TWL, Part II: Words

76.5     II. A Game of Chess

76.5. ACT TWO: This is the “air” section, characterized by ostensibly meaningful words made empty in their presentation.  Several coarse seduction scenes are staged through a series of walls that talk (see note 8) and then some chatty marital advice is set to a bartender’s “last call” mantra (lines 139-172).  All of this follows the beat of dying words in disguise, by the last gasps of Hamlet and the departing words of Ophelia (note 4, and lines 128 and 172).

Meanwhile, the title of the section refers to chess, a game in which words are practically unnecessary until the “check” and “mate” death knell at the end.  See note 137 for the source of this section’s title.

DYING WORDS range across a spectrum, from the deathless speech of the Sybil wanting to die (note 0.3) to the speechless death of the drowned sailor/hyacinth girl (lines 38-40, 47-48).  Rhetorical questions hang in the air (lines 111-134), souls sigh in limbo (lines 60-68), a riverbank weeper weeps (line 182) and a lovely woman sees death as her only escape (see line 253 and note 253).

There are allusions to the last words of Hamlet (line 128) and Ophelia (line 172), Agamemnon (line 198), Conrad's Kurtz (note 298), Webster's characters Flamineo (line 44) and the stabbed patient (line 118), and to tragic stories woven into tapestries (lines 97-110). There are also subtle allusions to the speechless deaths of Marie’s cousin Rudolph (lines 8-18), the Earl of Leicester’s wife Amy Robsart (line 279), the children of Lilith (line 159) and Eliot's friend Jean Verdenal (note 42).

See also the “little life” allusion at line 7, referring to the final speech at the end of Shakespeare, The Tempest (note 7).  For Prospero’s extended speech see The Tempest 4.1.148-154:

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And —like the baseless fabric of this vision—
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

But there is more: see, for starters, note 298 for the more enduring words of epitaphs.