216 Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
217 Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
218 I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
219 Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
220 At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
221 Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
222 The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
223 Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
224 Out of the window perilously spread
225 Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
226 On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
227 Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
228 I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
229 Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest —
230 I too awaited the expected guest.
231 He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
232 A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
233 One of the low on whom assurance sits
234 As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
235 The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
236 The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
237 Endeavours to engage her in caresses
238 Which are still unreproved, if undesired.
239 Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
240 Exploring hands encounter no defence;
241 His vanity requires no response,
242 And makes a welcome of indifference.
243 (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
244 Enacted on this same divan or bed;
245 I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
246 And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
247 Bestows one final patronising kiss,
248 And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
217. END OF THE WORKDAY: For the violet hour motif, see note 380. See also note 221 for the sailor home from the sea.
218. TIRESIAS, INTRODUCED: Eliot: “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ’character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest:
‘...Cum Iunone iocos et maior vestra profecto est
Quam, quae contingit maribus’, dixisse, ‘voluptas.’
Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti
Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota.
Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva
Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu
Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem
Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem
Vidit et ‘est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae’,
Dixit ‘ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet,
Nunc quoque vos feriam!’ percussis anguibus isdem
Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.
Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa
Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto
Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique
Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte,
At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam
Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto
Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore.’”
See Ovid, Metamorphoses 3:412-443:
“Twas now, while these transactions past on Earth,
And Bacchus thus procur’d a second birth,
When Jove, dispos’d to lay aside the weight
Of publick empire and the cares of state,
As to his queen in nectar bowls he quaff’d,
‘In troth,’ says he, and as he spoke he laugh’d,
‘The sense of pleasure in the male is far
More dull and dead, than what you females share.’
Juno the truth of what was said deny’d;
Tiresias therefore must the cause decide,
For he the pleasure of each sex had try’d.
It happen’d once, within a shady wood,
Two twisted snakes he in conjunction view’d,
When with his staff their slimy folds he broke,
And lost his manhood at the fatal stroke.
But, after seven revolving years, he view’d
The self-same serpents in the self-same wood:
‘And if,’ says he, ‘such virtue in you lye,
That he who dares your slimy folds untie
Must change his kind, a second stroke I’ll try.’
Again he struck the snakes, and stood again
New-sex’d, and strait recover’d into man.
Him therefore both the deities create
The sov’raign umpire, in their grand debate;
And he declar’d for Jove: when Juno fir’d,
More than so trivial an affair requir’d,
Depriv'd him, in her fury, of his sight,
And left him groping round in sudden night.
But Jove (for so it is in Heav’n decreed,
That no one God repeal another’s deed)
Irradiates all his soul with inward light,
And with the prophet's art relieves the want of sight.”
219. PERCEPTIVENESS: See John 9: 25:
“Whether [Jesus, by healing on the Sabbath] be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.”
Compare Tiresias's ability to see (note 218) with that of Madame Sosostris (line 54), or of the one-eyed merchant with his allusion to the one-eyed Odin (lines 52, 54 and note 208), or, at the bottom of the sea, the pearly-eyed sailor (line 48). For more of the eye's limitations, see note 308.
FEELING OLD: For another perspective of an old, blind man, see Eliot, Gerontion (1920):
“Here I am, an old man in a dry month
...A dull head among windy spaces.
...An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.
...And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.”
Gerontion had been part of an earlier draft of this poem but was cut at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. See note 167.
See also Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
“And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
...I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.”
Eliot wrote Prufrock in 1911 at the age of 26, feeling old before his time. It was first published in 1915, and Eliot’s first book ofpoems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. Gerontion was written in 1919, three years before the publicationof The Waste Land.
221. HOME FROM THE SEA: Eliot: “This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, but I had in mind the longshore' or 'dory' fisherman, who returns at nightfall.”
See Sappho, fragment 95 (ca. 600 BCE, tr. Henry Thornton Wharton, 1895):
“Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered;
thou bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother.”
Compare Albert returning to Lil at lines 139 and following, and see also Robert Louis Stevenson, Requiem (1879):
“Home is the sailor, home from the sea.”
See also Dante, Purgatorio 8:1-2:
“Twas now the hour that turneth back desire
In those who sail the sea...”
223. CHANGING TIMES: Typists, the two-career household and ready-to-serve meals, were part of the war and post-war trend. See note 256. Compare the typist’s teatime with Countess Marie’s coffee break (line 11), the bar talk at last call (line 139), or lunch with the Smyrna merchant (line 213). See also note 263, and observe how time moves here from evening to breakfast to teatime.
227. COMBINATIONS are undergarments; stays are corsets. Contrast the piled up bed and the hyacinth girl's hair and clothes in need of drying (line 38) with Cleopatra’s chambers (line 77).
231. CARBUNCULAR: Pimpled. A carbuncle can also describe a burning charcoal or a red garnet stone. Compare these to the sailor’s pearly eyes (line 48). See also Shakespeare, Hamlet 2.2.401, where Hamlet recites a play passage in which a vengeful Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, has “eyes like carbuncles,” i.e red and bent on killing. The unsourced play is a dramatization of the fall of Troy from Virgil, Aeneid 2:506-558, and in this passage Aeneas is telling Queen Dido how Pyrrhus has covered himself in blood to avenge the death of his father. Compare Dryden’s translation at Aeneid 2:539: “And all his father sparkles in his eyes.” Compare this to the “one bold stare” of the young man (line 232).
234. BRADFORD MILLIONAIRE: Bradford was an English manufacturing town and home to the nouveaux riche. Compare the socialite chess players at line 137.
The expected guest, a young house clerk, is "one of the low" (line 233) and of an even station with the typist home at teatime, but his stature is raised by his self-assurance.
235. THE TIME IS NOW: Compare this to the impatience of Marvell over his Coy Mistress (note 141), the “good time” Albert is expected to want (line 148) and the bartender’s call to “hurry up it’s time” (lines 141-169), all essentially happening at once.
242. INDIFFERENCE: Compare this to the rape of Philomela, whom Tereus rendered unresponsive and indifferent by cutting out her tongue (note 99). See also the indifferent chess players, waiting for a knock upon the door (line 138).
244. FORESUFFERANCE: Tiresias, who had “perceived the scene, and foretold the rest” (see line 229), now reminds us, with a word that may be newly coined, that he perceives only by virtue of having “foresuffered,” or first experienced. See note 218. In Ovid’s tale, his experience was as an “umpire”between the sexes; however, Eliot suggests at note 218 that Tiresias, having suffered both sides, is more important than a mere spectator: he “sees... the substance of the poem,” and unites all of the characters.
245. THEBES, BELOW THE WALL: See Algernon Charles Swinburne, Tiresias (1885):
“I, Tiresias the prophet, seeing in Thebes
Much evil...”
See also Homer, Odyssey 11:561-565 (ca. 800 BCE, tr. A. T. Murray, 1919), where Odysseus tells his crew,
“Ye think, forsooth, that ye are going to your dear native land; but Circe has pointed out for us another journey, even to the house of Hades and dread Persephone, to consult the spirit of Theban Tiresias;”
246. WALKING AMONG THE DEAD: See Dante, Inferno 20:34-42, where Tiresias, being one who sees the future, is consigned to walk backwards in the eighth circle of hell:
“See, he has made a bosom of his shoulders!
Because he wished to see too far before him
Behind he looks, and backward goes his way:
Behold Tiresias, who his semblance changed,
When from a male a female he became,
His members being all of them transformed;
And afterwards was forced to strike once more
The two entangled serpents with his rod,
Ere he could have again his manly plumes.”
TIRESIAS, FROM OTHER PERSPECTIVES: Tiresias makes a range of appearances in other works of literature, although he is frequently presented as a blind soothsayer with stern advice. In addition to Ovid (note 218), Homer (note 245) and Dante (note 246), see Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 468-474 (429 BCE, tr. Francis Storr, 1921), where Tiresias curses Oedipus:
“Thus then I answer: since thou hast not spared
To twit me with my blindness--thou hast eyes,
Yet see'st not in what misery thou art fallen,
Nor where thou dwellest nor with whom for mate.
Dost know thy lineage? Nay, thou know'st it not,
And all unwitting art a double foe
To thine own kin, the living and the dead.”
See also Sophocles, Antigone 5:79-83 (441 BC, tr. Francis Storr, 1912), where Tiresias curses King Creon for threatening to bury his niece Antigone alive:
“I prophesy. For, yet a little while,
And sound of lamentation shall be heard,
Of men and women through thy desolate halls;
And all thy neighbor States are leagues to avenge
Their mangled warriors who have found a grave
I' the maw of wolf or hound.”
Compare this passage to the dog that would “dig it up again” at lines 74-75. The “desolate halls” of Thebes can also be compared to the desolate streets of Jerusalem at Jeremiah 33: 3 (see note 27) of Babylon at Revelation 18: 19 (see note 209) and ultimately to the unreal city of London (see note 60).
For another king sternly advised by Tiresias, see Euripides, The Bacchae (406 BCE), in which King Penteus is warned not to cross Dionysus, the god of fertility. When Penteus ignores Tiresias’sadvice, the god’s female followers, the doglike Maenads (the “raving ones”), tear him apart limb for limb. Euripides was said to have died a similar death shortly after writing this play; see Satyrus, Life of Euripides (ca. 250 BCE). Compare the assault on fertility to the infertile image of Mr. Eugenides and his pocket full of currants (see note 210) and to Frazer’s Artemis, goddess of fertility, being hung in effigy (see note 55).
For an alternative cause of Tiresias’s blindness, see Callymachus, The Bathing of Pallas (ca. 250 BCE), in which Tiresias is blinded after seeing Pallas bathing. Compare this to Ovid’s Actaeon being killed by his own dogs after watching Diana bathe (see note 197), and also to the fate of King Penteus, above.
Finally, reflecting the Tiresias of line 219, see Guillaume Apollinaire, The Breasts of Tiresias (1917), a French play described by its author as “a surrealistic drama,” thus coining a new word in modern art. Surrealism was not fully defined as a movement until after The Waste Land, although it was directly preceded by the more current trend of Dadaism (see note 418).
248. GROPING AWAY: Line 247 is enigmatically missing a subject, but in context it is either Tiresias himself, being blind and groping, or the carbuncular guest, being the patronizing third person and a departing lover (line 250) or, in the spirit of note 218, a melting of both, and all. At the end of the scene, he “gropes his way” out of the room. Compare Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: The Grand Inquisitor (1880, tr. ConstanceGarnett 1912): In Ivan’s dramatic “poem,” Christ’s only answer to his inquisitor is a kiss:
“The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”
Christ, like the Ovidian Tiresias “groping into sudden night” (see note 218), then leaves into “the dark alleys of the town.”
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