Second Entry

After looking over my last entry, I have decided that it would be easier to tackle this monster by not going line-by-line and examining it that way. Most of what I will do in this post is look at particular sections and not the lines themselves, and by doing this I will hopefully get a better glimpse at the bigger meaning rather than probe smaller pieces of the picture. This is what we did in class, and this is (hopefully) how Eliot would have wanted the readers to take his poem, that is, if he really meant for anybody to understand it at all.


Reading through the next paragraph in the first section (or at least the first couple of lines), obvious allusions to the Bible are made in lines 19-30, and the footnotes confirm this, citing the books of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. What the footnotes do not indicate, however, is if this particular paragraph is an allusion to a more specific part of the Bible, say, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, something that I am gathering from my readings. The first clue to this starts at the most obvious reference to Jesus, the “Son of Man.” The next one (“And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,”) is a likely reference to the Cross and the Crucifixion, seeing that the “dead tree” is the Cross of stripped limbs with no branches for shade. The initial descriptions of a “stony rubbish” are also indicative of Jesus’ death, painting an accurate description of what many believe Golgotha (the site of the crucifixion) was like. We could even explore the landscape of what historians believe to be Golgotha and see that rubble and stone dominate the surface, certainly a site where “dry stone” exists. The last part of the paragraph is unclear to me (although the book’s footnotes indicate a quote from “The Death of St. Narcissus”) but could be loosely interpreted as Jesus’ resurrection. The only clear lines to show this would be about finding shade in the “red rock” since Jesus was inserted into a tomb cut into the side of a hill and sealed by a rolling rock.

Beginning with a German quote from the famous opera Tristan und Isolde, the next theme of the poem is about love, or so we can assume knowing the theme of the opera, running from lines 31-42. The speaker goes into a spiel about hyacinths, a flower named by the Greeks in reference to a story in which Apollo kills his lover, who is a young man. It is not made clear to the reader who the speaker is referring to, but if Eliot was a complete stickler for mythological analogies (and you bet he was!), then this could have been about a homosexual relationship. Even though the speaker would, hypothetically, take on a feminine role (e.g. “They called me the hyacinth girl.”), the assumption is plausible. Of course, with T.S. Eliot, any assumption is possible since nobody can understand his poetry. With the end of the paragraph being another German quote, the inference suggests that the speaker is still waiting to hear about this love, much like Tristan does with Isolde.

Speaking of Eliot’s unintelligible poetry, the next paragraph, the one about Madame Sosostris and Tarot, is unclear and almost placed haphazardly. If I knew anything about Tarot cards (which I can guarantee you that I do not), then I would take this space to try to decipher the meaning of the particular cards, like the drowned Phoenician Sailor and Belladonna; but, alas, I cannot. The only thing I can get out of this passage is that Eliot does have a bit of humor and pokes some fun at “dear Mrs. Equitone”. One certainly MUST be careful these days...

The last paragraph of Section I is a portrait of the London Bridge on a typical work day. Eliot describes the crowd as a sort of colorless mob, people that are both to blame and yet not to blame, something that is described with his quote from Dante’s Inferno. The passage goes on to describe the scene more, using King William Street and Saint Mary Woolnoth, and also engages in a bit of dialogue with a man who was apparently alive in 206 B.C. This is hazy, but I will say that “You! — hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frere!” is a very cool quote.


More fun to come later.