419. THUNDER’S THIRD DISCIPLINE: This is the third DA, after lines 401 and 411. Damyata means “Control yourself,” what lesser gods understood in hearing “Da.” See note 400.
DADAISM: Apart from any meaning heard in what the thunder said, the da da da passage also evokes the concept of Dadaism, a pre-surrealist art movement that began in Switzerland in 1916 and was reaching its peak at the time of The Waste Land. The movement, which ranged from visual arts to literature and poetry to theater, spurned the bourgeoisie reasoning and hard logic that were at the roots of World War I and instead placed a value on abstract nonsense. In contrast to Eliot’s objective correlative theory (note 417), compare this with the ostensible “gibberish” of the jazz movement (notes 130 and 433). See Eliot’s comments, in The Lesson of Baudelaire (1921; see note 76): “Dadaism is a diagnosis of a disease of the French mind; whatever lesson we extract from it will not be directly applicable in London”; and again in James Joyce, Ulysses, Order and Myth (1923), in which he criticized another critic: “Mr. Aldington treated Mr. Joyce as a prophet of chaos; and wailed at the flood of Dadaism which his prescient eye saw bursting forth at the tap of the magician’s rod.”
420. THE BOAT RESPONDED: See line 280 (Elizabeth and Leicester, on the Thames barge) and note 280 for more on oars. 421. CALMNESS: Compare the calm sea with the calm night after leaving the Chapel Perilous (see note 388) and the calm day of a riverside wedding in Spenser, Prothalamion (see note 176).
425. THE FISHER KING: Eliot*: “V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King.”
The fisher king sitting on a river bank, and the allusion of one who was gravely injured and, with his entire country, desperately in need of healing, is a prevailing image in this poem. See Weston**, Ritual to Romance 9: 117, 129:
“...he was called the Fisher King because of his devotion to the pastime of fishing ...If the Grail story be based upon a Life ritual the character of the Fisher King is of the very essence of the tale, and his title, so far from being meaningless, expresses, for those who are at pains to seek, the intention and object of the perplexing whole.”
But the image of this fisherman keeps reappearing in different shades and colors. See him weeping at lines 182-184, then sitting alongside a rat in the mud at lines 185-189, then musing upon the king’s wreck at lines 190-192. Later, fishmen are lounging at noon at line 263. Eliot directly compared the Fisher King to the Tarot deck’s three-staved merchant who stands on a seaside cliff and watches ships pass by (see notes 46 and 51), and he also imagined the fisherman as a sailor coming home from the sea in the evening (see note 221). Finally, at line 425, with the dry land behind him and the water in front of him, the Fisher King considers whether it might be time to set things right. See Isaiah* 38:1:
“Thus saith the LORD, Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live.”
This was Isaiah’s counsel to a mortally sick King Hezekiah, which led the king to weep.
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* see note 0.1 **see note 0.2
