A Prayer for Life: Water, Art and Spirituality in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

This article reads T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from an “ecocritical” (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996; Garrard 2004) and “blue” (Hau’ofa 2008; Ingersoll 2016; Mathieson 2021) or ‘water’ perspective. It focuses on Eliot’s magical and aesthetic (r)evolutions depicting the sterility and degradation of life after World War I. I focus on three episodes that mix modern expressions and arts with highly evocative and spiritual forces coming from Eliot’s American heritage and his interest in Eastern religions and philosophies. Madame Sosostris’s reading of the ‘wicked’ cards becomes in this way a Modernist dance of ‘liquid’ archetypes. Tiresias, the prophet and true ‘seer’ evokes a Cubist painting while substantiating the need for fluid and more positive encounters in our life. The three-time beating refrain in the Shanti prayer epitomises the rhythm of water-dropping, the expected coming of water that will heal and re-connect humanity with the ‘One life’. In this “undisciplined” (Benozzo 2010) interpretation, I read The Waste Land as a prayer for water, a communal and “partnership” (Eisler 1988; Eisler & Fry 2019) claim for regeneration and transformation, in the acknowledgement that we, humans, are just one side of the spiralling and cosmic music of the world.