32 Der Heimat zu
33 Mein Irisch Kind,
34 Wo weilest du?
35 “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
36 “They called me the hyacinth girl.”
37 —Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
38 Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
39 Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
40 Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
41 Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
42 Oed’ und leer das Meer.
34. FRESH BLOWS THE WIND: See Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 1.1.5-8 (1865; tr. Richard le Gallienne 1909):
“Fresh blows the wind
For home:
My Irish child,
Where tarriest thou?”
This is a sailor’s song overheard by Princess Isolde, en route to her loveless marriage to King Mark of Cornwall; Isolde wants to drink poison to escape her fate, but her maid substitutes the poison with a love potion. She takes the potion in front of the king’s nephew Tristan, the potion takes its effect and they fall in love. Compare Venus sending Cupid to poison Queen Dido with love for Aeneas, at Virgil, Aeneid 1. 684-685:
“let thy secret fire
breathe o'er her heart, to poison and betray.”
See note 92 for the extended story of Venus, Aeneas and Dido.
TRISTAN was, with Parsifal of the Grail legend, one of King Arthur’s knights. See Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail. See also Dante, Inferno 5.61-69, where Tristan commiserates with Cleopatra (see line 77) and the widow Dido (see above), condemned for their lust to the second circle of hell.
36. THE HYACINTH GIRL, reflecting the name of a perennial April wildflower, was initially a Spartan prince endeared by the sun god Apollo (and also, in other accounts, by the wind god Zephyrus). While playing quoits in the sun the prince was killed by a wind-blown quoit; Apollo raised a purple flower out of his blood, traced a mournful “ai, ai” on its petals and named it Hyacinth. See Ovid, Metamorphosis 10:276-343. For other hyacinth references, see lines 37, 125, 176 and 323 and notes 39, 42, 71, 74, 76.5, 111, 125, 138, 176, 209, 214, 227, 311.5, 312, 323, 378 and 429.
39. AMBIGUOUS IDENTITIES recur throughout this poem. See Eliot’s note at note 125, tying the hyacinth girl, whose gender is already changed from its Ovidian source, to the drowned sailor with pearly eyes; this as the speaker’s own eyes are failing. See also lines 12, 39-40, 46-48, 54, 126, 207-08, 218-19, 312-18 and 320.
NEITHER LIVING NOR DEAD: See Dante, Inferno 34:25:
“I did not die, and I alive remained not.”
See also Bhagavat Gita 2:11 (ca. 100 BCE, tr. Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, 1882):
“Learned men grieve not for the living nor the dead.”
Compare lines 117-126 (those who know nothing) and 182 (one who grieves).
41. INTO THE HEART OF ...SILENCE: See Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3: While waiting for the tide to rise on the Thames, Marlow, “the only man of us who still followed the sea,” told his shipmates of a past journey up the Congo:
“into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.”
Compare with Dante, Paradiso 12:30-31:
"Out of the heart of one of the new lights
There came a voice..."
42. WASTE AND DREAR: Eliot: “Id. iii, verse 24.”
See Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 3.1.24:
“The sea is waste and drear.”
This is the report to Tristan’s henchman Kurwenal, who was keeping vigil over his ailing master and had asked a shepherd to “Watch thou the sea” for Isolde’s ship to arrive.
JEAN VERDENAL, a friend of Eliot’s who died in World War I, appears to have influenced this poem on several levels. See John Peter, A New Interpretation of The Waste Land (1952), and James E. Miller, T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977). Eliot met Verdenal in Paris in 1910, and they kept a long-distance friendship while Eliot was studying at Harvard in 1911 and 1912. See Eliot, Letters. In one letter to Eliot, Verdenal had expressed a deep admiration for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which now bookends the hyacinth girl / drowned sailor story. In April 1915 (the cruelest month; see line 1), Verdenal was among troops sent to Gallipoli (see Mrs. Porter’s soldiers at line 199; see also the Stetson friend, line 69), where he was officially commended for helping to evacuate wounded soldiers:
“Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist.”
He died two days later. That summer, Eliot published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and he dedicated his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Verdenal. In 1934, Eliot wrote in T.S. Eliot, A Commentary, Criterion (April 1934):
“I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.”
Compare lines 1-11, referring to lilacs, memory, mixing, mud and sunlight coming over the lake.
DROWNING, or “death by water,” which might creatively describe the cause of Verdenal’s demise, is also suggested as the poetic demise of the hyacinth girl at line 38 (“Your arms full, and your hair wet”). See also the shallow water death of Bavarian King Ludwig II (note 8), Ophelia’s death in Shakespeare, Hamlet (lines 170-172) and the drownings of the pearl-eyed sailor (line 48) and Phlebas the Phoenician (lines 312-321). Phlebas’s end and the title to Part IV is also portended at line 55 (“Fear death by water”). See also the simile of perfumes that “drowned the sense in odours” (line 89).
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