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41. INTO THE HEART OF ...SILENCE: See Conrad***, Heart of Darkness 1: While waiting for the tide to rise on the Thames, Marlow, “the only man of us who still followed the sea,” told his shipmates of a past journey up the Congo:
“into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.”
Compare with Dante*, Paradiso 12:30-31:
Out of the heart of one of the new lights
There came a voice...
42. WASTE AND DREAR: Eliot*: ‘Id. iii, verse 24.” See Wagner†, Tristan und Isolde 3.1.24:
“The sea is waste and drear.”
This is the report to Tristan’s henchman Kurwenal, who was keeping vigil over his ailing master and had asked a shepherd to “Watch thou the sea” for Isolde’s ship to arrive.
JEAN VERDENAL, a friend of Eliot’s who died in World War I, appears to have influenced this poem on several levels. See John Peter, A New Interpretation of The Waste Land (1952) and James E. Miller, T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977). Eliot met Verdenal in Paris in 1910, and they kept a long-distance friendship while Eliot was studying at Harvard in 1911 and 1912. See Letters*. In one letter to Eliot, Verdenal had expressed a deep admiration for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which now bookends the hyacinth girl / drowned sailor story. In April 1915 (the cruelest month; see line 1), Verdenal was among troops sent to Gallipoli (see Mrs. Porter’s soldiers at line 199; see also the Stetson friend, line 69), where he was officially commended for helping to evacuate wounded soldiers:
“Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist.”
He died two days later. That summer, Eliot published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (see note 0.4) that year, and he dedicated his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Verdenal. In 1934, Eliot wrote in T.S. Eliot, A Commentary, Criterion (April 1934):
“I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.”
Compare lines 1-11, referring to lilacs, memory, mixing, mud and sunlight coming over the lake.
DROWNING, or “death by water,” which might creatively describe the cause of Verdenal’s demise, is also suggested as the poetic demise of the hyacinth girl at line 38 (“Your arms full, and your hair wet”). See also the shallow water death of Bavarian King Ludwig II (note 8), Ophelia’s death in Shakespeare*, Hamlet (lines 170-172) and the drownings of the pearl-eyed sailor and Phlebas the Phoenician (lines 312-321). Phlebas’s end, and the title to Part IV, is also portended at line 55 (“Fear death by water”). See also the simile of Cleopatra's perfumes that “drowned the sense in odours” (line 89).
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*see note 0.1 ***see note 0.3 †see note 8
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