by T. S. Eliot
While Red Wing’s weeping her heart away.
She watched for him day and night,
She kept all the camp fires bright,
And under the sky each night she would lie
And dream about his coming by and by;
But when all the braves returned
The heart of Red Wing yearned,
For far, far away, her warrior gay
Fell bravely in the fray.
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Eliot, in a note to these lines which may not be serious, reports that lines
199–201 derived from a ballad “reported to me from Sydney, Australia.”
According to one scholar, who cites no evidence for his claim, this soldiers’
ballad originally had the word “cunts” instead of feet.
201 [soda water]: bicarbonate of soda, or baking soda, used for cleaning.
202 [ Et O ces voix d’enfants . . . ]: The last line of a sonnet by the French poet Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), “Parsifal,” first published in the Revue Wagnérienne
(6 June 1886).
Parsifal a vaincu les Filles, leur gentil
Babil et la luxure amusante—et sa pente
Vers la Chair de garçon vierge que cela tente
D’aimer les seins légers et ce gentil babil;
Il a vaincu la Femme belle, au coeur subtil,
Étalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante;
Il a vaincu l’Enfer et rentre sous sa tente
Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril,
Avec la lance qui perça le Flanc suprême!
Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même,
Et prêtre du très saint Trésor essentiel.
En robe d’or il adore, gloire et symbole,
Le vase pur où resplendit le Sang réel.
—Et, o ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole!
The French can be translated as follows:
Parsifal has overcome the maidens, their pretty
Babble and alluring lust—and the downward slope
Toward the Flesh of the virgin youth who tempts him
To love their swelling breasts and pretty babble.
He has overcome fair Woman, of subtle heart,
Holding out her tender arms and thrilling throat;
He has overcome Hell and returns under his tent
With a heavy trophy at his youthful arm,
With the lance which pierced the Savior’s side!
He has healed the King, he himself a king,
And a priest of the most holy Treasure.
In a robe of gold he worships the vase,
Glory and symbol, where the actual Blood shined.
—And O those voices of children singing under the cupola.
Verlaine’s poem refers to Richard Wagner’s opera, Parsifal (1882), in which
the innocent knight Parsifal overcomes first the temptations of the flower
maidens in Klingsor’s magic garden, then the temptations of the beautiful
Kundry, who acts under a spell cast by Klingsor. Parsifal recovers the sacred
spear with which Christ’s side had been pierced and returns to the Castle
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of Monsalvat, where the Knights of the Holy Grail are waiting, and Anfortas,
the Fisher King, will be healed by a touch from the spear. Before he heals
Anfortas, Kundry (now free from Klingsor’s spell) washes his feet (compare
with Mrs. Porter and her daughter), and after Anfortas is healed a choir of
young boys sings.
204–206 [Jug . . . Tereu]: See note to line 103.
209 [Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant]: In both ancient Greek and Latin,
euge means “well done” or “bravo!” In ancient Greek, eugeneia meant “high descent, nobility of birth,” and eugenes “well-born.” The word persists in the modern term “eugenics.” Smyrna, modern day Izmir, is on the western coast
of modern Turkey, or Asia Minor, and until 1914 was part of the Ottoman
Empire. Like other cities on the coast, it had had a heterogeneous population
and was divided into Turkish, Jewish, Armenian, Greek, and Frankish quar-
ters. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire had supported the Central
Powers (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire), while Greece had
allied itself to the Entente (France, Britain, Russia). With the end of the
war, obtaining Smyrna became Greece’s primary goal. In May 1919 a Greek
occupation force, protected by allied warships, disembarked in the city.
Meanwhile, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and allied occupation of
Constantinople had begun to produce support for the Turkish nationalist
movement headed by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), which had declared itself the
successor to the Ottoman Empire. In February 1921 an international confer-
ence was held in London to resolve the problem of Asia Minor, but no agree-
ment was reached. The Greeks launched a major o¤ensive in March and by
the end of the summer were only forty miles from Ankara. But in August,
Mustafa Kemal launched a countero¤ensive which completely routed the
Greeks. On 8 September the Greek army evacuated Smyrna; the next day the
Turks entered it and engaged in a full-scale massacre of the city’s Christian
inhabitants, killing some thirty thousand. The conflict was not resolved until
July 1923, with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, in which Greece ceded
all territories in Asia Minor to the newly created Republic of Turkey. In short,
Greece and Smyrna were much in the news throughout the period that Eliot
was writing The Waste Land.
212 [demotic]: As spoken by ordinary people, versus correct or learned speech.
213 [Cannon Street Hotel]: Cannon Street runs westward from King William
Street (see notes to lines 66, 67). The Cannon Street Station was designed by
John Hawkshaw, the South Eastern Railway’s consulting engineer, and built
between 1863 and 1866; it became a terminus for suburban commuters and
businessmen traveling to and from the Continent. The massive, glass-roofed
shed yawned over the north bank of the Thames. Though the station was
remodeled in 1926 and badly damaged by bombs in World War II, its two
distinctive towers, a familiar City landmark, were reconstructed as part of a
redevelopment in 1969. Attached to the station was the City Terminus Hotel,
later renamed the Cannon Street Hotel (see Fig. 10), designed by Edward
Middleton Barry (1830–1880) and opened in May 1867. The building pre-
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sented an uneasy mixture of Italianate and French Renaissance styles. The
Cannon Street facade had its east and west corners, each crowned with a
mansard roof and spirelet brought forward from the main building line.
The hotel closed in 1931, due to a decline in business; its public rooms were
kept open for meetings and banquets, but the remainder were converted to
oªces, and the building was renamed Southern House. It was demolished
in 1963 and replaced with a fifteen-story oªce block of sterile appearance.
The architect, Edward Middleton Barry, is best known for having designed
several notable buildings in London, including the railway hotel at Charing
Cross, and Floral Hall in Covent Garden, Royal Opera House.
214 [a weekend at the Metropole]: The Metropole is a hotel in Brighton (see Fig.
11), a holid
ay resort on the southern coast of England. Designed by Alfred
Waterhouse (1830–1905) and opened in July 1890, it was the largest in Brit-
ain outside London, with 328 rooms of various sizes. The seven-story build-
ing, erected in red brick and terra-cotta, was also the first to break with the
traditional cream color of buildings on the seafront; at the time it was called
the ugliest building in Brighton. Today it is rather plain, adorned largely by
ironwork balconies, since alterations made in 1959 included removing the
distinctive bronze spire and several turrets, cupolas, and pinnacles.
218 [I Tiresias . . . two lives]: A legendary blind seer from Thebes. One day, when
he saw snakes coupling and struck them with his stick, he was instantly
transformed into a woman; seven years later the same thing happened again
and he was turned back into a man. Since he had experienced the body in
both sexes, he was asked by Jove and Juno to settle a dispute concerning
whether men or women had greater pleasure in making love. Tiresias took
the side of Jove and answered that women had more pleasure. Juno, an-
gered, blinded him. In compensation, Jove gave him the gift of prophecy
and long life. The story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, III, 316–338 (Eliot, in his notes, gives the original Latin for lines 320–338), given here in
Rolfe Humphries’s translation:
So, while these things were happening on earth,
And Bacchus, Semele’s son, was twice delivered,
Safe in his cradle, Jove, they say, was happy
And feeling pretty good (with wine) forgetting
Anxiety and care, and killing time
Joking with Juno. “I maintain,” he told her,
“You females get more pleasure out of loving
Than we poor males do, ever.” She denied it,
So they decided to refer the question
To wise Tiresias’ judgment: he should know
What love was like, from either point of view.
Once he had come upon two serpents mating
In the green woods, and struck them from each other,
And thereupon, from man was turned to woman,
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And was a woman seven years, and saw
The serpents once again, and once more stuck them
Apart, remarking: “If there is such magic
In giving you blows, that man is turned to woman,
It may be that woman is turned to man. Worth trying.”
And so he was a man again; as umpire,
He took the side of Jove. And Juno
Was a bad loser, and she said that umpires
Were nearly always blind, and made him so forever.
No god can over-rule another’s action,
But the Almighty Father, out of pity,
In compensation, gave Tiresias power
To know the future, so there was some honor
Along with punishment.
Tiresias also figures prominently in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, in which
he recognizes that the curse on Thebes has come about because Oedipus has
unknowingly committed incest with his mother Jocasta and killed his father.
Thebes has been turned into a waste land, its land and people infertile.
221 [Homeward . . . the sailor home from sea]: Eliot’s note refers to Fragment 149
by Sappho, a Greek poet of the seventh century b.c.: “Hesperus, you bring
home all the bright dawn disperses, / bring home the sheep, / bring home the
goat, bring the child home to its mother.” For many readers the entire pas-
sage on “the violet hour” (lines 215–223) recalls Dante, Purgatorio VIII, 1–6: Era già l’ora che volge il disio
ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core
lo dí c’han detto ai dolci amici addio;
e che lo novo peregrin d’amore
punge, s’e’ ode squilla di lontano
che paia il giorno pianger che si more.
The passage can be translated as follows:
It was now the hour that turns back the desire
of sailors and melts their heart
the day that they have bidden dear friends farewell,
and pierces the new traveler with love
if he hears in the distance
the bell that seems to mourn the dying day.
222 [The typist . . . ]: It is diªcult today to appreciate just how innovative Eliot was in making a typist a protagonist in a serious poem. Prior to The Waste
Land typists had appeared almost exclusively in light verse, humorous or
satirical in nature. Their ever increasing presence in oªces after 1885 was
registered instead in fiction and early film. While they were sometimes inte-
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grated into genre fiction (the thriller, detective fiction), often they were
shown being tempted by unscrupulous bosses or fellow workers. Early nov-
els about typists, from 1893 to 1908, were often melodramatic and lurid (see,
for example, Clara Del Rio, Confessions of a Type-Writer [Chicago: Rio, 1893]), but these vanished after 1910. Instead, typists became a subject increasingly
explored by writers working in the tradition of realism. American writers
who did this were David Graham Phillips (mentioned by Eliot in the London
Letter, March 1921, 137), The Grain of Dust (New York: D. Appleton, 1911);
Sinclair Lewis, The Job (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1917); and Winston
Churchill, The Dwelling Place of Light (New York: Macmillan, 1917). In Great Britain authors who did this were Ivy Low, The Questing Beast (London:
Secker, 1914); Arnold Bennett, Lilian (London: Cassell, 1922); and Rebecca
West, The Judge (London: Hutchinson, 1922). In four of these novels the
heroine engages in what would now be termed consensual premarital sex.
225 [Her drying combinations]: A “combination” was the popular term for a
“combination garment,” so-called because it combined a chemise with draw-
ers or panties in a single undergarment. Combinations were introduced in
the 1880s and vanished after World War II.
234 [a Bradford millionaire]: Bradford is located in the western part of Yorkshire,
a county in the northeast of England; it has always been a woolen and textile
center, and during the nineteenth century it experienced fantastic growth, its
population rising from 13,000 in 1801 to 280,000 by 1901. In Eliot’s era the
town was still known for its textile industries, which employed more than
33 percent of the city’s workers. Its mills prospered during World War I by
manufacturing serge, khaki uniforms, and blankets for the armed forces.
After the war there were charges of wartime profiteering.
246 [And walked among . . . the dead]: See Homer, Odyssey, book XI, which
recounts Odysseus’s journey to the underworld, where he consults Tiresias.
253 [When lovely woman . . . ]: Eliot’s note directs the reader to a novel by Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774), The Vicar of Wakefield (1762), chapter 24. The chapter begins with the song of Livia, which is introduced thus:
The next morning the sun rose with peculiar warmth for the season;
so that we agreed to breakfast together on the honey-suckle bank: where,
wile we sate, my yongest daughter, at my request, joined her voice to the
concert on the trees about us. It was in this place my poor Olivia first
met her seducer, and every object served
to recall her sadness. But that
melancholy, which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by
sounds of harmony, soothes the heart instead of corroding it. Her
mother too, upon this occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and
loved her daughter as before. “Do, my pretty Olivia,” she cried, “let us
have that little melancholy air your pappa was so fond of, your sister
Sophy has already obliged us. Do child, it will please your old father.”
She complied in a manner so exquisitely pathetic as moved me.
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When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can sooth her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom—is to die.
257 [“This music . . . upon the waters”]: See note to line 192.
258: The Strand, three-fourths of a mile long, is one of the busiest and most con-
gested streets in London. It runs northeast from Trafalgar Square parallel to
the Thames. Together with its prolongation, Fleet Street, it connects the City
(or financial district) with Westminster (the political district). The street con-
tains many restaurants, theaters, pubs, and hotels. Queen Victoria Street
runs from Bank Junction, the very heart of the City, southwest and then west
to Blackfriars Bridge (see Fig. 9). See also ll. 180, 207.
260 [Lower Thames Street]: This street runs eastward from London Bridge along
the north bank of the Thames (see Figs. 9, 12, 13). At this time the eastern end
of it still housed Billingsgate Market, and “fishmen” were laborers who carried
or wheeled the fish from docks to the market. At its western end still stands
the church of St. Magnus Martyr (see below, line 263). In Eliot’s time the
area was still lively with colorful fishmen and local tradespeople (see Fig. 13).
264 [St. Magnus Martyr]: Built between 1671 and 1676 by Sir Christopher Wren,
it is one of fifty-one churches which Wren built in the wake of the fire of
London of 1666. Wren is best known as the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Eliot refers to the slender Ionic columns which grace the church’s interior
(see Figs. 12–14).