Wandering the Desert: Spiritual Renewal

Kim Rawley

English 300

Dr. Steven Frye

October 17, 2004

Wandering the Desert: Spiritual Renewal

in T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

It is fitting that the fifth and final stanza, “What the Thunder Said,” of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is set in the desert. After taking us through a variety of locations in the Waste Land — from sterile farmland, the walking dead traveling over London Bridge, into sad apartments of lonely women and the gossip in noisy pubs — Eliot flings us into the wilderness to wander its vast arid plains and rocks. But in lines 322 to 345, Eliot uses allusion and imagery to suggest that there is a way out of the desert of modern life — Christ.

We don’t really need Eliot to tell us that the opening lines of the fifth stanza are about the events that lead up to and come after the Crucifixion, although he does so in his notes. The nine initial lines taken together paint a fairly clear picture of the Passion — the image of “torchlight red on sweaty faces” recalls the crowd gathered to hear Pontius Pilate’s offer to release either Jesus or Barabas and the “frosty silence of the gardens” and “agony in stony places” is the Gethsemane where Christ is arrested and taken away (16). Thus, the “shouting and crying” of the people as Jesus is brought to “prison and palace” and crucified ends with the “reverberation/ Of thunder of spring over distant

mountains” (16). The reference here is to Matthew 27:51, “And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent.” So, the rocks are torn apart and open up to possibly reveal water. Eliot’s “thunder of spring” could mean spring as in water, so sacred to baptism, or it could be spring as in renewal and rebirth. Perhaps, as allusions do many times in the poem, it works on both levels. Here the spring is a true renewal, not the spring of the poem’s beginning: “April is the cruellest month” (Eliot 5). The death of Christ is told: “he who was living is now dead” and people on Earth are poised to receive the benefit of His sacrifice: “we who were living are now dying/with a little patience” (16). “Dying with a little patience” seems to suggest that the hope of resurrection has led humans to the conclusion that although we are in the midst of “death in life,” Christ promises us eternity.

In the next part of the stanza, Eliot juxtaposes the rock and the arid desert against water, the symbol of baptism, redemption and Christ, and another allusion is made to the crucifixion in the line “dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit” (16). The mountain mentioned is Golgotha, where Jesus is hung on the cross. The name means the “place of the skull” because of the rock face’s appearance. It cannot spit because it is devoid of water, the healing element of Christ’s love. While the image of the desert is desolation: “here is no water but only rock/Rock and no water and the sandy road,” there is longing for the healing power of the water introduced in Stanza Four, “Death by Water”: “if there were water we should stop and drink/Amongst the rock one cannot stop

and think” (16). While the desert is a visual representation of mankind’s estrangement from the Divine, Eliot seems to be offering a glimmer of hope that the lifesaving water is forthcoming and will ease the spiritual longing of man.