The Unreal City: Eliot's 'The Waste Land'

Eliot's epic poem The Waste Land was published in 1922, and portrays a particularly bleak (even for Eliot) view of the city, and the crowds of commuters travelling to and from it every day. The city appears lifeless, and desert-like: there is no sign of the cosmopolitan, hustling-and-bustling image of the city we have today. The protagonist of the poem, Tiresias, can be seen as a characterisation of Eliot himself, who once was a bank clerk in London. Robert A. Day, in his essay 'The "City Man" in The Waste Land: The Geography of Reminiscence' (click here for link to article) says that "Tiresias is many things and many men [...] but among them is the Eliot of 1921, or rather his persona - the 'city man'." The poem takes us through a day in the life of one of these commuters, one of these "city men". Day continues to say that "[w]e find that London references occur in the proper order to provide a cinematic representation of a tiny nightmare Odyssey", providing a harshly bleak view of post-WWI London.

The poem's first section, 'The Burial of the Dead', begins this bleakness, stating that "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many". The crowds of faceless, identical commuters make their daily journey over the bridge, heading for their "death". Their existences are lifeless; they are like the walking dead. Day describes this by writing that "[t]he density of such crowds is typical of the urban rush hour; "death" is their fate, a living death in the Hell of the City". A bit depressing, isn't it? But it really does portray the bleakness and, some would say, resentment of the city in the post-war years. Like the character of Frank Wheeler in Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road (1961), Eliot shows resentment and disparagement towards the life of a commuter.

In the third section, 'The Fire Sermon', the description of the Thames reveals that the river contains no pollution or rubbish. But this is far from positive in this case. The lack of "empty bottles", "cigarette ends", "sandwich papers" and other rubbish portrays no sign of summer. There is no "testimony to summer nights" in the river; all joy has left the place, leaving only the bleak, Styx-like river in its place. There is no life around this Thames. The description is framed by the depressing statement that "the nymphs are departed". For those of you who may not know, nymphs are traditionally represented as creatures of nature, usually beautiful young maidens who love to sing and dance. But there is no singing or dancing at the Thames portrayed in The Waste Land.

In the fourth section of the poem, 'Death by Water', the character of Phlebus is "purified of the city's profit and loss" (Day), but only achieves this purification through a) death, and b) water, contrasting dramatically with the dryness of the city, which we see particularly in the last section of the poem, 'What the Thunder said'. There is "no water but only rock" in this city, and even then we are told that actually there is "no rock". Dry, desolate, and lacking all the ideas of a city we have today, London is once again said to be "Unreal", along with the ancient and once incredibly powerful and plentiful cities of Jerusalem, Athens and Alexandria, and the romantic European city of Vienna. All unreal, all overtaken by capitalism, where money controls everything, and there is no joy left.

Perhaps not the happiest thing for a Thursday morning, eh? :-P