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More & more clearly, Eliot saw and recorded the crumbling of European civilization; more & more sharply, his verse photographed the human ruins—an old man waiting for death in a rented house; a tuberculous courtesan calling for lights in decaying Venice; Apeneck Sweeney at an all-night party where, in a soaring descant above the all-erasing vulgarity, "The nightingales are singing near/The Convent of the Sacred Heart ..."
Few people were listening to nightingales, in the dawn after World War I, when Eliot began to work on The Waste Land. Their song came only faintly to Eliot himself, whose sense of general calamity was intensified by private troubles. By 1920, partly because of overwork in his dual career as banker and poet, Eliot was on the verge of a breakdown. While resting under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, he finished The Waste Land. He sent it for criticism to his friend, brilliant, erratic Poet Ezra Pound,* who blue-penciled it down to half its size. The poem first appeared in 1922, in the first issue of The Criterion, the small literary magazine which T. S. Eliot was editing with Lady Rothermere's backing,† The Waste Land turned out to be the most influential poem of the 20th Century.
The Patched Mirror. The Waste Land is easier on the ear than on the mind. It is like a kaleidoscopic mirror held up to the age—a patched mirror which at first seems to reflect only a heap of broken images, but which, to a longer view, blends them into a single bizarre picture, at once as strange and as familiar as one's own face (or one's own city) seen in a recurring nightmare. The broken bits of mirror reflect bittersweet scenes of past summers, and brown, foggy glimpses of London; a hysterical woman in an ornate boudoir like a candlelit tomb; women in a pub talking of postwar problems ("Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. / He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you / To get yourself some teeth . . .").
Some of the splinters mirror images from other poems, from legend, or from history. These references invite the reader to measure the squalor of his day against past splendors—Elizabeth and Leicester in a red & gold barge on the Thames contrasted with an anonymous London girl of today, in a canoe on the same Thames, being seduced without pleasure, without protest ("My people humble people who expect / Nothing . . .").
Dominating the tableau of aimlessness, decay and sterile joy is the image that gives the poem its name: the parched desert through which a wanderer struggles in search of an oasis. When he comes upon a chapel in the arid mountains, he significantly finds this symbol of faith broken and deserted—"There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home." But at the deepest point of despair, the rumble of thunder brings promise of rain to the waste land. The poem ends with the Hindu incantation, like the first shower of long-looked-for rain, shantih, shantih, shantih, meaning: "The Peace which passeth understanding."