The Waste Land

We gathered at Little Gidding this weekend to read The Waste Land and drink Absinthe, among other things (lighting drinks on fire is too much fun, plus I think it suits the mood of The Waste Land).

I know this is a silly connection to make, but a couple of lines from the beginning of A Game of Chess (a section I particularly liked) remind me of Roxaboxen:

"Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone"

I don't know The Waste Land very well, and only lately have I come to love it. I'm still not sure exactly what to make of it: I mostly read it in light Eliot's Four Quartets (I just can't help it!--he sticks with so many of the same themes.). His inclusion of other languages in the poem is slightly annoying, although Stearns insists that we mustn't translate them all, that a big part of what's going on is the alienation and ineffability (honestly, I just mostly think it's always pretty pretentious to include untranslated lines from other languages--even the most intelligent reader doesn't know all of the languages, and I really don't know any of them).

Part of what we debated a bit (and I think disagreed on) is how much hope and Christianity is present in the poem. It may be that what is genius about the poem is how Eliot leaves the question of whether there is hope up in the air: toward the end, we see the empty chapel with the wind blowing through it. But, just after that, we see the empty chapel, we hear a cock crow, and Eliot tells us that there is lightening, and a wind bringing rain.

Throughout the poem, there are a million beautiful lines (and it's shocking, because they're beautiful in such different ways--some are rococo-ly over-wrought; others are remind you of a carnival ground the morning after). But the poem is much more than a collection of beautiful lines--the way in which Eliot weaves together the different myths and vignettes and themes is the most remarkable part.


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