Liza Libes's Blog

What does Yeats have to say about desire, love and lust? Let’s find out today in his famous poem Lullaby. 

You can also watch my analysis of the poem here. 

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Lullaby - W.B. Yeats Beloved, may your sleep be sound That have found it where you fed. What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms? Sleep, beloved, such a sleep As did that wild Tristram know When, the potion's work being done, Roe could run or doe could leap Under oak and beechen bough, Roe could leap or doe could run; Such a sleep and sound as fell Upon Eurotas' grassy bank When the holy bird, that there Accomplished his predestined will, From the limbs of Leda sank But not from her protecting care.

The infamous tale of Arachne—the young girl who challenges the goddess Minerva to a tapestry weaving contest—is told in Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, yet perhaps slightly lesser known is the story of Jupiter (the Roman name for the Greek God Zeus) and Leda, which appears woven in Arachne’s tapestry. Arachne recalls Jupiter’s rape of a woman named Leda, who is subsequently transformed into a swan—one of many metamorphoses we find in Ovid’s collection. Taking up this same story in his poem Lullaby, William Butler Yeats, on the other hand, invites us to consider sexual desire as benign and innocent rather than as destructive and violent. In Lullaby, Yeats turns several violent mythological tales on their heads as he presents his own interpretation—or, perhaps, presents an ironic commentary on the violence of love.

Yeats first draws a parallel between lover and child before placing a peaceful bedroom scene against the backdrop of a violent war. In the first stanza of the poem, he paints a portrait of erotic bliss between the mythological Paris and Helen—two figures from Homer’s Iliad—and blurs the boundaries between a parent-child and a lover-lover relationship, thereby ascribing a childlike playfulness to erotic desire. Rather than presenting the standard condemnatory picture of desire gone awry—the classic take on Paris, whose lust for Helen is violent enough to provoke the Trojan War—Yeats depicts an alternate paradigm in which Paris’s desire for Helen is gentle and innocent, absolving erotic desire of its negative qualities. 

As the poem’s title suggests, our first stanza begins with a parent (let us assume a mother, for simplicity’s sake) who addresses a child about to go to sleep. She calls her child “beloved,” an address typical of one lover to another (perhaps of Paris to Helen), and tells her child that he has found “sleep” where he “fed,” highlighting two of the most fundamental human needs and portraying a child’s most basic desires. Just as a child desires a “sound” sleep, so does Paris long for peace through sleep in Helen’s arms. Yeats’ language here is simplistic, and the rhyme here occurs in the word “found,” which Yeats uses to describe the acquisition of sleep in both the child and Paris. Yeats’s word choice here ties the feeling of desire to a primal sense of discovery that recalls a childlike wonder. We thus discern a parallel between the child and Paris in their mutual desire for sleep, a symbol for peace and stability, and in the innocence that defines this sort of sleep. Paris, furthermore, seeks refuge in “Helen’s arms,” a description that equates Helen with a maternal figure and further strengthens the parallel between the child and Paris. Thus desire, in its association with a sleeping child, becomes an emblem of innocence rather than a force of destruction. 

Desire thus, according to Yeats, is powerful enough to stave off the chaos that ensues in the following lines—it is a force of stability. We might assume from a preliminary reading that the “world’s alarms” (most likely the onset of the Trojan War), should disrupt Paris’ peace, yet Paris slumbers on regardless, and rest becomes his ultimate source of satisfaction; the continuing enjambment from the third to the sixth lines, for instance, highlights his urgency to reach repose in Helen’s arms. The Trojan War no longer matters to Paris—his desire for Helen allows him to block out the surrounding disaster. Paris’s world thus becomes dreamlike and blissful: although Yeats may be giving Paris a literal golden bed to lie upon to symbolize luxury, we may interpret the golden bed metaphorically as the epitome of desire and happiness. In contrast to the destruction of the war outside, Paris and Helen enjoy a stable love. Even just a moment of desire, the “first dawn,” is enough for Paris to disregard the world around him. He concentrates solely on the bliss of his experience, his desire for sleep in Helen’s arms. 

Sleep then becomes the ultimate source of satisfaction for Paris, and because the first two lines of the poem set up sleep in relation to a child, we can imagine Paris as an innocent child when he is with Helen rather than a character who has violated the peace both of the woman he seizes and the world around him. We find, therefore, that Yeats represents Paris’s sexual desire as stable and peaceful rather than as destructive and violent. 

As we transition to the second stanza, we find this theme of peaceful sleep reemerging in a similar mythological tale—the tale of Tristram. This is, of course, the story of Tristan and Isolde—the same medieval legend that Richard Wagner adapts in his opera Tristan und Isolde. In the myth, the knight Tristan, after having slain Isode’s betrothed, King Mark, captures Isolde and carries her off with him. In this way, the Tristan story parallels the story of Paris and Helen, in that both men carry off their lovers against their will. Along the way, however, Tristan and Isolde both take a love potion and fall for each other—albeit unnaturally (if you’re interested in learning more about this, you can check out my analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land here—a poem that quotes from Wagner’s opera and uses the backdrop of the Tristan myth to establish a deeper layer of meaning). 

Yeats, on the other hand, again turns this unnatural and forced love into a more natural state of affairs: the ensuing imagery is as natural as it gets. We have roes and does and oaks and boughs; the repetition and rhymes here resemble that of a nursery rhyme, once again recalling our sleeping child from the poem’s opening stanza. In crafting this stanza, Yeats seems to be suggesting that Tristan’s conquest of Isolde is indeed natural. 

Finally, sleep finds Leda, who finds peace as a swan on the bank of the river Eurotas—once again, Yeats invokes naturalistic imagery to emphasize the calmness, serenity, and ease with which these lovers find peace. The holy bird (Jupiter) having accomplished his “predestined will” (which we may assume to be the rape of Leda), sinks from Leda’s body but not from her care, returning us to the image of the mother and the serenity that comes from a mother’s love. Leda, as a swan and mother, seems at peace. She is sleeping. She is sound.

Does Yeats, then, suggest that love restores peace, lulling lovers off to sleep? Without the mythological backdrop, that would seem to be the most accurate conclusion of this poem. If I had not told you that the three myths mentioned here—Paris and Helen, Tristan and Isolde, and Jupiter and Leda—were all myths concerning rape, perhaps we could then read Yeats’ poem as such. Yet it is no accident that Yeats singles out three mythological stories that concern the mistreatment of women. Does Yeats, then, consciously turn these tales on their head to present a peaceful alternative to sexual violence, or does he intend to leave us with an ironic commentary on the injustices that these women have been subjected to as the rest of the world turns a blind eye to their suffering—as the men in this poem go off to sleep peacefully amidst their suffering? A grimmer read might suggest the latter, but I’d like to stay optimistic—in pointing out these misdemeanors, perhaps Yeats suggests that we might move towards a more peaceful future in which male love might turn more gentle. 

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OVERVIEW
The Adventures of Augie March is about a young man who grows up in Depression-era Chicago. He’s born into a poor family with a single mother and a brother—George—who’s on the spectrum. He also has an older brother Simon whom he often looks up to throughout the novel, and together, the brothers go through many ups and downs. In the first half of the book, Augie attempts to hold onto various jobs, and he meets a series of Dickensian characters as he tries to figure out what his purpose is in life. The novel. told through somewhat unrelated episodic chapters and often goes into philosophical digressions on the human condition, is Bellow’s meditation on the nature of identity, specifically American identity from the start of the Great Depression to the end of the Second World War—roughly the years in which the novel takes place.

SAUL BELLOW: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Augie March is based to some extent on Bellow’s own life. In fact, Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize–winning Canadian-American author, was raised in Chicago just like Augie (and me, by the way!). Bellow even spent a substantial part of his life on Chicago’s South Side, where Augie lives in the first half of the book. Bellow is perhaps one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, and is known for his deeply intellectual and philosophical novels that explore themes of identity, morality, and the complexity of modern life. Bellow’s Jewish heritage and his experience growing up in an immigrant family heavily influenced Augie March, his third novel and the work that marked a departure from the more formal style he had used earlier. The novel’s freewheeling, exuberant prose and its portrayal of an ordinary man's struggle for self-definition won Bellow widespread acclaim and solidified his status as one of the 20th century’s best authors.

CHARACTERS

Augie March: Augie is our at-times charming, at-times insufferable protagonist. His central struggles are his inability to find his place in the world and his susceptibility to the influence of the people around him. Nevertheless, Augie tries to establish a firm sense of identity throughout the novel, and realizes the American Dream by the end.

Grandma Lausch: Augie’s grandma is a somewhat strict and manipulative matriarch who oversees the March household after Augie’s father dies. She represents the old-world, traditional values that Augie seems to resist.

Simon March: Simon is Augie’s ambitious older brother who is determined to climb the social ladder through hard work and the accumulation of wealth. Simon’s diligence and early success contrast with Augie’s more carefree approach to life, though we later learn that Simon has flaws of his own.

Thea Fenchel: Thea is a wealthy, adventurous woman who becomes one of Augie’s lovers—perhaps the most important one. She takes Augie on a journey to Mexico in pursuit of her passion for training eagles, a move that represents the unpredictability and intensity of Augie’s romantic entanglements.

SUMMARY

The novel opens with Augie’s childhood in a poor immigrant neighborhood in Chicago. Augie and his brother Simon are raised by their grandmother and somewhat capricious mother, and early on, Augie struggles to find his way in a world that seems determined to make him into something he is not—though he isn’t sure what he is. The primary conflict in the first third of the novel is Augie’s struggle to retain jobs: he cycles through various positions—working for a wealthy tycoon, a dog trainer, and a corrupt union boss, to name three examples—but seems unable to stay with a single calling and lacks the sort of commitment and determination that he observes in his brother.

As his brother gets married to a wealthy woman named Charlotte Magnus, Augie steps into a relationship with her sister Lucy, but his relationship with his friend Mimi, whom he helps through an abortion, angers the Magnuses, who insist that Lucy break off her engagement.

Augie cycles through many tumultuous relationships and is unable to stay with a single woman for very long until he meets Thea Fenchel, a headstrong wealthy girl who convinces him to move with her to Mexico, where she hopes to take up eagle training. Augie is at first excited but ultimately becomes disillusioned with Thea’s passion for eagle training, which he feels is a somewhat silly activity. Acting on impulse, he cheats on Thea with an actress named Stella, then spends a quarter of the novel regretting his decision before resolving to marry Stella and settling with her in Paris.

Throughout the novel, Augie struggles to reconcile his desire for freedom with the pressures of society, family, and his own ambitions. He continually rejects the conventional paths laid out for him, yet he is also unable to find a clear direction for his life. By the end of the novel, Augie is left to grapple with the question of whether his wandering, restless nature is a curse or a kind of freedom.

THEMES

The Search for Identity: Augie’s journey is fundamentally about the search for identity. He constantly reinvents himself yet seems to have no stable identity throughout the book. Each adventure helps him determine what he wants from life, but the novel leaves us with a sense of ambiguity.

Freedom vs. Conformity: Throughout the novel, Augie resists the pressures of conformity, whether from his family, society, or the women in his life. However, his quest for freedom comes at a cost, as he struggles with loneliness and uncertainty.

The American Dream: Augie’s life embodies the possibility of the American Dream. While he is born into poverty, he enjoys a sumptuous life in France by the end of the novel. Bellow, however, complicates this idea by demonstrating that material success alone does not lead to fulfillment, leaving us to wonder what the purpose of the American Dream really is.

FURTHER STUDY QUESTIONS

How does Augie’s resistance to being defined by others shape his character and the novel’s narrative structure?

What role does the setting of Depression-era Chicago play in shaping Augie’s worldview and the novel’s themes?

How does Bellow’s portrayal of women in The Adventures of Augie March reflect the novel’s broader exploration of gender and power?

In what ways does Augie’s relationship with his brother Simon highlight the novel’s themes of ambition and the American Dream?

How does the novel’s episodic structure contribute to its exploration of identity and the human experience?

What does Bellow suggest about the nature of freedom and individuality in modern society through Augie’s adventures?

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

You may access the full poem here.

Check out my previous The Waste Land analysis posts:

Intro

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

“Death by Water” is the shortest section of The Waste Land. According to Ezra Pound, the poet who helped bring The Waste Land to the state we know it in today, “Death by Water” is an “integral” part of the poem that helps bridge the desolation we see in the first three sections and the redemption that we will attain in the fifth and final section. “Death by Water” might be the poem’s shortest section, but its inspiration is drawn from a longer piece of Eliot’s: the section is a close translation of the final stanza of Eliot’s 1918 French poem “Dans le Restaurant,” a poem that takes us through the sort of city scenes that we find in the first three sections of The Waste Land. In this particular poem, Eliot describes an encounter between a man at a restaurant and his waiter. Because “Dans le Restaurant” has never adequately been translated into English, little scholarship exists on it, and the scholars who have written on it seem to be either stumped by the Phlebas stanza at the end or convinced that Eliot meant the stanza to be an entirely separate poem. When taken in the context of The Waste Land, however, the meaning of Eliot’s “Dans le Restaurant” becomes clear, and we can use this poem to inform our reading of “Death by Water” in The Waste Land.

“Dans le Restaurant” opens with a scene of a waiter talking to a restaurant patron. Immediately, the waiter begins telling the story of his youth and sharing memories of his homeland. He then segues into a memory of a sexual encounter he had at the age of seven with a little girl (whom he describes as “toute mouillée,” a phrase that would have carried a sexual meaning even in Eliot’s time) before giving her primroses. He then mentions 38 stains on her waistcoat and says he caressed her and fell into delirium. The restaurant patron dubs the waiter a lecher before the waiter concludes his story by saying that he let the girl go halfway through the act, which he says is “a shame.”

“Dans le Restaurant” is an oddly sexual poem for Eliot. It was written several years before The Waste Land and nearly ten years before his conversion to Anglicanism. The restaurant scene, however, which culminates in the famous Phlebas stanza, is yet another instance of unnatural or stilted love—the sort we’ve seen throughout the first three sections of The Waste Land. Rather than interpreting the final stanza of “Dans le Restaurant” as a standalone poem, we can thus read it as a logical necessity at the end of such a fraught scene—a ritualistic cleansing of sorts through water.

In the remainder of The Waste Land, water will be a proxy for rebirth. “Death by Water” is a culmination of sorts that invites readers to reflect on their mortality, especially by referencing the act of drowning. In this section, Phlebas the Phonecian sailor loses his life to water (hence, “Death by Water”). We have seen several instances of drowning in the poem so far—most notably in the Madame Sosostris passage in “The Burial of the Dead”—and in the first three sections of the poem, drowning is presented as a negative. Madame Sosostris, for instance, describes a tarot card with a “drowned Phonecian Sailor” (whom we can now assume is Phlebas) and announces “Fear death by water.” The Madame Sosostris section also alludes to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which contains another unfortunate instance of drowning. Early on in the poem, therefore, drowning carries a negative connotation and is associated with the fear that dominates the early stanzas (recall “fear in a handful of dust”). By the time we reach “Death by Water,” on the other hand, the act of drowning takes on a more positive connotation—drowning seems to be intricately linked with rebirth through the acceptance of suffering.

At first glance, Phlebas’ death is nothing special: by placing Phlebas in the distant Phoenician past, Eliot seems to be suggesting that Phlebas might have little relevance to our present world. He is at once forgotten and forgets, a poignant reminder that there is no memory in death, either for the deceased or for those who forget him. Eliot then suggests that all people must go through death—that no matter what stature one reaches in life, all living beings reach the same grim conclusion. It is a short section with somewhat macabre diction that at first suggests nothing of hope or regeneration, but when we consider it against the sort of sexually impure moments that pervade both the world of The Waste Land and “Dans le Restaurant,” it becomes evident that this “death by water” indicates a ritualistic cleansing. It is no accident that Eliot places “Death by Water” at the tail end of the Buddhist ritual of cleansing through fire. This death might be ordinary—it might suggest nothing regenerative—but it is an invitation for us to consider our mortality. Eliot seems to be suggesting that the moment we come to terms with our mortality, we might find rebirth and regeneration in life—we might be cleansed of worldly sins and sexual impurities and find a deeper meaning in our rote existence. And indeed, as we progress to the final section of the poem, we will see that hypothesis realized as water becomes a powerful symbol of cleansing and regeneration.

Stay tuned for the final installment of my analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where we’ll trace the poem to its more optimistic conclusion in its fifth section—“What the Thunder Said.”

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

You may access the full poem here. 

Check out my previous The Waste Land analysis posts: 

Intro

Part 1

Part 2

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“The Fire Sermon” is the longest section of The Waste Land. The title of this particular section is taken from a Buddhist sermon that describes the burning away of lust and the liberation from suffering. In this particular sermon, the Buddha envisions all worldly things as consuming fires and must free himself from them by achieving total detachment from the earthly world. In this way, Eliot’s “The Fire Sermon” becomes a turning point of sorts, in which we begin to free ourselves from lust and desire through a turn away from Western mores towards Eastern principles. Much of “The Fire Sermon,” however, still takes us through feelings of isolation and sexual futility, and it is not until the final section of the poem that we see direct hope for redemption.

As we might expect from Eliot, the opening stanza of “The Fire Sermon” is rife with literary references. We find ourselves now departed from the streets of London, where we left our pub women in the previous section, and instead immersed in a naturalistic world. We’ve seen a great deal of natural imagery throughout the poem already—especially in the famous sermon stanza in the first section of the poem, in the “fear in a handful of dust” line. Notice that then, too, we were in the midst of a sermon, though now we enter a different sort of sermon, stepping away from the traditional Judeo-Christian sermon into a Buddhist sermon. Yet even the Buddhist sermon, at this stage in the poem, is not enough to restore the dying Waste Land to health: the tent on Eliot’s river is “broken,” the land “brown.” The third line of this section re-emphasizes the desolation that we have seen thus far throughout The Waste Land through a reference to Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion” (a type of poem that eulogizes an upcoming wedding). Spencer’s poem, set along the River Thames, describes a warm marriage scene through colorful and jubilant diction. It follows a set of nymphs as they prepare to celebrate the wedding day. In The Waste Land, however, the “nymphs are departed,” creating a sense of despair of any sort of fulfilling marriage bond. The line Eliot quotes from Spenser—“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song”—is the refrain at the end of each stanza in “Prothalamion” that signals a calm equilibrium at the consummation of the marriage in question. Eliot compares Spenser’s river with that of the modern Thames: in Spenser’s time, there were no vestiges of human waste through empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends, and—arguably—contraceptives (“testimony of summer nights”). Eliot argues that in the modern era of decay, in the absence of marriage structures, we are left only with the replacement of the nymphs by ruthless bureaucrats (“city directors”) who leave no trace of themselves. Without the stability of marriage, there is no method of preservation—no way through which to erect a lasting tradition or timeless order.

Eliot then takes us to another Biblical allusion—this one taken from Psalm 137. The line in The Waste Land—“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept”—is a deliberate misquotation of the opening line of the Psalm: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” The psalm concerns the people of Israel’s despair in the wake of the Babylonian exile as they remember the foundational city of Jerusalem. In a rare self-referential moment, Eliot cites his own experiences at Leman—otherwise known as Lake Geneva—where he spent several weeks working on The Waste Land. Eliot reminds us, therefore, of his own despair over the bygone wonders of the ancient world. He then repeats Spenser’s line as if in prayer and alludes to another 17th century poem, “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. The poet here describes his love for a woman and urges her to seize the moment of their love rather than waiting for a time in the future in which it may decay. We know by now, of course, that decay is a central theme in The Waste Land, and in alluding to Marvell’s lines “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” Eliot introduces a sense of urgency to his poem—though, in the world of The Waste Land, it is already too late, as all that’s left is a skeletal chuckle and “the rattle of the bones.”

Decay does not leave us as we progress to the next stanza, whose opening image is a rat (the poem’s second instance of the animal). The diction here creates a scene of corruption, impurity, and decay: the rat’s belly is “slimy,” the canal is “dull,” the ground is “damp.” The sullied rats seem to impinge upon the purity of water, and the image of “white bodies naked” renders this impurity more imminently sexual with the classic association of whiteness with purity. Eliot then inserts another Tempest reference through the lines “Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck/And on the king my father’s death before him.” These lines reference Ferdinand’s dismay at his father’s shipwreck—right before he hears Ariel’s more celestial song—and create a link to the “pearls that were his eyes” of the previous section, commenting on the prevalence of blindness—or, perhaps, the act of turning a blind eye to the world—that we will soon see with the arrival of the blind prophet Tiresias upon The Waste Land’s stage. The reference to a “king” in this section may perhaps also hint at the impurity of Parsifal’s King Amfortas—which we will see in just a moment as we transition to the stanza’s final line—a citation from the poet Paul Verlaine.

Eliot then pivots directly to his characters from quotidian London life, summoning his character Sweeney, who features in several other of his poems, including “Sweeney Erect” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales.” Sweeney is typically Eliot’s stand-in for—to borrow a term from my Norton edition of The Waste Land—the “urban lout.” Another of Eliot’s characters, Mrs. Porter, then proceeds to wash her daughter’s feet in soda water, further reinforcing the contamination evident throughout our modern waste land.

Then comes the Verlaine poem, where we revisit our friend Richard Wagner and his influence on the text of Eliot’s poem (more on the Wagnerian backdrop of The Waste Land here). Eliot’s second significant allusion to Wagnerian opera comes not from Wagner himself but from the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, whose sonnet “Parsifal” is based on Wagner’s opera of the same name. The line crowning the second stanza of “The Fire Sermon” runs thus:

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

The line is a direct quotation of Verlaine’s poem, which chronicles Parsifal’s successful evasion of the sorceress Kundry’s sexual advances, as well as Amfortas’ wounds. Verlaine’s poem is at its core celebratory, and the final stanza of the poem in particular, with its majestic imagery, sets up an especially grandiose commemoration of Parsifal’s redemptive powers:

En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole,

Le vase pur où resplendit le Sang réel.

- Et, ô ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole!

Verlaine’s stanza combines regal imagery with virtue and purification, thereby connecting the image of the Holy Grail to the image of the Fisher King. The penultimate and antepenultimate lines taken together, in fact, may seem at first glance an apt conclusion to the poem, with the King finally reclaiming the Holy Grail.

What, then, might be the purpose of the final line, the line that Eliot excerpts? Although Verlaine might be commenting on the most positive conclusion of Wagner’s final opera, it is alternately possible that Verlaine includes this line to highlight the ultimate instability of the opera’s seemingly positive finale. Wagner’s score for Parsifal directs that these boys to whom the sonnet refers come in towards the end of the opera “heard but not seen,” reinforcing the parallel with the Hyacinth Girl (and in Bayreuth exclusively, these choir boys would be singing, as the sonnet suggests, from a hidden dome). The harmonies they sing are plain and thus suggest the “purity of the hymnal, a pre-sexual ecstasy.” Their voices, furthermore, evoke a wistful longing. Eliot thus creates a commentary on the greater message of the stanza: unattainable desire, represented by the hidden voices of the singing choir boys, becomes bound up with that which is unnatural or grotesque. This line from Parsifal reiterates the message Eliot extracts from Tristan und Isolde and casts it in a novel light, engaging a new set of poetic characters to demonstrate just how absurd and unfulfilling a meaningless romance can really be.

At the heart of this allusion is also the figure of Kundry, the mysterious seductress forced to roam the Earth to seek redemption for once scorning the image of Jesus Christ upon the Cross. Kundry becomes especially important when we consider her resemblance to the Cumean Sybil from Eliot’s epigraph: both women have been cursed with unending life. Kundry is the figure who has been sent by the sorcerer Klingsor to seduce Parsifal in an attempt to foil his quest for the Holy Grail; she therefore represents the meaninglessness of sexual experience and the very destabilizing force that the final line of Verlaine’s sonnet seems to evoke. Taken in conjunction with the imagery of this stanza from “The Fire Sermon,” we can conceptualize Kundry as a prostitute-like figure, who, in her advances towards Parsifal, becomes a symbol of sexual violation.

Kundry’s implication in the Verlaine allusion may perfectly explain Eliot’s strategic placement of the “Parsifal” quotation at this stage in the poem, for the stanza immediately following runs thus:

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

The excerpt hearkens back to the opening passage of “A Game of Chess,” which briefly chronicles the rape of Philomela by the Thracian King Tereus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Philomela is consequently transformed into a nightingale (while Tereus later becomes a hoopoe). Eliot thus uses onomatopoeic language to express the lament of Philomela, and we may surmise that “twit twit twit” represents the call of a hoopoe, who appears to be persistently chasing the nightingale who has been “so rudely forc’d.” The inclusion of this rape scene in The Waste Land accentuates the unnatural dimension of romantic attraction found throughout the poem and reminds us that rape is unnatural love taken to its extreme. Yet what is most notable here is that the rape of Philomela culminates in transformation as hope for redemption; although at this point in The Waste Land, the poem’s various characters are faced with desolation in the face of artificial romance, the poem will end with the hope for positive transformation and redemption.

Meanwhile, Eliot transports us back to the “Unreal City” from “The Burial of the Dead,” introducing yet more characters from urban life. We lapse back into a more quotidian dimension filled with “brown fog” (reminiscent of the yellow fog from Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), colloquial French, and several London hotels. In the following stanza, we are transported to corporate space through images of desks and taxis. Eliot’s comparison of the “human engine” to a “throbbing taxi” is probably my favorite simile of the poem, and this beautiful use of figurative language leads us into the next section of the poem, which we observe through the eyes of the blind prophet Tiresias who, in Greek mythology, lost his sight in a dispute with a god and was transformed into a woman—hence, he throbs between two lives just like the indecisive and mechanical “human engine.”

The Tiresias stanza has been subjected to many interpretations. I took three courses in college that covered The Waste Land and then wrote my master’s thesis on this poem, and every modernist scholar seems to have a different take on the Tiresias passage. One of my professors insisted that this was a famous example of queerness in modernist poetry (unlikely if you know anything about Eliot’s staunch Anglican beliefs, though we do have a Sappho reference in the seventh line of this stanza); another professor interpreted the stanza as a commentary on the film noir genre, which gained popularity right around the time of The Waste Land’s composition (there are several elements that connect the stanza to film noir, though we will never know if that was Eliot’s intention); and a third professor read the stanza as a commentary on the vapidity of the nouveau riche (perhaps the most likely of these three interpretations, at least given the “Bradford millionaire” line). Yet my reading of the stanza takes us to something far more fundamental and universal: the stanza paints a scene of sexual failure and the emptiness of the modern romantic experience.

Tiresias becomes an all-knowing figure in this stanza, looking into the minds and daily lives of a typist and her carbuncular lover, whose existence, like the throbbing taxi, has become lifeless and mechanical. The woman is “bored and tired” as she staves off the advances of the clerk before capitulating to him. The woman here seems to view sex as a chore rather than as an exalted pleasure, and she seems relieved just after it has ended. She is capable only of “half-formed thoughts” and exists in a mechanical world, emphasized by her “automatic hand” on the gramophone. At this stage, Eliot’s rhyme scheme also becomes, for the first time in the poem, fairly regular, reinforcing the idea that this sort of existence can only be dull and mechanical.

The theme of water returns in the following stanza, along with another reference to Ariel’s Song from  The Tempest. In this stanza, the subject matter is music, and we hear a mandolin echoing through a church, bringing the poem back to a more exalted tone, especially in the stanza’s final line, “Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.” Perhaps, at this stage, we begin to approach some form of redemption—or, at least, leave behind some of the bleakness we’ve encountered thus far in the poem’s world.

Yet then we revisit the soiled Thames, Eliot’s river worn out by the “oil and tar” of contemporary life. Eliot then hits us with another Wagner reference, this one to the Rhinemaidens from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. This specific gibberish-like wailing comes from the final opera in the cycle—Die Götterdämmerung or The Twilight of the Gods (yes, this is the opera from which Friedrich Nietzsche borrowed the title of his work The Twilight of the Idols). In Das Rheingold, the opera that opens the cycle, the Rhinemaidens lose the gold that they guard, and by the final opera, they lament the fact that the gold will never be recovered. Interestingly enough, they also sing a similar, more optimistic song in Das Rheingold—Wallala la la leia lalai!—but later, in Die Götterdämmerung,  resort to the lamentation that Eliot cites in his poem as they realize that they will not recover the gold. Eliot might be hinting here at a dynamic of irreparability in the world of The Waste Land, and, considering that he chooses maidens to voice this sort of cry, we might also interpret the Rhinemaidens’ cry as representing sexual irreparability, which has been a running theme throughout Eliot’s poem. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land connect this stanza to Dante’s Purgatorio, and as we are in a river, we may read this section as a sort of purgatorial cleansing that anticipates the redemption through water that will greet us in the poem’s concluding section.

The following stanza takes us through another scene from city life—another world filled with emptiness. Although the theme of this stanza may not be immediately apparent, it is reminiscent of the scene with Lil in “A Game of Chess” in that it likely concerns either a pregnancy or an abortion (“After the event/He wept”). Eliot reinforces the disconnectedness in such a relationship—and quite literally too (“I can connect/Nothing with nothing”). As the third section of the poem closes, we meet a reference to St. Augustine’s Confessions and the temptations of his youth, reinforcing the idea that the encounter we witness between the two lovers of this stanza both represents corruption and signals a possible hope for redemption (just as Augustine’s Confessions is a story of redemption and cleansing oneself of sin).

As we enter the final stanzas of the section, we see an excerpt from Eliot’s titular Fire Sermon that concerns burning sins away (just as in Confessions) and freeing oneself from worldly passions. We end with the image of burning fire, which will soon take us into the fourth section of the poem—our big turning point—as we swap the cleansing effect of fire for that of water, and begin to approach redemption.

Stay tuned for the next installment of my analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where we’ll reach the poem’s turning point in its fourth section—“Death by Water.”

You’ve written poetry. You’re ready to become a published author! But how do we get there? Navigating the literary magazine world can certainly be daunting, but here are some helpful tips and tricks for you to become a published poet! 

You can also view this article in video format here on my Instagram page. 

Know Your Journals 

Literary magazines come in all shapes and sizes. There are the big ones, the small ones, the new ones, the old ones. If you’re a poet who is just starting out, you might not get published in Poetry Magazine right off the bat, but you can start small and work your way up. 

(Pro Tip: Pens and Poison Mag is currently accepting poetry submissions from all new authors, so don’t forget to send us your best!)

Compile Your Poetry 

Most literary journals will accept 3-5 poems in a single submission, so you’ll want to compile your best work into a single document. Most journals will ask that the poems be formatted in 12-point Times New Roman and that each poem start on a new page. Once you’ve put your best poems together, you can save the documents as either Word or PDF files depending on the particular journal. 

Compose Your Author Bio 

Now that you have your poems ready, you’ll want to let journals know a little bit about who you are. Author bios should be short rather than a paragraph long. Let the editors know what makes you cool and where your work has appeared previously in a single snapshot. If you have not yet been published, that’s all right too! You can reference your personal blog or put your work up on Medium to get started on your publication credentials. 

Here is my author bio for some inspiration: 

Liza Libes founded her literary project, Pens and Poison, in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Kveller, Gone Lawn, Jewish Women of Words and elsewhere.

The key here is short and sweet! 

Draft Your Cover Letter 

Once your bio is ready to go, you’ll want to let the journal know what you’re submitting to them. Just as you did with your bio, keep your poetry cover letters short! I can’t tell you how many authors we’ve rejected over at Pens and Poison Mag just because they’ve sent us essays for cover letters—we’re interested in reading your work more than the introduction to it. Your work should speak for itself, so if find yourself writing an extensive cover letter to explain your poem’s contents, you might want to revisit the editing stages. 

Here’s a sample of my own cover letters to get you started: 

Dear editors of [Lit Mag],

I am writing to propose my four poems “Exit,” “Yellow,” “Lakeside” and “Luncheon at an Old Estate” for publication in your journal. You may find them attached to the submission below. 

My bio is as follows: 

Liza Libes founded her literary project, Pens and Poison, in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Kveller, Gone Lawn, Jewish Women of Words and elsewhere.

Thank you so much for your consideration, and I hope to hear from you soon. 

Best,

Liza 

A great cover letter does two things: introduces your work and includes your bio. That’s it! Don’t overthink this one. Editors will be more interested in your work rather than your cover letter. 

Note also that each of the poems I submitted to this one journal ended up landing in different journals. Oftentimes, editors will opt to publish one poem out of the several that you send to them, and from there, you can submit the remainder of the unpublished poems to other journals. 

Research Literary Journals 

Our last step is to identify literary journals that will house your work. Below are some databases to get you started. 

Poets and Writers 

A comprehensive list of literary journals that you can filter by topic or submission timeframe. Note that P&W prefers to list more mature journals, so this might be a better place to start once you’ve already had some publications under your belt. 

Duotrope

Duotrope is a fantastic database that can help you sift through literary journals to get you started. Duotrope also has their own submission management system, Duosoma, that can streamline your submission process! 

Submittable 

Submittable is a submission management system that houses countless magazines and journals. You can identify magazines to submit to by using the Submittable “Discover” feature and filter by “no-fee,” genre or keyword. You can then track the status of all of your submissions in one place! 

Facebook Groups

If you’re looking to get started with submissions, Facebook groups such as “No Fee Calls for Poems” will often feature smaller, up-and-coming journals that might have less competition. These journals are a great way to get started on your poetic resume! 

Submit Your Work 

Now you’re ready to submit! I recommend starting a spreadsheet to help you keep track of journals you’ve emailed, as well as response time. Staying organized is a great way to identify what works best for you and which journals seem to align the most closely with your writing. 

Best of luck to you on your submissions and don’t forget to check out Pens and Poison Mag to get you started!   

Whether you’re a newcomer or a long-time follower, you’ve been reading Pens and Poison, where you’ve learned everything from complex literary analysis to my educational hot takes. But who am I? Here’s your chance to learn all about Liza Libes, the poetic soul behind your favorite Pens and Poison posts! 

I asked you lovely people to send me your burning questions over on Instagram and am excited to be answering many of these questions today! Here are some answers to top questions, and don’t forget to follow me over on Instagram for your chance to participate in future Q&A’s!

Follow @pensandpoison 

What inspired you to start Pens and Poison?
After making the fraught yet necessary decision to withdraw from academia after I discovered that an academic career might not be a great fit for me, I transitioned to the real world and found that few people read literature and far fewer people understood it. I began to feel a void in my heart that had previously been occupied by literary discussion and quickly realized that literary study did not have to be just confined to academia. I founded The Pens and Poison project to promote literary education and foster appreciation for the written word, as well as to bring back the idea of literature as a work of art rather than a political vehicle. All across American college campuses, English literature students are being taught that literary study must necessarily rest on the far-left ideologies of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others. As a result, literary fields such as publishing, academia, and journalism are increasingly becoming dominated by ideological extremists who are bringing the focus away from literary study and towards their own political agendas. I believe that literature should not be politicized, nor should it be understood under these arbitrary political lenses. As I grow the Pens and Poison project, I hope to spread literature to all and to bring back the focus of literary study to the importance of the humanistic tradition.  

What advice would you give to someone just starting out on social media? 

I started working on my social media channels about five months ago. Since then, I have amassed 12k followers on Instagram and 22k subscribers on YouTube. Many of my followers are in disbelief that I have only been around for several months, and others are shocked to hear that I grew my socials so quickly with no prior social media experience. 

I started off posting one reel every day—what I call my "daily literary bite." At the start of my Instagram and YouTube journey, I would post reels primarily of me talking about a fun literary fact for 15-30 seconds. Many of my current reels have retained this format, though I have now added others into the mix based on trial and error of what seems to get my audience most engaged. 

I have learned a heck of a lot through putting myself out there on social media and have three main tips for those just starting out: 

1. Post every day! For me, consistency was key. Some reels did not do very well, some reels did much better than I would have ever expected. Posting daily with no exceptions—even on the days where I was tired, busy or sick—helped me understand the audience I was engaging and develop content that my followers best appreciated. 
2. Don't pay attention to what other people are doing. Sure, there are some Instagram "trends" that can be helpful, but I truly believe that what helped me grow was posting content that was unique. I came into Instagram with a blank slate—with no prior social media experience—and I believe that this was inadvertently the key to my success. I just posted what I wanted to post, and it turned out that no one else had done anything quite like this. This helped me stand out and develop a fresh brand rather than hopping on existing social media trends. 

3. Embrace the haters. The most shocking part of my journey was receiving so much backlash for just wanting to spread the love of literature. It got me down at first—especially as a young woman online—but I soon learned that the more people hate on you, the more successful you become. It means that people are paying attention and are jealous of what you have achieved. 

How do you balance your time between writing, social media, your company, and other responsibilities?

In the 5th grade, my homeroom teacher made us buy differently-colored folders for each subject: red for math, blue for English, orange for social studies, and so on. That was the first year of my life I distinctly remember having to be organized in order to survive. I went to a wickedly competitive high school that made my college degree seem like Kindergarten, and I learned from a young age to color-code, calendar, and compartmentalize (my three C’s of organization). I pride myself on my organizational skills and have taught myself to divide my tasks in chunks and accomplish a little bit of everything every day. 

Currently, I have five broad categories of projects I work on at any given time: my company, my novel, my social media, my blog, and the current book I’m reading. I make sure to visit three out of these five projects daily and schedule my days accordingly. On one day, I might work on my novel and read my book after I’m done with the company, and on another day, I might shoot some videos and write a blog article. On weekends, I tend to focus most on reading and writing. I write out the tasks I’d like to accomplish for the day at the start of each week so that I have a clear sense of what’s ahead. As an entrepreneur, I don’t have much of a structured schedule for work, so I need to be maximally organized to continue to progress on these endeavors. Pens and Poison doesn’t build itself, and neither does my writing career. 

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

I met the editor I’ve partnered with on nearly all of my literary endeavors during my sophomore year of college, when my writing was heavily influenced by my infatuation with the Victorian greats. My editor called me out on crafting overly-flowery sentences and told me to just write as if I would speak. My writing voice has resembled my speaking voice ever since, and it’s been substantially stronger. I’ve developed a particular pulse and cadence that best captures the raw facets of my identity. I’m not a fan of the sorts of contrived sentences that you find in The New Yorker. I do think that my editor is right: write as if you would speak. 

What books or authors have had the most influence on your writing style?

I did a reel several months ago where I asked ChatGPT which poets’ writing styles my poetry resembled, and unsurprisingly, it told me Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot. These are my two favorite poets and the poets I did my undergraduate and master’s theses on respectively. T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath are hands-down my biggest inspirations, and I love both of them for their unique understanding of human psychology and the human condition. 

What do you think is the biggest misconception about classic literature?

A lot of people in my English program dismissed the classics for being written by old white men. I think that this is one of the biggest problems in the literary world—people assume that just because a particular work was written by a demographic they don’t personally relate to that it holds no objective value. What all literature has in common is the ability to speak to the human condition regardless of race, class, sex, etc. Great literature says something meaningful and universal about human beings that applies to everyone—and it has value regardless of your background.  

Who is your favorite Dostoyevsky villain?

Ooh. I’m going to give a bit of an unorthodox answer here. I’m going to consider the Underground Man as a villain because he tells us as much in the opening line of Notes from Underground. The Underground Man represents the human vices that we often find in our own psyches, reminding us that human beings are far from simple and perfect creatures. We are often stubborn, reclusive, and sometimes even evil. Without giving too much away if you haven’t yet read the book, I think the Underground Man’s treatment of Liza at the end of this short novel is one of the most heartbreaking moments I have read in literature, reminding us all to be kind to our loved ones. 

How do you define literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction?

First off, literary fiction has to tell us something profound about the world around us. It is less of a departure from our world than a commentary on human beings. Literary fiction could have happened in your own world, and given that many authors write from their own experiences, oftentimes, it has. Literary fiction often emphasizes writing style and offers a sense of novelty rather than rehashing many standard tropes often found in genre fiction. Literary fiction gives us something that relates to ourselves and prompts us to examine our own lives and the world around us. 

What’s your process for choosing the books you feature on Pens and Poison?

I have a 70 page document for reel ideas that I visit every time I prepare to get behind the camera. I update it at odd hours in the night or after an introspective shower. I pick ideas that are both spicy and insightful. I want to make my opinions known and tailor my content to my authentic literary takes rather than the dominant discourse in various literary communities. 

What’s next for Pens and Poison?

I’m always expanding the literary love! I launched several new projects recently, including The Pens and Poison Podcast, the Liza’s Book Club series, and The Pens and Poison Mag. I’m excited to continue growing the Pens and Poison mission to create an authentic literary hub and hope to soon reach a greater audience. 

That’s all for now! If you enjoyed this Q&A with Liza, check out an earlier Q&A with me over on my YouTube here. And don’t forget to subscribe to Pens and Poison on YouTube for more poetic goodness. 

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Welcome back to Liza’s Book Club! For the month of August, we read Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie together. Let’s dive in!

OVERVIEW

Sister Carrie is the story of Carrie Meeber, a young woman who moves from a small town in Wisconsin to 1890s Chicago. Carrie is initially naive yet soon realizes that life in the city is not what she expected. She takes on strenuous and low-paying jobs just to survive and must soon deal with the harsh realities of urban life. Her beauty, however, catches the attention of two men, Charles Drouet and George Hurstwood, both of whom begin to make a difference in her life.

As the novel progresses, Carrie climbs the social ladder, transforming from a struggling factory worker into a successful New York City actress. She faces several setbacks along her journey, most notably the loneliness that comes with her newfound success. Dreiser’s portrayal of Carrie’s rise to fame and the ultimate emptiness she feels is a powerful commentary on the illusion of the American Dream and the pitfalls of American capitalism.

.THEODORE DREISER: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Dreiser was an early 20th century American author from Indiana who enjoyed a successful career as a journalist, but despite his widespread journalistic work and his two famous novels—Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy—he is not as well known as other American greats like Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. One reason for this discrepancy might be that Dreiser was a hardcore socialist with Stalinist sympathies. He was a great critic of American capitalism and believed that America was worth saving by moving away from the capitalist system and into a more socialist regime.

We see hints of his disdain for capitalism early in the novel, such as in Carrie’s saunter through Chicago department stores and shops in Chapter 3, where she witnesses the harsh working conditions of minimum wage manual laborers.

Dreiser’s naturalistic style of writing made him a controversial figure in his time, especially with his raw depictions of poverty, ambition, and the pursuit of pleasure. Because of this, his work didn’t find much traction domestically, but his novels resonated deeply with readers in the Soviet Union, where his critique of capitalism and exploration of social issues aligned with the state's ideological values.

Sister Carrie is fundamentally about the American Dream—both the glamors of the American Dream and its pitfalls.

CHARACTERS

Carrie Meeber
The protagonist of the novel, Carrie is a young, ambitious woman who seeks a better life in the city. She evolves from a naive country girl into a sophisticated and successful actress, but she remains haunted by feelings of emptiness and discontent.

Charles Drouet
A charming and carefree traveling salesman who becomes Carrie’s first lover. Drouet represents the easygoing, superficial aspects of urban life and is largely responsible for introducing Carrie to a more glamorous lifestyle.

George Hurstwood
A manager at a high-end bar, Hurstwood becomes infatuated with Carrie and eventually ruins his life to be with her. His tragic decline from a respected businessman to a destitute wanderer serves as a counterpoint to Carrie’s rise, highlighting the harsh realities of social ambition.

SUMMARY

The novel opens with Carrie’s train ride from a small town in Wisconsin to industrial Chicago. On the train, she meets a dapper man named Drouet, who promises to call on her that coming Monday. Carrie arrives at her sister’s apartment and immediately sets out to look for work, becoming quickly disillusioned by the working conditions of industrial city life. Soon, she is dismissed from her job after falling ill, and out of desperation she takes money from Drouet to secure a place of her own. Drouet and Carrie then move in together, and Carrie begins to feel morally insecure; in the 1890s, it was scandalous for an unmarried couple to share a living space. Carrie later meets Drouet’s friend Hurstwood, with whom she enters into an affair; shortly afterwards, she makes her début as an actress. As Drouet and Hurstwood both marvel at her newfound talents, Carrie resolves to run away with Hurstwood, but is then disappointed to learn that Hurstwood is married. She sulks until, one day, Drouet begins to suspect her affair, leading to a rift between the two that causes Drouet to move out. Meanwhile, Hurstwood decides he is going to do whatever it takes to get Carrie back and comes to her one night claiming that Drouet is sick and they must see him immediately. He puts her on a train to Detroit and forces her to unwittingly run away with him. It’s not until halfway through the train ride that Carrie suspects Hurstwood has tricked her. He nevertheless soon convinces her to marry him, and the two move to New York City.

Hurstwood takes another managerial post, and Carrie begins to enjoy New York life. However, harsh conditions soon lead to the closure of the bar that Hurstwood manages, and he has to look for a new job. In a rather predictable plot twist, he is unable to find anything and soon becomes a beggar on the streets. Meanwhile, Carrie becomes disillusioned by Hurstwood’s incompetence and leaves him to become an actress. She soon enjoys fame on the stage, and she rises to riches by the end of the novel. However, despite her ambition and success, she is not happy, and Dreiser leaves us asking: what constitutes happiness, then, if not success and ambition?

THEMES

The American Dream
From the novel’s start, Carrie embarks on a journey from a small town to Chicago and eventually to New York City. She is drawn throughout the novel by the allure of glamor, luxury, and extravagance, a lifestyle that Drouet introduces her to. One of the most telling scenes of her draw to luxury is a dinner she shares with her friends the Vances and their cousin Robert Ames at a fancy restaurant called Sherry’s. She is captivated by the elevated prices until Ames suggests to her that all these luxuries are unnecessary. By the end of the novel, she does live in luxury but is unhappy—leading Dreiser to suggest that the American Dream is perhaps an illusion.

Urban Life
The novel is set in two urban metropolises—Chicago and New York—and highlights some of the struggles that come with such a lifestyle, especially around the turn of the century. Hurstwood struggles to find decent work, and Carrie is ultimately lonely and alienated. The bustle of city life may have its allure, but the hyper-fixation on individuality that emerges from such a dynamic leads to deep loneliness.

Naturalism and Determinism
Dreiser was a key figure in the Naturalist movement, which emphasized the idea that individual people are often at the mercy of economic, social, or psychological forces beyond their control. Naturalist writing paints reality in a stark and raw manner instead of using euphemistic or flowery writing. Carrie’s rise and Hurstwood’s fall are both depicted as almost inevitable outcomes of the environment and circumstances in which they find themselves, rather than as the result of free will.

FURTHER STUDY QUESTIONS

How does Dreiser’s portrayal of Carrie challenge traditional notions of morality in literature?

What role does the setting (Chicago and New York) play in the development of the novel’s themes?

How does Carrie’s rise to fame reflect the broader social and economic trends of the late 19th century?

In what ways does the novel explore the tension between individual ambition and societal expectations?

How does the relationship between Carrie and Hurstwood evolve throughout the novel, and what does it reveal about gender roles and power dynamics?

What is Dreiser’s final conclusion about the American Dream?

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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.”

Every Sunday afternoon in the 3rd grade, sometime after lunch, my mom would drop me off at the old playground tire-swing, waiting by the sandbox with my little brother while I traveled to fairyland. That tire swing, bearing the weight of my two best friends and my imagination, transported us into another world—the fantasy world I had cooked up at eight years old that was the backdrop to the many whimsical stories I would tell my friends. 

Ever since the age of 4, I’ve wanted to be a writer. My piles of composition notebooks, populated with penciled thoughts and stories, documented the progression of my imagination over the first decade of my life. As I got older, swapping the realms of fairies and wizards for more mature representations of our reality, I transitioned to exploring more realistic fiction and fell in love with the classics that mark our robust literary history. 

Thus I became a reader and a writer, yet as I transitioned into high school, reality smacked me in the face as it dawned on me that being a writer might not be the most stable career for my future. I would sit around in math class panicked, unable to envision a profession for myself that would allow me to effortlessly provide for my future family until, transitioning out of my thirteen-year-old Jodi Picoult phase and picking up Jane Austen and Kurt Vonnegut—two of the earliest literary beasts that propelled my love of literature—I began to envision myself in a professorial setting, lecturing on Jane Austen’s use of free indirect discourse in Sense and Sensibility and Vonnegut’s stunning political acuity in Harrison Bergeron. Perhaps I could apply my writerly prowess to a professorship in English literature. 

By the end of high school, I had zoomed through virtually the entire English literary canon, reading more books than any of my English teachers. I was set on becoming an English professor. Yet the moment I stepped foot on campus to begin my academic journey, I sensed that something was wrong. I knew that so much of being a professor was fostering connections, yet I found myself unable to mesh personality-wise with the overwhelming majority of my department, gravitating instead to folks in the economics and hard sciences, who seemed more pragmatic and sensible than their literary counterparts. That was strange. I had never felt at home in math classes. I had always been told that I was idealistic, but was I not idealistic enough to thrive in academia? I brushed these thoughts aside as I studied for the GRE, prepared my personal statements and rec letters, and upon college graduation, braced myself for a smooth transition as an English literature graduate student at Columbia University. 

Immediately, in grad school, I felt the same premonition I had experienced at the start of college—I did not fit into this environment. I was too practical, too systematic, perhaps, to thrive on an interplay of ideas wholly disconnected from reality. Just as I had discovered through the progression of my composition notebooks, my relationship with fantasy had eventually found itself more grounded in reality, and I lived for tangible ideas and empirical facts. Perhaps this made me an outlier in the literary world, but coming from an immigrant background—with parents from the USSR who had suffered under the socialist system—I was substantially to the right of my graduate cohort, all of whom equated literature with socialism, though I’d always considered myself a liberal. I didn’t agree with Marx’s interplay of ideas separated from the dictates of human nature, and I certainly did not see a connection between studying Marx and understanding the English literary tradition—at least, not to the extent that Marx was pushed in my English classrooms. To me, literature was not a vehicle for social activism, nor should it have been. I had always seen literature, rather, as a unique window into human nature, tackling questions of the human experience that were far more fundamental than political divisions. Yet I met not a single student or professor in my cohort who shared my views and felt directionless as a result. 

Around that time, I also began to come out of my shell—I reveled in reading, but I understood that literature is not created in a vacuum; as any great writer might tell you, experiencing the world is a core prerequisite to making insightful observations about it on the page. I was certainly a lot more extroverted than the average bookworm and needed people around me to thrive; as an English grad student, on the other hand, the bulk of my work entailed me shutting myself up in my claustrophobic dorm room and writing sentences about nothing in particular. I began to experiment with several of my new convictions both in class and through homework assignments, rebelling against the history of literary criticism, which I perceived as heavily influenced by left-wing ideology, and soon learned that my professors did not look kindly on some of my hot takes. By then, friendless and isolated amidst a group of 30 graduate English students who addressed one another as “comrade,” I began to suspect that 17-year-old Liza, who had once set her eyes on becoming a professor of English literature, had made a grave mistake. 

After finishing up my MA thesis in the midst of the pandemic, I walked away from my graduate study with a Master’s Degree in hand and no set course of action after setting myself up to be an English professor for the past ten years of my life. And I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was at peace with my decision. I had dispelled the cloud of premonition that had been hanging over me for the past 5 years ever since I stepped foot on campus. Leaving behind the fantasy world of academic life and entering the bustle of the real world, I knew that finally I would thrive. 

So where am I now? I’m working on a few different ventures: I spread the love of literature through my literary project Pens and Poison and I teach teenagers how to write through my college consulting company Invictus Prep. I am working on a novel that I hope will immortalize the imagination of that little girl on the tire swing—and I am proud to say that I am not an English PhD. 

Welcome back to the Pens and Poison The Waste Land analysis series! Today, we’ll be looking at Part 1 of this monumental 20th century poem about the futility of human intimacy. If you missed my intro to The Waste Land, you can read it here. 

You can also watch my analysis of Part 1 of The Waste Land here. 

In the intro and backdrop to The Waste Land, we learned about how the poem is a reinterpretation of the Fisher King myth. Today, we’ll discuss how this mythical figure plays into the first part of the poem and what this might tell us about desire in The Burial of the Dead. 

Let’s start with the epigraph. A poem’s epigraph is typically a short quotation that provides a lead-in to a poem’s overall theme or message. Eliot chooses a rather abstruse epigraph for his poem—in keeping with the poem’s overall abstruse nature, of course—and gives us a quote partially in Latin and partially in Ancient Greek. It’s an excerpt from an early Latin satirical piece by Gaius Petronius called—quite aptly—The Satyricon. 

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

There are several different translations to the excerpt above, but here’s my own translation based on my limited working knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek:

“For I saw the Cumean Sybil hanging in a jar with my own eyes, and the boys asked her, ‘Sybil, what do you want?’; she responded, ‘I want to die.’ ” 

The myth of the Cumean Sybil follows the story of a woman who was granted a wish from the Greek god Apollo. Her wish is simple: to live for as many years as there were grains of sand on the beaches of the Earth. In making her wish, however, she forgets to ask Apollo for eternal youth and now must live out her immortal days rotting from old age, suspended in a jar to survive. In a somewhat morbid turn of events, Sybil can only then think of death. 

Eliot could not have chosen a more suitable: at once, he presents us with the poem’s main themes: death, futility, desire. 

From there, we have a dedication to Eliot’s friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound, who helped edit to the poem down to the form we know it in today: 

     For Ezra Pound

       il miglior fabbro.

We’re already reading in four languages before the poem even begins. Talk about modernist pretensions! In his dedication, Eliot communicates his gratitude to Pound, whom he calls “the better craftsman.” The Italian in the dedication might at once be an homage to Eliot’s favorite poet Dante Alighieri and an allusion to Pound’s admiration for the Italian language and culture, which famously and somewhat unfortunately culminated in Pound’s support for the Italian fascist party under Mussolini. 

Yet despite Pound’s less-than-perfect politics, his skills as an editor are unparalleled. Pound was responsible, for instance, for the poem’s current title, The Waste Land, which, at his instigation, Eliot changed from his original title He Do the Police in Different Voices, a reference to Charles Dickens’ Victorian novel Our Mutual Friend. Eliot’s original title was meant to capture the many overlapping voices we see throughout the poem, but the title The Waste Land more succinctly represents the poem’s essence. 

The Waste Land famously opens with an allusion to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a medieval collection of stories that center around a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Chaucer’s work opens with a plea to springtime—“Whan that April with his showres soote”—and through its opening lines sets up the theme of hope through the rebirth of life in spring. The Waste Land’s opening line—“April is the cruellest month”—takes Chaucer’s idea of spring as rebirth and turns it on its head—spring is no longer about hope; in Eliot, rather, spring becomes the emblem of futility and cruelty. The season no longer embodies the blanket of safety that it does in Chaucer—in Eliot, in fact, it is now “winter that kept us warm.” The narrator of the opening stanza of The Waste Land—perhaps the figure Marie—experiences a fear that can only be released by the act of sledding downward. When Marie feels frightened, her cousin negates her fear and isolation by taking her sledding in the mountains, replacing her fear with a sense of freedom. In one respect, Eliot seems to be saying, freedom assuages fear. Yet freedom from what? Desire, perhaps? That certainly seems to be the landscape that Eliot presents us with at the outset of the poem.

The second stanza of the poem—widely known as “The Sermon Stanza”—presents an alternate take on fear through allusions to the Book of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. At this stage in the narrative, Ezekiel establishes a prophetic authority within the poem that grants both the prophet and the reader the feelings that were earlier denied them in the Marie episode. While Marie sleds downwards and releases fear, the prophetic stanza explores the act of rising—almost a direct juxtaposition to Marie’s release of anxiety whilst sledding. Here, fear culminates in “a handful of dust,” a reference to the famous “all is vanity” from Ecclesiastes, which highlights the futility of old age and argues that all human experience must end in the same way. 

Intimacy in The Waste Land therefore becomes intrinsically bound up with the human experience of fear. If you recall our earlier analysis of the Fisher King, you’ll remember that one of the most famous representations of the Fisher King lies in Wagner’s opera Parsifal. It is no accident, then, that the end of the sermon stanza Eliot quotes directly from Wagner: 

       Frisch weht der Wind

                      Der Heimat zu

                      Mein Irisch Kind,

                      Wo weilest du?

My translation of these lines runs thus:

Fresh blows the wind 

To the homeland 

My Irish child, 

Why are you weeping? 

These lines appear twice in the opera, and with the exception of four preceding lines that establish the nautical setting of the first act, these words open the initial act of Tristan und Isolde and introduce a new motif within the opera that we do not find in the prelude; later on, sung by the same young seaman, they also open the second scene of the opera. 

Tristan und Isolde? But isn’t The Waste Land based on Parsifal? 

My theory is that Eliot quotes from Tristan rather than Parsifal because the former opera more accurately captures the theme of the futility of desire and the unnaturalness of intimacy—the main ideas of The Waste Land. 

The sailor’s song in Tristan establishes a powerful sense of erotic longing for an unattainable beloved; 

taken by itself, the sailor’s song has no obvious mal-intent: the seaman sings “of his separation from his own Irish sweetheart,” a lover we never see onstage and who is removed from the storyline entirely; the moody Isolde, however, overhears the sailor’s song and immediately takes his lament as an invitation to rage against Tristan in the memory of her own betrothed, the Irish knight Morold, whom Tristan has slain. As she overhears the sailor’s song, Isolde, starts up auffahrend, the German irritable. Her next reaction—sie blickt verstört um sich (she looks around in bewilderment)—suggests a sense of confusion and mental distress that anticipates the ignorance of Eliot’s Hyacinth Girl (whom we will meet in just a moment). 

When we hear the text of the sailor’s song for a second time in the following scene, we find that Isolde has undergone a change of heart: the description that Wagner gives of Isolde runs thus: deren Blick sogleich Tristan fand und starr auf ihn geheftet blieb, dumpf für sich. Her gaze lands immediately on Tristan and remains fixed; she sings hollowly to herself. The sailor’s song thus represents both “bereavement” and “passion” for Isolde, and her initial two lines in response to seeing Tristan—“Mir erkoren/Mir verloren” (both lost to me and destined for me)—reemphasize this dualistic dimension of love and suffering. Wagner borrows the thematic material of Mir erkoren/Mir verloren from his prelude and then reuses the same bars in the famous Liebestod in the final act of his opera. Wagner’s powerful leitmotif of desire and longing thus associates itself with the innocent sailor’s song and consequently begins to muddle innocence with sexual experience. 

Which brings us swimmingly to Eliot’s Hyacinth Garden.

Eliot is quite famous for his use of flowers and gardens as metaphors—you see his “rose garden” later in The Four Quartets’ opening poem, “Burnt Norton.” Gardens in literature have long been symbols for paradise, innocence and beauty, and they are often used metaphorically to represent societal decay—think of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, which Eliot was almost certainly intimately familiar with. In Eliot’s Hyacinth Garden, the love between the Hyacinth Girl and her lover possesses a sort of artificiality—one that is closely reminiscent of the love that develops between Tristan and Isolde, who only fall in love after they both drink a love potion. 

At the tail end of the “Hyacinth Girl" episode comes another quotation from Tristan und Isolde, this one taken from the opera’s third and final act: Oed’ und leer das Meer (Desolate and empty is the sea). The “Hyacinth Garden” passage is thus framed by these two passages taken from Tristan und Isolde, highlighting the opera's importance to the work—or, at least, to these few stanzas. Curiously enough, this line is sung by a tenor in the role of a shepherd who usually doubles in the opera as the young sailor; in performance, therefore, the roles become reminiscent of one another. 

At this point in the opera, Kurwenal, Tristan’s companion and vassal, and the shepherd are in the castle garden (there’s our garden again), looking out at sea to anticipate the coming of the ship that is to carry Isolde, the only Ärztin, or nurse, who will be able to heal the wounded Tristan—again, we revisit the theme of decay and healing and are reminded of the Fisher King. Kurwenal asks the shepherd to “pipe his merriest tune” should he apprehend the coming of Isolde’s ship, but the shepherd instead replies, after an extended pause that lasts five bars, that the sea is desolate and empty—our quote in the poem. 

The crucial thing to note here is that Isolde is not only separated from Tristan as a lover from a lover but also as a nurse from a patient; Tristan’s wound thus becomes associated with sexual guilt—for he has been wounded by the sword of Melot, a knight who serves King Marke, the man Isolde was supposed to marry upon the ship’s arrival to Cornwall. When Tristan and Isolde are discovered making love in the garden in the previous act, Tristan succumbs to Melot’s sword because of the guilt he feels at having been with Isolde. What is even most significant for our purposes is the explicit link that Tristan’s wound creates between himself and Parsifal’s Amfortas—Eliot’s Fisher King. 

In both cases, the wound is one of “sexual guilt” and thus sets up the motifs we find in the Hyacinth Garden episode and elsewhere in the poem. The difference, however, between Eliot’s barren world and that of Tristan und Isolde is that in the latter, hope arrives in the form of Isolde the healer and temptress, albeit too late, and leads to a more optimistic “transfiguration” through the singing of her Liebestod, Isolde’s eventual love-death. In Tristan, death is the necessary prerequisite to the fulfillment of an otherwise unattainable desire, the bypath to change and transfiguration and, ultimately, a better future. 

Death allows Tristan and Isolde to reveal their true feelings for one another and escape the artificial and substitutive world which they have been previously subjected to. With the resolution of the opera’s opening Tristan chord in the Liebestod, Isolde’s emotions, stifled unnaturally for over three hours by Wagner’s initial rejection of the standard dictates of harmonic chord progression, become not only possible but also genuine. She experiences an intense emotional episode and comes to terms with the reality of her love for Tristan: she can love him only in the wake of her own death. 

In Eliot, the Hyacinth Girl’s failure with lover mirrors Tristan and Isolde’s own failed relationship in terms of a common sense of unfulfilled longing: the moment that the Hyacinth Girl apprehends the abortive nature of her relationship with her unspecified lover, “she cannot speak” and virtually loses all conscience of her surroundings. She exists in a paralyzed limbo much like Isolde, yet unlike Isolde, there is no hope for her of transformation or redemption, for we leave her in the wake of silence, desolation, emptiness. Unlike Tristan and Isolde, therefore, who attain meaning in their lives through their mutual destruction, Eliot’s lovers cannot consummate their love through any sort of transformation and thus find themselves facing an utter loss of meaning in their relationship—“I knew nothing.” Yet after a continued strain of bleakness in tone and imagery, the male figure in the garden looks into the “heart of light.” Perhaps a shred of hope? Yet as if oblivious to the failure of his sexual relationship, his hope is fleeting: he blindly convinces himself that there is hope for himself and the Hyacinth Girl, resurrecting their love in a most unnatural fashion. The phrase itself—“the heart of light”—recalls Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, from which Eliot notably intended to extract the phrase “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” for The Waste Land’s epigraph before it became the epigraph for The Hollow Men instead. 

The alteration of the phrase—from heart of darkness to heart of light—suggests a false hope for a better future and an artificial method through which this hope can be attained. The tragedy of the world of the Hyacinth Girl is thus that these lovers, and, indeed, lovers in general, can no longer recognize the beauty of genuine human connection and opt instead to content themselves with an empty erotic experience that culminates in silence.

Later in the poem, there will be hope for redemption—through the themes of drowning and water that we are introduced to at this stage of the poem.

Here we come to Madame Sosostris, the famous clairvoyante with a bad cold, who, through her Tarot cards, brings us the idea of drowning as a symbolic transformation. During a Tarot reading, she draws the card of the Phoneician Sailor, exclaiming “fear death by water.” 

Eliot likes sailors.

At this stage, in fact, we have even more of them. Eliot invites us to recall Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest—a play about drowning and shipwreck—through the lines “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” an allusion to the drowning of Ferdinand’s father. Yet as many things in The Waste Land, the motif of drowning will soon become inverted and perhaps become a positive. Don’t forget to pay attention to the nautical imagery throughout—it will come back in later sections of the poem. 

Finally, we come to the famous closing stanza of “The Burial of the Dead”: Eliot’s famous “Unreal City,” which he himself claimed was a reinterpretation of Baudelaire's Fourmillante Cité—“swarming city.” We have yet another reference (Eliot likes those) to Dante’s Inferno in the line “I had not thought that death had undone so many,” wherein Dante visits Hell and witnesses many dying souls as he progresses through each of the nine circles of Hell. The narrator of Eliot’s poem roams through a similar Hell—yet here, Hell is conceptualized in the form of the London city streets. We revisit the theme of death and old age in conjunction with the garden: 

‘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?

Does Eliot thus suggest that we can attain growth from death—rebirth from death? Morbid, yet very much in keeping with the parallel to Tristan und Isolde. 

Finally, the closing line to The Burial of the Death (in yet another language): 

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

One more Baudelaire reference, this one bringing us back to the poem’s opening line through the idea of repetition and the digging up of memories. Talk about rebirth. 

So is this a poem about death and the futility of desire? Absolutely. Through the poem’s many allusions, Eliot takes us through the decay of human relationships and the human experience. At this stage in the poem, there is no hope for redemption, yet as we'll see later, Eliot will invite us to consider what we must do to resurrect human relationships and find meaning in decay. 

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 exploitation of decay in the second half of the poem—“The Game of Chess.”