The Waste Land

By T. S. Eliot

V.  What The Thunder Said

Then spoke the thunder
D A                                                                           400
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed                     405
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
D A                                                                              410
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours                           415
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
D A
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded 420
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I decided to revisit The Waste Land a poem written in 1922 by T. S. Eliot.  The poem is not easy to understand.  It is a rumination about the state of culture, of the psychic condition of Europe in the aftermath of the horrors of WWI.  In section V Eliot references the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, chapter 5, second Brahman .  The thunder, a harbinger of rain speaks in the formula from the Upanishads.  The headings DA DA DA correspond to the words “Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata” translated: give, sympathize, and control.  The thunder speaks as if a divine voice : What have you given?  And I the reader am jolted.  Indeed what have I given of myself to others around me, to my wife, daughter and her spouse, to my granddaughter, to friends, to any that by happenstance I may meet, and perhaps most important of all, what have I given to the earth?

Yes, life is “as if” a prison, and do we not listen carefully for the sound of the turn of the key?  That key of liberation, that hint of rain: one’s faith in Jesus, or the notion that “you can be anything that you want to be” in America, or the most farfetched “key” of all, Trump elected and Republican control of Congress, etc.  So many keys that we listen for, a reminder of our common condition.

Do I paint a pessimistic picture?  Not at all. 

Our boat responds gaily, to fate, the experienced hand with sail and oar.  The sea is calm and our heart responds too, still obediently beating to the controlling hand.