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76.5. ACT TWO: This is the “air” section, characterized by ostensibly meaningful words made empty in their presentation. Several seduction and assault scenes are staged through a series of walls that talk (lines 77-110), rhetorical questions hang in an air of wind and nothingness (lines 111-138), some chatty marital advice is mixed with a bartender’s “last call” mantra (lines 139-172), and dying words are disguised, first by a ragtime beat (lines 128-130) and then with a round of closing time send-offs (line 172).
See note 8 for a foreshadowing of the talking walls.
A GAME OF CHESS: Within this Act Two, and by its title, we are invited to observe a round of chess, a game of concentration and strategy that can make its players oblivious to the world around them. Chess is also a diversionary game for couples with nothing else to do.
Games of chess appear in several of Eliot’s recurring literary sources. See note 137 for Eliot’s key inspirations for this title in two Thomas Middleton plays, and see also Shakespeare*, The Tempest 5.1.172, where Ferdinand and Miranda are revealed in the midst of a chess game. See also Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isolde (1160; tr. Jessie Weston, 1899), a precedent for Wagner’s opera of the same name (see note 8), in which a young Tristan seems to impress the masters of a merchant ship with his chess skills, but as he loses himself in the game they steal him away to sea. See also lines 137-138 and note 138 for a consideration of the“lidless eyes” of both the chess players and the pieces between them.
Following the “air” theme of this section, chess is also a game in which words are practically unnecessary until the “check” and “mate” death knell at the end.
DYING WORDS, offered literally but surreptitiously, appear several times in this “air” section through the disguised last gasps of Hamlet (line 128) and departing words of Ophelia (line 172), but mortal knells are scattered throughout the poem, covering a broad spectrum from the deathless speech of the Sybil wanting to die (note 0.3) to the speechless death of the drowned sailor/hyacinth girl (lines 38-40, 47-48). In between, souls sigh in limbo (lines 60-68), a riverbank weeper weeps (line 182), a lovely woman sees death as her only escape (see line 253 and note 253) and a couple finds nothing to say (lines 111-138). We are also given allusions to the last words of Agamemnon (note 198), Conrad's Kurtz (note 298), and two of John Webster's characters, Flamineo (note 44) and the stabbed patient (note 118). There are also subtle allusions to the speechless deaths of Marie’s cousin Rudolph (lines 8-18), the Earl of Leicester’s wife Amy Robsart (line 279), the children of Lilith (line 159) and Eliot's friend Jean Verdenal (note 42).
See also the “little life” allusion at line 7, referring to the final speech at the end of Shakespeare*, The Tempest. For Prospero’s extended speech, see The Tempest 4.1.148-154:
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And —like the baseless fabric of this vision—
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Finally, see note 298 for the more enduring words of epitaphs.
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*see note 0.1
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