T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land - Part 2

Welcome back to the Pens and Poison The Waste Land analysis series! Today, we’ll be looking at “A Game of Chess,” the second part of this monumental 20th century poem about the futility of human intimacy. 

You can read my intro to The Waste Land here and catch up on Part 1 of this poem here. 

We left off our analysis of Part 1 with a rather bleak portrait of London city life—images of corpses pervade the final stanza of “The Burial of the Dead,” and we see an inversion of the concept of new beginnings as new life sprouts from the dead. In Part 2 of the poem, however, we are in a different sort of scene: a room that represents high French aestheticism. The title of this particular section is taken from the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Middleton, whose play “A Game at Chess” satirizes the heightened tensions between England and Spain in the early 17th century. The play uses chess as a metaphor for political maneuvers and failed relationships, and in Eliot, we see the idea of chess repurposed as a metaphor for sexual maneuvering. 

In the first line, we get a Shakespearean allusion (Eliot likes those) to Antony and Cleopatra, immediately introducing the theme of female sexuality that will be present throughout this section of the poem. The line taken from Antony and Cleopatra runs thus: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Burned on the water...” The encounter here, as described by Antony’s friend Enorbarbus, is the first between Anthony and Cleopatra and accentuates Cleopatra’s beauty, who “o’erpictures Venus” in appearance. In Eliot, the barge is swapped out for a chair, which is reflected in the marble that adorns the room. Notice that Eliot replaces water with marble—if water will later become symbolic of redemption, then at this stage in the poem, we are still operating within an irredeemable sphere. The ensuing description of the room is at once opulent and grotesque, featuring blind Cupids, jewels, and synthetic perfumes (again highlighting the unnatural environment). 

The narrator then zones in on a picture above the mantelpiece of the transformation of Philomela, an allusion to the story in Ovid’s Metamorphosis of the rape of Philomela that highlights an unnatural change following a forced sexual encounter. In the myth, Tereus, the king of Thrace, rapes Philomela, the sister of his wife Procne, and cuts out her tongue when she threatens to tell everyone what he has done. Philomela then alerts her sister of the rape through a tapestry she weaves and is later transformed into a nightingale, whose mournful cry is explained by Tereus’ actions. Procne, similarly, is turned into a hoopoe, a detail that will be important to us as we enter our analysis of the next section of the poem. Eliot denotes the nightingale’s cry through the onomatopoeic “Jug Jug,” an outburst that is sung to “dirty ears,” thereby emphasizing the perversion of forced sexual encounters that pervade the world of The Waste Land. Eliot seems to suggest that in the absence of a meaningful, loving relationship, women become sterile and purposeless, unable to share their inner thoughts as they are reduced to primitive sounds heard only by men with malicious intent. 

We leave the room in this sort of unrest and transition then to a marriage scene, now exiting the lavishness of the throne room and becoming privy to the vignettes of a infertile marriages. Though we stil find some of Eliot’s characteristic literary allusions in this section of the poem, the second half of “A Game of Chess” is largely devoid of complex references to literary history and instead turns to the British vernacular to paint a portrait of English city life. We witness a dialogue that betrays the lack of deep connection between two lovers—“I never know what you are thinking”—and segue back into a rats’ alley that resuscitates the final city scene in “The Burial of the Dead.” Yet throughout this barren, smoggy scene, vestiges of hope creep up through the line “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” which we saw in the poem’s previous section in reference to the Phonecian sailor. In recalling Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest once again, Eliot invites us to consider the transformation of decay into something more positive, yet only for a moment, for the following line recalls another sort of emptiness: “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” Here, we have the emptiness of emotion between two lovers much like we saw in the Hyacinth Garden scene in the previous section. 

At this stage, Eliot invokes a ragtime song that betrays a sense of irony: “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag–/ It’s so elegant/ So intelligent.” In the motif of the popular song lies the death of high art, though the song itself, which references Shakespeare and its own intelligence, seems to believe otherwise. Eliot ascribes a negative morality to this sort of world devoid of true artistic pursuit and once again brings our attention back to these troubled lovers, who, in a manner reminiscent of Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, seem panicked about quotidian, quasi-meaningless decisions—the woman wonders whether she should rush out with her hair down and what she might do the following day. She settles finally on playing a game of chess, highlighting the absence of profound emotional experience in her relationship as she presses her “lidless eyes” together and waits for a knock on the door: her eyes never close, symbolizing a constant alertness, and a lack of peace, as she waits for death. 

We shift then to a parallel infertility scene in a more lower-class setting and meet several gregarious women in a pub, who discuss their friend Lil. Throughout this section, we are met with the repetitive cry of the barman: “Hurry up please its time,” which, taken at its surface, suggests the closing of the pub yet might also symbolize the ominous approach of death. The women gossip about Lil and her husband Albert, who has just come home from the war and will be disappointed to find that Lil has gotten an abortion with the money that he left her. In this scene, sexuality and fertility become weapons of manipulation; in the absence of a meaningful relationship, suggests Eliot, women will be bitter about their sexuality and ability to bear children. They are left, instead, as barren and meaningless, just as in the barren world of the Fisher King. 

The most telling lines of “A Game of Chess” come towards the section’s conclusion in an allusion to Hamlet. (Eliot isn’t going to go very long without dropping an allusion on us.) Here, we find an excerpt from Ophelia’s famous mad songs that lead up to her suicide. Ophelia bids the women around her good night, just as the women in Eliot’s pub bid each other good night. Ophelia’s portentous words accentuate her decay into madness and reemphasize the danger of failed relationships, but why does Ophelia go mad? There is no single interpretation for her descent into lunacy, but based on the previous discussion of abortion and fertility in the poem, we can assume that Eliot is alluding to the popular theory that Ophelia is pregnant with Hamlet’s child and kills herself because does not wish to bear without having secured Hamlet’s love for her (recall that Hamlet turns bitter towards Ophelia halfway through the play). Eliot thus suggests that in the absence of meaning in human relationships, women must necessarily become futile and barren, leaving the world in a state of decay—leaving behind a waste land. 

“A Game of Chess” is thus an exploration of the lack of regeneration in a world that has brushed aside meaning in favor of trivial experiences. Yet while Eliot leaves off this section with a bleak picture of fertility and regeneration, we will start to see hope in “The Fire Sermon,” which might offer this sort of barren world a chance at redemption. 

Stay tuned for my next installment of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land analysis, where we’ll dive further into The Waste Land’s exploration of regeneration in the third half of the poem—“The Fire Sermon.”