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.Eliot s note, his words, nowhere except into the sadness of what wasare not necessarily a trap, but they require inter- wasted.The reader, continuing a journey down apretation on the reader s part as well.What Tire- river that is both the river of time, of history, andsias sees, for example, may seem obvious a couple the real Thames, encounters Elizabeth and Leices-making rather perfunctory love, as it is often ter, whose legendary dalliance ended nowhere.euphemistically put, almost as if the sex act were Then the reader hears from each of the three younga duty or an obligation, like eating or sleeping or modern women whom Eliot, in another note, callsvoting, rather than the intimate sharing of an abid- the Thames-daughters.Each one makes her con-ing and pleasurable procreative energy with each fession of surrendering her virtue to a male com-other.However, what Tiresias also sees, as he com- panion who was all too willing to take it, and nonements I Tiresias have foresuffered all is that of them found satisfaction or fulfillment in thatthis is how humans most often have engaged, and awful daring of a moment s surrender that is thedo engage, in such a powerfully life-giving, life- complete submission of oneself, emotionally andhealing action, not with zest, but with reluctance physically, to another person in the throes of love,and relief: I m glad it s over. So, then, what be it another name for sex or for passion.Tiresias sees is not the human tragedy but the First, however, the speaker must stand onehuman comedy, thus, too, explaining why, for his last time, as he has done twice before, on or nearTiresias, Eliot turned to the less somber and sober London Bridge (Wren s church of St.Magnus theRoman source, Ovid.Martyr, a fishers parish, is close by).Once againOvid s Tiresias, the reader now should remem- he must survey the unreal, the swarming humanber, speaks of the subject with an impressive author- city, filled with thousands of individuals seeking ority, after all, one of which even the gods stand in already lost in the arms of a significant other, each 462 Waste Land, Theone in the tangle of the ultimate human embrace troublesome and difficult for him to overcome fromimagining, like Ovid s Jove and Juno, that it is the his own point of view was his inability, from theother one who is getting the better part of the bar- time that he entered puberty, to keep himself awaygain.Eliot s point, if not the anonymous speaker s, from the sexual pleasures that he found in women.too, by now seems to be rather obvious: There must As Book III of The Confessions opens, it continues,be something else.This sad and apparently time- a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled aboutless, ceaseless parade of human hope and folly can- me.I was not yet in love, but I was in love withnot be all there is cannot be what it is or was love. More than anything else, Augustine foundmeant to be all about.his carnality to be the foremost impediment to hisThat it is not, was not, is, of course, the thrust finding peace with God and so peace with him-of both the entire poem and the seeker/speaker s self in a word, happiness.And in those closingquest.That much is clear.But if the lives of most five truncated lines of poetry with which The Firehumans are lives lost in the errors of misplaced Sermon closes, there is, in essence, another appeallongings, as Eliot suggests by his use of so much to the tradition of renunciation of the flesh and thepast poetry as examples, the reader now has the things of this world that also forms the basis of Theright to demand of the poet something more than Buddha s teaching.just the critique, something more in keeping with a In Eliot s view, Augustine s Confessions is to thepossible solution to this universal human dilemma.traditions of Western asceticism what The Bud-What, then, is human happiness? dha s Fire Sermon is to the traditions of EasternEliot had already introduced in the section s asceticism, an observation on which Eliot himselftitle, The Fire Sermon, one possible solution, elaborates in his note to these closing verses offound in the asceticism promoted by The Bud- The Fire Sermon and their allusion to St
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