The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot | Poetry Foundation - Kiến Thức Cho Người lao Động Việt Nam

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεîν θέλω.’

For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month

April is the cruellest month The Waste Land begins with a subversion of the first lines of the

The Waste Land begins with a subversion of the first lines of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales , by Geoffrey Chaucer. He paints April as a month of restorative power, when spring rain brings nature back to life: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licóur / Of which vertú engendred is the flour;” it’s an image repeated to the point of cliché in subsequent centuries. But in the wasteland of Eliot’s modern world, amid the ruins of the World War I, the Chaucerian image of a fertile, resurrective April becomes suffused with cruelty. It is, ironically, winter that “kept us warm.”

, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie

Marie Marie is Countess Marie Larisch, who played a pivotal role in the Mayerling Incident. The lines are taken from her book My Past and from Eliot’s conversations with her. Through biographical knowledge of the countess, readers can make connections to Crown Prince Rudolf and the scandal that allowed Archduke Franz Ferdinand to become the presumptive heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and through Ferdinand to World War I (and, perhaps, also Prince Ferdinand from The Tempest).

, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images

A heap of broken images Eliot’s endnotes for the poem connect the following line to Ecclesiastes 12:5: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.” But it also resembles Ezekiel 6:4: “And your images shall be broken.” Though the “heap of broken images” is one of many depictions of post-war decay in the poem, it can also be taken more generally as a metaphor for how present consciousness consumes past culture. Hugh Kenner, one of the great scholars of Modernism, explained this element well, arguing how the line evokes: “the manner in which Shakespeare, Homer, and the drawings of Michelangelo, Raphael, and the Magdalenian draughtsmen coexist in the contemporary cultivated consciousness: fragments, familiar quotations: poluphloisboio thalasse, to be or not to be, undo this button, one touch of nature, etc. […] Cities are built out of the ruins of previous cities, as The Waste Land is built out of the remains of older poems.”

, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu

Mein Irisch Kind,

Wo weilest du?

‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris

Madame Sosostris The name Madame Sosostris is reminiscent of Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, from Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow, which was published in late 1921 while Eliot was working on The Waste Land. In Huxley’s novel, Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana is the moniker Mr. Scogan uses when he masquerades as a woman who tells fortunes at a fair. This cross-dressing gender play foreshadows the sexual ambiguity of the Tiresias figure, who appears later in the poem and whom some scholars take as its central consciousness. Madame Sosostris’s clairvoyance, even if she is merely a charlatan seer, further solidifies her connection to Tiresias and to the Cumaean Sibyl in the poem’s epigraph (taken from Petronius’s Satyricon).

, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With

a wicked pack of cards

a wicked pack of cards Eliot admitted in his endnotes that he was “not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards,” but he used the symbolic register of the divinatory deck to spin a web of his own associations: James Frazer’s Hanged God from The Golden Bough, the Fisher King of the Grail quest (through Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance), the Phoenician Sailor (a presence later in the poem), death by water, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, etc. Eliot later said, “I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.”

. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(

Those are pearls that were his eyes

Those are pearls that were his eyes This line is pulled directly from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the context of the play, Ariel says this line in a song to Ferdinand, describing Ferdinand’s father’s supposed death by water. This line is repeated again in the second section of Eliot’s poem. Another line from this section of The Tempest, this one by Ferdinand, shows up in the third section of the poem: “This music crept by me upon the waters.”

. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City

Unreal City The “Unreal City” is borrowed from Baudelaire’s “The Seven Old Men”: “Unreal city, city full of dreams, / Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passers-by.” Eliot’s “Unreal City” is modern London. The urban scene that makes up the final piece of the first section of The Waste Land is set in the city’s financial district where Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank. Eliot’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, and Dante’s Inferno merge into a hellish tableau. The phrase “Unreal City” returns in the third section of the poem.

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!

‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

‘What is that noise?’

The wind under the door.

‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’

Nothing again nothing.

‘Do

‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

‘Nothing?’

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’

But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag The song “That Shakespearean Rag” with lyrics by Gene Buck and Herman Ruby and music by Dave Stamper was a minor hit in 1912. The cultural degeneration from Shakespeare to popular music is emblematic of the decline and debasement seen throughout The Waste Land. Eliot has interestingly affixed an “O O O O” to the beginning of the song, which is reminiscent of the final lines of Hamlet: “The rest is silence. / O, o, o, o.”

—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’

‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

‘What shall we ever do?’

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night The final words of this section of the poem come from Hamlet, spoken by Ophelia: “And so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.” Ophelia is yet another character whose death comes through water, and there is also a connection to the poem’s “hyacinth girl” through their mutual association with flowers. Hugh Kenner, in fact, described the hyacinth girl as speaking “with urgent hurt simplicity, like the mad Ophelia.”

III. The Fire Sermon

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck

And on the king my father’s death before him.

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water

Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

Tiresias

Tiresias In Greek mythology, Tiresias is a blind seer from Thebes. In addition to his gift of prophecy, he is known for his sexual transformation from man to woman (as a punishment from Hera, the queen of the Greek gods). In his endnotes, Eliot explained, “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character,’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” The interpretational mileage one gets from shoehorning everything in the poem into a single consciousness, whether it is that of Tiresias or not, varies from critic to critic, but it would be difficult to understand The Waste Land without wrestling with this question: “What does Tiresias see?” Thinking through some of the essential narratives that include Tiresias (especially Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex) can offer connections to many of the major motifs of The Waste Land, including blindness, gender ambiguity, withheld knowledge, cryptic prophecy, dangerous sexual power, stagnant relationships, plagued land, and death by water.

, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronising kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smooths her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

‘This music crept by me upon the waters’

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats

Oil and tar

The barges drift

With the turning tide

Red sails

Wide

To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

The barges wash

Drifting logs

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester

Beating oars

The stern was formed

A gilded shell

Red and gold

The brisk swell

Rippled both shores

Southwest wind

Carried down stream

The peal of bells

White towers

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

‘Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’

‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event

He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’

I made no comment. What should I resent?’

‘On Margate Sands.

I can connect

I can connect / Nothing with nothing We hear the voices of three “Thames-daughters,” each describing a loss of sexual purity. One laments, “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” Could this be a response to E.M. Forster, who had written in his novel Howard’s End a decade prior “Only connect”? If so, is it a negation of Forster’s famous injunction or an extension of it? Eliot’s line can mean “I can’t connect anything” or “I can’t connect anything with the nothingness” or “I can connect the nothingness with the nothingness,” all of which yield different interpretations to the closing lines of this section. The fact that this happens “On Margate Sands,” one place Eliot physically stayed during the writing of the poem, connects the maiden’s voice with Eliot’s personal voice as well.

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Nothing.’

la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician

Phlebas the Phoenician Ezra Pound, a mentor of Eliot’s, helped him edit the poem. Pound cut so much that he joked about performing the “Caesarean Operation” for the poem’s birth. The section that Pound cut most deeply was this fourth section, which became the shortest section. After his friend’s edits, Eliot questioned whether he should keep Phlebas the Phoenician at all, but Pound was adamant he remain. Phlebas is connected not only to the tarot cards of Madame Sosostris but also to Ferdinand from The Tempest and the Smyrna merchant Mr. Eugenides.

, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

Who is the third who walks always beside you? In his endnotes, Eliot pointed to Ernest Shackleton’s account of one of his Antarctic expeditions, in which the explorers maintained the delusion that there was an extra member present. It also clearly conjures up a biblical story from Luke 24 of travelers on the road to Emmaus, in which two disciples encounter a third presence on their journey, who is revealed to be a post-resurrection Jesus.

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

Co co rico co co rico

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder

DA In the Upanishads, a collection of Hindu scriptures, “DA” is the voice of thunder. As Hugh Kenner explained it, “If the race’s most permanent wisdom is its oldest, then DA, the voice of the thunder and of the Hindu sages, is the cosmic voice not yet dissociated into echoes.” It is the root of “Datta” (“Give”), “Dayadhvam” (“Sympathize”), and “Damyata” (“Control”), each of which appears in this final section of the poem. Interestingly, Eliot reshuffled their order from the original “Damyata, Datta, Dayadhvam.”

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments

These fragmentsThe fragments that immediately precede this phrase are in various languages and were taken from a traditional English nursery rhyme, Dante’s Purgatorio, the Pervigilium Veneris (of unknown authorship), and Gerard de Nerval’s sonnet “El Desdichado,” respectively. Fragmentation is not only a feature of the setting, plot, and theme of The Waste Land but also, crucially, its defining formal feature. As with the line “A heap of broken images,” this has become one of the more memorable detachable statements of self-reflective description in the poem. But it is emblematic not just of this poem but also of Modernism more generally. It also ties in nicely with Eliot’s description of “the mythical method” in his review of James Joyce’s Ulysses in The Dial. For Eliot, Joyce’s use of Homeric parallels had “the importance of a scientific discovery.”

I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you.

Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Hieronimo is Mad Againe is the alternate title of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (which Eliot noted was one source for Hamlet in his essay on Shakespeare’s play). The words “Why then Ile fit you” appear in Kyd’s play when Hieronimo says them to one of the murderers of his son when he is asked by the killer to write a play for the king’s entertainment. With that line, Hieronimo means both “I’ll oblige your wishes” and “I’ll give you what you have coming.” He uses the play as a means for revenge; wielding a real dagger as a prop, he murders the men on stage.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

Shantih shantih shantih Shantih is a Sanskrit word for peace that is prayed at the close of an Upanishad. Eliot wrote in his endnotes that “The peace which passeth understanding” is “a feeble translation of the content of the word.” The beyond-language-ness of this final prayer again returns us to those final lines of Hamlet: “The rest is silence. / O, o, o, o.”