T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," Part 2: The Setting

The setting is one of the The Waste Land’s most important thematic contributions.  Scene by scene, Eliot fully explicates an image of the Waste Land, eliciting a sense of illness and decay. Even in the poem’s initial lines, “April is the cruelest month,” the spring rain brings false hope with seemingly no true possibility of renewal, a false hope that continues throughout the poem, when “There is not even silence in the mountains / But dry sterile thunder without rain."

Without hope, the Waste Land instills in all its inhabitants a desperation that is manifested in “fear in a handful of dust.” Dust symbolizes humanity’s mortality, the beginning and end of his existence. The Waste Land reflects the general state of existence of its ruler, the Fisher King, and of humanity in general. That state is one where the individuals have no conscious purpose, carrying out their roles like automatons without any notion as to how those roles function. Just as the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris in “The Burial of the Dead” has maintained the means but lost the ability to clearly interpret future events, humanity has lost its ability to interpret between good and evil.

With this loss of moral knowledge is included an ignorance of individual identity, and no ambition to better that identity. Instead, Eliot describes the Waste Land’s inhabitants as a “crowd of people, walking round in a ring” in the beginning of the poem.  Scenes like those related in “A Game of Chess” show the interactions with people who wander blindly through life, asking “What shall we ever do?” but the poem’s conclusion they are no closer to answering this question than before, but remain “hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth.” 

Trapped in a monotonous cycle of existence, the inhabitants of the Waste Land are completely powerless to control their fate.They possess no sense of identity or purpose in life. Instead of self-reliance, the inhabitants of the Waste Land are condemned to a sort of helpless limbo, between life and death. This in-between state of existence is underscored by Eliot’s references to Dante’s Inferno, such as “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet."

This insatiable exhaustion can only be relieved through breaking of the Waste Land’s perpetual drought. If it is through the events in the Waste Land that humanity’s failings are made apparent, the physical description of the Waste Land enables Eliot to demonstrate the natural interconnection between the past, present and future of humanity. This eternal futility is a reference to the suffering that can be ended neither by cure nor death. There is no possible way to gain one’s desires, but neither is there any possibility of giving up completely.

The Waste Land is symbolic of not only the state of existence of the Grail legends’ fictitious inhabitants, but also humanity’s existential dilemmas in a real and uncontrollable universe.  It represents the living death, suffering without possibility of relief, sin without the hope of redemption.