A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is arguably the most important poem of the whole twentieth century. It remains a timely poem, even though its origins were very specifically the post-war Europe of 1918-22.

Written by T. S. Eliot, who was then beginning to make a name for himself following the publication (and modest success) of his first two volumes of poetry, The Waste Land has given rise to more critical analysis and scholarly interpretation than just about any other poem. Critics and readers are still arguing over what it means.

In this post, we plan to give a brief introduction to, and analysis of, The Waste Land in terms of its key themes and features. We will then zoom in and look at the individual five sections of the poem more closely in separate posts. (We say ‘brief introduction’ and ‘short analysis’, but even the shortest analysis of Eliot’s The Waste Land is going to require a longish essay.

Note: we have analysed some of the key quotations from The Waste Land in a separate post. We have also analysed some key themes of The Waste Land in a longer post.

Section-by-section summary

‘The Burial of the Dead’

This is the first of five sections that make up The Waste Land. The section opens with the famous declaration that April is the cruellest month because it breeds lilacs out of a land that is dead, and that the winter snows were preferable because they covered this dead land, allowing us to forget what lay beneath. (We have analysed the famous opening line of the poem in more detail here.)

Then we have a countess, Marie, recalling how she used to stay at her cousin’s the archduke’s, and they went sledding. Another speaker talks of a mysterious shadow rising to meet us, and then we have a woman’s voice, describing herself as the Hyacinth girl.

The (presumably male) speaker who answers her seems to have lost all grip on reality when confronted with the woman coming out of the garden with her arms full of flowers and her hair wet.

Then we have a section involving Tarot cards, used to foretell the future, which are dealt out by the clairvoyante, Madame Sosostris. This first part of The Waste Land ends with a male speaker meeting Stetson, whom he fought alongside in the Battle of Mylae (one of the Punic Wars of ancient times).

He asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted in his garden has begun to sprout, returning us to the imagery from the beginning of the poem. You can read our discussion of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ here.

‘A Game of Chess’

Next, we have ‘A Game of Chess’, the second section. The chief focus of this section is two scenes involving women: the first an upper-class woman and the second a lower-class one. There is a suggestion that they are both trying to cope with husbands who have served in the recent war, but are also dealing with their own issues, too.

The section opens with a long and detailed description of the upper-class woman’s dressing room, where she is using perfumes and other products to make herself look and smell nice. Then we have a conversation between her and (we infer) her husband, where they fail to communicate meaningfully with each other, partly because the woman is nervous and jittery, and because there is a suggestion that the man is suffering from shell-shock or PTSD.

From this scene, we move to a pub in the East End of London, where a working-class woman, Lou, is talking to Bill and some of her other friends about her friend Lil, whose husband Albert has come back from the war, wanting to have sex with his wife again.

Lil’s numerous children are mentioned, and we are given a grim picture of poor Lil, who has grown prematurely old, partly as a result of the numerous pregnancies and partly because she has been using abortion pills. You can read our discussion of ‘A Game of Chess’ here.

‘The Fire Sermon’

The third section of The Waste Land focuses not on marriage (as was the case in the previous section) but on other sexual relationships.

The section opens with a euphemistic reference to nymphs (i.e. prostitutes) plying their trade on the banks of the Thames, and goes on to refer to Sweeney visiting Mrs Porter’s brothel, and an Australian drinking song about prostitutes.

There is also the rape of Philomela by her brother-in-law Tereus, a foreign merchant propositioning the male speaker to a dirty weekend down in Brighton with him, and – most famously – a typist and a young estate agent’s clerk engaging in mechanical lovemaking (although love is largely absent here).

We then have several different female voices, the supposed Thames-daughters (as Eliot’s notes call them), telling us their stories of how they were undone by men. You can read our discussion of ‘The Fire Sermon’ here.

‘Death by Water’

This fourth section is a breath of fresh air (as it were) after the longer third section: a short lyric of just ten lines, it focuses on Phlebas, a Phoenician tradesman from classical times, who has drowned at sea (the title of this section takes us back to the Tarot card in the first section of The Waste Land, which warned us to fear death by water and referred to a drowned Phoenician sailor).

You can read our discussion of ‘Death by Water’ here.

‘What the Thunder Said’

The fifth and final section of The Waste Land, ‘What the Thunder Said’, is overwhelmingly written in unpunctuated, unrhymed, irregular free verse. It is as if the lack of water has led the speaker of ‘What the Thunder Said’, in his desire for water, to lapse into semi-coherent snatches of speech. We find ourselves in a dry land, among people undertaking a quest to find the Holy Grail (although we need to read Eliot’s notes to grasp this properly).

Much of this final section of the poem is about a desire for water: the waste land is a land of drought where little will grow. Water is needed to restore life to the earth, to return a sterile land to fertility. (Shades of the Fisher King myth here again.)

Along the way, in ll. 359-65, we get a weird digression which sees the speaker asking about a hallucinated third person (s)he imagines walking alongside his (her) travelling companion, a detail that was inspired, Eliot tells us in his notes, by one of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions, where one of the men suffered from the delusion that there was one more man among their number, an imagined extra person.

Shades of the Gothic are introduced here, which are echoed by the bats with the baby faces in the chapel. We are also in the realms of Arthurian myth here, and the Grail quest: the Chapel Perilous was the place, in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, where Lancelot was tempted – as with ‘The Fire Sermon’, temptation re-emerges as a theme.

Can one remain spiritually pure and focused, or will the lure of the body become too strong? This section – and the poem – ends with the arrival of rain in a thunderstorm, where the DA sound of the thunderclap is interpreted in light of the Hindu Upanishads. You can read our discussion of ‘What the Thunder Said’ here.

How to analyse The Waste Land

A good place to start with an analysis of The Waste Land is to examine the importance of literary allusion. Eliot’s poem draws on a vast number of literary and religious texts and traditions. In addition to this, there is what is called the ‘mythic method’: Eliot’s use of a mythic narrative or structure.

He probably borrowed this idea from James Joyce, who had used it in his novel Ulysses, which was published in book form in 1922, the same year as The Waste Land, but which had been appearing in instalments in the Little Review for several years prior to that.

Eliot wrote an essay in praise of Joyce’s use of ancient myth, and borrowed this for his own poem – drawing on Arthurian legend (e.g. the Fisher King) and various other religious and literary traditions. The Fisher King myth, which helps to explain so much of the poem’s imagery and themes, is summed up by Pericles Lewis on Yale’s Modernisms site:

The Fisher King is impotent, his lands infertile and drought-stricken; one cause of this infertility is a crime, the rape of some maidens in the king’s court. Only the arrival of a pure-hearted stranger … permits the land to become fertile again.

This is the modern world: civilisation has been reduced to a ‘waste land’ and the land has lost its fertility and ability to bring forth life. Even the living seem to be suffering from some kind of spiritual wound. But how can we fix this society? By regaining spiritual and psychological enlightenment and making peace with our demons. But that’s easier said than done.

Final thoughts

How should we approach Eliot’s poetry and the question of what The Waste Land means? How can we analyse The Waste Land and discover its true meaning? Is there a true meaning? Eliot was often notoriously unhelpful at providing clarification or elucidation to his poems. His notes to The Waste Land – added as an afterthought to the original poem – tend to confuse the reader as much as they assist.

When Eliot invites us in one of the notes to see the entire poem as focalised through the figure of Tiresias (a man who is a mess of contradictions: a blind seer, a man with breasts), should we take him at his word? Or is this Eliot trying to suggest coherence and unity to a very fragmented poem, after the fact?

Similarly, Eliot later dismissed the poem as a personal ‘grouse’ against life – contrary to what a hundred analyses of The Waste Land argued, the poem didn’t pretend to speak for a whole generation.

So one thing to bear in mind is this: even in those parts of the poem where we may think we know where the meaning of the poem lies, there may be other things going on in the background which we are at best only partly aware of.

The best student edition of Eliot’s poem is The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions), which comes with a very helpful introduction, as well as contextual information and major critical responses to The Waste Land.

Readers looking for a more detailed discussion of Eliot’s poem, particularly in its context of modernist poetry of the 1920s, are advised to seek out Oliver Tearle’s study, The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.