertility cults and rituals found in many different civilizations, and represented by stories of a god who dies and is later resurrected (e.g., Tammuz, Adonis, Attis), shows their common origin in a response to
6. Agamemnon is murdered not in a 'bloody ingale), and also with the ancient 'bloody wood' of wood' but in his bath. Eliot here telescopes Aga-Nemi, where the old priest was slain by his sucmemnon's murder with the wood where, in Greek cessor (as described in the first chapter of Sir myth, Philomela was raped by her sister's husband, James Frazer's Golden Bough). Tereus (she was subsequently turned into a night
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THE WASTE LAND / 2295
the cyclical movement of the seasons, with vegetation dying in winter to be resurrected again in the spring. Christianity, according to Weston, gave its own spiritual meaning to the myth; it 'did not hesitate to utilize the already existing medium of instruction, but boldly identified the Deity of Vegetation, regarded as Life Principle, with the God of the Christian Faith.' The Fisher King is related to the use of the fish symbol in early Christianity. Weston states 'with certainty that the Fish is a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, and that the title of Fisher has, from the earliest ages, been associated with the Deities who were held to be specially connected with the origin and preservation of Life.' Eliot, following Weston, thus uses a great variety of mythological and religious material, both Western and Eastern, to paint a symbolic picture of the modern Waste Land and the need for regeneration. He vividly presents the terror of that desiccated life?its loneliness, emptiness, and irrational apprehensions?as well as its misuse of sexuality, but he paradoxically ends the poem with a benediction. The mass death and social collapse of World War I inform the poem's vision of a Waste Land strewn with corpses, wreckage, and ruin. Another significant general source for the poem is the German composer Richard Wagner's operas Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods), Parsifal, Das Rheingold, and Tristan und Isolde.
The poem as published owes a great deal to the severe pruning of Ezra Pound; the original manuscript, with Pound's excisions and comments, provides fascinating information about the genesis and development of the poem, and was reproduced in facsimile in 1971, edited by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot. Reprinted below is the text as first published in book form in December 1922, including Eliot's notes, which are supplemented by the present editors' notes.
The Waste Land
'NAM Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: 2L [3uXA.a Tl OE/XLC;; respondebat ilia: curaOciveiv 0eko.''
FOR EZRA POUND
il miglior fabbro2
