The Wine-Dark Sea

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Winter kept us warm… There’s a paradox for you. That paradox leads me to the paradox of Christ: unless a grain of wheat shall fall upon the ground and die… Christianity is always a paradox, always a mystery. Life meets death and like Eliot’s Magi we aren’t certain if we’ve witnessed Birth or Death. Where are Chaucer’s pilgrims going? Chaucer points us to the holy martyr. To a tomb, a place of death, the place of martyrdom. A Martyr embraces death, knowing that death of the body is the birth of eternal life in heaven.

In this first stanza I recognize the moment of spiritual crisis when the soul begins to awaken to a realization that it is being called to rebirth and renewal. There is such a huge chasm that separates the sinner from grace—or so it can seem—and death stands in the way. The only way to achieve new life is to embrace the cross, to accept death of self. And that death can seem so terrifying. I don’t want to die to my self. I’m comfortable with the present me. Sure, maybe there are some grimy sins I’d like to get rid of… but only if it doesn’t hurt. Easier to forget the whole question of faith, God, salvation. Easier to lose yourself in the entertainment of the present moment. Put off the day of reckoning as long as possible. But then comes the pesky spring, calling you to awake, beckoning you to set forth from your comfortable home, to go on a pilgrimage, to embrace the road, the journey, knowing that it will lead you to the grave, the cross, the place of martyrdom.  There is no other way but the Way.

covering earth in forgetful snow I love that forgetful snow. Here again we have the theme of memory. What have we forgotten? Why are we cut off from the past? What have we lost? What needs to be remembered and recollected?

feeding a little life with dried tubers. It is that phrase that always makes me think of Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters at this point in the poem. It’s not a favorite painting of mine. So dark and dreary. The faces feel rather like caricatures instead of real people. It makes me think of period illustrations of Charles Dickens’ works. And yet… I also have the distinct feeling that Van Gogh loved these people that he’s painted. His brush reveals no scorn for them. Likewise, Eliot’s poem always seems to have a deep compassion for his characters, small souled though they may be.

Also, I love that word, tubers. Such a firm, earthy word. Roots. There are more roots to come in the poem. Roots that clutch, roots that feed. Roots are hidden but so important. And I suddenly think of the O Antiphons, O Radix Jesse. Do the roots deliberately point us to Christ?

The enjambment continues and here the verbs, covering and feeding… I get a feeling that winter is a mother, caring for her children. In fact, now I notice that all of the verbs are very domestic and maternal: breeding, mixing, stirring, covering, feeding. I’m not sure where to take that, just an observation.

I started this post almost two weeks ago. But this flue has had us in its nasty grip for almost that long as well. Now that sickness is slowly letting go its hold, perhaps I can pick up the pace a little bit. We’ll see. Motherhood is never dull.

Believe me I was tempted to do a blog entry on the title of the first section, The Burial of the Dead—but I know there is someone out there saying: Get on with it already! How many blog entries can you post before you even get to the first line of the poem?! So I’ll let that go with a note that the title of this section is from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which begins

I AM the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. John 11: 25-26.

Keep those words in mind as you read because I believe that the the motif of resurrection is as strong as the theme of death. No, this is not a poem of despair; but the hope is there even if it is tentative and elusive.

And so at last we begin. The poem opens with one of my favorite lines in any poem:

  April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

In that first sentence there is a lot to unpack. First, is the reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which begins:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
10 That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
15 And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Ok, ok. I just had to stick it in in the Middle English because I took a class in Medieval Poetry in college and we had to read selections of The Canterbury Tales and all of Troilus and Criseyde in the original and so that’s how it always sounds in my own memory. But I’ll be nice and give it to you in a contemporary English translation:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire’s end
Of England they to Canterbury wend,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.

In Chaucer April pierces March’s drought with sweet showers. Eliot seizes on that verb “pierce” and in his poem April is cruel not sweet. Eliot’s narrator is a sort of negative image of Chaucer’s—where Chuaucer rejoices in Spring’s abundant life which culminates in a longing for pilgrimage and renewal, Eliot’s narrator focuses on death and longs for winter’s sleep. He doesn’t want memory and desire to be aroused. He fears change and clings to his small comfortable life.

The confluence of lilacs and death calls to mind Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d, another poem that sings about the return of spring and of a journey. In Whitman’s poem the journey is that of Lincoln’s corpse:

Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
 
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,

.

Why does Eliot choose this poem to allude to? I think very likely it is that image of the coffin and the journey of the corpse. But also other thematic parallels come to mind. Memory is a theme in Whitman’s poem, the way the lilacs’ yearly blooming stirs up the memory of Lincoln’s funeral in the previous April. There are more allusions to Whitman’s elegy to come—a major figure in Whitman’s poem is the thrush, which will appear in The Waste Land as well. 

So much for the first sentence. As you can see it is packed. But put aside the allusions to Chaucer and Whitman for a minute and enjoy the music of the lines as well. It can be tempting to get so caught up in the treasure hunt of tracking down Eliot’s allusions that I forget to appreciate the lyrical quality of the words themselves.

I love the enjambment. The emphasis is on the verbs: breeding, mixing, stirring.

I think that’s enough to chew on for now. Tell me what you think as you read these opening lines.

This was going to be a quick blog entry, just to address the two short bits of text that appear before the main text of the poem: the epigraph and the dedication. But of course once I started digging I uncovered more and more things to say about these two brief tags. These are the kinds of things you can skip over very easily and yet I think they do add to the total reading experience. In any case, I’m the kind of reader who would be driven crazy by not understanding that Latin quotation. (I took four years of Latin in high school precisely because the habit of so many writers to throw out lines in Latin.)

The Latin (and Greek) of the epigraph translates:

I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her ‘What do you want?’ She answered, ‘I want to die.’

It comes from The Satyricon by Petronius a Roman work of fiction that survives only in fragmentary form (another fragment!). Wikipedia says: “The surviving portions of the text detail the misadventures of the narrator, Encolpius, and his lover, a handsome sixteen-year-old boy named Giton. Throughout the novel, Encolpius has a hard time keeping his lover faithful to him as he is constantly being enticed away by others.” At first, I didn’t think the greater story of the Satyricon was very important as the line Eliot quotes here is something of a conversational aside; but reading Wikipedia’s summary made me see another connection. It ties in with one of the poem’s major themes: infertility and wounded sexuality. The epigraph also introduces the themes of death and fragmentation.

The figure of the Sibyl here points us in several directions. First, the Sibyl was the guide who lead Aeneas through Hades in the Aeneid. When coupled with the dedication, which is a quote from Dantes’s Purgatorio, and the title of the first section, “The Burial of the Dead”, you get the general idea that we are meant to be thinking about death and journeys into the underworld. The Waste Land then is a type of the heroic journey to the underworld, a major theme in epic poetry. This theme which runs through The Waste Land is one of the reasons I think of it as an epic poem.

Death to the Sibyl, to whom Apollo granted long life but not youth, is not something to be feared but a release that she fervently longs for. For Aeneas visiting the realm of the dead is a means of accessing secret knowledge about the future of Rome. For the Christian death in baptism is a means of accessing eternal life in Christ.

An aside, it occurs to me that all the great epic heroes who venture into the realms of the dead are types of Christ, the true hero of the true myth and their epic journeys are echoes of his harrowing of hell after his death on the cross and before his resurrection on the third day.

Second, the figure of the Sibyl points to the theme of fragmentation. Her prophecies were recorded on loose leaves of paper which then had to be arranged by the reader. The arrangement obviously affected the interpretation of the prophecies. Again, this seems to be Eliot pointing to his method: the reader must piece together the prophetic message from the bits and pieces of various texts that form the poem. The Sibyl is not the only prophet or seer we will encounter in the poem.

Finally, I wanted to note that Eliot’s original draft has a different epigraph, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Ezra Pound discouraged Eliot from using, saying that Conrad didn’t carry enough weight, wasn’t classical enough. The lines were from the end of the novel when the narrator, Marlow, has travelled up the Congo and found the dying Mr Kurtz:

  Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—

  ‘The horror! The horror!’

Again, you see the theme of death. Interesting that here too you see Kurtz as a visionary, a sort of prophet. What he sees, we do not know except for his reaction: “The horror! The horror!” You also get the theme of a journey with Marlowe’s voyage up the river. The river plays a major role in Eliot’s poetic imagination, especially in the Four Quartets, but rivers are important in The Waste Land as well.

And then there’s the dedication:

For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.

The Italian means “the better craftsman” or “the better poet”. The words were spoken to Dante by the spirit of a poet who was in Purgatory. Pound was very influential in the revision of the poem. Some major changes, the title not being the least of them, resulted from his commentary. I’m not a huge Pound fan myself; but I have to acknowledge that Pound’s revisions are what pushes the poem from good to great.

Evidently this dedication was not found in the first printing but Eliot dedicated a copy of the poem to Pound with these words and they found their way into a later edition. As I’ve noted previously the Italian is a quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy. It isn’t at all coincidental that a line from the Purgatorio should find it’s way to the beginning of the poem, Eliot clearly has DAnte in mind in several places in The Waste Land.  My own theory about Eliot and Dante is that Eliot’s entire corpus of works when read chronologically seems to be thematic echo of the Commedia. The Waste Land certainly seems to take place in an infernal landscape, in the realm of the dead or of the spiritually dead, or of those who wish they were dead.

This “Exploring The Waste Land” site has a nice (if slightly outdated in terms of webpage design) presentation of the poem with several frames that allow you to see hyperlinked notes, definitions, translations, cross references, texts of works alluded to, commentary, and questions to the reader. It’s very handy and nicely laid out.

Part 1 of the series is here.

The full text of The Waste Land is here, if you want to follow along.

Yes, this is going to be an entire blog entry about the poem’s title. There is just so much to say before we even get to the main body of the text.

Already I’m grasping and fumbling for focus. Where to begin? Yes, focus has always been my weakness as a writer. When I fell in love with The Wasteland and wrote an essay on it in my freshman year I am positive it was a weak paper because I lacked focus. Still, what I chose to write on was the role of the Grail legend in the poem. To me the story of the grail was the key that unlocked the poem. So that is where I will start on this journey as well.

One of the things that makes The Waste Land so difficult is its density and fragmentation. The poem is made up of a series of either allusions to or direct quotations from other texts, poems, plays, operas, etc. Many are not even in English. It can be so overwhelming. (But then the Catholic liturgy is also intimidating to someone who has just stumbled in off the street.) Eliot’s technique of allusions makes the poem a kind of dense hypertext mosaic where each new line can contain a new reference to a different literary work. The poem is rather like one of those mosaic pictures where each panel is an entire picture in its own right. But as I will later show, there is a reason for this method. The method itself points to the meaning.

The Waste Land is like a treasure map and the title is the first clue. Once we understand that it is an allusion to a particular version of the Grail legend, then it tells us that we are on a quest. Yes, that’s right, as you read this poem you are setting out on the greatest of all quests: the Quest for the Holy Grail. That’s what I love about The Waste Land, it is a modern retelling of one of the greatest of all legends. From Monty Python, to Indiana Jones to Dan Brown, the quest for the grail continues to have a strong grip on the contemporary imagination.  In The Wasteland, however, you will find neither King Arthur nor the knights of the Round Table. You will not find heroic crusaders or intrepid archaeologists. And no grotesque fantasies about the sacred feminine or claptrap about Mary Magdalene being the bride of Jesus. Instead, Eliot’s version of the grail legend draws on the legend of the Fisher King and is a little more obscure—but more about that anon.

Another thing that makes the poem difficult is the cacophony of voices. Eliot’s original working title was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”, a reference to a character in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend who reads the newspaper with different voices. The allusion suggests a means to make sense of the cacophony: there is a controlling narrator to the poem who is “doing” all the different voices. There is a consciousness that is creating meaning. He is stitching together the various pieces that make up the poem and forming them into a sort of patchwork quilt. He is a sort of pilot steering a course in the seeming storm of words and images. Yes, I’m mixing my metaphors dreadfully, but it’s hard to talk about the poem without making a metaphor salad.

Now back to the Fisher King…. The version of the grail myth that Eliot is alluding to in the title might not be familiar to the reader as it is from Perceval, an unfinished romance by Chrétien de Troyes. (An aside: it’s fascinating to note that Eliot chooses to base his poem on a version of the grail story that is a fragment, unfinished. Fragmentation is a major theme in the poem.) Though the story of the Fisher King does appear in modern form in the fabulous movie of that name directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Robin Williams—I highly recommend it. I’m going from memory here and not looking up the story but the basic gist is that a knight on a quest comes to a barren land that has been stricken by some kind of plague or famine. He goes to a castle whee he finds a king, fishing. He finds that the king of the land is also wounded and wasting away. There is some kind of mystical connection between the king’s illness (a wound in his leg or groin. infertility?) and the sickness that has infested his realm. Only the grail can heal the wounded king. The knight must find the grail and heal the king, which will then heal the land.

While the knight is dining at the king’s hall he is presented with a vision of a youth carrying a spear and a maiden carrying the grail. Here he makes a fatal error in that he doesn’t exhibit any curiosity about the strange vision and fails to ask any questions about what it means. So he fails in the quest and goes off to wander aimlessly. The asking of the questions is somehow key to finding out what the grail is and that is somehow key to healing the king and his land.

Eliot has stated that the story of the Fisher King is a part of the mythological backdrop behind his poem and this is one poem that demands that you reach beyond the bare words of the text and into the various works that the text alludes to. The poem casts the reader in the role of the questing knight. In order to understand the poem, you, the reader, are required to become the knight. You are required to ask the questions that will make sense of the fragments that Eliot lays out before you. You are required to do the hard work of stitching them together into a coherent picture, a patchwork quilt. You must exhibit curiosity, ask questions of the text, delve into the meaning behind the symbols that Eliot mysteriously parades before you. The poem’s very obscurity points to the meaning, the need to cease being a passive observer, to ask questions, to realize that perhaps you are as much in need of the grail as is the wounded king.

A great book on the subject of the Holy Grail is The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence by Mike Aquilina (I blogged about it very briefly here.) Aquilina maintains that the search for the grail is the search for the Real Presence of Christ. Frankly, I can’t see how this is even arguable. You can only imagine the Grail as something other than a symbol for Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist if you have divorced the legend from history and are reading it through a hermeneutic of suspicion. The plain meaning of the Grail has always been that it was the chalice that Christ used at the Last Supper. Sometimes it is also said to have caught Christ’s blood at the crucifixion. But of course to a Catholic sacramental imagination that is really a symbolic redundancy.

The Fisher King is an image both of Christ, the wounded king, the fisher of men, and also of humanity, wounded, in need of a savior. The act of fishing represents hope. Christ is often symbolized by a fish. Thus fishing can be seen as a representation of the search Christ. The Fisher King is a symbol of how the Body of Christ is wounded. The knight’s failure to ask questions speaks of our unwillingness to seek answers,our unwillingness to ask for healing. It speaks to me of my own situation, stuck in sin, avoiding confrontation with my own sinfulness, avoiding the confessional where I can confront that sin and have it washed away.

I could say so much more about this; but I think I’ll leave it at that for now. We will meet the Fisher King again in the poem. Keep him in mind as you read. He is part of a whole series of images that speak about the sacraments, especially the sacraments of baptism and of Eucharist.

When Dom was first setting up this site for me, almost exactly seven years ago, and we were brainstorming about a name, one of the first names that I considered was The Waste Land, after the poem by T. S. Eliot, which is one of my favorites. That domain name, in just about any permutation, was already taken and so I went with a second choice, which is actually probably a better one. But I still adore the Eliot poem and recently I have conceived a hankering to share it with everyone in this space. It began when Calah mentioned it in a blog post at Barefoot and Pregnant. In the comments someone said that it was bizarre and too obscure for her. And my heart yearned to explain to the (poor! benighted!) commenter how absolutely wonderful, beautiful and good and true the poem is. Then I found myself mentioning it again in my blog post about People Look East.

After I mentioned The Waste Land in my Make your House Fair post, I found myself pondering it in the shower (All my best ideas come to me in the shower). I was recalling my youthful zeal to enlighten the masses about how wonderful Eliot is. I have found that even among people who love The Waste Land it is often misunderstood. (See my soapbox down there. I’m climbing up on it, which means I’m liable to get a bit pretentious. So if you don’t like that sort of thing, you can skip these posts and go look at the cute pictures of my kids.) When I first encountered it, I was told that The Waste Land is a poem about the bleakness and despair of the modern world—which is true to a point; but if it is a poem about doubt it is also a poem about hope. In the Judeo-Christian tradition the desert has often been a place of renewal, in the Bible new life is always springing up in places that were thought to be barren. I prefer to read The Waste Land as a great Christian epic that asserts that the problem of faith in the modern of world is not really a new problem but that people in every age need to seek again for the source of life.

So I said to myself, “Self, you should write a series of blog posts about The Waste Land. It would make a wonderful Lenten meditation, for example.” I’m not sure where the idea came from because it isn’t the sort of thing I’m likely to want to do. Still, I’ve learned to trust these moments of inspiration. However, I don’t want to wait until Lent to begin—by then i might have lost my initial impetus—so I’m going to just jump into it now and see where it goes. Though if I take this series as slowly as I suspect I will have to, I may very well be continuing it through Lent and beyond.Depending on how much I linger on each section and how often I post, this project could take months and months.

So there you go. My new project. A completely crazy return to my roots both as an academic and a writer and a new grand goal for the new year.

I don’t want this to be an academic paper, an essay, nothing that formall, although I have been an academic and so I suspect that despite my best efforts to the contrary, the tone will tend to creep in that direction unless I hold very firm to my blogging voice. Still, lapses in tone notwithstanding, instead of a well-organized piece of academic writing, this will be very much a series of unedited blog posts by a sleepy mommy who just wants to exercise the part of her brain that she fears is declining into mush. I hope to jot down my various thoughts and impressions on the poem as they come to me in a of consciousness kind of way. I don’t propose to consider every word or even every line, just such bits and pieces as catch my fancy. It will not happen on any kind of predetermined schedule and it may in fact be irregular and infrequent. I have no idea how it will play out at all. But I am very excited at the prospect of being able to share one of my favorites—one of the great poems of the English language—with you. I do hope you will read along and add your comments and insights to mine. Feel free to argue with me, to dispute my interpretations. I love a good debate, so long as it stays civil.

Before We Begin

I want to go ahead and jump right in with a few framing observations to set the scene. Eliot is often accused of being inaccessible and hard to read. Perhaps that is a just charge. I don’t think Eliot set out to be easy but I don’t think the poem is meant to be impossible either. It’s not like Finnegan’s Wake, which I suspect is difficult just for the sake of being difficult.

Poetry has always been the way I see the world; but I know for many people it is very hard. Still, I have never found Eliot anything other than a challenge, an invitation to dig deep or to scale the heights, I can’t quite decide which metaphor to use. I suppose you could say that he is my Everest, the mountain I had to climb because it was there.

I do know that I loved Eliot from the first time I met when, as a sophomore in high school, I was assigned The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Oh that poem still delights and amazes me! When a few years later I read The Waste Land as a freshman in college, in the spring of 1993—can it really be that it was almost twenty years ago?! I feel so old!—I was absolutely blown away, swept off my feet. The romance between Eliot and I lasted all four years of college and has continued to this day. To say that Eliot is my favorite poet is such an understatement. After I did my junior poet project on Eliot, I came to know him more thoroughly than I know any other author. His poetry reaches deep into the core of my being and is a part of who I am at the very heart of my spiritual and intellectual life. So in a way this is another rough draft of the paper I couldn’t really write as an inarticulate freshman or as a slightly less tongue-tied junior English major. I still can’t really write it fully; but I’m willing to give it another go.

I believe The Waste Land is the poem par excellence that grapples with the problem of faith in a post-Christian world. True, the poem doesn’t mention Christ by name nor is it explicitly Christian in its imagery. But it is, to borrow a phrase from Flannery O’Connor, Christ-haunted. I believe that one must enter into the world of the poem and to accept it on its own terms but that it does help to have a tour guide. I propose to become that guide, to offer my own insights and experiences of it. The poem is only difficult because the subject matter is difficult. It is only obscure because so much of the material it takes for granted has been lost. Reading it is participating in an archeological dig of sorts, you wade into the rubbish heap certain that you will find a treasure whose value is beyond price.

Now that I think about it, I suppose this project is really about my own renewal as well. I want to dive into the poem in the hopes of recovering the zeal I had a decade ago as a young English major. I want to restore that which has been lost, to dig deeper in the hops that this time I will uncover even more than I had found before. But I hope that for you, the blog reader, it will be interesting and entertaining. Even if you have no interest in Eliot or poetry, perhaps you will find something in these posts that will speak to you.

* Image credit: Black Cross with Red Sky by Georgia O’Keefe