250. DEPARTED LOVER: See note 248 for one (Tiresias or the carbuncular guest) “groping away.”
Compare the more painful awareness of the departed nymphs at lines 175-181. See also Revelation* 18:14 for the repeated use of the word “departed”:
“And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.”
252. GLAD IT’S OVER: The reactions to departure have evolved from plaintiveness (see note 176) to being hardly aware (line 250) to gladness. See note 297 for the context of the “event” now done and over.
253: OLIVIA’S SONG: Eliot*: “V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.” See Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) 24:
“The next morning the sun rose with peculiar warmth for the season; so that we agreed to breakfast together on the honey-suckle bank: where while we sat, my youngest daughter, at my request, joined her voice to the concert of the trees about us. It was in this place my poor Olivia first met her seducer, and every object served to recall her sadness. But that melancholy, which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by sounds of harmony, soothes the heart instead of corroding it. Her mother,
too, upon this occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and loved her daughter as before. ....
When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover
And wring his bosom, is—to die.”
For echoes of Olivia’s song beyond line 253, see line 182 (“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept”) and note 182 (Rousseau’s “sweetest melancholy”); see also lines 11 (breakfast with Marie on a surprisingly warm day) and 99 (the rape of Philomela, her cries and the nightingale’s forest song resounding through the grove) and notes 0.3 and 63 (the wishes to die of the Sybil and of the undying souls in limbo).
256. THE MODERN WORLD of Eliot’s time was full of new concepts. Record-playing continues the song theme of this section (see note 172.5), but along with the gramophone see also the typewriter, the two career family and ready-to-eat meals (line 223), horns and motors (line 197) and airplanes (note 374). The term automatic (line 255) was itself a burgeoning word.
Add to these the modernist movement in literature and art, a development in which Eliot and The Waste Land were key factors. See notes 1, 248, 412 and 419.
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* see note 0.1
