Modern American Poetry

(^154) Robert Langbaum
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
There follow cultural recollections, mainly from the Bible—“I will show you
fear in a handful of dust”—that establish in the image of the dry waste land
the spiritual habitat of the previous speakers. This is a new prophetic voice,
the Tiresias consciousness, which goes on through a recollection of the
Sailor’s song that opens Wagner’s Tristanto establish also the opposite Sailor
theme of water and hope for redemption. There follows a personal memory
of love; and only here, in the lines introduced by a dash, can we single out a
voice that we come to recognize as the protagonist’s.
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the
Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
The protagonist had in the past his chance for love; he had like Marie his
perfect moment, his vision of fulfillment. But he was unable to reach out and
take what the moment offered, and thus break through to fertility, creativity.
We know he failed only through the last line from the opening of Wagner’s
tragic Third Act: “Desolate and empty the sea.”
This way of rendering the protagonist’s failure makes it also collective;
as does the reference to the Hyacinth garden, since Hyacinth was a fertility
god. (Eliot capitalized the small hof the original draft; but restored it for the
final edition of 1963, having presumably lost interest by then in vegetation
myths.) It is the vision and loss of vision that sets the protagonist in motion;
insofar as The Waste Landhas a plot, it tells the story of the protagonist’s
attempt to recover his lost vision. All his subsequent memories are
transformations of the scene in the Hyacinth garden. This observation is
confirmed by the words, which I have bracketed, that Eliot deleted from the
original draft. When in Part IIthe rich lady asks: “‘Do you remember/