Prompt: Follow and unpack the eastern movement of “The Wasteland.”

In “The Wasteland,” Eliot is meeting his readers where they are—the West—and disorienting them by bringing them towards the Orient.

“The Wasteland” begins with “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” This is strikingly, if ironically, similar to the prologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “When that April with his showers sweet / The drought of March hath pierced to the root, / And bathed every vine in such liqueur / Of which virtue engendered is the flower…” By inverting the meaning of Chaucer’s text, Eliot is rejecting all that Chaucer means. Instead of embracing spring, and April, the month of Easter, Eliot rejects that revitalizing spirit with the implication that the dead are awaking to a fate worse than death—they are awaking to life. Because Chaucer is recognized as the first great English poet, Eliot is symbolically breaking ties with the legacy of British—and up to that point, primarily Christian—literature.

He goes on to reference Tristan and Isolde, an opera by Wagner that was originally a French romance, and the Fisher King from Arthurian legend. The poetic references move generally, but always consistently, east, drawing from Spenser, Dante, St. Augustine, Virgil; the poem then ends dramatically with a flurry of far eastern allusions—Buddha’s Fire Sermon, the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, and Sanskrit. “The Wasteland” ends with a feeling of mad repetition; a feeling of trance-like meditation: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih stantih.”

Lines 367-7 say “What is that sound high in the air / murmur of maternal lamentation / Who are those hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth / ringed by the flat horizon only / What is the city over the mountains / Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal.” One imagines a swarm of locusts or soldiers coming from the Far East, devouring Jerusalem, the city of organized religion; Athens, the city of reason, law, philosophy; Alexandria, the city of books and learning; Vienna, the city of high culture; and London, the city of modern industry, leaving nothing but Nirvana in its wake.

Back in that first section, Eliot introduces the exotic Madame Sosotris, a clairvoyante who foretells the future through Tarot cards. Tarot is a game of divination; mysterious and foreign to the modern British reader. She tells her listener to “fear death by water.” As there is no explicit listener-character, the reader is left in the position of accepting her premonition. As the average reader for Eliot was upper- to middle-class British, one may infer that Eliot, by way of Madame Sosotris, is prophesying the demise of British culture as it is currently understood. The poem which began with the Thames (61) ends with the “Ganga”, the Ganges, waiting for rain and London Bridge falling down. These last images reinforce my idea that Eliot does seem to be making a judgment so much as an observation of the evolution of culture and the inevitable decline of the West.