DONKER, Marjorie. The waste land and the Aeneid

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The Waste Land and the Aeneid Author(s): Marjorie Donker Source: PMLA , Jan., 1974, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Jan., 1974), pp. 164-173 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/461679 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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MARJORIE DONI(ER

The Waste LaLnd and the Aeneid

Virgil's position in the mind of Europe, his per-

A NUMBER of critics have noted important

vasive influence on Western literature. is the

relationships between the Aeneid and The

critical assumption of The Waste Land. On another Waste Land. It is generally accepted, for occasion, Eliot was to define the centrality of example, that the two poems share a particular Virgil in a manner that underlines the nature of mythic configuration, a pattern of quest that involves descent into and return from an experience that assumption. "But he [Aeneas] is the symbol of mystery and sacred knowledge. Ferner Nuhn of Rome; and, as Aeneas is to Rome, so is ancient Rome to Europe. Thus Virgil acquires the centralpoints out that "it may be useful to look upon ity of the unique classic; he is at the centre of The Waste Land as one of a series of poetic European civilization, in a position which no 'descents into hell'; Virgil's being into the classical other poet can share or usurp. The Roman Eminfernal regions, Dante's into the medieval hell, Eliot's into a modern hell: for we strongly suspect pire and the Latin language were not any empire and any language, but an empire and a language that the author has seen his work in very much this light."' Grover Smith has expanded on Nuhn's with a unique destiny in relation to ourselves; and the poet in whom that Empire and that language description and also related The Waste Land to the initiation pattern of death and rebirth con- came to consciousness and expression is a poet of unique destiny."4 figured in the Aeneid. He describes "archetypal" Eliot evokes not only the Aeneid's mythic depatterns of descent and ascent symbolized in both poems and reminds us that such a formulation is sign, but the particular concatenation of events of found in the Aeneid, not only in Aeneas' descent its first six books. He recalls Virgil's literary into hell, but also in the ocean-voyage motif of

strategies, and like him reformulates the monu-

the hero myth that unifies the themes of sea-trial

ments of the past to comment upon the present.

and grave-trial necessary for symbolic rebirth.2

He points to Virgil over and over again with a

Apart from the mythic patterns, other, more

variety of gestures, some of them obvious, others

specific allusions to the Aeneid in Eliot's poem

wittily disguised.

have also been noticed by various readers and I

Thus a caveat is in order. Many of the relation-

have drawn gratefully upon their comments in

ships that concern me here are hidden, submerged,

what follows. I refer especially to noted parallels

and elliptical, and I am aware that in describing

between Eliot's "lady of situations" and Dido

them I will often seem to be explaining in tedious

and between the figure of Phlebas the Phoenician

detail what is best apprehended without media-

and the helmsman, Palinurus, of the Aeneid

tion. Gilbert Highet's warning about symbolist

(Smith, p. 91).

poets applies here with particular force: "Their

It is the proposition of this essay, however, that

methods tend to disguise and transform all the

The Waste Land is even more consciously Vir-

material that passes through their minds, until

gilian than has yet been recognized and that there

nothing is left but a hint, a nuance, a grotesque, a

are many connections, specifically literary con-

parodic reminiscence, a phrase repeated in a

nections, yet unexplored between the two poems.

dream, a poignant echo. They do not care to

It is not an exaggeration to say that the existence

explain. They never shout. They speak gently to

of the Aeneid, the central importance of the

those who wish to hear."5 So at the risk of over-

Aeneid, is one of the assumptions of Eliot's poem

elaboration I should like first to put the two

and that if The Waste Land is a trip through hell,

poems "side by side," and then to comment upon

Virgil guides Eliot as he once guided Dante.3

what such a juxtaposition suggests.

164

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Marjorie Donker

165

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt

I

deutsch.

There are echoes of the Aeneid in the first sec-

And when we were children, staying at the arch-

tion of The Waste Land, "The Burial of the Dead," in memories of a sea voyage, the desert, and a

duke's,

"lost girl." Readers of the Aeneid will recall Aeneas' sea journey as he escapes from the ruins of Troy. The protagonist of The Waste Land reminds us of a similar journey, with a quotation from Wagner that evokes the voyage of Tristan and Isolde: Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu

Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du?6

And Aeneas is cast away upon the Libyan desert in a landscape similar to that of Eliot's poem: A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.

For both protagonists, there is the memory of a "lost girl." For Aeneas this is the recollection of his wife, Creiusa, lost in the burning city of Troy: "... there rose before my eyes the sad phantom and ghost of Creuiisa herself, a form larger than her wont."7 So the speaker of The Waste Land

My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. But we do not need to have information about

sources to be reminded of World War I here; for most of us "archduke" and "deutsch" are stimuli

for such a response. To this theme of war and loss, "The Burial of the Dead" adds a contemporary but debased echo of the epic's traditional supernatural machinery. The cards dealt by Madame Sosostris suggest the shape of events to come much as

prophecies and oracles from the gods guide Aeneas from place to place in Virgil's poem: Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

remembers the "hyacinth girl," associated with a

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

trancelike experience:

I see crowds of people, walking around in a ring. ... I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

As the voyage, the desert, and the "lost girl" are linked in the Aeneid with a theme of war and Troy, they are also associated in The Waste Land with a world destroyed by war, a prewar Europe of sunlight and gardens: Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

It is noteworthy that each image in the fortuneteller's prophecy has a protofigure in the Aeneid. More than one reader, for instance, has seen in "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" of The Waste

Land an analogue to a figure in the Aeneid, Palinurus the helmsman, whose death is also foreordained (Nuhn, p. 228). When Venus requests Neptune's assurance that her son will reach his destination safely, the sea god prophesies: "In safety, as thou prayest, shall he reach the haven of Avernus. One only shall there be whom, lost in the flood, thou shalt seek in vain; one life shall be given for many."9 The life "given" in the Aeneid is that of Palinurus, who becomes a sacri-

In this passage Eliot is manipulating two

fice for the safety of the others. In the working out

sources: a letter from the poet Rupert Brooke,

of Madame Sosostris' prophecy it is such a pilot-

who died in World War I, and the autobiography

figure, Phlebas the Phoenician, who drowns in

of Countess Marie Larisch, a cousin of the Aus-

"Death by Water," the fourth section of The

trian Archduke Ferdinand whose assassination

Waste Land. ("O you who turn the wheel and

triggered that war.8

look to windward.") And in the fleeting recollec-

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The Waste Land and the Aeneid

166

tion of a drowned father, "Those are pearls that course-a few things out of many I will unfo

were his eyes," Eliot pairs a father's drowning thee in speech, that so more safely thou ma

traverse the seas of thy sojourn, and find rest that Virgil pairs the death of Palinurus with the Ausonia's haven; for the Fates forbid Helenus drowning of Aeneas' father, Anchises. In both to know more and Saturnian Juno stays his utpoems the death by drowning precedes a quester's terance."14 Helenus will tell some things but not all (the blank card of The Waste Land) because it is descent into the Lower World and suggests the impossible for men to know everything. The wheel cost and sacrifice of the hero's journey. The second figure of Madame Sosostris' prophof change, like "the Wheel" of The Waste Land, symbolizes the cyclic nature of action and reacecy is described in multiple terms: she is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, and the lady of tion, the ever-recurring patterns that imply continuity and change in both poems.15 situations. As the "beautiful" but "poisonous" woman she has some relationship, if only as a Madame Sosostris' warning to "fear death by verbal echo, to the Aeneitd's figure of Bellona, thewater" also gains in import if we relate it to the goddess of war, invoked by a malevolent Juno to design of the Aeneid as well as to the more gendestroy the amity between the Trojans and the eralized fertility myths. with that of the "Sailor" in much the same way

Latins, while in such a reminiscence we find an

extension of the poem's concern with "falling towers," the destruction of cities, as a symbol of both private and cultural crisis. In turn, the Lady of the Rocks has an ancient counterpart in Scylla,

Virgil uses images of water to suggest the mani-

fold possibilities of the hero's journey. Water makes the dangerous ocean road and the fertile haven of the Tiber. If the water element demands

the hazardous sea rock, which Helenus, a Trojan

sacrifice (as it does in the case of the pilot Palinurus and Aeneas' father, Anchises), it is also the source

seer, warns Aeneas to avoid. And opposite Scylla

of life and civilization.

lies Charybdis, "the insatiate," she [who] "sucks the vast waves into the abyss, and again in turn

casts them upwards, lashing the stars with

Just as the role of prophecy and figures connected with it suggest a Virgilian matrix, Eliot's succeeding lines about a planted corpse and "the

spray."'0 This whirlpool image appears later in

Dog" are a cryptic reformulation of certain events

The Waste Land in association with the death of

in Aeneas' travels.

Phlebas1' Finally, as the "lady of situations," the Lady of the Rocks is conflated with Dido, Cleo-

patra, and other dangerous female figures in "A Game of Chess." The third figure described by Madame Sosos-

tris, the "man with three staves," is comparable to

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!

"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? "Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

the Aeneid's figure of Neptune the earth-shaker

"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,

with his three-pronged trident. As in the Aeneid

"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!

Neptune is the demanding male guardian, both chastising and protecting the Trojan voyagers, so

"the man with three staves" becomes in The Waste

This glances at a famous passage in Virgil. Aeneas, needing greenery to veil an altar, attempts to

Land the onomatopoetic father, "Da Da Da," the

pluck some myrtle and cornel bushes from a

Thunder, the sermon-giver.'2

hillock: "I drew near; and essaying to tear up the green growth from the soil, that I might deck the

The image of the "one-eyed merchant" has a the cannibalistic Cyclops.'3 At the same time, the

altar with leafy boughs, I see an awful portent, wondrous to tell. For from the first tree, which is

card "which is blank" and the "Wheel" seem to

torn from the ground with broken roots, drops of

grotesque counterpart in the Aeneid's figure of

have references in the same prediction that warns

black blood trickle and stain the earth with

Aeneas of the "Lady of the Rocks": "0 Goddess-

gore."16 Aeneas hears a voice crying out from under the mound; it is the voice of Polydorus, a Trojan prince treacherously slain by the King

born! since there is clear proof that under higher auspices thou dost journey o'er the sea-for thus

the king of the gods allots the destinies and rolls

of Thrace. Polydorus warns Aeneas to flee the

the wheel of change; and such is the circling

cruel land where, he says, "an iron harvest of

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167

Marjorie Donker

ninety-two of The Waste Land has already caused a number of readers to see behind the figure of

spears covered my pierced body, and grew up into sharp javelins."'17 Eliot's lines follow Virgil in suggesting an encounter with a friend ("one I knew") and the burial of a body that sprouts ("That corpse you planted last year in your garden"). Combined with a reference to the Roman-Carthaginian wars ("You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!"), wars inspired, in Virgil's poem, by the love-hate of Dido for Aeneas, these lines would seem to suggest an inversion of real vegetation rites. The garden of The Waste Land, like the body of Polydorus,

tainly the splendor of Eliot's description captures the opulence with which Virgil surrounds his unhappy queen for whom "lighted lamps hang down from the fretted roof of gold and flaming torches drive out the night."'9 But more directly Eliot is actually mimicking

withers and crops and men die, the ruin is asso-

Aeneas must turn from her to fulfill his duties to

"the lady of situations" the image of Dido. Cer-

Virgilian strategy when he conflates a Dido-like figure with that of Cleopatra ("The Chair she sa in, like a burnished throne . . . "). In Virgil's work the figure of the Phoenician queen carries an produces a harvest of warriors, an "iron harvest implicit reference to the Egyptian. As Theodor of spears." Death had undone so many. Haecker says, "Every Roman reading the story of There is a similar ambience surrounding The Aeneas and Dido must have thought of Caesar Waste Land's image of "the Dog." The capital letter of "Dog" implies that Eliot is referring to and Cleopatra, where the man won and the woman lost; but so must he also have remembered the Dog-Star Sirius, an ancient symbol of sterility Antony and Cleopatra, where the woman won and death that is, at the same time, the navigaand the man lost."20 Virgil makes the figure of tor's guide, a "friend to man." In the Aeneid the Dido, like that of Cleopatra, the symbol for a connotations surrounding "the Dog" are singusybaritic and irrational East, a menace to the larly appropriate to The Waste Land. When the Roman ideals of "pietas" and resolution. Trojans are stricken with plague, when the grass ciated with the Dog-Star Sirius (Aeneid iII.137-

his son, his drowned father, and the gods. So

42). Virgil later reemphasizes the role of Sirius as

Eliot's "lady of situations" is also linked to the

a creator of waste lands in a description of the

irrational and dangerous aspects of sensuality;

battle anger of Aeneas, whose helmet is said to

... her strange synthetic perfumes,

blaze "even as when in the clear night comets

Unguent, powdered, or liquid-troubled, confused

glow blood-red in the baneful wise or even as

And drowned the sense in odours . . .

fiery Sirius, that bearer of drought and pestilence to feeble mortals, rises and saddens the sky with baleful light."'18 In sum, "The Burial of the Dead" figures as one of a series of testings for the quester, a "trial" centered on the paradoxical nature of the earth as both garden and grave. Like the first books of the Aeneid it recalls the past and contrasts it with the menacing harvest of the present, invoking through prophecy a sibylline picture of events to

Eliot hints at other Virgilian matter in the following: Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.

Douglas Bush has remarked that in "the change

come.

Together, the next two sections of Eliot's poem,

of Philomel" and "other withered stumps of

"A Game of Chess" and "The Fire Sermon,"

time," Eliot employs the classical device of

suggest another testing or "rite de passage," in

"ekphrasis," the viewing of art objects within the

this case in terms of fire and burning. They echo

context of a poem.21 He notes that here "one may

much that is suggested in the famous affair be-

think of the pictures at which Aeneas gazed, pic-

tween Aeneas and Dido in the Aeneid, a relation-

tures of heroic action." But still another echo of

ship that is, in one sense, an important "testing"

Virgil operates in the phrase "sylvan scene."

of Aeneas' power to remain true to his Roman

The English source of this phrase is Paradise Lost, as Eliot reminds his readers with a note, but he

destiny.

Eliot's note on his use of "laquearia" in line

does not remind us that Milton's words are a direct

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The Waste Land and the Aeneid

168

"What translation of the Aeneid: "tumrn silvis scaena

is that noise?"

The wind under the door. coruscis / desuper, horrentique atrum nemus im"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing ?" minet umbra" (i.164-65).

Moreover, the shift from visual to auditory images within the stanza, the movement from what

is seen to what is heard, seems to recall Virgil's

Dido will respond to the departure of her lover with a fiery death, her own immolation on a

funeral pyre. Eliot, too, continues the chess game, poetical technique in his long passage on "fama," the traditional game of kings and queens, with rumor, which also falls on "dirty ears," spreading "The Fire Sermon." the news through all the Libyan cities of the seducHere, in the third section of The Waste Land, tion of Dido by Aeneas.

the typist will respond to the departure of her

Dido at first ignores the ugly voice of "fama," lover with an indifference that contrasts with but when she hears that Aeneas plans to leave Dido's passionate fury. But more significantly, the Carthage her reactions are violent and witchlike. final lines of "The Fire Sermon" point to Aeneas' "The same heartless Rumour brought her the departure from Carthage as Dido's pyre flames maddening news that they arm the fleet and make from the shore. ready for voyaging. Helpless in mind she rages, To Carthage then I came and all aflame raves through the city, like some Burning burning burning burning Thyiad startled by the shaken emblems, what O Lord Thou pluckest me out time, hearing the Bacchic cry, the biennial revels O Lord Thou pluckest fire her and at night Cithaeron summons her with burning its din."22 As she becomes more and more aware

of Aeneas' inevitable departure Dido becomes desperate. She asks, "What am I to do?" (Aeneid

iv.531-34). Confronted by Dido as he makes secret plans to leave, Aeneas is helpless to explain himself. And with the rising of the wind the Trojan ships are readied for departure. So a command from Mercury to Aeneas is couched in

urgent terms. "Hearest not the kindly breezes

While Eliot's notes for these lines refer the reader to St. Augustine, Buddha's "Fire Sermon," and

the collocation of these "two representatives of eastern and western asceticism," we remember

that St. Augustine is, like Aeneas, a city builder, also plucked from Carthage and its dangerous

and sensual temptations as a "rite de passage," a necessary step on a journey of initiation and "knowledge."

blowing? She [Dido], resolved on death, revolves in her heart fell craft and crime, and is tossed on

the changing surge of passion. Wilt not flee hence in haste, while hasty flight is possible? . . . A fickle and changeful thing is woman ever."23 The emotional undertones of the situation between Eliot's lady of the chess game and her listener produce an effect of anxiety and hysteria

similar to that in Dido's response to the news of Aeneas' impending departure. "My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with

We are also reminded of the ambiguous nature

of fire as a symbol for both purgation and lust. If on the one hand it is descriptive of purification,

it also suggests sensual passion. Such a paradox is exploited by both Eliot and Virgil in similar contexts. Virgil is lavish in his use of fire images in his description of Aeneas' Carthaginian experi-

ence. Dido's death by fire is the culmination of a long series of fire images that describe Dido's passion. I will mention only a few. "But the queen

... is wasted with fire unseen." She recognizes "traces of the olden flame." "All the while the

me.

"Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

"What are you thinking of? . . .

flame devours her tender heart-strings."24 So

Eliot extends the fire images of "A Game of Chess" ("a burnished throne, / Glowed," "the

The silence of the listener, his remembrance of a

flames of sevenbranched candelabra," "candle-

drowned father ("Those are pearls that were his

eyes"), and the summons that follows ("HURRY

flames," "Huge sea-wood . .. / Burned," "fiery points") to the climactic lines of "The Fire

UP PLEASE ITS TIME") recall the situation of the

Sermon."

hapless Aeneas and Dido. And, like Dido, the

The most interesting allusion to Virgil in this

lady of the chess game senses a threat in the wind:

section of the poem, however, is in the following:

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Marjorie Donker Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.

In his notes Eliot assigns this reference to Dante,

but again we are led back to Virgil. Dante's lines are shaped by Virgil's famous epitaph: "Mantua

169

Land is also confronted by a similar cave, "Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot

spit," in a landscape without birds, an Avernus. If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada

And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock

me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc/ ParWhere the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees thenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces."25 The As he progresses downward Aeneas is confronted Thames daughters sing of meaningless seduction. by terrible apparitions, "faint, bodiless lives, Virgil sings of shepherds, farmers, and leaders. The "death" by water of the Thames maidens, their inability to find meaning in "the event" ("I can connect / Nothing with nothing.") leads into the fourth section of Eliot's poem, which describes another "Death by Water."

flitting under a hollow semblance of form."27 So Eliot's quester also encounters apparitions. "Who

is the third who walks always beside you?"

Aeneas and the sibyl travel past a throng of phantoms until, crossing Acheron, they hear voices and wailing, "the souls of infants weepSome of the connections between this section ing."28 Eliot's poem seems to evoke this with: of Eliot's poem and the Aeneid have already been "What is that sound high in the air / Murmur of noted. There seems to be an echo of the fate of maternal lamentation." Palinurus, Aeneas' helmsman, in that of Phlebas Aeneas and his guide also encounter Palinurus, the Phoenician. And the images in this passage of the drowned ship's pilot who recalls how "by "the whirlpool" and "the wheel" ("O you who chance the helm to which, as my charge, I clung, turn the wheel and look to windward") take us steering our course, was violently torn from me, and back not only to Madame Sosostris' prophecy but to the images of the whirlpool Charybdis andI, dropping headlong, dragged it with me."29 Is

the labyrinth of the Aeneid. Most readers re-

this echoed in Eliot's "The boat responded /

member Charybdis, but equally important is

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar"?

Virgil's description of another, symbolic whirl-

When paired with later events in Aeneas' journey

pool, the maze carved in bronze on the doors of

it seems to be, for after meeting Palinurus,

the Temple of Apollo at Cumae. For Virgil's

Aeneas then faces the betrayed Dido in the

readers the labyrinthine patterns on the doors at

Mourning Fields where "those whom stern Love

Cumae prefigure Aeneas' descent into the maze,

has consumed with cruel wasting are hidden in

"the whirlpool," of the lower world, a great trial

walks withdrawn." "Even in death the pangs [of

of spiritual initiation described in the sixth book

Love] leave them not."30 Compare Eliot's

of the Aeneid. Similarly, the turning wheel and the

. . . what have we given ?

whirlpool images of "Death by Water" prefigure a

My friend, blood shaking my heart

final trial, a descent into hell, for the quester of

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

The Waste Land (Smith, pp. 67-71). This is the

Which an age of prudence can never retract

dominant motif of the last section of Eliot's

By this, and this only, we have existed

poem, "What the Thunder Said." If we juxtapose the images of Aeneas' journey to the lower world with those of "What the Thun-

der Said," the reflections one casts upon the other are illuminating. For Aeneas, the path downward

begins as "a deep cave . . . yawning wide and vast, shingly, and sheltered by dark lake and woodland gloom, over which no flying creatures

could safely wing their way; such a vapour from

Still later, Aeneas and his guide meet Deiphobus, a mutilated warrior, who recalls Helen's treachery, the "fatalis equus," and the fall of Troy. So Eliot's: What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers

At last Aeneas comes to Lethe, beyond which

these black jaws poured into the over-arching

he finds his father Anchises. Anchises' well-

heaven [whence the Greeks spoke of Avernus, the

known speech to his son is the ethical and phil-

Birdless Place]."26 The protagonist of The Waste

osophic center of Virgil's poem, a Stoic sermon on

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The Waste Land and the Aeneid

170

the need for purgation, regeneration, and right conduct. Part of it seems so important, not only to the "sermon" of The Waste Land ("Give, sympathize, control"), but as a gloss to the entire

it bear "no empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends." Aeneas has moved from east to west, to

mastery of the Roman ideals of control and

civilization. He will set a fertile new land in order, poem and its major symbols that I will quote from it at length, departing in this case from the found the imperial city, Rome. The protagonist of convenience of the Loeb edition for the verse

The Waste Land reverses this movement. He has

translation by Rolfe Humphries, which handsomely reproduces the meditative beauty of Virgil's great summation:

transversed Europe to the East, and after a series of fragments shored against the ruins, he plays not with order but with madness. "Why then Ile

fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe." His quest con-

The seed of life is a spark of fire, but the body cludes with a heap of broken images. A clod of earth, a clog, a mortal burden. Hence humans fear, desire, grieve, and are joyful, II And even when life is over, all the evil

Ingrained so long, the adulterated mixture, The plagues and pestilences of the body Remain, persist. So there must be a cleansing, By penalty, by punishment, by fire, By sweep of wind, by water's absolution, Before the guilt is gone. Each of us suffers His own peculiar ghost. But the day comes When we are sent through wide Elysium, The Fields of the Blessed, a few of us, to linger Until the turn of time, the wheel of ages, Wears off the taint, and leaves the core of spirit

Pure sense, pure flame . . . 31

Whatever we choose to make of the fragments with which Eliot concludes his poem, he seems to suggest that they are-in a variety of languagesa witness, however altered, to the viability of a

literary tradition. Virgil's vocabulary-the episodes, symbols, and language of his work-has come to us in a multiplicity of formulations. He is the progenitor of a long and noble line of literary descendants from Ovid and Dante to Spenser and Milton. Knowledge of Virgil's poetry is a working postulate of Renaissance poets and nineteenth-century writers alike.

These lines, which recapitulate Aeneas' own

This accounts, in one way, for the extraor-

purgatorial experiences, seem to define the move-

dinarily evocative nature of many of Eliot's al-

ment of The Waste Land which has also suggested

lusions. Each is densely packed with reference.

a series of trials by fire, by wind, and by water.

Consider, for one case, the relationship already

Like Aeneas, the protagonist of The Waste Land

described between Eliot's reference to a corpse

has seen the ambiguous dialectic of the elements.

that sprouts ("Will it bloom this year?") and the

For him, too, the body is "a clod of earth" with

episode in the Aeneid of Polydorus, the Trojan

a "seed of life." For him, too, fire has been both an

prince whose body sprouts a tree that drips black

immortal "spark" and a way of punishment. He

blood. Dante recasts this incident in his descrip-

has experienced "water's absolution" and "the

tion of the Bleeding Trees in the Grove of Suicides

wheel of ages." Eliot, like Virgil, has been con-

in the Inferno (xIII. 130-32). Spenser uses it in

cerned with guilt, that which each of us suffers,

The Faerie Queene when the Red Cross Knight

"His own particular ghost" ("There is always

plucks a bough from a tree "out of whose rift

another one walking beside you").

there came / Small drops of gory blood that

But the meaning of The Waste Land is also

trickled down the same" (II.30, 8-9). Even Baude-

enhanced for us in the recognition of its reversal

laire's title, Fleurs du mal, to which Eliot calls

of the movement of the Aeneid. We are not sure

attention with a note, could serve as an allusion to

"the guilt is gone." When the protagonist of

this same passage.

Eliot's poem sits fishing with "an arid plain"

Similarly, Eliot's allusion to "the Dog" (the

behind him, when "Ganga is sunken," it is in

Dog-Star Sirius) has both a Virgilian source and

ominous contrast to the fertility that Aeneas finds

a rich literary history. Renaissance literature in

beside the Tiber, the site of the new city, Rome.

particular is filled with allusions to the "dog days,"

The Tiber is in full flood-"the blue Tiber, river

the hot days of summer thought to be under the

best beloved of Heaven."32 Eliot tentatively

influence of Sirius, which is in the constellation

evokes the "Sweet Thames," but only briefly will

Canis Major. In turn, dogs and their relatives,

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Marjorie Donker wolves, are associated with summer heat, metaphorically murderous lust. Webster, in The White Devil, a play Eliot alludes to more than once in The Waste Land, makes a particularly strong use

171

sublimated, and psychologized into a pattern that implies the power and harmony of the Augustan success story. His great source of inspiration was Homer. The first six books of the Aeneid, Aeneas'

of this series of associations. And Milton has in wanderings, are Virgil's Odyssey, and the last six, mind a Virgilian reference to Sirius as a creator his of Iliad. But his poem also recalls the Argonautica, waste lands when he describes Satan thus: the works of Lucretius, Catullus, and many other poets. Virgil synthesizes the Roman heritage as an Incens't with indignation Satan stood expression of the grandeur and cost of the ImUnterrifi'd, and like a Comet burn'd, perial idea and of Latin civilization.34 That fires the length of Ophiucus huge Similarly, The Waste Land echoes and modulates In th' Artic Sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes Pestilence and War . . . (PL II.707-11)

This recalls the dangerous brilliance of Aeneas in his battle anger shining even as "when in the clear night comets glow blood-red in baneful wise, or even as fiery Sirius, that bearer of drought and pestilence to feeble mortals, rises and saddens the sky with baleful light."33

As Eliot says, then, what Tiresias sees is the substance of his poem, for what Tiresias sees is metamorphosis, transformation. And this is what we see too, the sea-change of art, the metempsychosis of word and image in the flux of time, a theme Eliot was to assert more than once.

the monuments of Western civilization available

to the twentieth century. But The Waste Land is designed to suggest neither splendor nor achievement; instead Eliot manipulates his allusions so that we are aware of them as fragments; they are not fused but imbedded into the structure of the

poem. Eliot's treatment of them suggests a chaotic cultural landscape, not integration, but disorder. This is underlined by suggestive differences in the city images of the two poems. Aeneas is a city builder-that is, a civilization founder. For Virgil the falling towers of Troy and the razed walls of Carthage are haunting reminders of the shadow on the Imperial imperative. Yet, despite

. . . And what there is to conquer

this shadow, Aeneas is the bearer of a new ra-

By strength and submission, has already been dis-

tionality and the destiny of Rome. The quester

covered

of The Waste Land, haunted, like Aeneas, by

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate-but there is no competition-

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. (East Coker)

falling towers that burst in the violet air, has only a tentative resolution, a faint hope. He wonders if he shall at least set his own lands in order. His

quest, unlike that of Aeneas, culminates in a sense of futility and hollowness, "the empty chapel, only the wind's home." But that sense of futility, of tentative resolution,

This sense of the unpropitious conditions of the

is not to be the last word. For Eliot, as for Dante,

present age that The Waste Land suggests, the

Virgil is a guide through the Inferno, but there are

comment on the status of the West in the twen-

pathways that even Virgil cannot assay. If Eliot

tieth century, points to another important rela-

pays homage to Virgil in The Waste Land, if in

tionship between Eliot's poem and Virgil's work.

some sense his poem both evokes and denies the

For Eliot is being particularly Virgilian when he

epic vision, there are other guides and models

reformulates literary monuments as the function

available to the poet. After Virgil the guide is

of a particular historical assertion. It was Virgil's

Beatrice. In his next works, The Hollow Men

conscious strategy to evoke the literary past, not

and Ash Wednesday, Eliot will remind us of the

only to universalize and enrich his poem, but to

Christian poet's sacramental vision of the Rose

create an attitude toward, even an analysis of, the

and the Virgin. Eliot is his own quester, and be-

yond the world of Rome he finds a true Eternal

contemporary world.

The patina of the Aeneid is the glow of civiliza-

City.

tion at one of its proudest and most self-conscious moments. Virgil balances and integrates the

Western Washington State College

literary past until his sources are rationalized,

Bellingham

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172

The Waste Land and the Aeneid

Notes 1 The Wind Blew from the East (New York and London:

10 "... gurgite vastos / sorbet in abruptum fluctus

Harper, 1942), p. 222. Northrop Frye also discusses the

rursusque sub auras / erigit alternos, et sidera verberat

movement of The Waste Land as a descent into hell with

unda" (Iii.421-23).

11 George Williamson notes that in "Death by Water" reference to Virgilian and Dantean patterns, in T. S. Eliot there may be a reminiscence of the "sea-dogs of Scylla and (Edinburgh and London: Grove, 1963), pp. 64-71. the whirlpool of Charybdis; or of Virgil's allusion (Eclogue 2 T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and VI) to Scylla's whirlpool and her sea-hounds that destroyed Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. sailors," A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem 69-71. See also W. F. Jackson Knight, Cumaean Gates: A Reference of the Sixthl Aeneid to the Initiation Pattern (Ox- Analysis (New York: Noonday, 1953), p. 146. 12 Those interested in puns may also find Neptune reford: B. Blackwell, 1936). Jessie L. Weston's book, From Ritual to Romance, to which Eliot refers in the notes to Thelated to the Fish-er King of Grail legend. 13 Smith, p. 85, associates the one-eyed merchant with Waste Land, also links the Grail romances to a motif of the Cyclops by way of Sweeney, who in "Sweeney Erect" initiation in a pattern of death and rebirth. As Grover Smith says, "The Grail legend corresponds to the great hero played Polyphemus to the Nausicaa of the epileptic girl. epics, it dramatizes initiation into maturity, and it bespeaks William T. Moynihan, noting parallels between the Odyssey a quest for sexual, cultural, and spiritual healing" (p. 70). and The Waste Land, also connects the Cyclops with the 3 Eliot's predilection for classical sources is most apparent "one-eyed merchant," Circe with "the lady of situations," in his plays. There are recognized similarities between theand a statement by Tiresias in the lower world with "fear Oresteia of Aeschylus and The Famivly Reunlioln, the Alcestisdeath by water." "The Goal of the Waste Land Quest," of Euripides and The Cocktail PaLrty., the Ion of EuripidesRenascence, 13 (1961), 171-79. The Aeneid, of course, reand The Colnfidenltial Clerk, and Oedipus at Colonus and capitulates much of the Odyssean material. I discuss this The Elder Statesman. further in relation to Virgil's and Eliot's use of the literary past. 4 "What Is a Classic ?" 012On Poetry and Poets (New York: 14 "Nate dea, nam te maioribus ire per altum / auspiciis Noonday, 1961), pp. 70-71. manifesta fides (sic fata deum rex / sortitur volvitque vices, 5 The Classical Tradition (New York and London: Oxis vertitur ordo), / pauca tibi e multis, quo tutior hospita ford Univ. Press, 1949), p. 517. 1 will further protect myself lustres / aequora et Ausonio possis considere portu, / against the charge of being overingenious by reminding my expediam dictis; prohibent nam cetera Parcae / scire readers now that it is not only as a symbolist poet that

Eliot likes to tease his readers. He is fond of verbal ploys Helenum farique vetat Saturnia Iuno" (Ii1.374-80). Eliot's that are often gratuitous, if witty, gestures. Th2e Waste Landuse of the epic epithet, "son of man," is a reduction of the begins with an epigraph from the Satyricon and a reference traditional "tag" for Aeneas, "nate dea," goddess-born. 15 After concluding her prophecy Madame Sosostris sends to "pueri" and ends with a line from Thomas Kyd. The

light-minded are free to use "kid" as a verb as well as a

noun. A colleague pointed out to me recently that Tlhe Cocktail Party begins with an aunt who is ill and ends with a crucifixion on an anthill. With this in mind, I cannot help but think that the picture of sexual sterility evoked by The Waste Land is in more than one sense responsible for the

poem's title. One of the most famous puns in the English language is Shakespeare's play with "waist" in "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action." 6 All quotations from The Waste Land are from The Com-

plete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, 1952). 7"implevi clamore vias, maestusque Creusam / ne-

a message to Mrs. Equitone: "If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, / Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: / One must be so careful these days." The reference to Mrs. Equitone may be a fleeting glance at the wooden horse goddess, the equine "fatalis machina," of the Aeneid. 16 "accessi, viridemque ab humo convellere silvam / conatus, ramis tegerem ut frondentibus aras, / horrendum et dictu video mirabile monstrum. / nam quae prima solo ruptis radicibus arbos / vellitur, huic atro liquuntur sanguine guttae / et terram tabo maculant" (Oi.24-29).

17"... hic confixum ferrea texit / telorum seges et

iaculis increvit acutis" (iii.45-46).

18 "non secus ac liquida si quando nocte cometae / quiquam ingeminans iterumque iterumque vocavi. sanguinei lugubre rubent, aut Sirius ardor / ille, sitim / quaerenti et tectis urbis sine fine furenti / infelix simula-

morbosque ferens mortalibus aegris, / nascitur et laevo crum atque ipsius umbra Creusae / visa mihi ante oculos et

nota maior imago" (ii.769-73). Unless otherwise noted, all

quotations from the Aeneid, in English or Latin, are from

contristat lumine caelum" (x.272-75). 19 " . . . dependent lychni laquearibus aureis / incensi et

Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed., The Loeb

noctem flammis funalia vincunt" (i.726-27). (Eliot quotes

Classical Library, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

these lines in his notes.) 20 Vergil: Father of the West, trans. A. W. Wheen (New

Univ. Press, 1965). 8 F. 0. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 3rd

ed. (New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958),

pp. 92-93 and George L. K. Morris, '"Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight," Partisan Review, 21 (1954), 231-33.

9 "tutus, quos optas, portus accedet Averni. / unus

York: Sheed and Ward, 1934), p. 39. Also J. W. Mackail, The Aeneid (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), pp. xvi-xvii. 21 Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), p. 516, n. 61.

22 "... eadem impia Fama furenti / detulit armari claserit tantum, amissum quem gurgite quaeres; / unum pro sem cursumque parari. / saevit inops animi totamque inmultis dabitur caput' (v.813-15).

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Marjorie censa per urbem / bacchatur, qualis commotis excita sacris / Thyias, ubi audito stimulant trieterica Baccho / orgia nocturnusque vocat clamore Cithaeron" (iv.298-303).

Donker

173

30 " ... quos durus celant calles . . . curae non ipsa in morte relinquunt" (vi.442-44).

31 "igneus est ollis vigor et caelestis origo / seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant / terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra. / hinc metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque, neque auras / dispiciunt clausae tenebris et carcere caeco. / quin et supremo cum lumine vita femina... " (iv.562-70). reliquit, / non tamen omne malum miseris nec funditus 24 "at regina ... caeco carpitur igni" (Iv.l-2)." .. . veteris omnes / corporeae excedunt pestes, penitusque necesse vestigia flammae" (iv.23). "... est mollis flamma medullas

23 " ... nee Zephyros audis spirare secundos ? / illa dolos dirumque nefas in pectore versat, / certa mori, varioque irarum fluctuat aestu./ non fugis hine praeceps, dum praecipitare potestas?. .. varium et mutabile semper /

est / multa diu concreta modis inolescere miris. / ergo exercentur poenis veterumque malorum / supplicia expendunt: 25 "Mantua bore me; Calabria gave me death, Naples now holds me. I sang of shepherds, farmers, and leaders." aliae panduntur inanes / suspensae ad ventos, aliis sub gurgite vasto / infectum eluitur scelus aut exuritur igni; Noted in Haecker, p. 29. Dante's lines are: "Ricorditi di / quisque suos patimur Manis. exinde per amplum / mitme, che son la Pia; / Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma." timur Elysium, et pauci laeta arva tenemus, / donec longa 26 "spelunca alta . . . vastoque immanis hiatu, / scrupea, dies, perfecto temporis orbe /concretam exemit labem, tuta lacu nigro nemorumque tenebris, / quam super purumque relinquit / aetherium sensum atque aurai simhaud ullae poterant impune volantes / tendere iter pinnis: plicis ignem" (vi.730-47). talis sese halitus atris / faucibus effundens super ad 32 "caeruleus Thybris, caelo gratissimus amnis" (v1i1.64). convexa ferebat / [unde locum Grai dixerunt nomine 33 ""... si quando nocte cometae /sanguinei lugubre Aornon]" (vi.237-42). rubent, aut Sirius ardor / ille, sitim morbosque ferens mor27 " ... tenuis sine corpore vitas / . . . volitare cava sub talibus aegris, / nascitur et laevo contristat lumine caelum" imagine formae" (vi.292-93). (x.272-75). / interea..." (iv.66-67).

28 "infantumque animae flentes ..." (vi.427).

34 Brooks Otis, Virgil, A Study in Civilized Poetry (Ox29 "namque gubernaclum multa vi forte revolsum, / cui ford: Clarendon, 1963), pp. 41-96. I am indebted to this datus haerebam custos cursusque regebam, / praecipitans valuable discussion of Virgil's "subjective" and psychologitraxi mecum ... "(vr.349-51). cal reworking of his Homeric models.

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