0.2 by T. S. Eliot (1922)
0.3 "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in
ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σἰβυλλα τἱ
θἐλεις ; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεἰν θἑλω.”
0.1. TITLE: Eliot, in the first of his own endnotes, directly acknowledged what inspired the name of this poem (see note 0.2), but see also notes 42, 145 and 385 for other influences, and see note 111 for an inspiration to the poem’s earlier working title, “He Do The Police In Different Voices.” Those many voices will become apparent throughout these annotations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, initially presented in 1922, is offered here in the form of its publication in Poems, 1909-1925 (Faber), the first edition in which Eliot included explanatory endnotes. His notes and these expanded annotations serve primarily to acknowledge the sources of the voices. These sources are given full citations at their primary reference points. All of the pre-poem sources are now public domain works, and many are widely available online. Most of the translations turned to here are also from publicly held works that would have been known in 1922. The most frequent sources for Eliot’s “voices” are:
SHAKESPEARE, surpassing Dante and the Bible (see note 130); specifically, William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1605) (notes 0.2, 4, 8, 42, 74, 76.5, 92, 112, 123, 128, 130, 131, 172, 172.5, 214, 231, 380, 393, 417, 432, 433); The Tempest (1611) (7, 12, 15, 26, 48, 76.5, 111, 125, 138, 167, 172.5, 182, 186, 191, 257, 266, 276, 291, 321.5, 393); Anthony & Cleopatra (1623) (8, 34, 42, 77, 80, 111, 172, 227, 293, 420); Cymbeline (1623) (8, 77, 80, 197); MacBeth (1623) (141, 308, 318, 321.5); and Coriolanus (1608) (417).
THE BIBLE, cited here and throughout these notes, with rarest exception, from the King James Version (1611), with references to Genesis (note 374), Job (22, 321.5), Psalms (184, 311), Ecclesiastes (13,23, 141), Isaiah (25, 145 (Darby Translation), 184, 426), Jeremiah (27, 385), Ezekiel (20, 22, 116, 186), Daniel (361), Matthew (184, 311, 311.5, 322, 324, 393), Luke (322, 366), John (0.5, 184, 201, 219, 298, 321.5, 322), Romans (307, 319), 1 Corinthians (71), Philippians (434) and Revelation (209, 248, 250, 321.5).
DANTE Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (ca. 1321; tr. Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, 1867), including Inferno (notes 12, 34, 40, 61, 63, 64, 68, 76.5, 126, 131, 246, 321.5, 343, 412 and 430); Purgatorio (0.4, 41, 182, 221, 293 and 428); and Paradiso (41).
VIRGIL, Aeneid (19 BCE, tr. John Dryden 1697): see notes 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 12, 26, 34, 70, 80, 92, 231, 276, 293, 307 and 388.
OVID, Metamorphoses (AD 8; tr. John Dryden, Samuel Garth, Alexander Pope et al, 1717), with stories of the Sybil (notes 0.3, 55, 63, 76.5, 111, 253) the Lethe River (4, 214, 266), the rape of Philomela (8, 99, 198, 202, 209, 242, 253, 280, 429), the Hyacinth prince (36, 39, 42, 71, 74, 76.5, 111, 125, 138, 176, 209, 214, 227, 311.5, 312, 323, 378, 429 ), Actaeon and Diana (77, 197, 198, 248, 276) and Tiresias (54, 208, 218, 219, 243, 248). See also Ovid’s Tristia at note 276.
ELIOT’S OWN VOICE, and the voices of those immediately around him, are also heard through several key resources:
“Eliot”: Eliot’s 1925 endnotes, from Poems, 1909-1925 (Faber).
“F&T”: T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land, a Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited and with an Introduction by Valerie Eliot (1971).
“Letters”: Valerie Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922 (1988).
“Letters II”: Valerie Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. 2: 1923-1925 (2011).
PRESENTATION: Preceding these annotations, the poem is offered to the reader as Eliot first intended, without interruption and with the line spacing intact, but with several typographical fixes to the 1925 edition, two of which Eliot would later endorse, at lines 42 (changing Od’ to Oed’) and 131 (deleting an extra quotation mark). Line numbers are also adjusted, without the poet’s endorsement, to fix an earlier miscount at line 347. Following Eliot’s lead, the poem is then offered to the student, with the endnotes interspersed and the line numbering increased for easier cross-referencing. Thus, the reader is encouraged to study and the student is encouraged to read. And so we begin...
0.2. WESTON AND FRAZER: Eliot: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommendit (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.”
Thomas Stearns Eliot gets top billing for The Waste Land, but the first of his endnotes spotlights the work of two anthropologists, Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920) and James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic & Religion, 3d Ed (1914). Anthropology (see also note 218), the study of humanity across cultures and time and discipline, was reaching a new level of popular appeal in the early 1920s, thanks in part to the works of Weston and Frazer.
THE GRAIL LEGEND, Weston’s key focus, is alluded to at lines 31-35, 201, 266-306, 386-390 and 424-426, and discussed at notes 8, 31, 46, 201, 209, 266, 388 and 425. See also Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913): “In Arthurian legend, a Fisher King (the fish being an ancient symbol of life) has been maimed or killed, and his country has therefore become a dry Waste Land; he can only be regenerated and his land restored to fertility by a knight (Parsifal) who perseveres through various ordeals to the Perilous Chapel and learns the answers to certain ritual questions about the Grail.” And from Ritual to Romance 2: “...the story postulates a close connection between the vitality of a certain King, and the prosperity of his kingdom; the forces of the ruler being weakened or destroyed, by wound, sickness, old age, or death, the land becomes Waste, and the task of the hero is that of restoration.”
RENEWAL, shown through revegetation and the effects of spring, is also the theme of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which considered the traditions of ancient fertility cults and ritual sacrifice that have influenced our modern culture. Volumes V & VI of this work, also credited in Weston’s Ritual to Romance,offered a two part study of Adonis, Attis and Osiris, respectively Greek, Phrygian and Egyptian gods of vegetation who were said to live and die annually.
THE ESCORT CYCLE of Aeneas’s Sybil, Virgil’s Aeneas and Dante’s Virgil (and in turn, Eliot’s Dante and our Eliot) is also introduced by Frazer’s book, which opens with the “sylvan landscape” (see line 98) of J. M. W. Turner, The Golden Bough (1834), also featured in the 1856 H. Graves & Co. edition of Virgil, Aeneid. For the painting’s story, see Virgil, Aeneid 6. Aeneas, in search of a new home after leaving his destroyed city of Troy, encounters the Sybil at Cumae. The Sybil agrees to act as his escort into hell, where Aeneas hopes to find the ghost of his father, but to enter he first must give Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld, the bough of a golden tree that replenishes itself as branches are taken from it. Compare Virgil escorting the poet through the circles of hell in Dante, Inferno 1.130-135. See also Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.1.127-138, for another father and child ghost scene. But first, before the guidance of Shakespeare and Dante and Virgil, it was the Sybil who escorted Aeneas, leading him not just to write but to relate. See Aeneid 6.116-119:
“...Commit not thy prophetic mind
To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind,
Lest they disperse in air our empty fate;
Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate."
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| J. M. W. Turner, The Golden Bough (1834) |
0.3. THE SYBIL: We have met “Syballum,” the Sybil, as an escort to Aeneas, but it is the Sybil’s untranslated words from another setting that give this poem its opening epigraph. For a translation, see Trimalchio, in Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, 48 (ca. AD 50, tr. Michael Heseltine 1913):
“Yes, and I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage; and when the boys cried at her: ‘Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?’ ‘I would that I were dead,’ she used to answer.’”
Apollo had granted the Sibyl a wish in exchange for her virginity; she asked for eternal life but in time she shriveled up, having forgotten to ask for eternal youth. See also Ovid, Metamorphoses 14:122-133 (AD 8; tr. John Dryden, Samuel Garth, Alexander Pope et al, 1717):
“I am no deity, reply'd the dame,
But mortal, and religious rites disclaim.
Yet had avoided death's tyrannick sway,
Had I consented to the God of day.
With promises he sought my love, and said,
Have all you wish, my fair Cumaean maid.
I paus'd; then pointing to a heap of sand,
For ev'ry grain, to live a year, demand.
But ah! unmindful of th' effect of time,
Forgot to covenant for youth, and prime.
The smiling bloom, I boasted once, is gone,
And feeble age with lagging limbs creeps on.”
ETERNITY, or the thought of never dying, is abhorrent to the Sybil, and her sentiment of a living hell also resonates in an alternative epigraph Eliot had once considered from Kurtz’s dying words in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902):
“The horror! The horror!”
See F&T, and note 298. But just as Marlow would call Kurtz’s cry a moral victory, Eliot, even as he relates the Sybil’s wish to be dead, appears to be actively yearning for something beyond the metaphorical grave. See note 298 for the poet’s eventual appreciation of a “new start.” More immediately, see note 0.5 for the first of several allusions to the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead and given a more positive promise of eternal life.
CONRAD: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is alluded to several times in this poem; see notes 0.3, 41, 76.5, 123, 266, 272 and 298. See also an allusion to Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands at note 395.
EPHEMERALITY: Counterposed to eternity, and rejecting the Sybil’s predicament, is the thought that nothing lasts forever. This too is reflected throughout The Waste Land, most notably in its sensitivity to the season cycle (see note 141) and its observation of the rise and fall of cities and civilizations (see note 376), but also within the poem’s many substories, built on memories and relationships.
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