The preface for The Wasteland by TS Eliot features a rather
ominous character. Sybil, a woman granted immortality and oracle powers by
Apollo on her own wish, says she wishes to die. The backstory to her death wish
is the immortality came without youth. Although this was a rather nasty trick
on Apollo’s part, the moral of the story is to always ensure you have thought
of all aspects of an action before you take it. The woman Sybil was carless and
paid dearly for it.
The first part of the first section, The Burial of the Dead,
is narrated though an unknown person. They speak of spring not as time of joy,
but as an awakening of things left frozen in the winter. This suggests that
there are things that are better left buried and the future uncertain. This is
in stark contrast to the second half of the poem where spring is a fond
remembrance. A dead woman reviewing earlier, happier times is the speaker for
the second half of first stanza. Countess Marie, a close friend of the Empress of
Austria, remembers a time before WWI, in the beginning of her life. She describes a place of idle chatter and
coffee houses. However, the very end of the stanza ends of an ambiguous note.
“I was frightened… you feel free” the woman describes the feeling of fear as
transforming into a freedom of sorts. The fear described in the beginning of
the stanza is changed into an old fear, not a fresh one – so less intimidating,
but still present.
Again a stanza opens with a
depressing, but this time barren and waterless scene. The unknown narrator
receives doomsday information from another unknown being. The prophet emphasis
a lack of “water”, a reference to the idea of water as life. Very little life
can survive without water, this is the epitome of a wasteland; this is a place
without life physical, spiritual, or otherwise. The unknown thing continues
with a promise to show the speaker his pasta or his future, “Your shadow at
morning striding behind you/ Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I
will show you fear in a handful of dust.” This parting line solidifies the
theme that any future is desolate and reminds us of Sybil who was granted the
immortality for the years equal the grains of sand she held in her hand.
The second
half of the stanza presents a narrator in the presence of a young woman. This
hyacinth girl seems to be a projection of beauty. However amazing the narrator
once found her, the passion appears to have faded. As he views her in this
stanza, the speaker glimpses nothing. The light of her soul has become empty of
all meaning to him. The stanza finishes with a German line describing an empty,
desolate sea, a reflection of his inner self upon viewing the hyacinth girl.
The third stanza continues the prophetic theme, with a psychic
as the main feature. A woman is named to be a very famous European clairvoyant,
tells the narrator’s supposed destiny. She
goes though an unusual tarot deck, including a drowned Phoenician Sailor,
Belladonna, the wheel of life, a merchant, and another mysterious card. One of
the cards picked up by this so-called psychic, she claims to be unable to understand.
This gives lie to her ‘powers’. The narrator departs with a warning to “be so
careful these days.” This stanza seems to be a continuation of an unfortunate
fate theme. None of the cards are particularly pleasant and the outlook remains
rather bleak.
The final stanza of section one is the most unsettling of
all. London, England is described as a ghost town. Men shuffle, groan, and drag
their feet along the pathways. The narrator sees a man he once knew, hinting he
was an old war buddy. The speaker accuses the other man of having buries a
corpse buried in his backyard, a disturbing notion. The corpse is not a
physical one, but the humanity that all the blank people of London (and perhaps
the world) has lost.
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