THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 19
comes,/Or hath come, since the mak
ing of the world.”
But Tennyson unfolds a single story,
whereas Eliot has many tales to tell, some
of them overlapping, or no sooner begun
than snapped off, and, to anyone versed
in Tennysonian euphony, “The Waste
Land” can seem like a baffling Babel.
You might as well be rummaging through
international newspapers, or spinning
the dial on a radio. Listen to the scraps
of languages other than English—Ital
ian, French, German, Latin, Sanskrit—
that litter the poem, and the profusion
of people who speak. Somebody named
Marie, of aristocratic descent, recalls an
episode from her girlhood; someone else
chatters to friends in a pub. The pub’s
landlord chimes in, too—“HURRY UP
PLEASE IT’S TIME.” There is a clair
voyante, Madame Sosostris, and another
seer, the blind Tiresias, with whom Odys
seus once conversed in the underworld,
and who now watches two loveless urban
dwellers making love. Elsewhere, another
woman brushes her hair and complains
of bad nerves, while a third records, with
out anger or animation, a sexual act
(“After the event/He wept”), which oc
curred in Richmond, in southwest Lon
don. She asserts her modest origins:
“My people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
la laTo Carthage then I came.Hang on, what? Within three lines,
we have jumped not just from Britain
to Carthage, and from modern to an
cient, but from a woman to a man: the
last line is taken from St. Augustine’s
“Confessions.” Chase down the quota
tion and you will discover that imme
diately before it comes the clause “I be
came to myself a barren land.” Aha.
Trying to sort out who is uttering
what, at any juncture, in “The Waste
Land” is far from a fool’s errand, but it’s
a tough task nonetheless. (Anyone at
tempting it should arm themselves with
“The Poems of T. S. Eliot,” edited in two
redoubtable volumes by Christopher
Ricks and Jim McCue.) Augustine is
not the only source whose words Eliot,
ever the ventriloquist, throws into the
mix. Others include Dante, Milton, Mar
vell, Spenser, Baudelaire, the explorer
Ernest Shackleton, and a gang of En
glish dramatists: John Webster, Thomas
Middleton, Thomas Kyd, and the leader
of the pack, Shakespeare, who never
keeps quiet for long. “The Tempest,” es
pecially, rumbles through the poem:A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the
gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before
him.Catch the echo here, in the final line,
and you want to ask what the hell Shake
speare’s Ferdinand is doing behind a gas
house. Isn’t he meant to be shipwrecked
on Prospero’s island? The whole passage,
collapsing history in on itself, is startling
even now, so imagine how it flummoxed
readers in 1922. Parody was not far be
hind; in a tale of 1925, P. G. Wodehouse
mocked “the jolly, wholesome sort of po
etry the boys are turning out nowadays”—
specifically, “good, honest stuff about sin
and gasworks and decaying corpses.”
Meanwhile, for readers who didn’t
catch the echo, Eliot offered help. Ap
pended to “The Waste Land,” when itappeared as a book, in late 1922, was
a section titled “Notes on the Waste
Land.” This gave references for the lit
any of quotations that bestrew the poem:
“The Tempest, I, ii,” “Ezekiel, II, i,”
“Paradise Lost, IV, 140.” There is no
disguising an aroma of practical jest
ing; Eliot treats us to nineteen lines of
Ovid, untranslated, and solemnly in
forms us that, when “The Waste Land”
mentions a hermitthrush, the bird in
question is Turdus aonalaschkae palla-
sii. Nice to have that sorted out. “It was
discovered that the poem was incon
veniently short,” he later explained, “so
I set to work to expand the notes, in
order to provide a few more pages of
printed matter, with the result that they
became the remarkable exposition of
bogus scholarship that is still on view
today.” If the Notes were bogus, how
ever, why did Eliot include them in
subsequent collections of his verse,
where length was no longer an issue?
Forget hermitthrushes; what’s the
Latin name for a wild goose?
The gravest charge to be levelled
against the Notes is that they lure stu
dents into approaching “The Waste Land”“I’m going to wind down with a glass of wine and a few e-mails.”