Analysis of The Waste Land

The Waste Land can be viewed as a poem about brokenness and loss, and Eliot’s numerous allusions

to the First World War suggest that the war played a significant part in bringing about this social,

psychological, and emotional collapse. (Perhaps revealingly, Eliot completed the poem while

recovering from a nervous breakdown.) Many of the characters who turn up in Eliot’s poem – such

as Lil, the mother-of-five whose unhappy marriage is discussed by her friend in a London pub – lead

unfulfilling lives and their relationships are lacking in intimacy and deeper meaning.

People’s lives in general are lacking spiritual significance. The typist in ‘The Fire Sermon’ is a good

example of this: her job involves merely copying or repeating what others have said, and when she

gets home from work her food is processed and comes in tins, and even her sex life is mechanical

and repetitive, something Eliot neatly captures with his use of regular quatrains at this point in the

poem. The music she listens to when her lover has gone is played on a gramophone: it’s a world

away from the magical music Ferdinand heard on the enchanted island in Shakespeare’s The

Tempest. Modern life has lost all sense of magic and meaning.

Eliot reinforces such an idea by overlaying his poem with a loose mythic structure, drawn from

Arthurian legend and a work of comparative religious study, The Golden Bough by James Frazer.

Specifically, Eliot uses the story of the Fisher King as a form of allegory for the modern world. The

Fisher King has been wounded in the groin, and his wound has also affected the kingdom over which

he rules. The once fertile and abundant soil has ceased to yield crops; the land has become a waste

land.

The cure for this spiritual sickness which plagues the king and his land is the Holy Grail, but only

those who are pure of heart will find the Grail (the cup that, according to Christian legend, caught

Jesus’ blood at the Crucifixion). Is anyone in the modern world of The Waste Land up to such a task?

The poem’s references to the Buddhist Fire Sermon suggest that before we will become worthy of

salvation, we must first learn to curb our worldly desires and passions in order to attain spiritual

enlightenment.

The Waste Land begins with a reference to a ‘heap of broken images’ and ends with a collage of

quotations taken from various poetic traditions, as well as a snippet from the nursery rhyme ‘London

Bridge is falling down’. Art, literature, oral and written culture – civilisation itself – seem to be under

threat. Can we do anything other than shore up the ruins? The poem ends on an ambiguous note,

with the triple repetition of the Sanskrit word ‘Shantih’, which Eliot translates as ‘the peace which

passeth understanding’. Has such peace finally been achieved, or is this merely wishful thinking? The

breakdown of the poem into a confused medley of semi-coherent quotations implies that after the

war, such peace remains a far-off dream.