The Waste Land

Given Eliot’s perception of Western civilization as a barren, lifeless, and sterile cultural landscape, a blasted trackless desert world, an inferno world, the poem uses water to suggest at once both reanimation and also (ironically) death. Here, water is at best a desperate hope, at worst, an agent of destruction. The poem laments the world: “Here is no water, but only rock / Rock and no water” (Lines 331-32). In the opening section, the poet describes a world struggling to tap the healing energy of water, a world despairing over the thought of the return of spring’s healing rains. Here, however, nothing grows: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” (Lines 19-20). The poem draws on the idea that water alone might heal such a bleak landscape. In an amoral modern world too easily surrendering to the fires of lust, water promises to calm that rage and to allow spiritual growth. Water represents a desperate hope. After all, within Christian tradition, water is associated with the salvation and restoration of the Holy Water and the rite of Baptism, which promises new life.

Until the closing section, however, the poem concedes the reality of the dark warning pronounced by the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris who cautions “Fear death by water” (Line 55).