The Wastland

Each time I read The Wastland I can’t help but see it as a catalogue of events that transpire in an environment where all meaning and presumed patterns have collapsed. Broken cyclical references and unsuccessful relationships among people, including the multiple speakers and the reader, pervade the poem. Part one, “The Burial of the Dead,” at first seems to situate readers in the somber mood of the narrative with both its titular reference to the death and the immediate juxtaposition of birth and death. The initial lines read, “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire.” It is important to note that April signifies spring, a time of rebirth and renewal, but the immediate invocation of the “cruelest month” quickly undermines any sense of optimism. The next stanzas follow in this vein as readers are provided a cyclical reference either to vegetation, familial life, or ensuing love and then almost instantly given a reason why these things are certain to fail or have failed already.
The death and resurrection is most clearly gestured to via vegetation in the beginning of The Wasteland, as we observe in the second stanza, “And the dry stone no sound of water.” The lack of water here is interesting in that it denotes an arid place not capable of sustaining life, a literal wasteland. However, shortly thereafter, Eliot uses floral imagery, specifically hyacinths, which are a perennial and thus occur over and over again. Perhaps this reinforces once more the cyclical nature of the poem. What remains curious though is the amount of references to reoccurring images, memories, like those we share with Marie, in stark contrast to the overall crux of the work, “A heap of broken images.”
The larger narrative finds the disruption of rebirth and renewal, the retarded cycle of death and resurrection of land and being situated among a fragmented framework.
This fragmentation expressed explicitly by the multivocality of the text and the “heap of broken images” is echoed in the breaks in the cyclical environments which saturate Eliot’s work. The poem invites a read that at once tries to make sense of a nonsensical world and to struggle to “only connect,” to channel E.M. Forster, the present to the past and future or, if you prefer, to fix the irregularities in the larger, in an all of time way context of time. The epigraphs invite readers to struggle to make sense of a fragmentation of language and time. The beginning of the poem, its initial epigraph, signals to readers the way in which to read the remaining narrative. The words are not accessible to most readers, a hallmark of Eliot’s. However, not only does this inclusion signify to readers that the poem will primarily focus on the destabilization of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, but it also illuminates the temporal and linguistic instability of the text.
The second book refocuses our attention on a more interpersonal cycle; a description of a wealthy couple and of a lower class couple illustrates the emphasis on class found in so much of modern literature. Also, this section, “A Game of Chess,” includes dialogue which I feel could be a verbatim representation of a reader’s thoughts upon exposure to this poem for the first time. Although on a more serious note, the lament present is also indicative of the struggle to make meaning out of the small disparate bits of information the poem provides, to, in effect, re-order a disordered world wherein the natural cycles no longer function. The lines, “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?” The woman presented in the second section has deliberately halted the renewal that The Wasteland so desperately seeks; by having an abortion, Lil exemplifies what Eliot hints. The remaining references to the past and the difficulty in producing a future become emblematic of the poem, the former illustrating a commonality between Eliot and HD, as her Trilogy renders visible similar historical reference upon reference and the latter speaks to modern concerns in general—uncertain fates and unknowable outcomes regarding death and desolation.