Modern American Poetry

New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 165

of feeling. The vision encountered and lost of the hyacinth girl leads to a
desire for recovery expressed through the fiction of the Quest. The longing
everyone has for water recalls the seasonal alternation of drought and rain;
while winter and spring are recalled by the longing for death that leads in the
end to the longing for rebirth. The whole connection of human emotions
with the cycle of the seasons is expressed through the fictions of the
vegetation myths.
The sense of violation we detected in “Preludes” permeates the first
three parts of The Waste Land.The theme is established through the fiction,
represented in the rich Belladonna’s painting, of Philomela’s rape; and that
fiction applies to all the women in the poem, including such recollected
victims as Dante’s La Pia and Ophelia (III, 293–94, 306). The Christian
imagery of Part V makes explicit our accumulating sense that all the
violations come together in the figure of Jesus, the arch-victim.
The movement from the fire of Part IIIto the relief, in Part IV, through
water prepares the sensuous texture out of which, in Part V, the figures of
Jesus and other redeemers take shape. They take shape because the senses
require them to take shape, the senses as objective correlatives to the
protagonist’s emotions:

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder.

Earlier, a similar rendition of thirst gives rise to the figure of Jesus:

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water.

The longing for water, for even the sound of water, together with the hope
offered by the lovely water-dripping song of the hermit-thrush, leads to
“Who is the third?” The third, as we have seen, is the unrecognized
apparition born of the Antarctic explorers’ despair, and the unrecognized