Dr. Drouin mentioned Pearl James’s new book The New Death: American Modernism and World War I several weeks ago during our reading of Brittain’s Testament of Youth. I’m still waiting for my copy to come in from ILL, but I did find some digital excerpts online (forgive the lack of page references; Kindle did not provide clear pagination). After reading The Waste Land and then comparing it with James’s assessment of how WWI changed modern ways of talking about pervasive death, I found that some of her claims helped frame my reading of Eliot’s imagining of death in a post-WWI landscape. James argues that what proved most jarring for survivors of trench warfare “is not primarily the numbers of dead. Instead, it is how people are dying and that once dead, they often remain unburied.” She cites a 1918 war essay by Winifred Kirkland as an example of writing focused not just on death but on “ ‘dissolution:’ the grotesque physical breakdown of the body over time.”

The reality of unburied dead easily leads to unfinished mourning. In Testament of Youth, we see Brittain experiencing tremendous survivor’s guilt as she seeks ways to memorialize the dead. She does not understand how she can go on living “when so many beautiful bodies of young men were rotting in the mud of France and the pine forests of Italy” (458). Like James mentions, these bodies were not given any kind of closing ritual, leaving survivors grappling with the task of disassociating the person from their unburied body. It is significant that Eliot titles the first section of The Waste Land “The Burial of the Dead,” borrowing from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It underscores the importance of death rites to a generation puzzling out what kind of relationship to have with the dead, if any.

Heightening this imagery of dead bodies and their relation to an unnatural burial, Brittain also says her “early ideals of the War were all shattered, trampled into the mud which covered the bodies of those with whom I had shared them” (446). The profaning of the human body and the image of it being carelessly scattered, like a type of deformed seed, in the mud again emerges when Brittain sees Roland’s possessions from the front. His clothes were “damp and worn and simply caked with mud…the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the Dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of eat, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies--dead that had been dead a long, long time" (251-252).

This kind of description also appears in Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches,” where the poet describes how the soldiers were “Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, / The torn fields of France” (17-18) and how dead troops were becoming a part of this besmirched landscape, with poppies taking root in “man’s veins / Drop, and are ever dropping” (23-24). James supports this unsettling depiction in her book: “Unidentified dead bodies, broken into parts and mere matter, have become maidenly ubiquitous; they pervade the entire landscape, both at its surface and below, in its textures, smells, sounds, sights.”

Now we come to Eliot’s The Waste Land, which like Brittain’s Testament of Youth, adopts an almost funeralistc tone. While reading The Waste Land and looking at some excerpts of the source texts supplied in the Norton Critical Edition, these strange image patterns of rot and death sprouting from the ground kept surfacing, with the human body acting as a kind of seed. In its scattered and retooled elements from sources like Jessie Weston’s explanation of “The Fisher King,” Eliot’s poem clearly toys with fertility and sterility, but I think there’s an added dimension at play here, an added texture directly coupling unburied, unmemoralized bodies with planting and reaping. The poem operates on an inverted seasonal timetable, starting with a barren spring and moving back to winter. Dead, deformed seeds yield nothing in desolated ground. There is no redemption for the water death described in section IV; the body of Phlebas, like the bodies of soldiers, remains unburied, with only the sea’s current picking “his bones in whispers” (316).

Perhaps the clearest appeal to this type of imagery appears at the end of Eliot’s first section, where the speaker talks with Stetson, a war veteran. He asks, “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / Or has sudden frost disturbed its bed?” (71-73). Notice the parallels with Rosenberg’s poem, who described the body as sprouting poppies. In Eliot’s poem, the dead literally haunt the living, and I kept thinking about some of the related patterns in The Waste Land and Hamlet. While The Waste Land does not appeal directly to Hamlet, unlike Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” there is the inclusion of Ophelia’s parting words before her death at the end of Section II. In Hamlet, murderous blood waters the earth. Incest replaces healthy reproduction. The dead also haunt the living. After the carnage of Act 5, the crumpled bodies of Prince Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes litter the stage. In the last lines of the play, Fortinbras commands his troops: “Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this / Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss” (5.2.403-404). The field of battle and the grounds of the caste have switched in a way that is unnatural, or “amiss.” Eliot also dislodges the bodies from the fields of war, placing them instead in an urban, “Unreal City” (60), planting the corpses and raising their ghosts there instead. But do they belong here either? Traditional language proves unsatisfactory to describe the slaughter of WWI. Words lose their relation to each other; they are fragments, broken like unburied body parts, or “a heap of broken images” (22).