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9 - The iconography of the Waste Land

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Jon Stallworthy
Jon Stallworthy
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

T. S. Eliot's Waste Land records a journey through hell: an inner hell lit by the flames, haunted by the flickering images, of an outer hellscape from which Western Europe was only then beginning to emerge. Shaw, in his 1919 Preface to Heartbreak House, had said that ‘the earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors’ and the speaker of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ cries out:

‘Stetson!

‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?’

What makes that at once so horrible and so memorable is the unexpected superimposition of a corpse on a garden. This is a miniature example of the theme, the territory, I mean to explore.

In 1918, Wilfred Owen wrote to a friend:

For 14 hours yesterday I was at work – teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst till after the last halt; I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet to see that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb and stands to attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.

Type
Chapter
Information
Survivors' Songs
From Maldon to the Somme
 , pp. 109 - 127
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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