“Looking Into the Heart of Light” and Meeting the Dead

Abstract

The Waste Land rhymes with the waste land, representation mirroring the represented, especially in the prominence of “fragments,” which characterize both. “You know only / A heap of broken images,” says the speaker near the poem’s beginning, which, in being titled “Burial of the Dead,” flouts the later understanding of Four Quartets that “those who are only living can only die” and suggests that the dead are silenced and forgotten.1 The speaker addresses “Son of man,” an evident biblical allusion that works to call to the reader’s mind, but not his own, the Son of God, who is absent from the wastelanders’ thought. Still, when the speaker asks, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” the reader cannot help but wonder if Eliot, behind his speaker and ever capable of irony, also has in mind the poem, whose “roots” certainly include, as the poet said in his notes, the vegetation myths brought to light in The Golden Bough and in Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. The subsequent proffer of a glimpse of “fear in a handful of dust” certainly sounds biblical, prompting one commentator to conclude that “dust is the symbolic reminder to man of his bodily mortality, his beginning and end in matter.”2 KeywordsWaste LandTruth TellerFear DeathRepresentation MirrorCanterbury TaleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.