Interpretations of The Waste Land in the first few decades after its publication had been closely linked to Romance, due to Eliot's prominent acknowledgement of Jessie Weston's 1920 book From Ritual to Romance in his notes.[86][133] Eliot's 1956 disavowal of this line of enquiry with his comment that they invited "bogus scholarship", however, prompted reinterpretations of the poem—less as a work which incorporates previous Romantic ideals and the "magic of the grail legend", and more as a poem describing "alienation, fragmentation, despair and disenchantment" in the post-war period, which are considered typical features of modernist literature.[134]
Fertility and the Fisher King myth
Perceval arrives at the Grail Castle to be greeted by the Fisher King in an illustration for a 1330 manuscript of Perceval, the Story of the Grail.In his notes, Eliot credits Weston's analysis of the Grail legend in From Ritual to Romance with inspiring "the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem".[89] Weston concentrates on the story of the Fisher King, part of the Holy Grail mythos which has its origins in Perceval, the Story of the Grail, written by Chrétien de Troyes in the 1180s.[135] In the story, Perceval is a young man who meets a group of knights one day in the forest and leaves with them to be trained in knightly ways at King Arthur's court. The key lesson he is taught is not to speak too much. While out riding one day, Perceval meets two men fishing in a river; they offer him hospitality in a nearby castle. In the castle hall, he meets the Fisher King, who is gravely wounded. Supernatural events begin to occur: a boy brings a white lance into the hall, and a drop of blood falls from its tip. Two more boys holding candlesticks appear, and then a girl holding a gold grail set with precious stones and radiating light. The grail, in this telling a kind of platter, provides food for the guests in the hall. Remembering his training, Perceval asks no questions about these strange happenings, and when he awakens the next day he finds the hall empty: his apparent lack of curiosity has been taken as indifference. Perceval returns to Camelot, and while at the Round Table a "loathsome damsel" appears to denounce him, saying that various calamities will occur because the Fisher King cannot defend his lands, still being in his injured state. As a result, Perceval loses his religious faith. Five years later, Perceval seeks help from his uncle, a hermit. His uncle instructs him in knightly ways, and Perceval receives communion.[136]
At this point Chrétien's story ends. It was continued in several different versions by various authors. Robert de Boron introduces an explicit link between the grail and Jesus' crucifixion, and in this version Perceval returns to the castle, asks the correct (secret) question of the Fisher King, and becomes keeper of the grail himself.[137] Another continuation was by Wolfram von Eschenbach, who made the Fisher King's injury a sterilising groin injury, and the question Perceval asks "What aileth thee, mine uncle?" (in Weston's translation).[138][139] The asking of the question, an act of compassion, is ultimately what heals the king and restores the land.[140]
Weston interprets the story of the Fisher King as a continuation of pagan fertility rites. She focuses on the idea of a "waste land" surrounding the Fisher King's castle, which will be restored along with the king's health, only after the correct question is asked. In this sense it is a story of death and rebirth, as well as an allegory for reproduction, with the lance representing male genitalia and the grail female.[141] Weston considers the fish symbol as an analogy for fertility, a connection later lost in readings of the Grail legend.[142]
The Waste Land can be interpreted as being, at least in part, narrated by a Fisher King character, living in a modern industrial "wasted land".[143] Eliot's notes indicate that he associated the Fisher King with one of the tarot cards drawn in "The Burial of the Dead" (the man with three staves); "The Fire Sermon" contains a figure fruitlessly fishing in a polluted canal in winter as a direct parallel of the men Perceval encountered fishing in a stream; and the final verse of "What the Thunder Said" describes a Fisher King character fishing in the sea, considering the question "Shall I at least set my lands in order?"[5][144]
The mythic themes of fertility take on a more concrete role in the middle parts of the poem, which deal with scenes of sexuality. "A Game of Chess" includes a scene of a married couple playing chess in an opulent setting which contrasts with two sexless dialogues "illustrating two aspects of the terrible emotional barrenness of the modern world".[145] The section continues to a matter-of-fact conversation between two women about infidelity and abortion, blending into the last words of Ophelia in Hamlet before she committed suicide by drowning – an end to life, rather than a baptismal rebirth.[146] "The Fire Sermon" describes a dispassionate affair, perhaps a parody of Frazer's "sanctified harlotry" ritual in which "in order to promote fertility, a girl consorted with a stranger before marriage, the act being accompanied by a ritual feast and music."[147]
Death and regeneration
Themes of death and regeneration more generally occur throughout The Waste Land, especially in "The Burial of the Dead". Unlike in fertility myths such as that of the Fisher King, however, "death is never redeemed by any clear salvation, and barrenness is relieved only by a chaotic multiplicity, which is not only an ironic kind of fertility, but is also the distinctly urban chaos that the young Eliot appreciated as conducive to his work."[148] The poem opens with a resistance to growth after a winter that represents a "living death", and a yearning for stasis which contrasts with the Sibyl of the epigraph, who longs for a death that means escape from a static existence.[149][150] "The Burial of the Dead" also describes a dry and lifeless desert scene which, despite the prospect of shade and therefore respite, promises only a vision of death – to "show you fear in a handful of dust".[151] Madame Sosostris draws the drowned Phoenician sailor, but he is later a symbol of Adonis, representing the promise of spring and thus renewal, and his drowning can be read as an allegory for baptism, a spiritual rebirth.[152] The living death of The Waste Land sees people bury corpses and expect them to sprout, in a deliberate reference to the rituals of Osiris as described by Frazer, when priests would bury effigies of the god to ensure a good harvest.[153]
Post-war disillusionment
I dislike the word "generation", which has been a talisman for the last ten years; when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the "disillusionment of a generation", which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.
T. S. Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)[154]
The Waste Land can be read as an expression of post-war disillusionment and anxieties about Western culture.[155] Critic Burton Rascoe wrote that the poem "gives voice to the universal despair or resignation arising from the spiritual and economic consequences of the war, the cross purposes of modern civilization, the cul-de-sac into which both science and philosophy seem to have got themselves and the breakdown of all great directive purposes which give joy and zest to the business of living. It is an erudite despair."[156] Eliot disliked being described as a poet who had "expressed 'the disillusionment of a generation'", but this was a reading common even in the early days after the poem's publication.[157] The poem describes a barren modern waste land after the largest war ever fought, without the traditional common cultural touchstones of religion, aristocracy, and nationhood.[158][159] Being unable to grow anything new, the poet has only "a heap of broken images" from ages past to assemble, and The Waste Land represents an attempt to create something new out of these.[158]
One way in which the poem expresses this disillusionment is in the contrast between its quotations and allusions to older texts and representations of the modern day. "A Game of Chess" contrasts a modern woman with an elaborate description of Queen Cleopatra and Belinda from The Rape of the Lock in an ornate setting; it also juxtaposes the working class women's conversation with Ophelia's last words in Hamlet. In this way, an idealised past is presented as an unrealistically prelapsarian place, and "modern civilisation does nothing but spoil what was once gracious, lovely, ceremonious and natural."[160]
Scholars observe Eliot's depiction of modern London as being an example of these themes as well. The distasteful description of the River Thames in "The Fire Sermon" invites comparison with its beauty in Spenser's day,[161] and the beautiful Rhinemaidens of Wagner's Ring cycle, who guard gold at the bottom of the Rhine, are ironically placed in the polluted Thames.[162] The poem's final verse contains the titular line of the nursery rhyme "London Bridge Is Falling Down", showing that even with the optimism of potential rebirth the city is destined for ruin.[163] The sounds of the city accompany the passionless affair of the typist in "The Fire Sermon", linking it to sterility,[147] and its inhabitants cannot rely on a shared sense of community—they live in a version of Dante's Limbo, a static lifeless realm neither life nor death.[164][165] Eliot makes a direct reference to Inferno in the line "I had not thought death had undone so many", and indicates that the people living in this city have chosen, through cowardice, not to die (and possibly be reborn) but to stay in this state living death.[165]
Religion
Christianity
Christianity infuses the Fisher King legend, and questions of death and rebirth are central concerns of all religions.[166] The Bible has been described as "probably the single most pervasive influence on the poem".[167] Eliot adopts a deliberately prophetic Old Testament tone of voice in "The Burial of the Dead", referencing Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes.[167][168] The Ezekiel source describes the prophet's mission in a secular world, and the book is relevant again in the depiction of a dry desert-like waste land.[168] Ezekiel prophesied the Babylonian captivity, which is alluded to in the description of the Thames as the "waters of Leman" in "The Fire Sermon".[168] The Ecclesiastes section referenced contains a description of a waste land, and "What the Thunder Said" refers to it again in its "doors of mudcracked houses" and "empty cisterns".[169] New Testament symbols include the card of the Hanged Man, which represents Jesus, and "What the Thunder Said" references the Road to Emmaus appearance, in which the resurrected Christ is not recognised by his disciples.[170]
Buddhism
The Waste Land also contains allusions to Buddhism and Hinduism, both of which Eliot came into contact with while studying as a postgraduate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard in 1911–1914.[171] The title of "The Fire Sermon" takes its name from the Buddhist discourse of the same name, which uses the metaphor of fire to mean both the inherent pain of physical existence and the process of purification to transcend that pain.[172] Eliot juxtaposes the Buddha with St Augustine, both representing historical figures who turned away from worldly pleasures to follow a life of asceticism.[173] Their combined voices blend into the poem's narrator at the end of the section ("Thou pluckest me out"), becoming the voice of prophecy, and the section tails off in a meditative fashion, losing the narrator "me", then "Lord", leaving only "burning".[174][175]
Hinduism
Sanskrit quotations from the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, part of the collection of texts known as the Vedas, occur throughout the final section, "What the Thunder Said". The three words "datta", "dayadhvam" and "damyata" are an instruction to observe charity, compassion and self-control, and the poem's final line is the same as that of every Upanishad: "Shantih shantih shantih" ("peace peace peace").[176] This gives the impression of a desire for the readers to end their post-war suffering on the physical, natural and spiritual planes by following these virtues.[176] The poem contains other allusions to Hindu scripture, such as the appearance of the sacred river Ganges called by its traditional name in the line "Ganga was sunken", and it can be read as an allegory similar to themes found in the Vedas where drought or sterility is caused by an evil force. In this reading the poet takes the role of a priest, whose role is to purify the land and release its potential fertility.[177]
