Academic Sample: "The Waste Land" Through the Cards

Trevor Brogan

Waste Land through the cards

“The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot appears, at first glance, to be a disjointed collection of scenes with a common theme.  The disjointed nature of the poem is due in part to Eliot’s heavy reliance on allusions to craft his scenes and in part to the editorial excisions Ezra Pound inflicted on Eliot’s original manuscript.  The themes of ennui and loss of faith in love unite the five sections of “The Waste Land,” and Eliot attempts to strengthen the connection through the use of recurring images.  Some of the most important images are introduced near the end of Part 1: “Burial of the Dead” in the scene of Madam Sosostris doing a tarot reading for the speaker.  By Eliot’s own admission, the tarot cards in “The Waste Land” do not conform to the conventional constitution and symbolism, but those that can be made to fit with tradition still predict much about the poem’s events and themes.

 Tarot was originally a card game related to the modern playing card deck used in Poker, Blackjack, and other such games, but by the time it reached England the cards had acquired a great deal of symbolism used for fortune telling and divination.  A tarot deck consists of seventy-eight cards divided into two major groups known as the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana, and the Minor Arcana is further divided into four suits of fourteen cards each.  The cards of the Major Arcana are somewhat better known in popular culture because they appear in movies and television far more often. Each card has a distinct name and image with associated symbolism, which is typically taken to be descriptive of the person who is having the cards read.  Some of the better-known tarot cards from the Major Arcana are the Fool, the Wheel of Fortune, and Death.  The meanings of the Minor Arcana are derived the combination of the card’s suit and number, and are typically taken to be advice or a prediction of the future.  Ever card has a basic meaning which is affected by where and when it is dealt during a reading and the tradition the tarot reader follows.   There are numerous varieties of tarot decks, but the one Eliot may have had in mind is the Rider-Waite deck, first published in 1901 and considered a standard among tarot practitioners.

There are many ways to read tarot cards, and Eliot’s relative ignorance of the cards is revealed in the lack of contextual clues about the type of spread being utilized in the poem.  All that can be determined is that either six or eight cards are dealt and an additional one is mentioned.  Critics such as James Miller read lines 49 and 50 as referring to single card and image using three titles. (Miller, 73) However, since Tarot cards do not have multiple names it is possible that there could be three cards – Belladona, the Lady of the Rocks, and the Lady of Situations – named in those lines.  In the interests of exploring the possible symbolism of each title, I will treat them as if each title is a different tarot card. 

The number of cards Eliot actually refers to is a minor point to argue, because neither six nor eight cards can complete a typical tarot spread.  The most popular and widely-used tarot spread is the Celtic cross, which requires ten cards to complete, while the simpler Four Winds spread stops at five cards (Ozaniec 118).  Because spreads are an essential part of drawing meaning from tarot cards, I will approach the cards in the poem through the Celtic cross spread as far as possible.

The first card is introduced as “your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,” (Eliot, line 47), implying that the sailor is meant to represent the speaker, who is receiving the reading.  There is no card resembling the drowned sailor in the Rider deck, nor likely in any other variation Eliot would have been aware of, but the line does reflect the first step of many tarot spreads: selecting a card to represent the client, or Querent.  Normally, this card is a Court card – the Page, Knight, Queen, or King – from the Minor Arcana (Greenway 17) or the Fool card from the Major Arcana (Butler 194, 197).  The Fool’s symbolism includes being “The spirit in search of experience” (Butler 113), which almost always describes Querent.  Instead of this image of an ignorant but optimistic fool, Eliot uses the image of a man whose profession has led to his death.  This card seems to fail in its job of signifying the speaker, because the drowned sailor appears as a separate character later, in the shortest section of the poem.  Nonetheless, the speaker has a strong connection to the card, since its appearance prompts the parenthetical aside “Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!” (line 48).  That same line appears in Part 2, seemingly out of nowhere in the midst of the speaker’s lover bombarding him with questions.  The drowned sailor himself may be, “in some obscure biographical sense, Jean Verdenal,” a friend of Eliot’s who died in WWI and who James Miller claims is the real driving force behind the poem (73).

The second card named in the poem, “Belladonna” (line 49), is another problematic card because there is no obvious parallel in the Rider-Waite deck.  The word “belladonna” could have two possible meanings, depending on one’s language.  It could refer to a species of poisonous plant also known as nightshade, in which case the card would be symbolic of death and quite fitting with the overall themes of the poem.  Alternatively, given how freely Eliot uses foreign languages in the poem, “belladonna” could be translated from its Italian roots as “beautiful lady.” By appearing after the Significator card, Belladonna should indicate a current challenge in the Querent’s life, (Ozaniec 119).  The challenge in the speaker’s life is a loss of fulfilment in his life, particularly sexual fulfilment.  Parts II and III of “The Waste Land” are filled with scenes and allusions of moments of sex without romance, starting with the frustration of the rich woman whose husband – the speaker – cannot stay focused long enough to answer her, heading down to the conversation in the pub, and ending with the emotionless encounter of the typist and the “young man carbuncular” (line 231).  Both aspects of the “Belladonna” image can be seen in the speaker’s perception of his wife.  The opening stanza of Part II concerns itself with the material beauty surrounding the lady, until the appearance of a nightingale brings the tragic story of the rape of Philomel to mind (lines 98-103).  The speaker is unable to find worth, or life, in the daily routine he and his wife go through, and so there must only be a kind of death.

“The Lady of the Rocks” (line 49) can, with some effort, be linked to an actual tarot card.  Each suit in the Minor Arcana is traditionally associated with one of the four mystical elements, and the element of Earth, or the Rocks if you will, is linked to the suit of Coins or Pentacles.  The Lady of the Rocks could therefore be the Queen of Coins.  As a Court card, the Queen can be seen as representative of either a person or a situation, depending on the tarot reader’s interpretation of its placement within the spread.  Normally, the Queen of Coins “indicates success through the practical application of thoughts and desires” (Fenton-Smith, 177), but when reversed, or dealt upside-down, it can “describe someone whose self-worth is dependent on what they contribute or achieve, not on who they are” (Fenton-Smith 178).  That attitude of needing to perform to expectations is clearly evident in the final scene of A Game of Chess, in the discussion of giving Albert what he wants.  “He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you / to get yourself some teeth” (Eliot, lines 143-144).  The speaker here is one of several ladies meeting in a pub to talk about how they are trapped by expectations regarding their appearance and ability to give “a good time” (line 148) to their husbands who are coming home from the war. 

The fourth card in the spread is “The lady of situations” (line 50).  This Major Arcana card depicts a lady sitting in judgment with balanced scales in one hand and a sword in the other, and “implies legal dealings of some kind” (Greenway 43) or that “you have what you deserve and, if you are completely honest with yourself, you know this” (Fenton-Smith 231).    Instead, there is primarily a sense of emotional separation from the dim realities of a city that has been abandoned by the “nymphs… / And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors” (Eliot, lines 179-180).  Taking the guise of the mythical blind seer Tiresias, the speaker detachedly observes a sexual liaison which leaves almost no impact on the woman beyond “one half-formed thought… / ‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over’” (lines 251-252).  Instead of considering the scenes by the empty river and in the bedroom as the just results of previous events, the speaker is withdrawing, perhaps to turn inward before confronting the world again.  This is more in line with the advice of the Two of Swords, which is to “sort out your beliefs and resolve your emotional conflict” (Fenton-Smith 108).  It is at this point that my attempt to correlate the cards to the poem hits its weakest point, since the card and symbolic meaning do not match.  However, this is the only such failure in my reading.

“Here is the man with three staves,” Madam Sosostris says of the fifth card (line 51), and Eliot’s footnote claims this is a legitimate tarot card.  “Staves” is one alternate name for the Minor Arcana suit of Wands, meaning this card can only be the Three of Wands.  It suggests, according to Fenton-Smith, “that you are thinking about your current situation and searching for meaning both within and without yourself” (22).  This obviously applies to “The Waste Land” as a whole, with its frequent shifts to explore new scenes, but Eliot “quite arbitrarily [associates it] with the Fisher King himself” (Eliot, line 46, footnote), a figure that appears in The Fire Sermon musing on the past (lines 186-195) and near the end of the poem, wondering if he should return to his royal duties of overseeing the land (lines 423-425).  The Fisher King is one of the strongest symbols of Eliot’s theme in “The Waste Land” because the poem was based in part on Jessie L. Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance, which explores the Fisher King story.  “We might assume that [Eliot] happened upon the book, saw parallels between himself and the fisher-king in the book, and began to assimilate elements of the work through his imagination” (Miller, 93-94).  The Fisher King is a key figure in the King Arthur stories, a guardian of the Holy Grail who suffers from a wound that leaves him impotent.  The Fisher King’s lands, in reflection of his infertility, have become a barren wasteland and his own activities are limited to fishing and waiting for a chosen knight to come and heal his wound.  As the fifth card in a Celtic cross spread, the Three of Wands would speak of the Querent’s future, but its introspective meaning doesn’t promise success in finding a solution.  “The Waste Land” likewise doesn’t end with a clear resolution.  There is no Percival or Galahad coming to ask the question that will magically heal the King’s wound, but there is a hint of returning desire to act in the Fisher King’s own question “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” (Eliot, line 425).

Eliot’s decision to pair the Fisher King with the Three of Wands is surprisingly serendipitous considering his ignorance of the complete Tarot.  An alternative to the Fenton-Smith interpretation of the cards assigns masculine principles to the number three, including “masculine life-force and sexual libido” (Saunders 89), with the reverse being impotence and “an inability to… resolve outstanding issues” (90).  The Suit of Wands, reversed, could describe “inability to focus… and a tendency to use energies for negative purposes” (Saunders 96).  These traits have an uncanny similarity to the problems faced by the Fisher King and the speaker of “The Waste Land,” who are one in the same.  Both figures are trapped in a nearly-dead land reflective of their physical and mental state and are powerless to solve those problems on their own.

“The Wheel” mentioned in the same line as “the man with three staves” (line 51) must be the Wheel of Fortune, a card that even a novice of tarot can guess the meaning of.  It signifies change and the endless cycle of life’s ups and downs, and its appearance in a spread can mena either good or ill.  As the sixth card of the Celtic cross, it would deal with the immediate future (Ozaniec 119) and promise an end to the overarching despair of the poem, but only after time has passed.  The Wheel can be tricky though, as change is constant and requires taking the long view to take full advantage of it.  If viewed in an optimistic light, “The Wheel will support you when you feel your life has become stagnant” (Ozaniec 52), while a more pessimistic view calls it “the torture-wheel of endless rounds of boredom of modern suburbia” (Miller 73).  The speaker is in the down-turn of the wheel through most of the poem, but endurance pays out after the storm breaks in line 394.  Water, at last bringing life as rain to a parched land instead of death as a stagnant, trash-choked canal, and the “Da, da, da” of the thunder cause the Fisher King-speaker to consider taking action again.

The Celtic cross Tarot spread consists of two parts.  The first six cards describe the Querent and the forces surrounding him in time, while the remaining four provide advice on how to move forward, starting with how the Querent sees things and how others see the Querent.  Since Madam Sosostris only deals two cards after the Wheel, the merchant and the mysterious blank card (Eliot lines 52-54), we do not get a definite guess at the final outcome of the speaker’s problems. 

“The one-eyed merchant” (line 52) eludes identification with a true member of the tarot, but it does lend its imagery to later portions of the poem.  In part three, The Fire Sermon, he appears in a transitional stanza between the scene of the Fisher King by the river and the encounter in the bedroom.  What is surprising is that the card which follows and is attached to the Merchant, and “Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, / Which I am forbidden to see” (lines 54-55), does exist in a technical sense, although it is not an official part of the tarot.  It is a habit of printers to include an extra, blank card in card decks, and some schools of tarot suggest leaving it in and assigning it a meaning.  “The Blank card signifies that life holds plans for you that are greater than your own plans.  You may have clear objectives and a strong belief in where you are heading, but when this card appears life takes you in an unexpected direction” (Fenton-Smith 101).  As the final card in the actual spread dealt out by the clairvoyant, it predicts a sudden twist or change near the end of the journey.  The final part of “The Waste Land” has a sudden shift in mood coinciding with the arrival of the rain.  Before the storm breaks, the speaker is traveling through a barren waste on the edge of his own sanity.  He rambles about the rocks and lack of water, and then line 359 begins to hallucinate, seeing a third traveler out of the corner of his eye, and in line 377 the hallucinations reach their peak, with grotesque and impossible imagery.  The rain in come line 394, and suddenly there’s clarity and epiphany inspired by the sound of thunder.

The cards have all been dealt now, but one final character from the Major Arcana makes his mark on the poem by his noted absence.  “I do not find / the Hanged Man” (lines 54-55).  Since the purpose of using tarot cards is to answer questions by allowing some mystical or spiritual force to speak through the cards, mentioning a card that doesn’t appear seems presumptuous.  Nevertheless, the failure of the Hanged Man to appear has significance to the poem, since Eliot mentioned it and ascribed his own interpretation of it in a footnote.  Had the clairvoyant continued dealing cards to create a proper Celtic cross, and had it appeared, the Hanged Man would have been in the position describing the Querent’s hopes and fears (Ozaniec 119).  The Hanged Man is more of an advisory card than a predictive one.  In the traditional Ride-Waite deck, the man hangs by his foot rather than his neck and has a calm, contemplative expression on his face.  “The figure as a whole suggests life in suspension, but life not death.” (Butler 159).  “The Hanged Man is a card for surrender” (Fenton-Smith 234).  The general consensus is a recommendation to reflect on changes in one’s life and let it take its own course for a while. 

Even if we include the Hanged Man in the spread of Tarot cards and divide the Belladona into three images, we still end up one card short of a complete Celtic cross.  There is no card or image in the Madam Sosostris stanza to fill the spot for “Final Outcome,” the very thing someone would hope to learn from divination.

Tarot is a fascinating and complex thing.  The message of the cards depends heavily on the philosophy and intent of both the reader and the client.  On one hand, this makes it difficult to trust those that read the cards unless one is already a believer.  On the other hand, this fluidity of interpretation allows for multiple levels of symbolism and the ability to find meaning and direction from any combination of cards.  The cards are read early in “The Waste Land,” and aside from a few obvious parallels between a select few cards and later characters the entire reading does not come up again.  The cards are not even given an explanation regarding their connections to one another and what their overall message is supposed to be.  It may seem that the tarot is abandoned as a failed attempt to find peace and purpose in the Waste Land, but in truth the lessons they try to teach are reflected throughout the poem.

Works Cited

Butler, Bill.  Dictionary of the Tarot.  New York: Schocken Books, 1975.  Print.

Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Devon: Duke & Co., 2005.  57-74. Print.

Fenton-Smith, Paul.  The Tarot Revealed.  Allen & Unwin, 2008. Print.

Gish, Nancy K. The Waste Land: A Poem of Memory and Desire. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988. Print.

Greenway, Leanna.  Simply Tarot.  New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 2005.  Print.

Miller, James E., Jr. T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land.  Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 1977.  Print.

Ozaniec, Naomi. The Illustrated Guide to Tarot. New York: Sterling Publishing, 1999. Print.

Saunders, Thomas. The Authentic Tarot: Discovering Your Inner Self. London: Watkins Publishing, 2007. Print.