‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?... / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats/ And the dead trees give no shelter ...’ TS Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)Patrick Comerford
I began this series of Poems for Pent on Ash Wednesday [22 February 2012] by choosing TS Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday.’ Now as we come towards the climax of Lent in Passiontide, my choice of poem this morning is ‘What the Thunder said,’ which part 5 of ‘The Waste Land’ by TS Eliot (1888-1965).
We are almost at the end of March and the end of Lent. Palm Sunday, which marks the beginning of Holy Week next week, falls on 1 April, and I am reminded of TS Eliot’s opening line in ‘The Waste Land’:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.’
We have passed the Spring Equinox, and it is so noticeable these evenings that the days are getting longer. In this season of moving from death through rebirth to new life, we are also quickened the pace as we move through Lent to Easter, from penitence death to celebration and resurrection.
In this poem, Eliot provides a rich resource for understanding this passage of time as he contemplates his own passage from scepticism to belief, from cynicism to the embrace of divine mystery, drawing on Lenten themes as he narrates his spiritual journey.
Lent confronts us on with our own mortality and also lead us into the experience of the death of Christ. A spirituality informed by Lent insists that we wrestle with the inevitability of our own deaths, in the light of the death of Christ, as we journey towards Easter and Resurrection. In the midst of the wasteland, we become aware that we are on the road to Emmaus, as Eliot reminds us in Part 5:
Who is the third who walks beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you.
The experience of failure and disappointment is sometimes understood as a crisis of religious faith. In the Gospels, however, it is precisely at this moment that Christ appears to the disciples. Only as we deny ourselves, only in the awareness of our human limitations, Eliot insists, are we open to the “peace that surpasses understanding.”
‘Ash Wednesday’ illustrates Eliot’s movement from a tentative faith toward a deep commitment. This journey takes place in the desert, where one is without support systems. In the desert, the mystics confronted the demonic; in the desert experiences of our lives we discover who we are before God.
The season of Lent calls us to self-examination and to a desire for God. ‘Ash Wednesday’ closes with Eliot’s prayer:
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
‘The Waste Land’ is a 434-line poem, first published in 1922. It has been called “one of the most important poems of the 20th century.” But the poem is seen by many as obscure, and its obscurity is heightened by shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.
Yet, despite this perceived obscurity, the poem is a touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are “April is the cruellest month” (the first line), “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” and, in its last line, the mantra in Sanskrit:
Shantih, shantih, shantih.
In ‘The Waste Land,’ Eliot draws on diverse sources across the history of culture and literature, including Greek mythology, the Upanishads, Buddha’s sermons, the Bible, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, Shakespeare’s plays, Wagner’s operas, the writings of Herman Hesse, Shackleton’s account of his Antarctic expedition, and even the colloquial dialogue he overheard between his first wife and their maid.
The poem is divided into five sections:
1, The Burial of the Dead
2, A Game of Chess
3, The Fire Sermon
4, Death by Water
5, What the Thunder said.
In Part 1 of ‘The Waste Land,’ ‘The Burial of the Dead,’ Eliot invokes the Prophet Ezekiel as he describes modern existence:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of Man
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats
And the dead trees give no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
He sees us living in a time of hopelessness, of “broken images,” where there is no shelter, no life-giving water. Yet, glimpses of hope are to be found all around us:
… … Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something that is different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
While earlier commentators tended to read ‘The Waste Land’ as a secular commentary on life in London in the inter-war years, more recent studies see in this poem a description of Eliot’s pilgrimage to faith from the Unitarianism of his childhood and youth, through his readings in Hinduism to his preparation for his eventual Baptism in 1927 and his subsequent, life-lasting Anglo-Catholicism.
In a recent study, A. Lee Fjordbotten, (‘Liturgical influences of Anglo-Catholicism on ‘The Waste Land’ and other works by TS Eliot,’ Fordham University, 1999), says ‘The Waste Land’ reveals a spiritually searching and developing Eliot who is anticipating his formal conversion in 1927. He points out that the structure of the poem is similar to the traditional process of conversion, especially as seen in the season of Lent.
In this way, the poem becomes the chronicle of Eliot’s own spiritual journey to conversion, and he analyses the five sections of ‘The Waste Land’ liturgically, in relation to the five Sundays of Lent and their respective themes, so that Part V, ‘What the Thunder says,’ relates to the Fifth Sunday in Lent and this week.
In her more recent study of ‘The Waste Land,’ ‘The Prefiguration of TS Eliot’s conversion in ‘The Waste Land’,’ in the Saint Austin Review (January/February 2012, pp 19-20), Paula L. Gallagher, says the beginning of Eliot’s conversion is prefigured in this poem and begins with his recognition of the emptiness of modernity.
She argues that the poem – far from being just the apogee of modernist despair – significantly prefigures his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism: “Eliot’s personal journey through the Waste Land – from the rejection of modernity, to the search for Christ, to the arrival of rain – contains imagery, allusions and ideas that prefigure that conversion to Anglo-Catholicism.”
The fact that Eliot is writing this poem about the barrenness of modernity and imaging it as a Waste Land shows that Eliot sees through modernity to the reality of its sterility. The image of the Waste Land represents the aridity of modernity, its lack of culture and tradition, and indeed its inability to allow culture and tradition to grow and flourish. Hence, the Waste Land is repeatedly described as a desert with “dry stone and no sound of water.”
The Waste Land, where “there is not water but only rock,” lacks the life-giving and life-sustaining water which will enable tradition and culture to thrive. The poet is seeking the rain which will reanimate the Waste Land of modernity; the rain which will touch and enliven the dead roots of tradition and culture. This water, ultimately, is Christianity.
‘Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine’ (Photograph: ChrisO)In ‘The Waste Land,’ Eliot singles out for special mention two London churches, known not only as two architectural masterpieces by Christopher Wren, but as important centres of Anglo-Catholic life: Saint Mary Woolnoth and Saint Magnus the Martyr.
In Part 1, ‘The Burial of the Dead,’ he walks
… down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine
He got to know Saint Mary Woolnoth, on the corner of Lombard Street and King William Street, while he was working in the City at Lloyds Bank from 1917 to 1925. Professor Barry Spurr of the University of Sydney, in his study of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’ TS Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010), says the dedication of the church to the Blessed Virgin Mary chimes with Eliot’s subsequent Anglo-Catholicism, and reads in the reference to the “dead sound on the final stroke of nine” a reference to the traditional time of execution in prisons – and so to the execution of Christ at the ninth hour.
Saint Magnus the Martyr in Lenten array and with ‘Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’ (Photograph: Steve Cadman)In Part 3, ‘The Fire Sermon,’ Eliot celebrates spiritual importance the Church of Saint Magnus the Martyr, the fishermen’s church near London Bridge:
… where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
John Betjeman would later write: “the whole district smells of fish, but inside the church there is the abrupt change to a smell of insense.”
In a footnote, Eliot says the interior of the church is “one of the finest among Wren’s interiors.” Barry Spurr notes that Saint Magnus Martyr “was one of the leading shrines of the Anglo-Catholic movement and it is very notable that Eliot should not only refer to it, but, in the midst of a poem of almost unrelieved negativity, present it so positively (if somewhat uncomprehendingly) in terms of the exquisite beauty of its interior: its “Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.”
Spurr points out that white and gold are “the liturgical colours … of Eastertide and resurrection, a concept otherwise denied repeatedly throughout ‘The Waste Land’.”
Father George Every told Spurr that Eliot started frequenting the High Mass at Saint Magnus the Martyr after World War I, and that “the influence of the liturgy on the drama was indeed apparent to him before he was a believer. Images out of Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion belong to this time.” Eliot first enjoyed Saint Magnus aesthetically for its “splendour” and that later he appreciated its “utility” when he came there as a sinner.
The plaque marking the Faber and Faber office in Bloomsbury where TS Eliot worked at the time of his conversion (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)The Waste Land also encompasses the “Unreal City” of London, a particular instantiation of modernity, which Eliot uses to convey specific ideas about the state of modernity. London is “Unreal”; it is not connected to objective reality but is immersed in the empty pursuits of modernity.
In the fifth section of the poem, which I have chosen this morning, Paula L Gallagher points out that other major historical and cultural cities in addition to London are depicted as crumbling “falling towers” and as “Unreal”: Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria and Vienna. Significantly, Rome is not included in the list, and so is symbolically excluded from the Waste Land. Rome, the ‘Eternal City,’ symbolises the grace of Christ and is a fortress of culture and tradition. Eliot’s recognition of the unreality of modernity and the role of Rome in history is another step on his path to conversion.
Gallagher argues that the beginning of Eliot’s conversion, as prefigured in the poem, begins with his recognition of the emptiness of modernity. The fact that Eliot is writing this poem about the barrenness of modernity and imaging it as a Waste Land shows that he sees through modernity to the reality of its sterility. “The image of the Waste Land represents the aridity of modernity, its lack of culture and tradition, and indeed its inability to allow culture and tradition to grow and flourish...”
She finds another prefiguration of Eliot’s conversion in the opening lines of the fifth section, “What the Thunder Said”, which contain allusions to Christ’s Passion:
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
Professor Lawrence S. Rainey of Yale University also recognises a connection between the phrases “silence in the gardens” and “agony in stony places” and the Garden of Gethsemane. [Lawrence S. Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 116.]
Gallagher identifies the “Prison and Palace” with Pontius Pilate’s house and prison, continuing the connection to Christ’s Passion. Christ has died – “He who was living is now dead” – and his Resurrection is merely hinted at:
… reverberation
Of thunder of spring.
Thunder is preliminary to the rain, and springtime is the time of rebirth. The rain is the symbol of hope, that there could be a regenerative, spiritual rebirth. Water in the Waste Land is Christianity, and the Resurrection is the heart of Christianity. The Resurrection makes possible the rebirth of humanity into the life of grace through baptism.
In choosing these images to prepare the later presentation of Christ as the source of hope and regeneration, Eliot’s conversion is again prefigured she writes.
In this section, Eliot also alludes to Christ’s post-Resurrection appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. In the poem, the people are journeying, continuing the conceit of a pilgrimage. The poet sees but does not know who the third person is: “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” This is Christ, hidden from recognition, for he is
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded.
The climax of the poem comes with the arrival of the rain. The scene is a deserted church, inside which a “cock stood on the rooftree”, crowing. The cock traditionally heralds the dawn, which is another symbol of Christ. Thus the cock is announcing the Resurrection. Instantly the rain arrives:
Then a damp gust
Bringing rain.
The arrival of the rain is the apocalyptic moment, when the reanimation of modernity can finally come to fruition. The arrival of the rain, at the moment when the cock crows, connects Christ and his resurrection as the source of life (water) in the desert of the Waste Land. With the resurrection and with grace, modernity can recover its deadened culture and traditions; modernity can be regenerated and made fertile again. By connecting the resurrection imagery with the remedy for the barrenness of the Waste Land, Eliot recognises the crucial role that Christianity plays in society and in reality.
The Thunder, which is mentioned in the title of Section 5, speaks near the end of the poem, giving three commands that Eliot explains as give (data), sympathise (dayadhvam), and control (damyata). According to Rainey, giving means charity, sympathy means compassion, and control means self-control. These three commands, given in the voice of the thunder, are Eliot’s instructions for what to do when the rain, or the grace of the resurrection, comes to humanity. Living these commands will allow humanity to truly live a meaningful life, after being reanimated by the rain.
The last lines of the poem contain many images and allusions, which formally incarnate the collapse of the Waste Land. The unreal city is collapsing:
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.
Modernity cannot sustain itself and it crumbles. Eliot knows that the Waste Land is empty and collapsing; for him the way to the Waste Land is ruined. The next line, from Dante’s Purgatorio – “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina” (“Then he vanished into the fire that refines them”) – indicates that Eliot himself has chosen to leave the Waste Land and to journey towards Purgatory and its purification.
The poem ends with an offering of hope. The last line is:
Shantih shantih shantih.
According to Eliot’s footnote, this means “the Peace which passeth understanding.” Rainey notes that this line also alludes to Philippians 4: 7, “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” And so, the journey or pilgrimage through the Waste Land of modernity fimds its true end with the arrival of rain and grace, and concludes with the peace of God. The poem ends on a note of hope and the possibility of order emerging from the madness and disorder of modernity.
‘The Waste Land’ read by Robert Speaight, Argo Records cover by Olga LehmannV. What the Thunder said by TS Eliot
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
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
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
– But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
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
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon – O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
Reading:
TS Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).
Steve Ellis, TS Eliot, A guide for the perplexed London: Continuum, 2009).
A. Lee Fjordbotten, ‘Liturgical influences of Anglo-Catholicism on ‘The Waste Land’ and other works by TS Eliot,’ Fordham University, 1999.
Paula L. Gallagher, ‘The Prefiguration of TS Eliot’s conversion in ‘The Waste Land’,’ Saint Austin Review (January/February 2012), pp 19-20).
BC Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of TS Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1968).
Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’ TS Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010).
George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to TS Eliot, a poem-by-poem analysis (London: Thames and Hudson, 2nd ed, 1967).
Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.
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