The Waste Land Discussion Group

I don't know if there's any demand for this, but I thought it might be fun to go through TS Eliot's epic The Waste Land, just seeing what we make of it. For those who haven't read it, here's the full text.

I'm not sure how big chunks to take this in, but I'm going to kick off with just a few lines, and then post a few questions at the end which might make good discussion points. Feel free to ignore them if they give you flashbacks to English Lit lessons.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.


And the questions:

What's so bad about April? Isn't February actually a sight crueller?

How can winter be keeping us warm?

What is that dried tubers reference about?

Is there a discernible metre here?

What's the point in having a couple of lines rhyming, but not in any obvious pattern?

So can we collectively conclude that Eliot's not being literal when he's talking about April's cruelty? To me, it seems that at this point he's talking about the unpleasantness of awakening, that being (metaphorically) dead is in some sense a comforting state. When he calls this section 'The Burial of the Dead', does he mean the process of interment itself, or the state of being buried?

And while we're on the subject, what is the Waste Land, exactly? Is it death? Forgetfulness? Awakening?

Deccydiva said:

My Eng Lit lecturer claimed the entire poem was about sex and in retrospect I wonder whether that was a highly personal perspective! There is a recurring image of water and fertility...

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I'm a bit too young to remember, but wasn't everyone a bit sex-obsessed in the 1970s? It'd be terribly disappointing if it turned out it was all about procreation.

kdnxdr said:

I've never studied poetry so, I've never studied this poem.

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Me neither. It's great that there are people around who have studied this poem, and I plan on learning as much as I can from them (I've just added the word reverte to my vocabulary), but hopefully this won't become purely a thread for academics. There can't be too many people in poetry who haven't read the Waste Land or don't have an opinion about it.

I've been thinking about this April is the cruellest month line. It's become so much a part of the language that it no longer seems perverse. Every spring I'll hear at least one weather forecaster announce the coming of a cold front over the Bay of Biscay with the words, 'well, they do say April is the cruellest month.' But spring is traditionally a time of renewal. I've read loads of Russian poetry, and I can't imagine Nekrasov, say, with his General Frost marching through the forest freezing a widow to death at the grave of her husband, saying that winter was warm and April cruel.

Then I got to wondering if there could have been a sense for Eliot in which April was literally, and not just metaphorically, cruel. Eliot lived in Britain throughout the First World War, and most of the major offensives in France took place in the warmer months. Once the autumn rains came and the battlefields turned to mud, a relative period of peace would come. Perhaps a certain forgetfulness did arrive with winter, but with the certain knowledge that, come spring, the military offensives would recommence. I've often wondered if one of the influences on this poem, particularly in this first section, is the trenches of Flanders.

That moment in Nekrasov when General Frost turns into her husband and freezes her to death is just about the saddest thing I've ever read. It literally brings tears to my eyes, and I'm usually not at all sentimental about fictional characters.

Anis - if you want I can PM you a translated version of it. The full title is Moroz, krasnyi nos, or Frost, the Red-Nosed, which sounds rather jolly but isn't at all.

Kid - I'll put it up later today

This week's section is a little longer, but it all seems to fit together:


Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter


My translation of the line in German is:

I'm not a Russian (woman) at all, I'm originally from Lithuania, real German

The Starnbergersee is Lake Starnberg, in Southern Bavaria. Presumably the Hofgarten is the one in Munich, capital of Bavaria.

For me, the obvious questions to ask about this section are about the Marie and her place in the poem. What's her story? Why does Eliot mention her? What can we surmise about her? Is there a real life individual behind her?

The brilliance of the Waste Land is certain. I doubt whether any one interpretation can ever be the correct one, mainly because there are so many points which you can read in more than one way. Eliot would surely have been aware of this, and since he published it in this form, he mustn't have minded too much.

Marie's little story has always guess me. My best interpretation is that she's an exiled member of a rich German family. I'd always taken that fact that she's from Lithuania to mean that she was from Memelland, the north-easternmost strip of Germany which was incorporated into Lithuania after WW1. However, my friend google informs me that the annexation didn't take place until 1923, just after the Waste Land was published. I don't know if a Memelland German in the early 1920s would have thought of themselves as coming from Litauen. Before WW1, Lithuania was part of Russia proper, so, if Marie was exiled, it could have been because of the outbreak of war between Germany and Russia in 1914. Or maybe she's from an earlier period or no time period at all. I'm just speculating.

Anyway, Marie's an exile from the extremely fringes of German-speaking Europe, marked by her accent as an outsider to the point where she has to assert her Germanness. Certainly she's rich, given her ability to travel around and her relationship with an archduke. Wikipedia locates the title of archduke within the former Holy Roman Empire, which never extended anywhere near Lithuania, and was more commonly associated with the Habsburgs. Their empire in Eliot's lifetime was entirely outside modern Germany, and again nowhere near Lithuania. To modern ears, archduke immediately summons up images of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose death kicked off the whole WW1 shooting match. I don't know whether in 1921 or so the word archduke would have been taken by Eliot's readers to mean Franz Ferdinand specifically.

I'm with Anis in seeing Marie's (in my interpretation, pre-exile) childhood as relating to the warm winter of L5. She remembers glorious, exhilarating adventures in her lost childhood home, and she whiles away her adulthood in passivity, at leisure resorts, drinking coffee and reading through the night. She goes south because of its warmth: she associates snow with her lost childhood, and doesn't want to be reminded of it.

Like I said, just my speculation.