by T. S. Eliot
Dreadful Night,”
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again;
Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
e d i t o r ’ s a n n o t a t i o n s t o l i n e s 8 – 2 2
7 7
Yet the phrase “a little life” is hardly unique to Thomson. It occurs repeatedly
in Christian writing which compares the “little life” of man to the vast de-
signs of God.
8 [Starnbergersee]: The German name for Lake Starnberger, which is located
fifteen kilometers (roughly nine miles) from Munich. Eliot visited the city
in 1911.
10 [Hofgarten]: “Court Garden” in German. The Hofgarten, which is located in
the heart of Munich, dates to the seventeenth century and stands opposite
the Residenz, a sprawling building that until 1918 was the home of the Wit-
telsbach family, the ruling house of Bavaria. One side of the Hofgarten abuts
a tall arcade, the “colonnade” referred to in line 9 (see Fig. 1), while just be-
yond the arcade is the Arcade Café (see Fig. 2), situated within the Hofgarten
(see Fig. 3).
12 [Bin gar keine Russin . . . echt deutsch]: “I am not a Russian, I come from
Lithuania, a real German” (German).
15 [Marie]: In her notes to The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Original Drafts (hereafter TWL:AF), Valerie Eliot states that Eliot “met” the Countess Marie Larisch, though “when and where is not known,” and that
“his description of the sledding . . . was taken verbatim from a conversation
he had with” her (p. 126). Marie Larisch (1858–1940) was the illegitimate
daughter of Ludwig Wilhelm, heir to the throne of Bavaria, and Henriette
Mendel, a commoner. In 1859 Marie’s father renounced his claim to the
throne and married her mother. Around 1874 Marie went to live with Lud-
wig’s sister, her aunt, who was Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and she
became a companion to the empress’s son and the heir to the throne, Arch-
duke Rudolf. In 1877 Marie married Georg, Count Larisch von Moennich.
In 1889 the archduke was found dead, together with his mistress, and it
became known that Marie had served as a go-between for them, leaving her
in disgrace. To justify her conduct she later wrote My Past: Reminiscences of
the Courts of Austria and Bavaria, together with the True Story of Events Leading up to the Tragic Death of Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria (London: Bell and Sons; New York: Putnam, 1913). In 1950 the book was rediscovered by a
scholar of Eliot’s work, and for some twenty years, until Valerie Eliot pub-
lished her account in 1971, it was thought to have served as a source for
The Waste Land.
19–20 [What the roots . . . stony rubbish]: Perhaps an echo of Job 8:16–17. “He is
green before the sun, and his branch shooteth forth in his garden. His roots
are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones.”
20 [Son of man]: Eliot’s note cites Ezekiel 2:1. “And he said unto me, Son of man,
stand upon they feet, and I will speak unto thee.” Thereafter “son of man”
becomes the form in which God addresses the prophet Ezekiel.
22 [broken images]: Perhaps an echo of Ezekiel 6:4, in which God judges the
people of Israel for worshiping idols: “And your altars shall be desolate, and
your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men before
your idols.”
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e d i t o r ’ s a n n o t a t i o n s t o l i n e s 2 3 – 3 4
23 [And the dead tree . . . no relief ]: Eliot’s note cites Ecclesiastes 12:5, which describes the “evil days” that come when men are old and declining into dark-
ness: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall
be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall
be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and
the mourners go about in the streets.” Compare Eliot’s comments on Ecclesi-
astes in “Prose and Verse,” 162–163.
26 [Come in . . . this red rock]: Perhaps an echo of Isaiah 2:10: “Enter into the
rock, and hide thee in the dust, for fear of the Lord.” Or perhaps an echo of
a more consoling prophecy in Isaiah 32:2: “And a man shall be as a hiding
place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a
dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”
28–29 [Your shadow . . . rising to meet you]: Perhaps an echo from a speech
by the title character in the play Philaster by Francis Beaumont and John
Fletcher (written around 1608–1610). Philaster is a young prince who, like
Hamlet, has been unfairly dispossessed of his kingdom; he is in love with
Arethusa, daughter of the king, the man who has dispossessed him. Megra,
a lady of the court, has falsely accused Arethusa of having a love a¤air with
someone else, and her charge has been reinforced by Dion, a trusted cour-
tier who, wanting to force Philaster into open rebellion against the king,
has sworn that he knows it to be true. Philaster believes the accusation, and
longs to travel to “some far place / Where never womankind durst set her
foot,” a place where he will “preach to birds and beasts / What woman is
and help to save them from you”—that is, from women in general. There
he will deliver a homily to the animals which will show
How that foolish man
That reads the story of a woman’s face
And dies believing it is lost forever.
How all the good you have is but a shadow
I’th’ morning with you and at night behind you,
Past and forgotten. (III.ii.132–137)
As used by Eliot, the relevant phrases have been stripped of their amorous
and gender-bound context and applied to humans in general.
31–34 [ Frisch weht . . . weilest du]: As Eliot notes, his quotation is from the opera Tristan und Isolde (1865) by Richard Wagner (1813–1883), I.i.5–8. “Fresh
blows the wind / To the homeland; / My Irish child, / Where are you tarry-
ing?” (German). The scene opens on a ship that is transporting Isolde
from Cornwall to Ireland, where she is to marry King Mark. She is accom-
panied by Tristan, the king’s nephew. From the ship’s rigging, a sailor’s
voice resounds with a melancholy song about an Irish woman left behind,
which includes the lines transcribed by Eliot. Later in the opera, Isolde
decides to kill both Tristan and herself with poison; but her companion,
e d i t o r ’ s a n n o t a t i o n s t o l i n e s 3 5 – 4 3
7 9
Brangäne, substitutes a love potion for the poison, and the two fall hope-
lessly in love.
35 [hyacinths]: In Greek myth Hyacinth was a beloved companion of Apollo.
When the two engaged in a discus-throwing contest, Apollo’s discus inadver-
tently killed his friend. Where drops of Hyacinth’s blood touched the ground,
a purple flower miraculously arose, resembling a lily. Apollo inscribed his
grief upon the flower, which was said to have marks which looked like the
letters AI, ancient Greek for a cry of woe. The story is told in Ovid, Metamor-
/> phoses X, 162–219. Several di¤erent flowers seem to have been included
under this name in the ancient world, none of them the modern flower
which we call a hyacinth.
39–40 [I was neither / Living nor dead]: Perhaps an allusion to Dante, Inferno
XXXIV, 25. Dante recalls his state of mind when he first saw Satan at the
very bottom of the Inferno:
Com’ io divenni allor gelato e fioco
nol dimandar, lettor, ch’ i’ non lo scrivo,
però ch’ ogni parlar sarebbe poco.
Io non morì, e non rimasi vivo.
This can be translated:
How chilled and faint I turned then,
Do not ask, reader, for I cannot describe it,
For all speech would fail it.
I did not die, and did not remain alive.
41 [and I knew nothing]: Compare Job 8:9: “For we are but of yesterday, and know
nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow.”
42 [Öd’ und leer das Meer]: “Desolate and empty the sea” (German). From Wag-
ner’s Tristan und Isolde, III.i.24. Tristan is lying grievously wounded outside Kareol, his castle in Brittany, tended by his companion Kurwenal. He will
die unless Isolde can come and cure him with her magic arts. Tristan wakes
from his delirium; he is clinging to life only so that he can find Isolde and
take her with him into the realm of night. For a moment he thinks that he
sees Isolde’s ship approaching; but a shepherd who is watching with him
pipes a sad tune: “Desolate and empty the sea.”
43 [Madame Sosostris]: The name is obviously appropriate for someone who
equivocates, or whose answer to every question is a variant of “so so.” Not
surprisingly, her friend is named Mrs. Equitone, a variant on the notion of
equivocation. To learned readers the name Sosostris may also recall the
Greek work for “savior,” soteros, which survives in the English word soteriological, of or having to do with the doctrine of salvation in Christian theol-
ogy. For many years scholars also thought that her name was suggested to
Eliot by a character in Aldous Huxley’s novel Chrome Yellow (1921), in which
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e d i t o r ’ s a n n o t a t i o n s t o l i n e s 4 6 – 4 8
Mr. Scogan disguises himself as a gipsy fortune-teller named Sesostris and,
at the village fête, reads the fortune of a simple young girl whom he means
to seduce. This scholarly myth was first promulgated by Grover Smith, “The
Fortuneteller in Eliot’s Waste Land, ” American Literature 25 (1954): 490–492.
To support his claim Smith cited a letter he had received from Eliot, dated
10 March 1952, in which Eliot had said it was “almost certain” that he had
borrowed the name from Chrome Yellow (“almost certain” are the only words
of the letter which are directly quoted). Smith then paraphrased the rest of
the letter: “He has also said that, being unconscious of the borrowing, he was unaware of any connection between the name of the clairvoyant and that
assumed by Mr. Scogan” (italics mine). Eliot had better reason than he knew
for being “unaware of any connection” between the two characters, for he
had probably drafted the scene with Madame Sosostris by early February
1921 and had certainly completed the typescript of parts I and II sometime
in mid-May, while Huxley, who was living in Italy, did not even begin to write
his novel until the beginning of June (see Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley:
A Biography, vol. 1, 1894–1939 [London: Chatto and Windus, 1973], 117, 119).
Eliot and Huxley did not correspond during this period, as the two men were
not close; and Eliot, writing in January 1921, had damned Huxley’s recent
long poem “Leda” as “a concession to the creamy top of the General Reading
Public” (see London Letter, March 1921, 139).
Smith’s mistaken claim was di¤used in his subsequent monographs on
Eliot: T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Influence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 76, a work that went through numerous
impressions and a second edition in 1974, and The Waste Land (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 47, 67–68. From these it became a standard
note in all commentaries on the poem.
46 [pack of cards]: The tarot deck consists of twenty-two cards, one unnumbered
and the rest numbered through twenty-one, which are added to a pack
(British usage) or deck of fifty-six cards arranged in four suits (cups, wands,
swords, and pentacles or pentangles). Jessie Weston suggested that these
suits were repositories of primeval symbols of fertility corresponding to the
four Grail talismans, grail-cup, lance, sword, and dish ( From Ritual to Ro-
mance, 77–79). Scholars have expended vast amounts of ink on establishing
precise connections between the tarot cards and Eliot’s use of them, even
though Eliot, in his notes to the poem, admitted that he had little familiarity
with the tarot and had “departed” from it “to suit [his] own convenience.”
47 [the drowned Phoenician Sailor]: There is no such card in the tarot deck, but
this passage is thought to anticipate part IV of The Waste Land.
48 [Those are pearls . . . Look!]: From Shakespeare, The Tempest I.ii.399. The play begins with a storm scene and a shipwreck: young Prince Ferdinand and
others from the court of Naples come to shore on an unnamed island inhab-
ited by Prospero, the former ruler of Naples whose throne has been usurped
by his brother Antonio, acting in concert with Ferdinand’s father, Alonso. At
e d i t o r ’ s a n n o t a t i o n s t o l i n e s 4 9 – 6 0
8 1
Prospero’s behest the storm has been created by Ariel, a magical spirit of the
island who serves him. When Ferdinand laments his father’s supposed death
—he is mistaken, for his father is still alive—Ariel tries to comfort him with
a song (396–405):
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth su¤er a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Burden. Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them—ding-dong bell.
49 [Here is Belladonna . . . Rocks]: Belladonna is Italian for “beautiful woman.”
There is no such card in the tarot pack. Commentators have often urged that
the phrase, “the Lady of the Rocks,” has overtones of a passage in the essay
by Walter Pater (1839–1894) on “Leonardo da Vinci” in The Renaissance
(1873). Pater discusses da Vinci’s painting La Gioconda, popularly known as the Mona Lisa: “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the
vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secret of the grave;
and had been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and
traªcked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.” But Eliot disliked Pa-
ter’s prose style; see his comments on it in “Prose and Verse,” 162.
51–52 [Here is the man . . . the one-eyed merchant]: The first two cards, the man
with three staves and the wheel, are genuine tarot cards, but the one-eyed
merchant is Eliot’s invention.
60 [Unreal City]: The City is the name for the financial district (see Fig. 9) in
London, located just beyond the north end of London Bridge. The area is home
to the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, and the head oªces or head-
quarters of Britain’s major commercial banks, including Lloyds Bank in
Lombard Street, where Eliot worked from 1917 to 1925. The London Bridge
that Eliot knew (see Fig. 4) was built between 1825 and 1831 to a design by
John Rennie (1761–1821); it was dismantled in 1967 and replaced with the
current structure.
Eliot’s note at this point invokes a poem by Charles Baudelaire (1821–
1867), “Les sept viellards” (1859), which recounts a ghostly encounter in the
street that sets the pattern for the incident which follows in this portion of
The Waste Land.
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
Les mystères partout coulent comme des sèves
Dans les canaux étroits du colosse puissant.
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e d i t o r ’ s a n n o t a t i o n s t o l i n e 6 0
Un matin, cependant que dans la triste rue
Les maisons, dont la brume allongeait la hauteur,
Simulaient les deux quais d’une rivière accrue,
Et que, décor semblable à l’âme de l’acteur,
Un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l’espace,
Je suivais, roidissant mes nerfs comme un héros
Et discutant avec mon âme déjà lasse,
Le faubourg secoué par les lourds tombereaux.
Tout à coup, un vieillard dont les guenilles jaunes
Imitaient la couleur de ce ciel pluvieux,
Et dont l’aspect aurait fait pleuvoir les aumônes,
Sans la méchanceté qui luisait dans ses yeux,
M’apparut. On eût dit sa prunelle trempée
Dans le fiel; son regard aiguisait les frimas,
Et sa barbe à long poils, roide comme une épée,
Se projetait, pareille à celle de Judas.
Il n’était pas voûté, mais cassé, son échine
Faisant avec sa jambe un parfait angle droit,
Si bien que son bâton, parachevant sa mine,
Lui donnait la tournure et le pas maladroit
D’un quadrupède infirme ou d’un juif à trois pattes.
Dans la neige et la boue il allait s’empêtrant,
Comme s’il écrasait des morts sous ses savates,
Hostile à l’univers plutôt qu’indi¤érent.
Son pareil le suivait: barbe, oeil, dos, bâton, loques,