Waste+Land+Notes

**The Waste Land:** Eliot drew the title of this poem from Arthurian legend, especially the image of the waste land in Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. The original title of the poem was "He Do the Police in Different Voices," a line taken from the Charles Dickens novel Our Mutual Friend. Compare the title of this poem to Madison Cawein's "Wasteland," a poem Eliot most likely read: []

**"For I once saw with my own eyes," the poem's epitaph reads, "the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she answered, 'I want to die.'":** The original epitaph of The Waste Land came from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath – ‘The horror! The horror!’” The line was removed at Pounds behest—he didn’t feel Conrad was a significant enough author, which isn’t entirely unfair since the book had only been published two decades prior. Eliot felt Conrad’s quotation was more apt, perhaps because it reflected deathbed the terror of a lifetime of regret, just as the characters of The Waste Land are on the brink of death, filled with lives of sin. Whatever his motives, the epitaph was altered to a quotation from a classical text, with which Pound was probably much happier.

**April is the cruelest mont**h: Compare to the opening of the Canterbury Tales.

When that Aprilis, with his showers swoot, The drought of March hath pierced to the root, And bathed every vein in such licour, Of which virtue engender'd is the flower;

**Son of Man:** Eliot's notes cite Ezekiel 2.1: "And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee."

**cricket no relief:** Eliot's notes cite Ecclesiates 12.5: "Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets."