Thursday, 19. April 2007, 17:01:52
Poetic Romance
When we two parted
--by Lord Byron
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow--
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me--
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee so well--
Long, long I shall rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.
In secret we met--
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?--
With silence and tears.
Thursday, 19. April 2007, 16:48:22
Poetic Romance
Touched by Love
I knew I had been touched
by love...
the first time I saw you
and I felt your warmth
and heard your laughter.
I knew I had been touched
by love...
when I was hurting from
something that happened,
and you came alone
and made the hurt go away.
I knew I had been touched
by love...
when I quit making plans
with my friends
and started dreaming dreams
with you.
I knew I had been touched
by love...
when I stopped thinking in
terms of "me"
and started thinking in
terms of "we".
I knew I had been touched
by love...
when suddenly I couldn't make
decisions by myself anymore,
and I had this strong desire
to share everything with you.
I knew I had been touched
by love...
the first time we spent
alone together
and I knew I wanted to stay
with you forever...
because I had never felt
this touched by love.
Thursday, 22. March 2007, 10:44:06
Poetic Romance
Villanelle of the Poet’s Road – Ernest Dowson
Wine and woman and song,
Three things garnish our way:
Yet is day over long.
Lest we do our youth wrong,
Gather them while we may:
Wine and woman and song.
Three things render us strong,
Vine leaves, kisses and bay:
Yet is day over long.
Unto us they belong,
Us the bitter and gay,
Wine and woman and song.
We, as we pass slong,
Are sad that they will not stay;
Yet is day over long.
Fruits and flowers among,
What is better than they:
Wine and woman and song?
Yet is day over long.OVERCOMING TIME AND DESPAIR:
ERNEST DOWSON'S VILLANELLE
Karen Alkalay-Gut
Victorian Poetry 34, 1, 101-8, Spring 1996.
Introduced into English in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the villanelle was generally considered to have been appropriate for light verse, having little potential for meaning, much less profundity. As W.E. Henley characterized it, "A dainty thing's the Villanelle; / And, filled with sweetness, as a shell/ Is filled with sound..." This hollow sweetness is due, in part, to the forced and predictable rhymes repeated in predictable patterns as necessary to the form. But the complex uses to which later poets such as Auden, Empson, Pound, Thomas, and Theodore Roethke have put the villanelle indicate its potential even in earlier periods, and a closer look at some of Ernest Dowson's efforts in this form reveals an inconspicuous intricacy that both reflects the limitations of his time and anticipates some of the complexities of the moderns. For Dowson employs the repetitious and cyclical villanelle to various philosophical purposes, and an examination of two of his villanelles discloses this form as a way to transcend the non-progressive patterns of life without capitulating to the lofty goals of the Victorians.
Of the five villanelles of Ernest Dowson, "Villanelle of His Lady's Treasures" and "Villanelle of the Poets' Road, are most interesting to explore in detail because although antithetical in their subject matter, they cover the major range of Dowson's themes and illustrate many of his considerations. "Villanelle of His Lady's Treasures" treats the relationship between love, life and art, which underlies much of Dowson's work, and with its central ars poetica theme; "Villanelle of the Poets' Road" illustrates Dowson's version of end-of-century time and progress.
The title of this deceptively simple poem provides the basis for the problem developed in "Villanelle of the Poets' Road," as the much-used metaphor of the road of life is given a new twist. Linear and progressive as a road is, its perception is enclosed in the cyclical, obsessive and repetitive form of the villanelle. In this context, the two likely purposes in life - pleasure and advancement - cancel each other out, leaving the individual with only the weariness of frustration.
The first line, recalling Fitzgerald's Rubiyat, with its "book of verses... a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou," presents the favored nineteenth century version of the carpe diem theme. Yet the second line qualifies Omar Khayyam's enthusiasm over these transformative totems, which are here only "garnish," and connected to each other with no subordination or qualification. Fitzgerald's syntax accentuates the 'Thou' far more than the others, diminishing the verses, food and wine to accessories accentuating the pleasure of the beloved, but Dowson sandwiches the 'other' between two equally significant nouns and connects them all with the equalizing 'and'. Like the more contemporary "Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll," the wine, poetry, and love form no hierarchy, and lead to no higher pleasure.
With no goal, the "way" becomes central, but the pleasures of "Wine and women and song" cannot carry the weight of this burden. At best they afford a temporary, partial distraction. There is, of course, an implicit criticism of society in the emphasis upon the necessity for escape from society. One might compare even further "Wine, women and song" with the "Sex, Drugs, Rock'n'roll" slogan of the sixties in which the concept of a progressive society is negated in the temporary, changeable, and 'insignificant' goals which would only be counted at best as 'means' in the conceptions of the dominant culture.
Repetition here is the key to understanding the growing meaninglessness of these 'garnishes.' The reason for this devaluation of the totemic nouns appears in the form - the recurrence inevitable in the prescribed cyclical form represented by the villanelle. Once around the cycle, all is mere reiteration. After a phenomenon has been experienced, the experience itself can no longer be a singular goal.
Nevertheless the poem is neither static nor merely cyclic. The apparently tangential decoration becomes a social and/or ethical obligation in the second verse, "lest we do our youth wrong." Carpe diem has become an historical imperative, and the phrase "gather them while we may," is meant to recall and contrast with Herrick's far more innocent enjoinder to "Gather ye rosebuds while thee may." There is already a poetic tradition, and knowledge of it has turned an ingenuous pursuit into a hedonistic imperative, ruining the freshness of discovery while negating the ultimate value of attainment.
It should be emphasized that Dowson's use of Herrick and Fitzgerald, frequently dismissed as "derivative," is very much like the contemporary practices of pastiche and sampling - using well known references as a statement on the sad persistence of well-known themes and the impossibility of progress. Herrick and Fitzgerald are used to prove their part in the failure of their own values.
In the third verse a veritable double-bind becomes apparent as the three magical items grant a form of sustenance, which "render us strong," even as they diminish in significance and force to impotent synecdoches. The repeated, "Yet is day over long," begins to acquire a justification different from the apparent jaded pose of the first tercet. For "Vine leaves, kisses, and bay," are only the fragments which sustain "us," even though they are all there is. They are also 'leaves' and not flower (like rosebuds) or fruit.
By the fourth verse the "wine and women and song" have become wearisome through the sameness of their recurrence. Therefore, although they are now exclusive property, belonging to "us," and affording some distraction, they inspire a bitterness because their very presence emphasizes the emptiness and fragmentedness they represent in contrast to their literary sources.
Pleasures can not be pleasing because of the sophistication of our awareness of time and the insignificance of individual experiences in this light. Rather than finding the facts of transience a command to search for pleasure, as the carpe diem theme imperializes, Dowson's villanelle negates the value of pleasure given an ephemeral universe.
It is the temporariness of this property that is acknowledged and emphasized in the fifth verse: "they will not stay," a temporality that can evoke only a vague sadness, even as it diminishes its value. This idea is continued in the last verse in which the best the world has to offer is not good enough, as unlike fruits and flowers as leaves can be. In these last lines, Dowson breaks the usual order of the villanelle by stopping at the end of the penultimate line with a question. It is a technique, as McFarland points out, characteristic of Dowson, and is here used to stop the cycle, the rhythm, and the flow of the poem with what J. Alfred Prufrock called an "overwhelming question." The initial judgement of "garnish" is the final one as well, and the poem returns to its beginning, but with the realization that day is overlong because all there is is embellishment.
Throughout the poem there is a considerable emphasis upon the artificiality and hollowness of the subject - much of this emphasis is brought about through the use of masculine rhymes and sharp end-stopped lines, giving a hollowness to the traditional trochaic trimeter of the villanelle: like life the lines are short, sudden, and empty.
Despite the seeminartificiality of this poem there is a marked realism - a consciousness of reality and the use of literature. Dowson was aware of the characteristics of the villanelle, was cognizant of the fact that, as McFarland notes, "for many writers that [special] mood and moment [necessary to the composing of a villanelle] involved some form of nostalgia for the Golden Age (often pastoral), for past love, or for passing time (fin de siecle, as often as not.) ("Victorian Villanelle," p. 129). It is for this reason that Dowson evokes previous writers. But the point of Dowson's villanelle is the contrast between the accepted themes and use of form and his own knowledge gained from the reading of these poets. It is because we know pleasure loses its individuality and passes, because we`ve read Herrick and the others, we cannot believe in any intrinsic value. McFarland complains of the victorian villanelle that "there remains the inclination to limit the villanelle to those milder strains of nostalgia which offer only a low-key pathos even when dealing with the contemplation of death." ("Victorian Villanelle," p. 138) But nostalgia, as they say, is not what it used to be.
The power of this poem, it should be emphasized, is gained from the pain this contrast evokes. Yeats quotes to Dorothy Wellesley lines from the "Villanelle of the Poets' Road" to support the contention that "people much occupied with morality always lose heroic ecstasy." Those who have it most often are those described in his poem. "Bitter and gay" becomes their heroic mood."
The influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy for this structure cannot be overemphasized. Such critics as Chris Snodgrass and John Reed have noted in detail the significance to Dowson of Schopenhauer's pessimism, "trapped in 'time's deceit,' the very Schopenhauerean vortex of self-subverting 'dreams of prayer' and 'broken vows'. But it is in this villanelle that Dowson attempts to embody the trap.
Monday, 19. March 2007, 11:08:02
Poetic Romance
Shakespeare's Sonnet 18
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Monday, 19. March 2007, 10:55:35
Poetic Romance
Shakespeare's Sonnet 138
Sonnet 138
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.
Monday, 19. March 2007, 10:47:33
Poetic Romance
Shakespeare's Sonnet 8
Sonnet 8
Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.
Why lovest thou that which thou receivest not gladly,
Or else receivest with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,
Resembling sire and child and happy mother
Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: 'thou single wilt prove none.'
Monday, 9. October 2006, 16:49:52
Poetic Romance
A Grain of Sand
---By William Blake
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. 
一粒沙中看世界
一粒沙中看世界，
一朵野花见天堂。
将无垠，握在手中，
见永恒，于一瞬间。
─威廉•布莱克
Monday, 9. October 2006, 16:06:05
Poetic Romance
And did those feet in ancient time (1804)
By William Blake ( Preface To Milton) 
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountain green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
(A Painting By William Blake)
Monday, 18. September 2006, 12:53:43
Poetic Romance
She walks in Beauty
---By George Gordon Byron
---A poem about a man's adoration for an ethereal lady.
She walks in Beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Sunday, 27. August 2006, 15:49:37
Poetic Romance
The Waste Land 
Section I: "The Burial of the Dead"
1APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
2Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
3Memory and desire, stirring
4Dull roots with spring rain.
5Winter kept us warm, covering
6Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
7A little life with dried tubers.
8Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
9With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
10And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
11And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
12Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
13And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
14My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
15And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
16Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
17In the mountains, there you feel free.
18I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
19What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
20Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
21You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
22A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
23And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
24And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
25There is shadow under this red rock,
26(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
27And I will show you something different from either
28Your shadow at morning striding behind you
29Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
30I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
31Frisch weht der Wind
32Der Heimat zu
33Mein Irisch Kind,
34Wo weilest du?
35"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
36"They called me the hyacinth girl."
37-- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
38Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
39Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
40Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
41Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
42Od' und leer das Meer.
43Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
44Had a bad cold, nevertheless
45Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
46With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
47Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
48(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
49Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
50The lady of situations.
51Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
52And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
53Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
54Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
55The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
56I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
57Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
58Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
59One must be so careful these days.
60Unreal City,
61Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
62A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
63I had not thought death had undone so many.
64Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
65And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
66Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
67To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
68With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
69There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!
70"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
71"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
72"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
73"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
74"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
75"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
76"You! hypocrite lecteur!-- mon semblable, -- mon frère!"Summary The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence ("I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter"). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader "something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust" (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines). The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a "hyacinth girl" and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered through quotations from Wagner's operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet's sins.
Form Like "Prufrock," this section of The Waste Land can be seen as a modified dramatic monologue. The four speakers in this section are frantic in their need to speak, to find an audience, but they find themselves surrounded by dead people and thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars. Because the sections are so short and the situations so confusing, the effect is not one of an overwhelming impression of a single character; instead, the reader is left with the feeling of being trapped in a crowd, unable to find a familiar face.
Also like "Prufrock," The Waste Land employs only partial rhyme schemes and short bursts of structure. These are meant to reference--but also rework-- the literary past, achieving simultaneously a stabilizing and a defamiliarizing effect. The world of The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier time, but it cannot be approached in the same way. The inclusion of fragments in languages other than English further complicates matters. The reader is not expected to be able to translate these immediately; rather, they are reminders of the cosmopolitan nature of twentieth-century Europe and of mankind's fate after the Tower of Babel: We will never be able to perfectly comprehend one another.
Commentary Not only is The Waste Land Eliot's greatest work, but it may be--along with Joyce's Ulysses--the greatest work of all modernist literature. Most of the poem was written in 1921, and it first appeared in print in 1922. As the poem's dedication indicates, Eliot received a great deal of guidance from Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and to break up the rhyme scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot's wife, Vivien, also had a significant role in the poem's final form. A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe. A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem's epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl's predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former glory. Thus, the underlying plot of The Waste Land, inasmuch as it can be said to have one, revolves around Eliot's reading of two extraordinarily influential contemporary cultural/anthropological texts, Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough. Both of these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern thought and religion; of particular interest to both authors is the story of the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is the cause of his country becoming a desiccated "waste land." Heal the Fisher King, the legend says, and the land will regain its fertility. According to Weston and Frazier, healing the Fisher King has been the subject of mythic tales from ancient Egypt to Arthurian England. Eliot picks up on the figure of the Fisher King legend's wasteland as an appropriate description of the state of modern society. The important difference, of course, is that in Eliot's world there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all. The legend's imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative (like religion or mythology) in the modern world.
Eliot's poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poem's writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its apex in the Four Quartets. The overall range of allusions in The Waste Land, though, suggests no overarching paradigm but rather a grab bag of broken fragments that must somehow be pieced together to form a coherent whole. While Eliot employs a deliberately difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display his own intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the twentieth century.
The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. Marie's childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledding, and coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture.
The second episode contains a troubled religious proposition. The speaker describes a true wasteland of "stony rubbish"; in it, he says, man can recognize only "[a] heap of broken images." Yet the scene seems to offer salvation: shade and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only of nothingness--a handful of dust--which is so profound as to be frightening; yet truth also resides here: No longer a religious phenomenon achieved through Christ, truth is represented by a mere void. The speaker remembers a female figure from his past, with whom he has apparently had some sort of romantic involvement. In contrast to the present setting in the desert, his memories are lush, full of water and blooming flowers. The vibrancy of the earlier scene, though, leads the speaker to a revelation of the nothingness he now offers to show the reader. Again memory serves to contrast the past with the present, but here it also serves to explode the idea of coherence in either place. In the episode from the past, the "nothingness" is more clearly a sexual failure, a moment of impotence. Despite the overall fecundity and joy of the moment, no reconciliation, and, therefore, no action, is possible. This in turn leads directly to the desert waste of the present. In the final line of the episode attention turns from the desert to the sea. Here, the sea is not a locus for the fear of nothingness, and neither is it the locus for a philosophical interpretation of nothingness; rather, it is the site of true, essential nothingness itself. The line comes from a section of Tristan und Isolde where Tristan waits for Isolde to come heal him. She is supposedly coming by ship but fails to arrive. The ocean is truly empty, devoid of the possibility of healing or revelation.
The third episode explores Eliot's fascination with transformation. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris conducts the most outrageous form of "reading" possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into predictions, many of which will come true in succeeding sections of the poem. Eliot transforms the traditional tarot pack to serve his purposes. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work of magic and transformation in English literature, Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Those are pearls that were his eyes" is a quote from one of Ariel's songs). Transformation in The Tempest, though, is the result of the highest art of humankind. Here, transformation is associated with fraud, vulgarity, and cheap mysticism. That Madame Sosostris will prove to be right in her predictions of death and transformation is a direct commentary on the failed religious mysticism and prophecy of the preceding desert section.
The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland of the poem, the modern city. Eliot's London references Baudelaire's Paris ("Unreal City"), Dickens's London ("the brown fog of a winter dawn") and Dante's hell ("the flowing crowd of the dead"). The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker recognizes, is a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of ghoulish questions about a corpse buried in his garden: again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and fertility. This encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the tremendous slaughter of the first World War; however, it can also be read as an exercise in ultimate futility: as we see in Stetson's failure to respond to the speaker's inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights of history, tradition, and the poet's dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.
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