How Does Eliot Present Water in The Waste Land?

The lexis of water runs through out the whole of T S Eliot’s The Wasteland, with even one segment being named ‘Death By Water’. The death of the Phoenician soldier is interconnected with the rest of the text, such as the Burial of the dead where Madame Sosostris warns of ‘Death by water’ indicating the card with the ‘drowned Phoenician sailor’ on. The universal nature of water links seemingly unrelated things, people and times together, and contributes to the timelessness that T S Eliot creates in the poem, and yet water can connote a journey and moving on with one’s life. The ‘Phoenicians’ were once sailors of great repute, and thought to have spread the Grail myth (which The Wasteland is in part based on), and the interconnectivity of the Phoenician sailor reflects that fact. It also helps to entwine the past and the present, with Phlebas ‘Forgetting’ the ‘Profit and the loss’, which, while by no means a modern invention, is a more modern turn of phrase, but could also connote that water is either a healer, allowing him to ‘forget’ life, or a murderer, stripping Phlebas of all the memories of his ‘age and youth’ and leaving him as ‘bones’ to be ‘picked’ at by the torturous sea.

The idea of water as a healer however, is linked to the Grail myth, as the knights must ask the right question to restore water and fertility to the wasteland. This restoration of fertility can be seen in the ‘Burial of the dead’ in which water is ‘breeding lilacs out of the dead land’. By beginning his poem with growth and images of springtime (also connected to spring rains and the renewal of life after the cold and infertile winter) Eliot sets up the theme of rebirth and renewal as of great importance.  Rebirth is synonymous with baptism in the Christian faith, but is also found in most major religions, and the world over water symbolizes renewal and new life, and Eliot reflects this fact in his references to different cultures such as Buddha’s ‘fire sermon’. ‘Fire’ is the antitheses to water, and much as water represents life, fire represents death and hell, and the ‘burning’ it causes contrasts with the ‘life’ water brings to the Wasteland. This new life is much like the Christian belief that when you are baptized you become a new creation, and the juxtaposition of ‘fire’ and ‘water’ can be seen to reflect the battle between good and evil or against sin. The constant repetition of ‘burning’ in the end of ‘The Fire Sermon’ could signify the burning shame of sin, or perhaps the burning of lust. Buddha, in fact, compared worldly desires to burning, and Saint Augustine also described his promiscuousness before his conversion to ‘burning’, connoting the sterility and coarseness of the world without the soothing touch of water, here representing enlightenment or a relationship with God. This suggests that the solution to the infertility of the wasteland or the ‘burning’ of lust displayed through the poem could be a renouncement of worldly pleasures and the pursuit of the desires of the flesh. This view is reinforced by Eliot’s portrayal of Queen ‘Elizabeth’ I in ‘The Fire Sermon’. Words like ‘gilded’, ‘red’, ‘gold’, ‘white’ and ‘bells’ make the river of water seem regal and heroic, as though it is as it high point in the poem while Elizabeth is sailing upon it. This is significant, as Queen Elizabeth never married or succumbed to lust, and by seating ‘Leicester’ with Elizabeth in the procession, Eliot illustrates that she is not weak and does not give into her desires, with the word ‘and’ clearly marking them as separate individuals.

Water does not just represent just one thing in The Wasteland though, being both part of the seedy underbelly of an industrialized world, with ‘rats’ crawling, and with the ‘dead’ flowing ‘over London Bridge, as well as part of a more civilized and refined upper class world, with ‘Marie’ taking shelter in the ‘colonnade’ from a ‘shower of rain’ by the ‘Starnbergersee’. This perhaps suggests that water is an intensely personal thing, and can mean many different things to different people, as well as being manipulated to represent our world view.