Water as a Complex Symbol in "The Waste Land"

"Death by Water," Section IV of "The Waste Land," is by far the shortest individual section of the poem, but it seems integral to the poem as a whole. Many of the poem's themes are concentrated in these ten lines:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Eliot develops a productive tension between forgetting and remembering. The dead sailor forgets the surface world, but the speaker urges the listener to remember the sailor. It seems that life may be forgotten when one enters the realm of death, but the reverse is not true: the living are to remember the dead. The dead inhabit the living.

The persistence of death in life is a theme touched upon throughout the poem, right from the beginning in which April's cruelty is evidenced by its "breeding / lilacs out of the dead land" (1-2). In "Death by Water," we see a foreshadowing of our death, since the sailor, "who was once handsome and tall as you," was not so virile as to avoid death. Since death seems to be at both ends of life, and life (in "The Waste Land") is comprised of remembering death, we seem always to emerging out of and into death.

An interesting contrast to the pervasiveness of death, however, is the collection of attempted sexual encounters through the poem. In some ways, sex (and reproduction more specifically) is a stay against death. We perpetuate ourselves and our species by producing the next generation. Eliot, who was moved by anthropological accounts of vegetation ceremonies, seems to call upon these notions in his choice of myths and symbols. Moreover, he was familiar with Remy de Gourmont's thought, which included radical ideas on the significance of sex in human behavior.

A productive intersection of Gourmont's and Eliot's perspectives occurs in the theme of unity. Gourmont points out in The Natural Philosophy of Love, "fecundation is the reintegration of differentiated elements into a unique element, a perpetual return to unity" (13). Eliot, as I've mentioned in other posts, is intensely interested in unity, as well. "Death by Water" presents the ultimate failure of sexuality. There is no redeeming aspect to this section; it represents a negative object lesson. There is no positive transformation (however cruel) in this section. Instead, the "current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers" (315-316).

As Brooker and Bentley point out in Reading The Waste Land, "Death by Water," despite its bleak sense of closure, is NOT the end of the poem. Instead, it comes just before the final section, "What the Thunder Said." In this way, Eliot situates the ending against the backdrop of unproductive death; it provides a contrast for what follows. The offerings of "What the Thunder Said" are unified with the drowned sailor and cannot be the offerings they are without him. The urgency of the rock and water section is intensified because it occurs after "Death by Water." Furthermore, the experience of water as both deadly and life-giving in such close proximity achieves a richer and more affecting reaction.

William Carlos Williams, Objects, and Associations

It seems to me there's too much emphasis on Williams as an "objective" poet. That is, he does more than simply present objects. His famous dictum "no ideas but in things" has been taken too far. He doesn't discount ideas entirely in favor of things "in themselves." Instead, he stresses the value of ideas, but he wants to understand them through things. In his 1923 text Spring and All, he is at great pains to define and promote the imagination. His biggest targets are "association" and "symbolism," but surprisingly, he ultimately appears to end up arguing for a position that requires sharpened versions of these two processes.

Association is a function that surrounds "vague words." In one of the book's prose sections, Williams uses the example of the sky to discuss how some art fails to give the reader access to the sky:

"The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through layers of demoded words and shapes. Demoded, not because the essential vitality which begot them is laid waste [...] but because meanings have been lost through laziness or changes in the form of existence which have let words empty" (100).

This argument seems akin to Pound's complaint about a line like "dim lands of peace." Pound deplores the addition of "of peace" as a vague and limp abstraction. Williams would probably add that "dim lands" is itself a weak construction because such a construction may have an automated response; the line does not sufficiently bring the landscape before the reader. The words are empty, relying on symbolism to move away from the land to a verbal abstraction rather than a description that would move into the land.

But here's where I think it's also important to note that Williams doesn't want to move into the land simply to present a landscape. His notion of the imagination derives from the idea that associations should flow from the encounter with what is presented as directly as possible. He doesn't despise associations; he requires that they be earned honestly, i.e. by traveling into the object rather than trusting a habituated move away from the object.

Whether or not he is able to do this in his own poetry is up for debate. A first obvious question is why he needs to add the prose sections to Spring and All; can't the practice of his poetic technique accomplish his goals without a host of critical statements smattered throughout? Does the poetry accomplish the laudable task of revitalizing the world and generating man's imagination?

Um...sometimes. I think he successfully avoids the "crude symbolism" that associates "anger with lightning, flowers with love," but it seems he sometimes fails to apprehend the emotional vitality available in the objects of the world. Unfortunately, I'm going to argue that one of his most well-known poems fails in this task: his famous red wheel barrow does little to fill the words again.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

The objects may be brought more fully in front of the reader, but I find its ability to evoke emotion questionable. It's likely this poem has been talked about so much by critics simply because it presents an intellectual challenge to see how this material might be bent in a certain direction. In this sense, it's a fun puzzle piece, but it engenders the pleasure of the critic and not the reader.

By contrast, the poem beginning with the following stanza more nearly accomplishes Williams's poetic task:

The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air - The edge
cuts without cutting
meets - nothing - renews
itself in metal or porcelain -

Very bluntly, the rose is refused its usual associations; it cannot be simply a marker for love. Instead of trusting that traditional movement of associations, Williams takes a closer look at the object. He notes how the petals come to an end in an edge, marking the boundary between the object and its environment. But the rose, and more specifically the petals, are continued in the reflection of the metal or porcelain vase holding the flowers. Although the petals end, making the rose an object made discrete by its boundaries, they paradoxically transcend their boundaries. The rose is understood in terms of movement rather than stasis.

I would argue that, in fashioning a new way in which the rose might be understood, Williams is also contemplating a new way in which the rose might articulate with human emotions. The poem works against typical associations, but it can only do so in the context of those associations. Although Williams insists that the rose is obsolete, he knows he's working against the backdrop of received ideas. In other words, Williams does not proceed as if the rose is obsolete as a metaphor for love; he revitalizes the metaphor by discovering a new basis for it. He states:

The rose carried the weight of love
but love is at an end - of roses

If is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

In the first couplet, the rose has been a symbol for love, but as the flower ends, so does love. The diction of the second couplet is complicated, but my reading is that "If" is at the edge of the petal. The fact of ending and the need to pick up the continuation in the reflection creates this conditional situation, requiring a new way of perceiving the flower in its environment. The potential of such an imaginative response in the reader reintroduces the possibility of love. For Williams, the flower is not a metaphor for love; the "if" of imagination is a metaphor for love.