T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

The Waste Land Explication

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I Could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence (38-41)

        This passage taken from “The Waste Land” is the voice of a male speaker describing his moment of sexual failure/impotence upon seeing the girl from his past, the hyacinth girl.  Although the girl’s “arms [are] full,” suggesting sexual energy and expression as if she is about to embrace him, the speaker’s biological senses suddenly collapse, and thus fail to respond to her sexual desire/seduction physically: He becomes mute (“I Could not Speak”) and blind (“my eyes failed”).  However, with the lost of his corporeal sight, his spiritual vision sees beyond the mortal ground where he can at least, with confidence, affirm that he is neither “living nor dead,” as if in a state of limbo/nothingness.  Though unable to verbalize his epiphany, his spiritual vision “look[s deep]…into the heart of light” and becomes aware of the “silence” that pervades this nihilistic realm.  In effect, while he is in this mental trance, all forms of his familiarity de-familiarize.  For instance, he no longer recognizes/reacts to his old acquaintance (the hyacinth girl) the way he should/is expected to, that is passionately/nostalgically.  In other words, his cognitive mechanism disintegrates, causing his social behavior to defy his character or his wishes.  His “memory,” “knowledge,” and perhaps even his “identity” efface into a nihilistic state where nothing is decipherable/explicable: “I knew nothing.”  Despite what the lushness/sexual ecstasy her “wet” hair suggests and “hyacinth” that symbolizes her fecundity, his inaction to such an enticing, pleasurable call begs questions: Can we trust the speaker’s senses?  Why does his sight fail? Why is his sensory-collapsing epiphany ineffable? Could it be that the hyacinth girl is only an oasis, an optical illusion the speaker thirsts for in the desert?  If the hyacinth girl does in fact represent the normalcy and fruitfulness of the past that is no longer possible in the Waste Land, then Eliot in this passage is wistfully delineating a bleak, barren view of the modernists whose sexual/mental intercourse has fragmented abysmally.