Fear, Dust, and Water: A Look Into T.S. Eliot’s Poetic Imagery
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust”[1]
T.S. Eliot’s lyrics from his 1934 pageant play The Rock help frame our understanding of Eliot’s poetic vision, particularly in his post-war poem, “The Waste Land.” While the two poems are separated from the biographer’s point of view because of Eliot’s conversion to Christianity, much of Eliot’s imagery in “The Waste Land” is present in his post-conversion works such as The Rock and is used in both cases to evoke a tragic and dystopian view of the future. Born out of the trauma of the war, “The Waste Land” is a portrait of the poetic consciousness which characterizes the 20th century knower. Famous for being laden with references to anything from Shakespeare to pop music to Greek tragedy, Eliot’s use of intertextuality reflects the opposite mindset of the Victorian optimists who firmly believed in the power of producing original poetic material as a means of conjuring “modern prophecies.” If we read Eliot’s poem as a response to Victorian optimism, we see that the high level of intertextual commentary in “The Waste Land” is not due to Eliot’s imaginative laziness but a central clue to the poem’s fundamental idea. As the “cycles of Heaven” constantly give birth to new information, man gradually drifts farther away from the wisdom of earlier decades and, consequently, farther from God.
Two ideas are central to our understanding of “The Waste Land” as an emblematic modernist poem. The first is the symbol of rebirth, and the second is fragmented information. Eliot weaves content and form together as a way of conveying these ideas. Eliot’s free verse, which appears—on the surface—to be a hodgepodge of disjointed quotes and references, are linked thematically through the symbol of rebirth. The speaker is aware of the poem’s “lack of originality” and relates it to the idea of a barren womb. The poem famously opens with a meditation on the month of April, which is typically associated with spring and rebirth. While spring is usually busy “breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” this particular spring is different. The speaker ominously predicts that nature’s twentieth cycle will never again bring forth the same fruit as before.
“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”[2]
The speaker, in this moment, is explaining to the “son of man” the nature of his available materials. All he has is a “heap of broken images” which will serve as his “seed” to cultivate a new meaning. John Milton began his epic poem by stating his goal: to “justify the ways of God to men.” Eliot, while not speaking so explicitly, is also “stating his goal” in this line, therefore echoing the great English poet of the seventeenth century. He is using a collection of fragments from the past as tinder for resuscitating the century.
The speaker makes it clear how perilous his position really is. While Milton had his own personal Muse, Eliot must rely on the Muse of past poets. His verse is naturally more fragmented than past poets, for it is written with an attitude of desperation and urgency. The outcome of his endeavors is therefore unforeseen by history. For centuries, two patterns marked the cycle of nature: death and rebirth. But the narrator introduces a third possibility in the cycle. As Eliot sows his “broken images,” the reader is not granted the old comfort of expecting reward. Inviting us under the shelter of a rock (the only shelter in this desert waste land) the speaker warns us, as if in whisper, that he cannot guarantee his own success.
“I will show you something different from either
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”[3]
Dust, when considered apart from the context of Eliot’s poetics, does not necessarily provoke fear. But when presented as a possible third alternative to the old order—the old order of shadows rising and falling in the cycle of days—the object of the speaker’s fears becomes more palpable. The rise of modernity presents a new cadence that interrupts the cycle of birth and death: the prospect of Nothing. Like Beckett’s anticlimactic ending to Waiting for Godot, Eliot presents the possibility that the universe will end “not with a bang but with a whimper.”[4] Eliot’s reference to “a handful of dust” is highly evocative of the Biblical line from Genesis: “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.”[5] Eliot attaches a sense of fear to a handful of dust: what if the dust is only dust? What if his “broken images” reap no reward? The emotion behind the famous line “April is the cruelest month” suggests not merely by despair or anger, but fear. This feeling of “fear in a handful of dust” is a salient image for Eliot and should be kept in consideration when reading the rest of the work.
The speaker’s fundamental fear in the poem is not death per se, but death without resurrection. The symbol of Christian baptism makes a presence early in the poem and returns again in the poem’s resolution. Eliot accepts the idea borne from Christian tradition that death necessarily must precede rebirth, but he is doubtful of the promise that rebirth will actually follow. In the third stanza of section I, Madame Sosostris deals out her tarot cards in order to divine the outcomes of the future and produces ill-omened results. The sorceress says, “I do not find the Hanged Man. Fear death by water.”[6] The footnotes indicate that the “Hanged Man” is a reference to the Egyptian fertility god “who is killed so that his resurrection may restore fertility to land and people.”[7] Sosostris’s prediction, “death by water,” is typically understood to be referencing a Christian baptism gone haywire, where the believer is not raised back out of the water but is held under and drowned. (The prophecy later becomes fulfilled in section IV, “Death by Water.”)
The subsequent stanza is comparatively domestic in contrast but is imbued with a darker meaning from the preceding imagery. Here, Eliot inhabits the voices of an ordinary Englishman wandering the empty streets of London. He cries out to his neighbor,
“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?”[8]
The phrase “planting a corpse,” which was typical 1920’s slang for the child of an illegitimate couple, has deeper meaning when considered in a post-war context (Andrews). Eliot could also be referencing Thomas Hardy’s image of “the century’s corpse outleant,” which represented the death of the 19th century.[9] In a normal centennial cycle, the corpse of one century would become fodder for the next, but the 20th century was faced with an unforeseen difficulty. Because of the war’s excessive death count, which took such a huge toll on England’s male population, the century’s corpse is gripped with a “sudden frost.” The image of “sudden frost” again develops Eliot’s idea of death without resurrection. The frost of the war killed too many people for the possibility of resurrection to be present.
In section II of Eliot’s poem, the fear of Nothing, suggested earlier in the phrase “a handful of Dust” takes on a more definite shape. Framed as a frantic dialogue between a husband and wife, the speaker in this section says,
“‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
‘Nothing?’”[10]
The line break which isolates the word “Nothing” leads us to treat the word as a positive noun, rather than a negative or abstract concept. Eliot poeticizes Nothing as a solid substance when he presents us with the image of Dust. The speaker continues,
“‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—’”[11]
The irregular line breaks in this section suggest a sense of panic and frustration. Eliot’s insemination process is failing, because the only available fragment to implant in his traumatized consciousness as a substitute for the terrible alternative of Nothingness is a 1920s pop song. The 20th century, which was marked by an explosion of information, is causing confusion in the creation of poetry and in the mind of the poet himself. Portraying a dialogue between an unhappy English couple is apropos to Eliot’s theme of infertility, later reinforced by the following stanza, in which a female speaker has taken birth control pills and “never been the same.”[12] As Eliot writes in section III, “the nymphs are departed.”[13] The departed nymphs, or the century’s infertility, can be read as a metaphor of the modern printing press (magnified now exponentially in the Digital Age) which almost suffocates the possibility of originality. This is Eliot’s idea of the “wisdom we have lost in knowledge”—we do not know how to use the knowledge that modernity offers. With every centennial cycle, the Dust from which Adam was born spirals (or “departs”) farther away from the God which animates the Dust with life.
The last two sections of the poem, “Death by Water” and “What the Thunder Said” places the reader at an existential crossroad. In “Death by Water” Eliot gives us the option of embracing the Christian death, conscious of the possibility that resurrection may not necessarily follow. Phlebas the Phoenecian is a character in this section that drowns and atrophies under the ocean’s undercurrents. In the closing lines, the speaker compares Phlebas to the “Gentile or Jew” who expects to be “born again” through baptism. The speaker warns them: “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”[14] Eliot follows up this foreboding tale with another choice in “What the Thunder Said.” Our second choice is not much more hopeful. The speaker suggests that even if we reject the Christian death, we will eventually die anyway. Eliot writes,
“He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
with a little patience”[15]
The first line here presents the idea that Christ died without rising again. If we embrace this alternative Christian narrative, it follows that we too will eventually follow the same pattern, no matter how long we prolong the event. This kind of death is notably characterized by the absence of water. In the next line after “with a little patience” Eliot writes, “Here is no water but only rock.”[16] The absence of water is emphasized again and again for the next thirty lines. “Dry sweat” and “Sterile thunder without rain” are among some of the unpleasant images which strongly suggest that something fundamental is missing.[17] Here, Eliot uses a particularly instructive word:
“But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From the doors of mudcracked houses”[18]
The word “mudcracked” evokes more immediate associations than the word “dust,” for it suggests the past history of a once active riverbed. If section IV is death by water, section V is death without water. Empty Dust—dust “departed” of life—is the alternative to rejecting the death presented in Christian symbolism.
Christian imagination finds its way into section V as well, but Eliot cleverly undermines it in the stanza “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” Although critics have posited that Eliot is making an explicit reference to the New Testament account of Christ on the road to Emmaus, Eliot adds a wry footnote telling us that this stanza is in fact an allusion to “one of Shackleton’s” Antarctic expeditions.[19] Again, we see an idea in Eliot’s pre-conversion poetry which resurfaces again in The Rock, namely, “where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Because of modernity’s overwhelming supply of information, the allusion to Christ is quite literally drowned in a postmodern framework in which the possible alternative interpretations to the text are virtually bottomless. Because of this additional footnote, we have no way of knowing, and the information brings us “farther from God” and consequently, “nearer to the Dust.” The speaker (as well as the reader) is, in a sense, cut off from his access to God through Eliot’s footnote.
In section V, the speaker brings us to the threshold of an abandoned church.
“There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one”[20]
By placing “dryness” in a church setting, the speaker renders null the notion that we might die “by water” through the Christian rite of baptism. To live without water excludes the possibility of dying by water. A choice is required: to plunge into water with the unlikely chance of ever rising out again, or die “with a little patience,” slowly but surely, with no hope of resurrection at all. Both involve death. In the final stanzas, the poem suddenly “turns” with a new burst of energy, accompanied with the hope of a coming rain:
“Then a damp gust
bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant”[21]
Here Eliot references the Rigveda in a surprising, albeit ambivalent, witness to the Christian imagery of baptism. Ganga, the Hindu goddess who personifies the sacred Ganges River, is awaiting rain from her father Himavant, the god of the Himalayas and the source of her water. The poem does not disclose whether the speaker’s encounter with water results in resurrection. In fact, it is not entirely clear that he encounters water at all. The last stanza is so thick with vague imagery that one gets the sense that the speaker himself is drowning in his own ambiguity. While the final lines may very well suggest the speaker’s impending death and existential thanatophobia, they also reflect his willful choice to die by water and thus reflects his hope in the possibility of resurrection. In a style quite characteristic of Eliot, he concludes with the hope of a Christian saint, who, like Pascal, embraces both modern and ancient narratives and makes his life wager accordingly, even though through a glass dimly.
Works Cited
Andrews, Charles. “T.S. Eliot and The Waste-Land.” British Literature Since 1800, Whitworth University, 12 Apr. 2017. Lecture.
Eliot, T.S. “The Hollow Men.” Collected Poems 1909-1962, Harcourt, Inc., 1991, p. 82. Print.
Eliot, T.S. “Choruses from ‘The Rock’.” Collected Poems 1909-1962, Harcourt, Inc., 1991, p. 147. Print.
Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. 2012, p. 2530-543. Print.
Hardy, Thomas. “The Darkling Thrush”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2012, p. 1933. Print.
NOTES:
[1] Eliot, The Rock, 14-18.
[2] Eliot, “The Waste Land,” 19-22.
[3] Eliot, 27-30.
[4] Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” 98.
[5] Gen. 3:19.
[6] Eliot, “The Waste Land,” 54-55.
[7] The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, 2532.
[8] Eliot, 71-73.
[9] Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush,” 10.
[10] Eliot, 122-23.
[11] 126-28.
[12] Eliot, 160.
[13] 175, 80.
[14] 319-21.
[15] 328-30.
[16] 331.
[17] Eliot, 337, 42.
[18] 344-45, italics mine.
[19] Norton, 2541.
[20] 389-91.
[21] Eliot, 394-98.
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