Entry into The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a complex and allusive poem. As Eliot's notes indicate (and an avalanche of scholarship confirms), a full reading of the poem requires much study. But often the reader first approaching the text is not equipped with the requisite learning, especially those ranks of young but intellectually fatigable college students. How do these readers find entry into The Waste Land? I would suggest that the most readable and compelling section of the poem comes near the beginning of the final section, What the Thunder Said:

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

This begins a sub-section of 29 lines that hang together. They present a sustained contemplation that doesn't require knowledge of a foreign language, the Grail legend, the biography of Augustine, references from Shakespeare, etc. The poetic repetition of these two substances, water and rock, is hypnotic and frustrating at the same time. There's a paradoxically musical confusion in the poet's persistent attempt to imagine these two substances interacting with one another.

Eliot counts on some basic symbolist principles in this section. Rock is still and solid; water is moving and diffuse. These simple concepts circle around each other in permutation after permutation. Rock is inescapable; water is desired. The length of this section emphasizes the insurmountability of this problem; the reader always comes back to the rock; the reader is never given water. This denial accomplishes the reader's emotional response without establishing a clear "meaning" (and without the layers of allusion covering other sections of the poem).

Furthermore, the grammatical structure mirrors the description of unachieved desire. A lengthy set of conditional phrases is never completed, reenacting the impossibility of the desired object:

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A a pring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And the dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

The reader does not get to consider the possibility of water because the putative realm that includes water is never described. The substance is denied to both the speaker and the reader. Through these methods, Eliot dramatically builds emotion and frustration, while at the same time constructing a poem that embodies the themes it explores.

But I'd like to look a bit deeper at these two substances in order to uncover another layer of meaning. First, due to much of the rest of the poem's obvious interest in sexual frustration (which I haven't developed here, but about which has been much written), it is worth seeing these substances in this light. Motion is rightly conceived of as essential to the sexual act; the rock's immobility does not lend itself to participation. On the other hand, the rock's rigidity might have a claim to mimicking male sexual readiness, but the lack of water suggests an unfulfilled readiness. That is, the rock does not find its yielding and flowing counterpart.

Second, while the preceding paragraph admittedly participates in a bit of vulgar Freudian criticism, it does so within a context of more obvious references to sexual frustration. I'd like to step beyond this into another layer of (perhaps still Freudian) analysis. The rock is a stable object; it is clearly delineated; its boundaries make it discrete and isolatable. Water is counter to these ideas. I would suggest that the rock indicates a single and identifiable subjecthood. The rock is a unified Self. Rock, as a substance, is consonant with the "windowless monad" of the self described by Leibnitz. From this perspective, the desire for water represents a sort of death drive, a wish to wash away the self, to dissolve into movement. The speaker is unable to imagine or achieve the loss of self, but he is inevitably drawn to it.

If we take the first and second of the points listed above in conjunction, we find that Eliot presents sexuality as a loss of the self. This reminds me of my thoughts about Ezra Pound's Imagistic poetry. But there's an important difference: where Pound (in his poetry) rejected sexuality outright, Eliot seems intent on remembering the pull of a desire whose satisfaction is ultimately impossible. In large part, I would argue that The Waste Land explores desire and the inevitability of its failure to find satisfaction. In conjunction with this failure comes the protection of the self as a discrete monad. I hope to support this reading in entries to come. However, at th is point it seems safe to say that the above quoted section of the poem provides a useful entry point for new readers, not just because it is not so allusive or fragmentary, but also because it hints at the themes we see throughout.