Patrick Comerford
Today, the Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship remembers Saint Martin, Bishop of Tours, ca 316-397 (11 November 2022).
Saint Martin of Tours, who was born ca316 in Pannonia, in modern-day Hungary, Martin was a soldier in the Roman army and a Christian. He found the two rôles conflicted and, under the influence of Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, he founded a monastery in Hilary’s diocese in the year 360, the first such foundation in Gaul. The religious house was a centre for missionary work in the local countryside, setting a new example where, previously, all Christian activity had been centred in cities and undertaken from the cathedral there. Martin was elected Bishop of Tours by popular acclaim in 372 and he continued his monastic lifestyle as a bishop, remaining in that ministry until he died on this day in 397.
Before this day gets busy, I am taking some time this morning for reading, prayer and reflection.
Throughout this week, I am reflecting in these ways:
1, One of the readings for the morning;
2, A reflection based on TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ first published 100 years ago, in 1922;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’
Luke 17: 26-37 (NRSVA):
26 Just as it was in the days of Noah, so too it will be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 They were eating and drinking, and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed all of them. 28 Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, 29 but on the day that Lot left Sodom, it rained fire and sulphur from heaven and destroyed all of them 30 —it will be like that on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. 31 On that day, anyone on the housetop who has belongings in the house must not come down to take them away; and likewise anyone in the field must not turn back. 32 Remember Lot’s wife. 33 Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it. 34 I tell you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. 35 There will be two women grinding meal together; one will be taken and the other left.’ 37 Then they asked him, ‘Where, Lord?’ He said to them, ‘Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.’
The Waste Land 5: ‘What the Thunder Said’’
TS Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, the same year as James Joyce published Ulysses. The poem includes well-known phrases such as ‘April is the cruellest month,’ and ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ Recent studies see in ‘The Waste Land’ a description of Eliot’s pilgrimage from the Unitarianism of his childhood to his life-lasting Anglo-Catholicism.
‘The Waste Land’, which I am reflecting on throughout this week, was first published 100 years ago at the end in 1922. It is a masterpiece of modern literature and one of the greatest poems in the English language. Its opening lines are often quoted, even by people who have never read all five sections and 434 lines of the poem.
‘The Waste Land’ was published in Eliot’s The Criterion in October 1922. It was then published in the US in the November issue of The Dial, and was published in book form in December 1922.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, I am dipping in and out of the five sections of The Waste Land in this prayer diary each day this week. ‘The Waste Land’ is divided into five sections:
1, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair.
2, ‘A Game of Chess’, employs alternating narrations, in which vignettes of several characters address those themes experientially.
3, ‘The Fire Sermon’, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition, influenced by Augustine of Hippo and Eastern religions.
4, ‘Death by Water’, includes a brief lyrical petition.
5, ‘What the Thunder Said’, the culminating fifth section, concludes with an image of judgment.
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.
We are almost mid-way through November and is noticeable since the clocks went back how the days are drawing it and by late afternoon the evenings are turning to darkness. Advent approaches, with Christmas less than seven weeks, and so we soon prepare to move from reflection on our own mortality and penitence to the celebration of new life.
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 these themes as he narrates his spiritual journey.
In the midst of the wasteland, we become aware that the Incarnation invites us to a new journey on the road, a new pilgrimage in life, accompanying Christ, 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 the Risen 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.’
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 its last line, the mantra in Sanskrit:
Shantih, shantih, shantih.
Paula L Gallagher points out that in this fifth section of the poem, 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 finds 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
Today’s Prayer (Friday 11 November 2022, Feast of St Martin of Tours):
The Collect:
God all powerful,
who called Martin from the armies of this world
to be a faithful soldier of Christ:
give us grace to follow him
in his love and compassion for the needy,
and enable your Church to claim for all people
their inheritance as children of God;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post Communion Prayer:
God, shepherd of your people,
whose servant Martin revealed the loving service of Christ
in his ministry as a pastor of your people:
by this eucharist in which we share
awaken within us the love of Christ
and keep us faithful to our Christian calling;
through him who laid down his life for us,
but is alive and reigns with you, now and for ever.
The theme in the USPG Prayer Diary this week is ‘A New Commandment.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by Sue Claydon, chair of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship.
The USPG Prayer Diary invites us to pray today in these words:
Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, we give thanks for his bravery in refusing to fight and instead following his faith.
Yesterday’s reflection
Continued tomorrow
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).
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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