Worriers of The Waste Land

Jude Rogers on the enduring power of the most elemental poem of the 20th century

May 27, 1896. A seven-year-old boy sits at home, as the walls shake, not wanting to die. Outside there is air, there is water, in their most destructive forms: a supertornado racing through downtown St Louis, Missouri. Winds atomise houses that have stood since the Founding Fathers arrived. Hundreds are swept into the nearby Mississippi. What is left the next morning is an unreal city, a waste land, a memory that likely lingered long in the mind of the young T.S. Eliot, who would go on to write the most elemental poem of the 20th century.

Nearly 100 years after its composition and publication, The Waste Land is still seen as a deliberately stormy, oblique epic poem. And while Eliot always railed strongly against making poetry personal, this childhood detail from Robert Crawford’s 2015 biography, Young Eliot, sets his best-known work in an interesting context. In childhood, he had heard a world howling as it was torn apart. The Waste Land is a tornado of voices from myths, world religions, foreign languages, old poems, songs and plays, dodgy hotel rooms and the tangy backrooms of pubs. Its form is as far from a conventional narrative as you could get, and its central mood is one of violent emotions, sensations and disruptions. I first read it at 17, despairing that I didn’t understand it – and I would never claim to fully understand it. But it is a poem that has been an incredible treasure chest to me over the years, its heaps of broken images asking to be slotted together in many different, beautiful, revealing ways. To me now, The Waste Land is a poem about the four elements of nature – air, water, earth and fire – and about the cruelties of nature, and the cruelties of ourselves within it. It begins famously in the ‘cruellest month’ of April, where life painfully continues among the dust and the rubble, lilacs still growing from the dead land. When water comes, its relief is only brief: ‘dull roots’ are only stirred, and surprising summer showers exist only in hazy memory. Otherwise, it is frighteningly absent (‘where the sun beats… there is no sound of water’), or it subsumes and drowns (‘fear death by water’, says fortune-teller Madame Sosostris). Moisture also clogs in the air as ‘brown fog’, as corpses from ancient Roman battles sprout new life from deep within the earth.

This is a terrifying world, and it reflected Eliot’s contemporary one.

The Waste Land first started to take form during the Great War, the first conflict during which fire could fall from the air. It was also a war in which men lived in the earth of the trenches, or were condemned to die in them, and where Eliot lost a good friend – French poet Jean Jules Verdenal– in the battle of Gallipoli. Eliot himself avoided the 1917 draft by arguing that his ill wife, Vivienne, was solely dependent on his support, but nevertheless, his poem pounds with shadows of trauma and depression, fear in handfuls of dust, that come from those environments. Here are men who ‘crawled head downward down a blackened wall’. The recently demobbed Albert, who’s ‘been in the army four years, he wants a good time’. A crowd of dead-eyed people flowing to work over London Bridge, attempting to re-engage with real life (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’, Eliot writes). All the old-known institutions have fallen too; it is impossible to navigate it now. ‘Falling towers/Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London’, Eliot writes, ‘Unreal’.

Then the fire comes. It is sacrificial in The Waste Land, coming most powerfully in the poem’s third section, The Fire Sermon, named after a Buddhist scripture about achieving freedom from suffering through detachment from the mind and the senses. Eliot was well-read on a global scale, studying Buddhism and Sanskrit as part of his university studies at Harvard in the early 1910s. Disruption and disjunction have to be enacted, his poem tells us, before any kind of peace is achieved – and the poem’s form reflects this too. Eliot and his editor, Ezra Pound, are trying to burn convention back to its bare bones, igniting many different sparks on the fire, to try to make sense of their rapidly changing world, and also to find peace.

But Eliot also acknowledged the difficulties he faced in this search, and this is where the personal enters again. ‘On Margate Sands. I can connect/ Nothing with nothing’, he writes –a direct reference to himself finishing The Waste Land in Margate in 1921, having taken three months off work following a nervous breakdown. He wrote a lot of it in a shelter on the beach, which now bears a commemorative plaque; this was his sanctuary from which he weathered his storms.

And the elements in The Waste Land did finally redeem. We go ‘Burning burning burning burning’ through Carthage, another ancient destroyed city, then meet a drowned man underwater, ‘his age and youth/Entering the whirlpool.’ Then we reach the last section, What The Thunder Said, where a damp gust of air brings us rain, and the thunder speaks to us in soothing, calming Sanskrit. ‘Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.’ Giving, Compassion. Self-control. These are values that promise ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ – peace, calmness and bliss – for the little boy from St Louis. The teenage girl who keeps throwing herself into Eliot’s elements feels the same, and always will…