LECTURES TWO and THREE Chronicles of War and Evil I: traditional and

experimental approaches to war in literature a comparison between the poems

written in the First World War trenches (Lecture One), T.S. Eliots The Waste Land
[and two poems by William Butler Yeats The Second Coming and Lapis Lazuli]
The Soldier
by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Glory Of Women by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops 'retire'
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen, 1893 - 1918

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devils sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Louse Hunting, Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

Nudes -- stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.

And soon the shirt was aflare

Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.
Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons' pantomine
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the glibbering shadows
Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin
Charmed from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
Blown from Sleep's trumpet.
Such poetry dedicated to realistic notations about/from the terrifying, and in fact
just barbarous, Great War used stereotypes and exhausted or facile metaphors,
epithets deriving from simple, linear associations; they dwell long enough on their
descriptions to rub in the impressions/emotions; they observe traditional rules of
composition (being written in the fixed form
The major and revolutionary texts of the twentieth century appeared later,
however, namely in the nineteen-twenties. This period represents the Great Decade
of English modernism, when Eliots The Waste Land (1922), William Butler Yeatss
poem The Second Coming (1921) and his volume The Tower (1928), Virginia
Woolfs novels (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando) and, eventually,
James Joyces Ulysses (1922) were published.1

The scandal surrounding the publication of Ulysses was due to its surface licentiousness
that competed with its extremely complex artistry, which probably remained inaccessible to
the censorious public and authorities. After being accepted to be serialized in America (in
parts, between 1918 and 1920, in The Little Review) and in London (in 1919 by The Egoist),
it came to be published in Paris by a private bookstore, the Shakespeare and Company in
1922. It was banned in Britain until 1930 and in Ireland it remained unavailable at least until
1967. The first complete Irish edition was Sam Slotes, in 2012.

To illustrate the complexity of the representations they are really amplified echoes
of war in T. S. Eliots The Waste Land in the annus mirabilis 1922, the more
direct references to war in the poems first and last parts will be presented first.
Beforehand, some indications about how to read this epic poem of the twentieth
century should be provided.
1) The reminiscing voice is that of a sophisticated intellectual. It is the voice of
the implied author T.S. Eliot, who, as an American child, had been a lover of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica; a voice which does not become evident until
the poem is seen in performance, for reasons that ought to be obvious to
students of the Victorian literary canon: the poem is a multiple dramatic
monologue2.
2) The allusive texture of the poem hides the direct referents and the intentions
of this text in progress, whose meanings only begin to be teased out after
completing a first, a second, an nth reading aided by the final Notes to the
Waste Land, provided by T.S.Eliot himself or by several generations of
annotators.
3) From 1) and 3) above, it is obvious that since the poem is written by a
neurotic intellectual, who is typically shell shocked (traumatized) after the
First World War, the interpretation of the poem takes clinical
(psychoanalytical) points of access to and contact with the suffering
unconscious in order to dealing with the artistically developed meanings. We
have to read the chunks/traces/shards of the poems meanings. As
announced in 2) supra, it is only at its end that the poem self-reflexively
foregrounds its fragmentariness see the line These fragments I have
shored against my ruins
4) The pattern for articulating the chunks of the poems meanings are
suggested by the titles to the poems five parts and it is provided in the body
of the parts by the sonata form (which develops a theme with variations in
three moments: the exposition, development, recapitulation; the fixed form of
the repetition can order, through its insistence on the same motifs, even
subliminal meanings that are uttered without being controlled by the logical
mind of speakers)
5) Alienation being the theme of this ironic epic, 3 The Waste Land presents the
encounter of humanity with its modern, civilized other. Otherness being
postulated as the law of existence in poststructuralism (see Lacanian

Notice the other name of the stream of consciousness technique, also dominant in high
modernist literary texts: multiple selective omniscience.
3
An epic is usually the ritual presentation of human success in spite of numerous
adversities, usually taking the form of a perilous journey ending in human triumph (in
ancient literature, it was the reverse of tragedy, though both literary/ceremonial forms
accepted the overarching power of fate

psychoanalysis, for example), The Waste Land configures a multiple

heterotopia.4
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot Motto: Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis
meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibylla ti theleis;
respondebat illa: apothanein thelo. See DEDICATION
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

10

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-dukes,
4

Heterotopian London (and the modern world), can be interpreted according to Michel

Des espaces autres (Of Other Spaces) 1967 meant for architects "Utopia is
a place where everything is good; dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is
where things are different that is, a collection whose members have few or no intelligible
connections with one another (Walter Russell Meads account of Foucaults concept.
Heterotopia can be a single real place that juxtaposes several spaces because, Foucault shows,
Foucaults lecture

space takes for us the form of relations among sites; there exist threatening, unusual
(virtual) or limit-spaces called heterotopias [they] exert a sort of counteraction on the
position occupied by subjects and objects; modern heterotopias of deviation: those
[containing]..individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm:
Eliot makes the deviant Waste Land inhabitants mere voices from nowhere and
which leave nothing solid behind the norm of the post-war social world. The
heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are
in themselves incompatible; The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive
at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. Heterotopias are like mirages: they
both arrest attention of subjects and, if space is, in theory, a container, exclude
subjects. Heterotopias are like switches, they have the function of altering the state
of the world through their action/existence: they have a function in relation to all the
space that remains source sighted on February 22nd 2015
http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.ro/2011/05/michel-foucault-of-other-spaces.html

My cousins, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

15

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

20

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,

25

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

30

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

35

They called me the hyacinth girl.

Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

40

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

45

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.

50

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

55

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,

60

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

65

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

70

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, thats friend to men,
Or with his nails hell dig it up again!

75

You! hypocrite lecteur!mon semblable,mon frre!

TASKS
(i)

(ii)

(iii)

identifying the separate themes/voices by the changes in pronouns which indicate changes of
voices plus the intertextual material (The first lines of Chaucers Canterbury Tales When in
April the sweet showers fall/And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all/The veins are
bathed in liquor of such power/As brings about the engendering of the flower/When also
Zephyrus with his sweet breath/Exhales an air in every grove and heath/Upon the tender
shoots..) and the material provided by notes (Marie Larisch)
identifying the (hidden) references to war; notice how they are blurred as every other allusion
in the poem, and were it not for the development and repetition (in the poems coda), they
would not become manifest at all, perhaps
demonstrating that and why and how the poem casts London as a post-war heterotopia

*How many identifiable spaces can be identified as juxtaposed in the first part? (to demonstrate that the
poems space is configured, as discourse, through relations among sites and through the juxtaposition in
a single real space of several incompatible spaces/places
* (at home) Find in the poem as many individuals as possible whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the
required norm(s) include this homework in your portfolios

V. What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying

325

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

330

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink

335

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

340

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses

345

If there were water

And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water

350

A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing

355

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road

360

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman

365

But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

370

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

375

Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light

380

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

385

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the winds home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,

390

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

395

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moments surrender

400

Which an age of prudence can never retract

405

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

410

DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

415

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

420

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

425

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi sascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidonO swallow swallow
Le Prince dAquitaine la tour abolie

430

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymos mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih

shantih

shantih

*Themes for study at home: follow the elements: water, fire, air/the spirit ( The Word), land(s) in the entire poem

APPENDIX: Eliots Notes to the Waste Land (which are not enough for teasing out all meanings)
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 (Macmillan). 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 recommend it (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 meanThe 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.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

20. Cf. Ezekiel 2:7.
23. Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:5.
31.V. Tristan und Isolde, i, verses 5-8.
42. Desolate and empty the sea
Id. iii, verse 24.
46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of
cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own
convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack,
fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind
with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the
hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V.
The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the
'crowds of people', and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The
Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I
associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.
60. Cf. Baudelaire:
Fourmillante cit, cit pleine de rves,
O le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.
63. Cf. Dante's Inferno, iii. 55-7:
si lunga tratta
di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.
So long a train of people, that I should never have believed death had undone so
many.
64. Cf. 63. Cf. Dante's Inferno, iv. 25-27:
Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
non avea pianto, ma' che di sospiri,
che l'aura eterna facevan tremare.
Here there was no plaint, that could be heard, except of sighs, which caused the
eternal air to tremble.
68. A phenomenon which I have often noticed.
74. Cf. the Dirge in Webster's White Devil.

76. Hypocrite reader! - my doppelganger - my brother!

V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the
approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book), and the present decay of
eastern Europe.
357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in
Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) 'it is
most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats.... Its notes are not
remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite
modulation they are unequalled.' Its 'water-dripping song' is justly celebrated.
360. The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic
expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the
party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that
there was one more member than could actually be counted.
366-76. Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos:
Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege
zum Chaos, fhrt betrunken im heiligen Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu,
singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht
der Brger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hrt sie mit Trnen.
401. 'Datta, dayadhvam, damyata' (Give, sympathize, control). The fable of the
meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka--Upanishad, 5, 1. A
translation is found in Deussen's Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489.
407. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi:
...they'll remarry
Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider
Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.
411. Cf. Dante's Inferno, xxxiii. 46:
ed io sentii chiavar l'uscio di sotto
all'orribile torre.
Also H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346:
My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my
feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on
the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which
surround it.... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole

world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.IT IS TO BE REMEMBERED

THAT WALTER PATER WAS THE FIRST TO SAY, IN THE CONCLUSION TO
STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE, THAT Experience, already
reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of
personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that
which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of
the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world
(IZ)

424. V. Weston, From Ritual to

Romance; chapter on the Fisher King.
427. V. Purgatorio, xxvi. 148.
'Ara vos prec per aquella valor
'que vos guida al som de l'escalina,
'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.'
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.
428. V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III.
429. The Prince of Aquitaine to the ruined tower
V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado.
431. V. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.
433. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'The Peace which
passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word.