For Those Who Cannot Pray: Eliot’s The Waste Land

First published in Dappled Things’ “Deep Down Things” blog - dappledthings.org

Considering the depth of T.S. Eliot’s Christian poetry, The Waste Land almost presents as an outlier. Its seemingly chaotic pessimism is at odds with Eliot’s careful modeling of Dante in Ash Wednesday and his impression of a Christian soul in The Four Quartets. There is too much shaking, much less piety. Too much despair, much less hope.

Not too long ago, I overheard someone comment, “The Waste Land can be no one’s favorite. It wasn’t even Eliot’s himself.” I set my lips in a tight pursed line, willing myself to be less visibly annoyed and more … considerate. There was nothing heinous in its being said; it might even be true. Upon a first, or second, or third reading, it does seem as though The Waste Land is nothing more than a failed thing, a failed modern thing, a failed insubstantial, incoherent thing. It could be no one’s favorite. In this lens, how could it be?

What is required is a shifted perspective, from Eliot’s spiritually mature poems, his critical opinions, and Christian literature’s consideration of both, to the primordial ooze, of life before form and of life in a disordered form. The Waste Land is the landscape of the Israelites in Egypt and their just coming out. It is a conversion of the narrative voice from death to life, in a way that sheds the cinematically bright strobe lights and cooing doves of conversion and salvation.

The Waste Land is the repentant sinner’s prayer, in between his worthiness and worthlessness, his new life and his old. It is the prayer of those who cannot pray, whose anxiety and anger prevent them from giving. They are Phlebas drowned, Phlebas who did nothing but drown. The Waste Land is that first turning, the first motion of moving upwards, beyond a life once lived to life promised.

Eliot structures The Waste Land as he does Ash Wednesday, but with less obvious progression from the first “stair” to the second, to the third. Each subsection is a revelation, progressing from the poetic voice’s despair at the utter chaos of his personal life and the external life of history and culture, to that “awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” 1 somewhat foisted on the poetic voice but warranted all the same.

You see, The Waste Land is forcible; its end already decided. The restoration is in motion, regardless of corporeal attitudes and events. These things are at the foreground, however, to ever more tightly focus the reader to the end, that third Man always present. The twist, that unexpected, unconventional way of finding Him is probably what the student had in mind when he said, “The Waste Land is no one’s favorite.” Of course not. One’s waste land isn’t something to revel in. It’s painful to look back on. It’s sub-standard, at times sub-human. But, as Eliot shows us, it had to exist. Because of sin, because of error … because in this, grace abounds all the more (Romans 5:20).

The Waste Land is the prayer of the woman betrayed, the man widowed, the grieving father. It is their first step out of despair, first step into pain, last step out of anxiety, last step into surrender. It must be read, not dismissed, because man needs to see what he’s been through, so he might see also the primacy of God, coming in, plucking out.

This action - this plucking out - is chaos, a shaking of all, a surrealism that swirls as gasoline in water, colorful, disorienting. In some sense, disorientation is necessary. Fr. Alfred Delp, SJ, murdered by the Nazis during the last years of the second World War wrote of a shaking; that the faithful need to be content with being shaken so that all the decrepit things which have been pushed into the crevices of their attics can be dislodged and thrown away. 2 At the end of The Waste Land one sees this.

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih 3

The Unreal City must be put away -- London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down. Man must be cleansed through the Refiner’s fire, a thing not to be taken lightly -- Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina / Quando fiam uti chelidon.

Violence exists and its effects remain -- O swallow swallow / Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

And perhaps these fragments of unreality cleansed - perceived as madness while the old man is shattered so he might be made new - is the first step beyond the violence and ennui, the first shaking step out. It is disorienting to reorient. It’s the Crucifixion prior to the thunder of the stone rolled away.

In my end is my beginning 4 -- If our individual waste lands are the end of our hypocrisy, ignorance and shame, then might we begin again? Without our waste lands would we ever see beyond ourselves? If the bridge didn’t collapse and flood overtake us, might we not have known that the bridge was faulty, and we couldn’t swim anyways?

Salvation through the cross; The Quartets through The Waste Land. So when we cannot pray, when our waste lands are too dense with debris and falsehood, we should pray in and with them, for the end is already decided; involving our cooperation with grace, all will be well and all manner of thing shall be well. 5 Our waste lands are not wasted.

Works Cited

1 Eliot TS, The Waste Land, in T.S. Eliot Collected Poems 1909 - 1962, (Harcourt, Brace & World,

Inc.) ll. 404

2 Delp, SJ, Alfred. Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings. Ignatius Press, 2006. pg

23 onward

3 Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 427 - 434

4 Eliot, “East Coker”, ll. 221

5 Eliot, “Little Gidding,” ll. 182 - 183