The Waste Land

I enclose herein my six-month old review of The Waste Land, by T.S.Eliot.

For me, interpreting a poem is always a task fraught with fear; I'm always wondering if I'm ‘correctly’ reproducing the poet’s intentions. The assumption that one begins with when starting to read a poem is that the poet intends to convey something, some thought, some emotion. And while this is true, the vehicle of conveyance sometimes obscures the meaning so much so that the outcome may be unintelligible to anyone else reading it.

One need not despair, however; the beauty of the poem is that it can be interpreted in any way that the reader fancies, without any sort of reference to the original meaning (if indeed there is such a thing). A poem is special because the reader’s interpretation makes the poem personal to himself and himself alone.

Having said that, one needs to recognize that not all poems stand on their own, waiting to be interpreted by the next reader who comes along. Some are fairly abstruse in structure, others in meaning, still others in both. ‘The Waste Land’, an epic five-part surrealistic endeavor by T.S Eliot, belongs to the latter category.

Such poems need a bridge – a bridge that narrows the gap between the poet and the average reader, possessing an average attention span, with an average amount of time to spend edifying himself with poems written by Nobel Laureates. Annotations, if written responsibly and intelligently, can serve as this bridge, piercing through the fog that represents the poet’s emotions without adding any smoke to it. The best annotations are the ones that dole out information sparingly, but in the right places – compare them to a sightseer’s guide to a country that informs him about the places he must visit, but remains silent about the places he should avoid. Subjectivity must not be abandoned completely, to the disadvantage of the tyro, and yet must not be so overt as to preclude any sort of reader involvement.

‘The Waste Land’ is a perfect candidate for such an annotation - at first glance, it seems unreadable, possessing no rhyme, no apparent rhythm, and no obvious meaning; it appears to be a gratuitous foray into logorrhea. Indeed, my impulse, on reading the first ten or so lines, was to put it down immediately, and I was continually seized by these impulses throughout my first reading. The poem certainly did not relate a story, or at least did not sustain one, or have a common thread. It did not possess any continuity to speak of, except in places. There were strange onomatopoeic interludes that were jarring and unpleasant. The language kept changing, here in French, there in German, here again in English. It was, in short, one of the most irritating poems to read, at least for the first time.

However, it also possessed many attractions; lines stared out from the midst of unintelligible verse, lines gravid with meaning, as if isolated from the rest like lagoons in the midst of sandy beaches; its length indicated some sort of overall ‘plan’ – it was, after all, separated into five parts, and that must indicate structure, if fractured; there were at least five languages that I could identify, including German, French, and Sanskrit, and knowledge of these languages could only mean that the poet was a scholar. Best of all – and perhaps only fanatical readers such as myself can understand this – it was long. Four hundred and thirty three lines of blank verse, a veritable pillar of long-windedness, the ‘War and Peace’ of poetry, sat there smugly, challenging me to give it a full reading. And it was then that I knew that a different approach had to be adopted in tackling this literary monster.

And so I downloaded the Librivox recording of the thing. (Librivox, for those who do not know, is an audiobook website that contains recordings of works in the public domain, works whose copyright has expired. ‘The Waste Land’ is one of the few poems available on that website for download.)

I read the poem along with the recording, enunciating each line deeply, like some sort of mantra, and an hour and two consecutive readings later, a shadow had lifted partially and a vague form emerged from it. The meaning of it all, while far from clear, was now much more apparent than it was at any time in the past.

I will not attempt to provide a verse-by-verse interpretation, or even a part-by-part interpretation – such an endeavor would be naïve, not to mention verbose and utterly devoid of stimulation. Instead, I will skirt the edges, providing hints as to how to read it, without actually going through much of the poem itself.

One can find buried within the The Waste Land's Wikipedia page, a short poem by Ezra Pound; this poem was in fact an absurd commentary on the poem itself -- a meta-poem, if you will. Its last two lines read -

‘Or say that the upjut of sperm

Has rendered his sense pachyderm.’

Ribaldry aside, one can easily appreciate what he’s saying – a pachyderm is exactly what might have written the poem. Random words that were perhaps typed out by a million elephants on a million typewriters writing for a million years, he thought. However, it is precisely this quality of the poem that makes it intelligent, or, to refute Ezra Pound, not written by some lunatic with time hanging heavy on his hands. Consider, for example, the first two lines –

‘April is the cruelest month, breeding,

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing –,’

Now the traditional way to read this line would be to assume that the second statement follows the first statement, and is an explanation for it – that is, if one asks the question, ‘Why is April the cruelest month?’ then one could expect the answer to be contained within the next line. But the next line states that April breeds lilacs out of the dead land. Now, you wonder, how could this be a bad thing, how could this make April ‘cruel’? Is it because the poet does not like lilacs? Or does he consider it a cruel thing that lilacs could grow out of dead land? The answer, of course, is neither, because there is no answer – the second line is not in any way connected to the first line, except by its subject (April). The second line is self-contained, as is the third, the fourth, and so on. And that is a clue – the reader reads each line with a fresh mind, not knowing what to expect. At the same time, (and this is important) he focuses on visualizing the words in the lines that stand out (to him). This makes the poem a visual extravaganza like no other.

One must be careful, however, not to overdo this- there are places where the poet makes sense, and in these places the reader should pause and switch to a more traditional mode of reading.

So that, then, is the poem in its entirety – large episodes of intensely visual descriptions interspersed with relatively banal interludes into traditional ‘storytelling’. Which brings me to my final observation regarding the poem – what is a Waste Land -- or a wasteland -- but a vast open space, punctuated here, there, and everywhere with a heap of broken images, through which perhaps a river such as the Thames runs, where you could easily experience fear…in a handful of dust?

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land