With Automatic Hand: The Waste Land

Abstract

Consider the first verse-paragraph that opens The Waste Land : April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. ( CPP 61) These lines pose an intriguing question: How many people are speaking here? To answer it, we can only scrutinize the text in order to identify the lexical and syntactic patterns that distinguish each individual's speech. If we begin to do that, we swiftly observe that lines 1–7 are very distinctive. We notice the participial constructions that end many lines: “breeding” (1), “mixing” (2), “stirring” (3), “covering”(5), and “feeding” (6), a pattern that is even repeated once more and reappears at line 8, in “coming over the Starnbergersee.” We also can't miss the use of adjective-noun pairings that occur in these lines, usage so insistent that there are seven of them: “cruellest month” (1), “dead land” (2), “dull roots” and “spring rain” (4), “forgetful snow” (6), and “little life” and “dried tubers” (7). Taken together, then, participial constructions and adjective-noun pairing seem to typify a coherent voice, and we can identify that voice for the moment as Zone 1. Further, we can also identify that voice as masculine, oddly, because we have no idea whatsoever who is speaking the poem's first four lines; yet they sound threatening (“cruellest month” and “dead land”), and minatory speech not assigned to any individual or source is conventionally spoken by a masculine voice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.