367 What is that sound high in the air
368 Murmur of maternal lamentation
369 Who are those hooded hordes swarming
370 Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
371 Ringed by the flat horizon only
372 What is the city over the mountains
373 Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
374 Falling towers
375 Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
376 Vienna London
377 Unreal
378 A woman drew her long black hair out tight
379 And fiddled whisper music on those strings
380 And bats with baby faces in the violet light
381 Whistled, and beat their wings
382 And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
383 And upside down in air were towers
384 Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
385 And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted
wells.
367. A DRUNKEN HYMN: Eliot: “Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos: Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligen Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen.”
See Hesse, A Glimpse of Chaos (note 298), with reference to Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (note 248):
“Already half Europe, at all events half Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is reeling into the abyss and, as she reels, she sings a drunken hymn such as Dmitri Karamazov sang. The insulted citizen laughs that song to scorn, the saint and seer hear it with tears.”
Compare St. Augustine’s point of conversion, leaving behind influences of drunkenness and lust, at note 307.
Meanwhile, the incognizance of lines 366 and 367 continues at lines 369 and 372. Compare lines 54-56, where Madame Sosostris could not find the Hanged Man (which Eliot associated with the hooded figure of Christ (see note 46 and line 364)) and saw only “crowds (now hooded hordes) of people, walking round in a ring.”
374. FALLING TOWERS: The unreal city (see note 60), previously seen at dawn and at noon (see lines 61 and 208), is now in Tiresias’s violet hour (see lines 215 and 220 and note 380); it is also a city at war with bombs bursting, planes whistling and towers falling.
Towers will appear throughout section five, and while the only towers mentioned previously were white with pealing bells (line 289), they are now falling (line 374), upside down in air (line 383), horrible (note 412) and destroyed (line 430). Compare the tale of the Tower of Babel reaching vainly to God, at Genesis 11:4-9:
“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men [built].... And the LORD said, Behold, the people ...have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth...”
376. FALLING CITIES: London is now placed in context with Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria and Vienna, all centers of empires and cultural hubs for their time, but here they are cracking, falling apart and reforming into something unreal. Babylon (note 209) and Carthage (note 307) may be added to this list. See also Joyce’s Dublin at note 111.
378. THE LONG-HAIRED WOMAN, fiddling whisper music on her hair, can be compared to the hyacinth girl, found with “arms full, and ...hair wet” (line 38); the woman on talking walls whose “hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words” (line 108); the woman who walked the street with “hair down” (line 133); and the woman who “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (line 255). See also hair’s tie to fertility in both Frazer, The Golden Bough 3:5.6, and Weston, From Ritual to Romance 4.
380. THE VIOLET HOUR, previously introduced at lines 215 and 220 as the evening hour at the end of the workday (see note 221), also alludes to the liturgical color of repentance and baptism; see Brooks (note 330). See also note 68 and Luke* 23:44 for the noon darkness that fell over the earth on Good Friday. Elsewhere, violet or purple, appearing here as light, describes air (line 373), sails (note 77) and trenches (note 331). See also Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5.177 (Ophelia’s violets withered when her father died) and 5.1.229 (Laertes wishing violets would spring from Ophelia’s grave). See also the “violet and purple morn” in Whitman, Memories 12. Violet also relates to Phoenicia, the “land of purple”; see note 312.
BATS WITH BABY FACES: See Pierre Leyris, Poémes, 1910-1930, 155 (1947), relating this passage to Hieronymus Bosch paintings, perhaps alluding to the baby faced bat in Bosch, Hell (1504).
Hieronymus Bosch,
Hell (detail) (1504)
382. CRAWLING DOWN A WALL: See Bram Stoker, Dracula 3 (1897): “I saw the whole man... begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings.”
384. TOLLING BELLS: See note 291 for the peal of bells in general, and see line 67, “where St. Mary Woolnoth kept the hours.” See also Whitman, Memories 6:
“With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang.”
385. VOICES ...OUT OF EMPTY CISTERNS recalls the “children’s voices in the dome” at line 202. See also Jeremiah 2:13,14:
“For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. ...The young lions roared upon him, and yelled, and they made his land waste...”
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