Sample Notes for Testing Only

Eliot's original notes have been supplemented by additional notations, which appear in green like so. I have taken several notes directly from M. H. Abrams et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., vol. 2 (NY: Norton, 1993). I have also drawn heavily on A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot by B. C. Southam.

The title probably originates with Malory's Morte d'Arthur. A poem strikingly similar in theme and language called Waste Land, written by Madison Cawein, was published in 1913.
Eliot's original title for the poem was He do the Policemen in Different Voices, a reference to Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, and is a comment on the skill of Sloppy in reading out Court cases from the newspapers.

Epigraph I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her "What do you want?" She answered,
"I want to die."
Petronius, Satyricon
The Cumaean Sibyl was the most famous of the Sibyls, the prophetic old women of Greek mythology; she guided Aeneas through Hades in the Aeneid. She had been granted immortality by Apollo, but because she forgot to ask for perpetual youth, she shrank into withered old age and her authority declined.

Dedication The better craftsman.
(Purgatorio xxvi, 117)

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

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12.I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German

18.Eliot derived most of the ideas in this passage from My Past by the Countess Marie Larisch.

20. Cf. Ezekiel 2:7.

23. Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:5.

30. Cf. Donne's Devotions. Evelyn Waugh took this phrase for the title of his novel, A Handful of Dust .

31. The wind blows fresh
To the Homeland
My Irish Girl
Where are you lingering?
V. Tristan und Isolde, i, verses 5-8.

42. Desolate and empty the sea
Id. iii, verse 24.

43. A mock Egyptian name (suggested to Eliot by 'Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana', the name assumed by a character in Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow who dresses up as a gypsy to tell fortunes at a fair).

46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the 'crowds of people', and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.

55. On his card in the Tarot pack, the Hanged Man is shown hanging from one foot from a T-shaped cross. He symbolizes the self-sacrifice of the fertility god who is killed in order that his resurrection may bring fertility once again to land and people.

60. Cf. Baudelaire:
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.

63. Cf. Dante's Inferno, iii. 55-7:
si lunga tratta
di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.
So long a train of people, that I should never have believed death had undone so many.

64. Cf.

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