New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 159Once we see that The Waste Landdramatizes the making of an identity,
that the Quest is for personal order that leads to cultural order and cultural
order that leads to personal order, then the poem turns out more positive
than we used to think it. The deadness and disorder that made the biggest,
indeed the only, impression on the poem’s first readers are seen as a phase
through which the poem passes to point toward the Christian poems that are
to follow Eliot’s conversion in 1927. We can now see from The Waste Land
that Eliot was by 1922 farther along toward conversion than we had thought.
Eliot—“Fishing, with the arid plain behind me,” and wanting to set “my
lands in order”—has by now put behind him all liberal humanitarian modern
answers: he is fishing, waiting for revelation. He has by now seen the need
for Christianity, though he still cannot believe.
To understand the modern problem of identity that Eliot is trying to
solve in The Waste Land,we have to look back not to “Prufrock” or “Portrait
of a Lady,” whose speakers are still, as I have suggested, Jamesian in their
delineation, but to “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” which
were written during those same years, 1909–1911. The characters of these
poems are not, like Prufrock and the lady, separated from external reality by
an unspoken ideal; they are, on the contrary, undistinguishable from the
images of external reality that make up their consciousness.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer ...
III
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands; ...
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock.