The Undead in Eliot's The Waste Land

Shrinidhi Prakash

Whether Eliot likes it or not- and he doesn’t- The Waste Land is a decidedly postwar freak of genius.
That is not, of course, to deny its intensely personal colours. Eliot is to postwar depression what Owen
was to wartime terrors. The poem (for want of a better term) is that rare gifted voice which rails at
the establishment, at social squalor, at human waste, without ever lapsing into formulaic polemics,
always with its idiosyncratic timbre. It is a triumph of the interweaving of the personal and the political.

“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” asks the wife in A Game of Chess- but it is not

such a black and white game. ‘Son of man,’ says Eliot, ‘you know only a heap of broken images,’ a one-
way game of creation and destruction. And indeed at first glance this Waste Land confirms the image.

We pick our way across ‘dry bones [which] can harm no one’ as our guide murmurs ‘He who is living
is now dead.’ An entire canto is devoted to the transience of life and the peaceful finality of death,
describing the drowned Phoenician, once as ‘handsome and tall as you,’ released from the worldly
woes of ‘profit and loss’; the dead rest ‘[a]fter the agony in stony places/The shouting and the crying.’
Yet this is an illusion. There are other spheres, organic no-man’s lands- ‘I was neither/Living nor dead,’
murmurs the gazing lover. The dead in this poem are not exactly alive and well, but nor are they
beyond offspring. The Waste Land is not barren; it is strewn with the bones of kings, sailors and
nameless men united in their refusal of eternal sleep. Nowhere is this more magnificently exhibited
than in the poet’s accosting of ‘Stetson’:

“Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

The planting of a corpse is the consummate symbol of the Waste Land, opening up a wealth of
questions on our relationship with the dead. Eliot bluntly challenges our motives for burial. Is it really
to be honoured that millions of soldiers are six foot under? The poet’s tone suggests that for Stetson
it was an act of shame, something to be stowed away under his feet and forgotten rather than dwelt
upon, until it began putting up shoots in his flowerbeds (or nosy dogs began rooting in the patch). Or
perhaps he did intend it to sprout; perhaps Stetson profits from death and decay, living on the bones
of lions. ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?’ we ask; what
does Stetson harvest from the dead? Only the mixed blessing that is the ghost of their decay and the
fruit of their sacrifice, ‘mixing memory and desire.’

The poet is not at ease with this otherworldly fertility. Winter, barren, ‘forgetful’ winter, is far
preferable to the strange and cruel magic of April ‘breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land.’ He is reviled
at how the stifled life in Lil’s womb works her features emaciated and ‘antique.’ Shakespeare’s
drowned sailor, reinvented by the sea as a fantastic jewel, not only relives the ‘stages of his age and
youth’ but lives on to haunt him as a figure lost on the battlefield; ‘Those are the pearls that were his
eyes’ takes on an Owenesque tint, comparable to the ‘white eyes writhing’ in the dying soldier’s face.
‘[A]t my back in a cold blast I hear/The rattle of the bones,’ he frets. No, far preferable is the ‘sweet
Thames’ of his fantasies to which he confides the latter lines, which ‘bears no empty bottles, sandwich
papers,/Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends/Or other testimonies of summer nights,’-
a stream of time unpolluted by memories, untainted by the dead.

Yet this ghastly resurrection of the dead is necessary. The Dog which digs up the corpse is a ‘friend to
men,’ dutifully raking up the history which makes us what we are today, ensuring that the dead are
given their due in our thoughts. Thus the poet cannot avoid the silent, uncountable, hooded figure
gliding by his side on the road, no more than he can forget its incarnation as the ‘hooded hordes
swarming/Over endless plains’ against the ‘murmur of maternal lamentation.’ Neither death nor those
who have died truly leave us; their voices linger on, ‘singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted
wells.’

In this land of deceptive decay, writes Eliot, we have no one to guide us. We live in an age in which
the gods have fallen, the ‘nymphs are departed,’ and the king is a ‘wreck,’ leaving us with a ‘heap of
broken images’ and a vacuum of not just relief but direction. Even literature, it is found, is expressive
rather than instructive. The very fragmentation of The Waste Land itself is testament to the former
assertion, and the poet realises the latter want during his domestic squabble. ‘O O O O that
Shakespeherian Rag—/It’s so elegant/So intelligent,’ he sighs- but little good the Bard does him. ‘
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”/ I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street,’ he realises.
Masterless among ruins we are reduced to numb ‘crowds of people, walking round in a ring,’ or ‘fishing
in the dull canal... Musing on the king my brother’s wreck/And on the king my father’s death before
him.’ Inert we are a ‘humble people who expect nothing,’ equally devoid of resentfulness and hopes
for a ‘new start.’ We regard splendour and squalor with equal indifference, drifting from the
‘[i]nexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’ to ‘rats’ alley’ to the ‘Ganga.’

Of course, this comes with a caveat, for nothing dies entirely in the Waste Land. The empire of fear
takes control in this chaotic world; the card-wielding clairvoyante emerges ‘the wisest woman in
Europe’ in such times. She at once assuages and gives rise to the rich mad dreams of the Waste Land,
feeding it with ghostly deaths and beautiful sailors and wild beauties. These take ready root given that
the poet’s personal restlessness is mirrored by the postwar climate; here fear is the cheapest emotion,
found in a ‘handful of dust.’ Around the poet seers advise caution in delivering horoscopes; Londoners
stare, hypnotised, at their feet, lest they be accused of planting corpses; doubtless readers wonder at
poets’ free mixing of German into their verse. For his part, the poet stirs up terrifying memories of a
sled ride with a cousin; he frets psychopathically for a woman refusing to doll up for her returning
husband; above all, of course, he fears and tussles with the undead Waste Land, glancing nervously
over his shoulder at Death and the Dead on his road.

An unignorable aspect of both fear and disillusionment in this poem is the status of women, whose
role in postwar social upheaval Eliot does not ignore. If The Waste Land is not feminist, it is only
because the term implies too polemical a tone for the bizarre meditation that it is. It is, however, a
poem shot through with great sympathy for the female condition, either surprising or natural given
the condition of Eliot’s wife. A Game of Chess, the most intimate portrayal of the latter, is not
particularly encouraging in its depiction of a man trapped in a claustrophobic marriage with an ailing,
clutching wife. Yet this draws him to explore the various states of love and marriage across the
country, crossing over to consider the plight of the other sex after the manner of ‘Tiresias, though
blind, throbbing between two lives.’ The resulting meditation is extraordinary for the female
disillusionment, independence and defiance it illustrates on the subject of love and sex- all eyed with
apprehension by this inert society around them. The two women central to this exploration, “Lil” and
the ‘”typist,” are not as explicitly victimised as Philomel, ‘by the barbarous king so rudely forced,’ who
is threaded in via leitmotif for comparison; they do not explicitly reject advances, but are trapped by
subtler social webs. The poet plays devil’s advocate in chastising the former, whose case is
nevertheless the more obvious- an extraordinary wife who freely discusses the contraceptives
(necessary as her husband does not “let her alone”) which have emaciated her, and refuses to ‘make
[herself] a bit smart’ for her returning husband. The case of the young ‘typist’ is more, and precociously, subtle; she embodies the mortel ennui of the modern woman, worn out by the aggressive but ‘unreproved, if undesired’ lover. Both women are, in one way or the other, withered,
embodying postwar Weltschmerz, but they nurse too an unmistakeable spark of frightening disdain
for the male. They throw themselves wholeheartedly into the Waste Land’s struggle for control over
its own, rich wanderings.

And, of course, control is found at last- from within. Damyata (self-control) finishes the poem
reflecting on the past driven by external forces, when your ‘heart would have responded/Gaily, when
invited, beating obedient/To controlling hands.’ Of course, this is still to some extent ongoing, given
the poem’s final tussle with Hindu ethical codes. Yet the end of the poem seems to suggest a change
of heart in the brooding fishing prince, who seems at last inclined towards positive action and
leadership as he thinks of setting ‘[his] lands in order,’ gazing out at the fragments of Dante, Virgil and
de Nerval strewn around the Waste Land. External or internal, there is some hope for the order of
things, found through a cleansing of the self. The closing shantih shantih shantih is despairing,
certainly, but hopeful nevertheless; it is the air of someone who has struggled to peace, if only by
vanquishing the wild ravings that are the poem.