The Good, the Bad and the Meaningless: Eliot's 'The Wasteland' and Dale Biron

Back at it again with The Wasteland.

This go around I noticed how Eliot used water as a symbol for death. The fourth section “Death by Water” is the most obvious section where water appears as a deadly force.  The speaker recalls  Phlebas the Phonecians meeting his end in the sea:

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and feel

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool. (315-8)

While in this case the sea devours poor Phlebas, water typically serves as a symbol of rejuvenation or renewal. Eliot acknowledges this tradition of water in the fifth section “What the Thunder Said” as the collective speaker yearns for water: “If there were water we should stop and drink” (335). Eliot shows that water is dangerous in its absence and abundance. Without water we thirst, and with much we drown. The poems defamiliarize water as a positive source by associating it with suffering and death.

The combined features of water as both necessary and deadly indicate that death itself is ever-present and inevitable. Phlebas’ death serves as this very lesson:

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. (320-1)

Phleba’s is remembered for his death, not his life. There seems to be a lot of meaninglessness in his death as well. Death in The Wasteland is painful, inevitable, and perhaps even insignificant. These images of water contribute to a vision of the world unfamiliar with positivity notions of life.

             The speaker of Dale Biron’s “Laughter” is similarly disenchanted. The speaker considers what old age might look like, concluding that the scars of life and laughter lines will be indistiguishible. I tend to read this in the negative spirit of The Wasteland, the joy in life (taking the form of laughter lines) is ultimately insignificant as it will blend with the troubles of life and be forgotten. Maybe the mixing of scars and laughter lines is not negative or depressing, but a symbol of the meaningless of life. The nuances of life events begin to blend as we get older, thus making what we feel is significant rather meaningless.  

Laughter

Dale Biron

When the
face we wear

grows old and weathered, torn
open by time,

colors
tinted as dawn

like the late
winter mountains

of Sedona
ashen and crimson.

It will no longer
be possible

to distinguish
our deepest scars

from the long
sweet lines left

by laughter.