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The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion by R.V.

Young

R.V. Young

Withered Stumps of Time:


The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion

In the first chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s to be an attack upon respectable Christian


Brideshead Revisited (1945), Anthony society, it was in reality a lament, and a cry
Blanche—aesthete, epicure, and homo- of alarm, over the deliquescence of the civi-
sexual dandy—stands on the balcony of lization of the West: falling into a comfort-
Sebastian Flyte’s rooms in Christ Church able materialism, devoid of all authentic
College reading The Waste Land (1922) Christianity, and with only a sterile re-
through a megaphone to passing students. spectability left behind. When The Waste
At the time the action of Waugh’s novel Land was first published, Eliot’s own con-
begins, the early 1920s, T.S. Eliot’s poem version was still several years in the future,
was already a succès de scandale, and and the poem does not assume an explicitly
Blanche’s affected, stammering recitation Christian perspective. Despite its “mod-
was calculated to elicit much the same re- ernist” techniques, however, the poem im-
sponse as a heavy metal band in the club- plies a prophetic denunciation of the secu-
house of a gated retirement community. larism, rationalism, and materialism char-
The few lines of the poem that appear in the acteristic of the modern era. The Waste
novel are there to mark Blanche as a student Land is thus the most notable instance of
of extraordinarily avant-garde knowledge radically innovative, “modernist” art in
and precociously decadent taste. For upon the service of tradition.
its first appearance, The Waste Land struck
most readers as a defiant, outré assault by a It is the flexibility and ambivalence of po-
modish cynic on all the decencies of English etic style that allow an innovative tech-
literature and society. nique to serve a traditional vision. While
Evelyn Waugh, of course, knew better: the surface texture of The Waste Land sug-
one of his first novels after his conversion to gests irony and disillusionment, its under-
Catholicism, A Handful of Dust (1934), lying structure is mythic; that is, it orga-
takes its title and its epigraph from The nizes experience in terms of grand, epic
Waste Land, which is evoked to add gravity narratives. What at first seems nothing
and insight to Waugh’s macabre satire.
What Waugh perceived was that Eliot was R.V. Young is Professor of English at North Carolina
State University and the author, most recently of A
more conservative—more deeply commit-
Student’s Guide to Literature (ISI Books, 2000) and
ted to the religious and cultural values of Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry
the Western world—than many of his most (2000). This essay was originally delivered as a lecture
severe critics. Although the poem seemed at a summer colloquium of the ISI Honors Program.

24 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring/Summer 2003


The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion by R.V. Young

more than a sly accumulation of the shards associations. The title of the section is the
and slivers of Western civilization—“a heap rubric of the Anglican funeral service from
of broken images” (l. 22)1—emerges as the Book of Common Prayer, which rein-
something like the ruins of a monument, forces the theme of death evoked by the
still noble and still radiating significance. epigraph, but also puts it in a Christian
The “disillusionment” of modern man is framework. This first part of the poem works
juxtaposed with the foundational myths of by juxtaposing a series of scenes of modern
Western, and occasionally Eastern, civili- life, characterized by frivolity, distraction,
zation. The shallow, fashionable cynicism and despair, with stern admonitions from
of the “flapper” generation, of the “bright the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures. The first
young things,” is truly disabused of the enigmatic line, “April is the cruelest
illusions engendered by its pride, lust, and month,” begins to unfold if we will only
sloth. remember the great medieval poem that
To be sure, Eliot handles myth—that is, begins with April in the first line, The Can-
“plot” or “story”—very curiously in The terbury Tales:
Waste Land. The poem’s stories are not so Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
much told as suggested. Much as a jazz The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
musician takes a well-known song and And bathed every veyne I swich licour
works bits of it into a series of variations and Of which vertu engendred is the flour...
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages....2
changes without ever playing the entire
melody straight through, so the poet of The
Waste Land evokes shadowy images of many Chaucer’s characters are pilgrims on their
of the great works of world literature with- way to the shrine of a saint, and if many of
out ever actually narrating a complete ver- them have something besides holiness on
sion of any story. This feat is managed by their minds, their sexual sinning is at least
combining a novel and relentless deploy- vigorous and earthy.
ment of the old device of allusion with a Eliot’s characters prefer the subterra-
stream-of-consciousness point of view. nean “warmth” of winter; the “stirring” of
Evocations of the literary monuments of spring seems threatening, an end to dull
the Western tradition provide points of comfort. Eliot apparently put together the
reference in the welter of experience repre- first of these “characters,” the first distinct
sented through the thoughts and emotions consciousness that swims into view, out of
of the shadowy “characters” who people the reminiscences of Countess Marie
the fragmentary “scenes” of the poem. Eliot’s Larisch, a relative and confidante of the
vision of the modern cultural waste land Austrian imperial family, in her book, My
emerges out of these oblique, stream-of- Past (1916).3 We are in the world of a deca-
consciousness dramas anchored in the pat- dent central European aristocracy in the
tern of allusions. years just before World War I. These are
bored, distracted men and women who,
The first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims on the road to
Canterbury, are going nowhere in particu-
provides a good example of how meaning is
generated out of allusions that should be lar. Instead, they wander aimlessly in pur-
recognizable, or at least recoverable, by an suit of pleasure, comfort, or excitement:
alert reader combined with other material And when we were children, staying at the arch-
that has simply been appropriated by the duke’s,
poet from his own random experiences and My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

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The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion by R.V. Young

And I was frightened. He said, Marie, neously hints at hope and fear:
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free. Only
I read, much of the night, and go south in the There is shadow under this red rock,
winter. (13-18) (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from
either
The recollection of a thrilling, if fearful,
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
childhood experience is “mixing / Memory Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
and desire” (2-3): an older but not wiser I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (24-30)
Marie flees the freedom of the mountains
for a warm winter in the South. Although it is not cited in Eliot’s own notes,
Marie’s disjointed, self-absorbed remi- commentators generally recognize an allu-
niscences and reflections are immediately sion to a Messianic passage in Isaiah: “And
followed by a series of allusions to some of a man shall be like an hiding place from the
the gravest prophetic writings in the Bible. wind, and a covert from the tempest; like
The poet’s own notes cite Ezekiel 2.1 and rivers of water in a dry place, like the shadow
Ecclesiastes 12.5, but it is hard not to see also of a great rock in a weary land” (32.2). The
a reference to the valley of the dry bones in speaking voice proffers fear in a handful of
Ezekiel 37. The consciousness at this point dust, because both the burial service (“The
in The Waste Land, presumably Tiresias, Burial of the Dead”) and the Ash Wednes-
sees a similarly catastrophic, lifeless land- day service in the Book of Common prayer
scape: remind us that we are made of dust and shall
What are the roots that clutch, what branches return to dust in death. Adam’s name of
grow course means “red earth” or “red dust.”
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, Christ is the second Adam, however, and
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only also a rock or stone; hence the “red rock”
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
suggests Christ as the bringer of salvation,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no
relief, but of a salvation fearful to those who pre-
And the dry stone no sound of water. (19-24) fer winter to April.4
Immediately following the “handful of
The phrase “roots that clutch” recalls the dust” is a lyrical reminiscence of youthful
“dull roots” in the opening lines and joins love, framed by two passages from Tristan
the two sections of the poem. It is as if the und Isolde, Richard Wagner’s music drama
presiding consciousness of the poem has of doomed, illicit passion. The final line
peeled back the façade of Marie’s world of quoted from Wagner, Oed’ und leer das
empty wandering and revealed its spiritual Meer (“Empty and blank the sea”), suggests
interior. The “dead tree” and “cricket” come a watery counterpart to the drought-
directly out of Ecclesiastes: “and the almond stricken waste “where the sun beats, / And
tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper the dead tree gives no shelter.” In the two
shall be a burden, and desire shall fail” following passages that close out “The
(12.5). The failure of desire is not explicitly Burial of the Dead,” we are reminded that
mentioned here, but it becomes a central the waste land is the spiritual terrain of
theme, and it is linked to the notion that urban dwellers, as well as the literal wilder-
relentless pursuit of pleasure destroys the ness suggested by the imagery. Modern men
capacity for it. and women who fear the red rock are drawn
The “dry stone” is a final note of despair, instead to the slick superstitions of a for-
but it opens on to a passage that simulta- tune-teller with “a wicked pack of cards.”

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The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion by R.V. Young

“Superstition recurs in a rationalist age,” the past failed to attain, but which the
Chesterton quips, “because it rests on some- present has simply abandoned. Tristan und
thing which, if not identical with rational- Isolde, for example, represent an immoral
ism, is not unconnected with scepticism.”5 passion that ends in violence and death, but
Of course the Tarot cards have significances the young man whose memory is bracketed
of which Madame Sosostris is unaware. She between the Tristan references cannot speak
does not find “The Hanged Man,” because or see; he is “neither / Living nor dead.”
Christ, who was “hanged on a tree” (Acts Madame Sosostris sees “crowds of people,
5.30, 10.39) is invisible to her venality and walking around in a ring” (56), and they
unbelief. In the final passage of this section, reappear a few lines further in the brown
the streets of London are assimilated to the fog on London Bridge. Like the crowds, she
antechamber of Dante’s Inferno, where is aimless, only careful about her horo-
those who were neither good nor evil spend scope.
eternity going around in a futile circle.6 Like Like J. Alfred Prufrock, most of the char-
Madame Sosostris and her client, the crowd acters in The Waste Land are beset by a
that “flowed over London Bridge” is alien- withering self-consciousness. “After such
ated both from the grace of God, repre- knowledge, what forgiveness?” the speaker
sented by the Messianic scriptural refer- of Gerontion asks; and The Waste Land is in
ences, and even from the intense if sinful some ways an elaboration of this terrible
passion embodied by Tristan and Isolde. question. The allusions are both menacing
Like the “Unreal City,” the dwellers in the and hopeful. The scriptural passages are
modern spiritual waste land are shrouded sternly threatening, but they mysteriously
in a “brown fog” that blinds the sight and proffer a veiled salvation. Still, it must be
stifles the lungs. Almost twenty years later seized with courage.
Eliot himself provided what may be re- Or consider the parenthetic comment
garded as a retrospective comment on this on “the drowned Phoenician Sailor,”
“crowd” in Notes Toward a Christian Society “(Those are pearls that were his eyes.
(1940): “Britain has been highly industrial- Look!).” This is the first of several allusions
ized longer than any other country. And to The Tempest, a magical play of loss and
the tendency of unlimited industrialism is restoration, injury and forgiveness. In the
to create bodies of men and women – of all immediate context, Ariel’s song to
classes – detached from tradition, alien- Ferdinand, confirming the death of his fa-
ated from religion and susceptible to mass ther, Alonso, the line is forbidding. But if
suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a the larger context of the play is invoked, the
mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well reference proffers redemption. The diffi-
housed, and well disciplined.”7 culty is in deciding whether to take this
allusion as negative irony or a promise.
This opening section of The Waste Land And this is precisely the difficulty faced by
provides a fair sample of how the poem as the characters in the poem as well as the
a whole works. Scenes of ordinary modern reader. The estrangement of modern man
life, marked by banality, vulgarity, and both from nature and traditional sources
overall emptiness are juxtaposed with allu- of wisdom leaves him in perpetual uncer-
sions to important works, literary and re- tainty.
ligious, of Western civilization. This is not In the preface to Notes Towards the Defi-
to say that the past is simply better than the nition of Culture (1949), Eliot mentions his
present. The allusions suggest ideals that debt to Christopher Dawson. Reflecting on

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The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion by R.V. Young

cultural decadence in an essay published Augustine’s own allusive treatment of Virgil,


two years after The Waste Land, Dawson so that section III refers back to section II.)
makes an observation that could serve as a The opening scene in section II contains an
commentary on the poem: obvious allusion to Enobarbus’ famous
The rawness and ugliness of modern European
description of Cleopatra on her Nile barge
life is the sign of biological inferiority, of an in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
insufficient or false relation to environment, (II.ii.190ff.), but Eliot’s own note calls our
which produces strain, wasted effort, revolt or attention to an unusual word, laquearia,
failure. Just as a mechanical industrial civiliza- taken from the first book of the Aeneid.
tion will seek to eliminate all waste movements
There is in this slide from Shakespeare to
in work, so as to make the operative the perfect
complement of his machine, so a vital civiliza- Virgil a significant resonance, since
tion will cause every function and every act to Shakespeare’s Antony is a Roman hero who
partake of vital grace and beauty. To a great fails to live up to the standard set by Rome’s
extent this is entirely instinc- founder; that is, Antony
tive, as in the grace of the old does not relinquish the
agricultural operations,
ploughing, sowing and reap-
North African temptress
ing, but it is also the goal of who distracts him from
conscious effort in the great the duties of Empire, as
Oriental cultures—as in the Aeneas had abandoned
calligraphy of the Moslem Dido in order fulfill his
scribe, and the elaboration
destiny. What Eliot bor-
of Oriental social etiquette.
Why is a stockbroker less rows from Virgil at this
beautiful than a Homeric point is the very atmo-
warrior or an Egyptian priest? sphere and texture of
Because he is less incorpo- temptation from the ac-
rated with life, he is not in- count of the luxuriance
evitable, but accidental, al-
most parasitic.8
of the setting of the hero’s
first meeting with the
What The Waste Land Carthaginian queen:
does is to confront stock- Postquam prima quies epulis
brokers with Homeric mensaeque remotae,
warriors and Egyptian T. S. Eliot crateras magnos statuunt et
priests through the vina coronant.
fit strepitus tectis vocemque per ampla volutant
stream of consciousness of Tiresias. One
atria; dependent lychni laquearibus aureis
may say that the allusions are the antidote incensi et noctem flammis funalia vincunt.9
to the illusions of a society trapped in its
own narrow span of time and estranged
from the sources of its cultural vitality. [After the first pause in the feast and the tables
Perhaps the most intense and intricate are taken away, they set out great goblets and
crown the wine. A great din reaches the roof and
deployment of The Waste Land’s charac-
voices roll through the broad halls; the kindled
teristic techniques comes in the central third lamps hang down from the gold-paneled ceiling
section, “The Fire Sermon,” which takes its and torches vanquish the night with their flames.]
title from a discourse of the Buddha, but
whose presiding genius turns out to be Saint Here, then, is the corresponding passage
Augustine. (His pre-eminence results from from The Waste Land:
Eliot’s devising a subtle allusion to

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The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion by R.V. Young

In vials of ivory and coloured glass Augustine dominates, however, because of


Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic the prominent recurrence of Carthage. The
perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid – troubled,
first of these lines translates the opening of
confused Book III of the Confessions: “Veni
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the Carthaginem, et circumstrepebat me
air undique sartago flagitiosorum amorum”10
That freshened from the window, these ascended [“I came to Carthage, and everywhere a
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
frying pan of shameful loves was clamoring
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. (86- all around me”]. This allusion is generally
93) recognized, but what generally goes unno-
ticed is the immediately preceding sentence
From a few hints in the language of the at the end of Book II of the Confessions:
Aeneid—above all, that wonderful word “Defluxi abs te ego et erravi, Deus meus,
laquearia—Eliot has turned a banqueting nimis devius ab stabilitate tua in
scene into a scene in a boudoir. And where adulescentia et factus sum mihi regio
Virgil depicts a woman afflicted with a de- egestatis”11 [“I slid away from you, my God,
structive passion through the wiles of Cu- and wandered far out of the way of your
pid and Venus, Eliot shows us a neurotic firmness in my youth and became to myself
woman and an unresponsive man with all a region of destitution or waste”; that is, “I
desire drained from their relationship. The became to myself a waste land.”] The model
point of course is the contrast, once more, for his own wandering he has already
between an heroic, if destructive passion learned as part of his education: “I was
leading to death, and the numbness of the compelled to memorize I know not what
failure of love, which is death in itself. wanderings (errors) of Aeneas, oblivious to
It is when Carthage and desire return to my own wanderings (errorum meorum),
the poem at the end of “The Fire Sermon” and to weep the death of Dido, because she
that everything in between—that is, from killed herself for love, although in the mean-
the beginning of “A Game of Chess” through time I myself was dying away from you,
the end of section III—receives its full sig- God, my life, and bore it most miserably
nificance. This third section famously closes, with dry eyes.”12
To Carthage then I came Saint Augustine moralizes the myth of
Dido and Aeneas; Eliot works both the
Burning burning burning burning myth and Augustine’s treatment of it into
O Lord Thou pluckest me out the flowing stream of consciousness that is
O Lord Thou pluckest
the poem’s argument or substance. Thus,
Burning (307-311) the greatest of the Latin Church Fathers
mediates between Virgil and Eliot and the
Here, Augustine meets the Buddha. “The worlds they envision. The saint’s under-
collocation of these two representatives of standing of the human condition lies at the
eastern and western asceticism, as the cul- heart of The Waste Land’s mythic struc-
mination of this part of poem,” Eliot says in ture, and in his view the ultimate waste land
his own note, “is not an accident.” The is the human soul estranged from God.
reason, social constructivists to the con- Dudley Fitts once observed that Eliot delib-
trary notwithstanding, is that human na- erately spelt his title as two words because
ture is fundamentally the same in East and the poet is describing not a natural desert,
West, in the ancient world and the modern. but a land that has been laid waste. The

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The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion by R.V. Young

human soul in its created state is a paradise, directors;


but it has been devastated by sin. (The soul Departed, have left no addresses. (173-81)
saved by grace, of which the most eminent
is the Blessed Virgin, is a garden enclosed.) The quotation from Spenser’s solemn wed-
Virgil tells an epic tale of great deeds ding hymn, the Prothalamion, and the evo-
wrought by sacrifice and suffering in the cation of departing nymphs, a standard
service of imperial destiny. For Augustine feature of elegiac Renaissance pastoral,
this is an epic delusion, which may explain merge with the depiction of the trash left
the melancholy pervasive in the Aeneid and behind by idle revelers engaged in debauch-
indeed throughout the Virgilian canon. ery. The sandwich papers and cigarette ends
By restaging the confrontation between become a synecdoche for the entire realm of
Virgil’s mournful mythic heroism on be- mirthless pleasure and sterile sexuality. The
half of imperial glory with Augustine’s “nymphs” become girls fornicating by the
Christian vision of humility in the service of river, “White bodies naked on the low damp
God’s glory, Eliot dramatizes his myth of ground” (193), the same ground where the
modern disillusionment. All the scenes or rat may be found “Dragging its slimy belly
stories in “The Fire Sermon” make sense on the bank” (188). These lines and the brief
when considered in the light of Augustine’s dramatic stories that follow are all folded
explanation of lust as a turning away of the into the Augustinian vision of depraved
soul from God. “Fecisti nos ad te et sexuality: Mr. Eugenides, who offers a ho-
inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat mosexual tryst at the Metropole; the seduc-
in te,”13 Augustine writes: “You made us for tion of the typist by the “small house agent’s
your self and our heart is restless until it rest clerk”; and the three “Thames-daughters,”
in you.” Parts I and II of Eliot’s poem, “A who displace Wagner’s Rhine Maidens. The
Game of Chess” and especially “The Fire Thames-daughters lose not their gold but
Sermon,” dramatize a series of restless or their virginity and, above all, their human
“unquiet” hearts. dignity. With the mention of Elizabeth and
The insufficiency of what Augustine calls Leicester it may be recalled that Elizabeth
created beauties, when pursued heedlessly (who retained her virginity?) entertained a
with no consideration of their Creator, is whole series of adventurers—Drake, Ra-
figured in Eliot’s mingling of the lyric and leigh, Essex—who were avidly stealing gold
satiric in the opening lines of “The Fire from the Spaniards, who had stolen it from
Sermon.” The language hovers on the edge the New World. If lust is the principal focus
of pastoral loveliness, but is continually of “The Fire Sermon,” lust is often the result
marred by the ugly and uncouth: of love corrupted by avarice.
The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf Although Tristan und Isolde is quoted in
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind “The Burial of the Dead” and the Rhine
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs Maidens and their song turn up in the third
are departed. section of The Waste Land, it is the final
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
section, “What the Thunder Said,” that is
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich
papers, the most Wagnerian, offering a miniature
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette Götterdämmerung. The landscape in this
ends part of the poem could be the set of a pro-
Or other testimony of summer nights. The duction of the last installment of the Ring,
nymphs are departed.
with its barren crags, dry thunder, and
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City
oppressive darkness pierced by unearthly

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The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion by R.V. Young

flashes of lightning. Most striking, how- —But who is that on the other side of you? (360-
ever, is the sense of terror, of a desperate 66)
struggle against overwhelming odds, of
what is noble and dignified betrayed and Finally, the affirmations at the end of the
defeated by what is brutal and crass. While poem are uttered in Sanskrit: Datta,
Wagner dramatizes inevitable tragic catas- Dayadhvam, Damyata (“Give Sympathize,
trophe, however, Eliot introduces an ele- Control”); Shantih, Shantih, Shantih (“The
ment of hope. Indeed, insofar as he invokes Peace that passeth all understanding”). The
the search for the Chapel Perilous, he seems invocation of a foreign language and reli-
to be glancing at Wagner’s last opera, gious tradition at this point leaves the re-
Parsifal. Moreover, “What the Thunder sult in doubt. Is there a Grail in the chapel,
Said” begins with an unmistakable refer- or is it “the empty chapel, only the wind’s
ence to Christ’s Passion, starting with His home” (389), surrounded by “tumbled
arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, and graves” (388)?
Eliot’s own note explicitly mentions the In this poem Eliot does not answer the
journey to Emmaus. His “twilight of the question. Poems, in any case, usually ask
gods” thus allows the possibility of God— more questions than they answer. The
incarnate as man—overthrowing the pow- Wagnerian description of apocalyptic de-
ers of darkness and rising again. struction, however, can be taken as a Chris-
It would be an error, nevertheless, to see tian critique of an avaricious society preoc-
more than a shred of hope in The Waste cupied with power and possessions:
Land itself. The depiction of the Passion, What is that sound high in the air
which in a fashion typical of Eliot’s poetic Murmur of maternal lamentation
procedure rests on suggestive synecdoches, Who are those hooded hordes swarming
is exceedingly grim and offers no hint of Over the endless plains, stumbling in cracked
earth
resurrection:
Ringed by the flat horizon only
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces What is the city over the mountains
After the frosty silence in the gardens Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
After the agony in stony places Falling towers
The shouting and the crying Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Prison and palace and reverberation Vienna London
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains Unreal (367-77)
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying These lines may bring to mind any num-
With a little patience (322-30) ber of minatory passages from the pro-
phetic books of the Old Testament, from
Similarly, the passage that suggests the Christ’s discourses on the Last Things, or
meeting of two disciples with the risen Christ from the Book of Revelation; but they also
on the road to Emmaus breaks off without seem to anticipate by means of imagery
revealing the identity of the mysterious Eliot’s somber assessment of the impiety of
third person: modern culture in The Idea of a Christian
Who is the third who walks always beside you? Society:
When I count, there are only you and I together I would not have it thought that I condemn a
But when I look ahead up the white road society because of its material ruin, for that
There is always another one walking beside you would be to make its material success a suffi-
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded cient test of its excellence; I mean only that a
I do not know whether a man or a woman wrong attitude towards nature implies, some-

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The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion by R.V. Young

where, a wrong attitude toward God, and that sufficiency. The radical poetic techniques
the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a of The Waste Land are an integral part of its
long enough time we have believed in nothing
significance. The dislocations of stream-of-
but the values arising in a mechanised,
commercialised, urbanised way of life: it would consciousness narrative and the ironic jux-
be as well for us to face the permanent condi- tapositions of multiple allusions embody
tions upon which God allows us to live on this Eliot’s vision of the human condition in
planet.14 which we enjoy only brief, fragmentary
glimpses of beauty and meaning among the
Insofar as there is a poetic answer to the “withered stumps of time.”
question posed by The Waste Land, it comes
several years afterwards in The Journey of 1. All quotations from Eliot’s poetry are taken from
the Magi. It is not aimless wandering, not T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950
even a journey to the Chapel Perilous “In (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971). Line
this decayed hole among the mountains” numbers are given in parentheses for The Waste Land.
(386) that finds renewal of life and purpose. 2. The Canterbury Tales I.A.1-4, 12, The Works of
It is rather following a star to an infant lying Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, (2nd ed., Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
in a manger in the inauspicious village of
3. This connection was first made by George L. K.
Bethlehem. But the reminiscence of the aged
Morris (Partisan Review 1954).
astrologer is not sentimental or nostalgic,
4. See Romans 9.33: “Behold, I lay in Sion a stumbling-
and it suggests that Eliot, in accepting the
stone and a rock of scandal; and whosoever believeth
Christian Gospel as the only way out of the in him shall not be confounded”; and Corinthians
modern desert of the spirit still acknowl- 10.4: “And they drank of the spiritual rock that
edged that life may often only be found by followed them; and the rock was Christ.”
way of death: 5. G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (New York:
Dodd, Mead & Company, 1925), 130.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down 6. See the Inferno III. 34-69.
This set down 7. Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt,
This: were we led all that way for Brace & World, 1949), 17.
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth 8. Christopher Dawson, “Progress and Decay in An-
and death, cient and Modern Civilizations,” Dynamics of World
But had thought they were different; this Birth History, ed. John J. Mulloy (LaSalle, IL: Sherwood
was Sugden & Co., 1976), 66. For Eliot’s acknowledgment
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our of his debt to Dawson, see Christianity and Culture, 83.
death. 9. Virgil, Aeneid I. 723-27, ed. R.D. Williams, 2 vols.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, (London: MacMillan, 1972).
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensa- 10. Confessions III.1, Patrologia Latina 32.683.
tion,
With an alien people clutching their gods. 11. Ibid. II.10, Patrologia Latina 32.682.
I should be glad of another death. 12. Ibid. I.13, Patrologia Latina 32.670: “illae quibus
tenere cogebar Æneæ nescio cujus errores, oblitus
errorum meorum; et plorare Didonem mortuam, quia
Even if one finds the baby in the manger, the se occidit ob amorem, cum interea meipsum in his a
grail in the chapel, one still lives on in the te morientem, Deus vita mea, siccis oculis ferrem
waste land, only “no longer at ease.” To miserrimus.”
escape the waste land means learning how 13. Confessions I.1, Patrologia Latina 32.661.
to live in it without being its subject or 14. Christianity and Culture, 49.
citizen: it is to shed one’s illusions in the
myth of the City of Man and human self-

32 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring/Summer 2003

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