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.

Love Languages: T.S. Eliot and Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I’ve never known what to do with T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. The endless allusions overwhelm me and the only reaction I can manage is confusion. However, unlike my reaction to Stein’s poetry, I don’t feel angry or frustrated.  Stein’s poetry, specifically Tender Buttons, is telling a story about the physical world that is bound with Stein’s experience. Her poetry is remote. Eliot’s The Wasteland also fragments reality—exposing the distance between the reader and history. Yet, the pieces the poem offer are not so disjointed that it becomes unrecognizable to the reader. His allusions are still grounded in a reality many readers are familiar with.

Perhaps my favorite fragment is “A Game of Chess” in The Wasteland. Eliot uses both content and form to explore women's relationship to other lovers and sexuality.  The poem has two female speakers, yet they speak and dialogue in different manners. The first speaker poses frantic, paranoid questions to an unknown lover. She speaks to her lover:

    “My nerves are ad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
    “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.” (111-114).

Eliot includes quotation marks as a way of indicating direct dialogue. Yet, in the second part of the poem, there are no quotation marks. Instead, this new speaker indicates dialogue by repeating, “I said” and “she said” in the middle of the lines of the poem. The language also changes to a more colloquial and coarse vernacular with phrases such as:

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said. (148-9)

Both women speakers in the poem are discussing lovers and sexuality in two differing forms, indicating that Eliot’s poem is noting different perspectives on women and sexuality.

In her poem “Chess,” Aimee Nezhukumatahil also writes about sexuality with the metaphor of chess.  Eliot’s metaphor is rooted in the history of chess as a sexual metaphor, where as Nezhukumatahil’s poem uses the metaphor to discuss the unexpected trajectory of romantic relationships.

"Chess" by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Exactly four different men have tried
to teach me how to play. I could never
tell the difference between a rook
or bishop, but I knew the horse meant

knight. And that made sense to me,
because a horse is night: soot-hoof
and nostril, dark as a sabled evening
with no stars, bats, or moon blooms.

It’s a night in Ohio where a man sleeps
alone one week and the next, the woman
he will eventually marry leans her body
into his for the first time, leans a kind

of faith, too—filled with white crickets
and bouquets of wild carrot. And
the months and the honeyed years
after that will make all the light

and dark squares feel like tiles
for a kitchen they can one day build
together. Every turn, every sacrificial
move—all the decoys, the castling,

the deflections—these will be both
riotous and unruly, the exact opposite
of what she thought she ever wanted
in the endgame of her days.