Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up

A. Booth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137482846
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

A guidebook to the allusions of T.S. Eliot's notorious poem, The Waste Land, Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up utilizes the footnotes as a starting point, opening up the poem in unexpected ways. Organized according to Eliot's line numbers and designed for both scholars and students, chapters are free-standing and can be read in any order.

Part I

The Burial of the Dead

Line 20

“Son of man”: Ezekiel

In its first eighteen lines, The Waste Land zooms through the seasons: the bulbs and roots of springtime are followed by coffee in the summer and sledding in the mountains. After this move through the calendar year, lines 19–42 traverse the geography of fertility—from desert to garden. The poem moves from a landscape where “roots that clutch” hang on for dear life in a heap of “stony rubbish” (WL 19, 20), then travels from that scene of dead trees and dry rocks to a hyacinth garden.

The desert portion of this second section of “The Burial of the Dead” opens with a question: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” (WL 19–20). This questioner—the first in the poem—sees an unpromising landscape and asks about fertility: is it possible that things can grow here? The answer that comes back sounds like the sharp putdown of a teacher whose method on the first day of class is to make clear to his students that they know a lot less than they think they know:

Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

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. (WL 20–24)

The question is about what can grow out of “stony rubbish,” and the answer is: “You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images.” The answer is not that nothing could grow in such a place, though such a declaration might seem plausible. Here we are in a poem called The Waste Land at a spot characterized by “stony rubbish.” It could be the middle of a desert or the bottom of a landfill; it could be postwar Europe, littered with soldiers’ graves, shattered by a devastating war. It could be cultural ground zero: Western civilization in decline, the classics slighted, imaginative life diminished. Whether the landscape is literal or figurative, what matters in a poem tortured by issues of fertility is whether things can grow. Is there vegetation so hardy that it can take root and hang on in this Oklahoma dustbowl of a place? Are there imaginative compensations that can flourish here? What is the prognosis—literary, cultural, or agricultural? The answer the poem gives is that “you,” the questioner, are not in a position to speak, not in a position to speculate.

Eliot’s gloss on the first few words of this answer to a question about growth sends us to Ezekiel, one of the Old Testament prophets who preached against Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon in the sixth century BCE. The footnote to Eliot’s line 20 cites Ezekiel 2.1, which reads: “And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee” (King James Version). “Son of man” is what God calls Ezekiel throughout the book, emphasizing the distance between them. The phrase reminds us that to have a place on the family tree of human beings, to be the child of parents, is the opposite of the Old Testament God, who has no progenitors. The verse Eliot cites, when God tells the son of man to stand up and listen, is the moment in Ezekiel when God speaks for the first time to his prophet. In other words, Eliot’s footnote suggests that the voice of God is suddenly heard in The Waste Land.

* * *

In Ezekiel’s Old Testament narrative, God’s words don’t come out of the blue but are preceded by what appears to be a bizarre weather front—a fiery cloud that blows out of the north. In the cloud are four creatures. Each has four faces (human, lion, eagle, ox), four wings, feet like the hooves of calves, and wheels that the creatures seem to operate by a kind of spiritual telepathy. They appear and disappear like lightning; their flapping wings make a sound like flood water. Over their heads is a throne, and on the throne is a figure like a man but fiery and radiant as a rainbow. The figure, Ezekiel says, “was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD” (1.28), and when the prophet sees it, he throws himself face down on the ground. It is at this point that God speaks the words Eliot cites: “Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.”

Ezekiel doesn’t exactly stand up; instead, in an act of divine puppetry, “the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet” (2.2). God tells him that he is being sent to preach to the rebellious, stubborn Israelites, and it will not be an easy assignment. The Israelites will not want to hear what he has to say. Ezekiel is not to be afraid though, and is not to back down. For the next twenty-four chapters, Ezekiel exposes the wrongdoing of Israel, predicting its destruction at the hand of an angry god, and often recording for the reader the lengthy instructional session in which God dictates the prophet’s script: “Alas for all the evil abominations of the house of Israel! for they shall fall by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence . . . So will I stretch out my hand upon them, and make the land desolate” (6.11, 14). This is not Ezekiel speaking to the Israelites but rather God speaking to Ezekiel, and what he describes is a land laid waste for its sins—a country that will be filled with dead bodies—“in all the tops of the mountains, and under every green tree”—because the people have abandoned the true God and turned instead to different gods—false “idols” (6.13). God’s declaration that judgment is at hand is pronounced on a country that is bringing its own doom upon itself.

To cite Ezekiel is to add a layer of moral condemnation onto Eliot’s already grim desert scene. The wasted land Ezekiel sketches is the threat of future punishment, while the desert Eliot sketches seems to constitute a land where that punishment has already been administered—a waste land that need not have been a wasted land. To creep under the shadow of a rock, as a speaker suggests in this section, is to cower in the heat of divine retribution, surrounded by the desolate outcome of collective impiety.

One commentator has described the book of Ezekiel as splitting into two parts: “dooms and consolations” (Greenberg 3). After describing the fall of Jerusalem, the prophet’s tone changes, and he begins to reassure the Israelites that they’ll return to their land and recover from their tragedy. Probably the most famous provision of comfort is in Chapter 37, the story of the valley of dry bones. God sets Ezekiel down in this valley and instructs him to deliver a message: “Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD” (37:5–6). Ezekiel does as he is told and reports, “as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above” (37:7–8).

The bones have been assembled into bodies, but they’re not breathing, so God tells Ezekiel to speak to the wind, saying that God has instructed them to “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live” (37:9). Once again Ezekiel obeys, and the winds obey, and breath comes into the bodies which “lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army” (37:10). Then God says to Ezekiel that the bones are a metaphor: “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost.” Ezekiel is to give them a message from God: “Prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel” (37.12).

In the story of dry bones, God demonstrates that he knows how his people are feeling and that he is not indifferent to their low spirits. I know what they say, he tells Ezekiel: “they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost” (37.11). He has been listening to their conversations, and he chooses to reinstill hope by beginning with their own expression of hopelessness and spooling out a parable from it. The revival of dry bones is as improbable as the revival of Israel’s morale; it is precisely the improbability of the thing occurring that gives the narrative its voltage and its staying power—the rattling transformation of bones into an army is probably the most famous section of book of Ezekiel, familiar to anybody who has ever heard the song “Dry Bones,” which begins by asserting that “Ezekiel connected them dry bones” and then launches into an anatomical litany of how the toe bone’s connected to the foot bone, the foot bone’s connected to the heel bone, and so forth.

In the Old Testament, Ezekiel, under God’s instructions, takes bones and wind and combines them into a narrative of hope and resurrection, so that later in The Waste Land’s Part II, an exchange between speakers moves from a remark about bones to one about wind, we can hear an echo of Ezekiel:

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

‘What is that noise?’

The wind under the door.

‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’

Nothing again nothing. (WL 115–20)

What strikes me about this passage when I read it with Ezekiel’s dry bones in mind is the way that the unsavory-sounding rats’ alley, site of lost bones, and the mention of wind, which in the Webster play Eliot is quoting indicates life, but only just, constitute the elements necessary for resurrection according to the peculiar Old Testament parable. In the book of Ezekiel, God insists that no matter how dead the Israelites may feel, he can reach down into their graves, pull them out, and reconstitute their bones into living, breathing, vigorous soldiers. This is not like Lazarus, still moldering in a shroud. This is more bizarre than turning back the clock 24 or 48 or even 72 hours. This is rabbit-out-of-a-hat: now you see skeletons—now you see soldiers—young, fit, fighting athletes.

It is therefore possible, I think, to see Eliot’s rats’ alley not only as a place of death and depression, which it undoubtedly is, but also as a place containing elements that might transform death and depression into their opposites. We have bones, we have wind, and God can do wonders with these ingredients. Thus also “The Fire Sermon,” “Death by Water,” and “What the Thunder Said,” all of which contain both bones and wind may be understood as housing not only the bones and rats that remind us of the Great War trenches but also the bones and wind that remind us of Ezekiel and the dancing transformation in the valley of dry bones.

Line 23

“And the dead tree gives no shelter”: Ecclesiastes

Eliot cites a verse from Ezekiel as his source for the phrase “Son of man” and another Old Testament verse, this time from Ecclesiastes, as the source for a line about a dead tree and a cricket:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

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. (WL 19–24)

His note for “And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief” sends us to Ecclesiastes 12:5, which reads: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.”

* * *

Ecclesiastes or “The Preacher,” as he is called in the King James Version, is swashbuckling in both his pursuit of wisdom and his confrontation of doubt. Men work, but for what, he asks? Generations come and go; the sun rises and sets. What does it all add up to? In the words of Ecclesiastes:

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down. . . . I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. (1.3–5, 14)

Though we think of “vanity” as being about ego and attention to surfaces, Robert Gordis has explained that the word translates literally as “breath, vapor” (204), so that when the preacher repeats his refrain “vanity of vanities” (1.1), he is emphasizing the fleetingness and insubstantiality of life. But the book swings back and forth between assertions about our inability to construct meaningful lives for ourselves and assertions about life as an unquestionable good: “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion” (9.4).

Ecclesiastes 12, the chapter from which Eliot quotes, begins by cautioning us to “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,” for, as he details in the next five verses, old age is coming, and about those years “thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them . . . ” (12.1). A catalog of infirmity follows, telling how strong men will become bowed over, how teeth will no longer chew because there are so few of them left, and how the perimeters of the world close in: you look out your window and can’t see much became your vision has dimmed. “Also,” in the verse Eliot cites, old age is a time “when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.” Here, the preacher talks about how elderly people’s worlds may shrink because of fear. Anxiety keeps them at home. They’re afraid of high places—perhaps because of physical difficultie...