One possible interpretation is provided by the reference that follows: by this moment of surrender, and this only, ‘we have existed’. The ‘awful daring of a moment’s surrender’ is the response no amount of prudence or caution afterwards will ‘retract’ or undo that moment of surrender. This prompts the speaker (or collective speakers?) of this section of Eliot’s poem to ask what they have given. This first ‘DA’ is interpreted by those listening to it as ‘Datta’, a Sanskrit word often translated as meaning ‘give’.

The context of the line is the coming of the thunderclap in ‘What the Thunder Said’, the final part of The Waste Land. Perhaps one of the most opaque and obscure quotations in the whole of The Waste Land – and there’s no shortage of those. ‘The awful daring of a moment’s surrender’. This refers to the souls of the damned in hell, and can be translated as ‘And after there was so long a train of people, that I never would have believed that Death so many had undone.’ Eliot’s clerks and bankers, by comparison, are inhabiting 1920s post-war London: a living hell? Compare this section of the poem with the man from ‘A Game of Chess’, the poem’s second part, who talks of still being ‘in rats’ alley’ among the bones of ‘the dead men’.Įliot’s inspiration for these lines from a passage from the Inferno, a poem by the medieval Italian poet Dante (part of his three-part Divine Comedy): Why? One answer is survivor’s guilt: many of the young and middle-aged men travelling to their jobs as clerks in 1922 would have been veterans of the war, who would have seen many of their comrades killed in action in northern France. All of this death has ‘undone’ the living. ‘ I had not thought death had undone so many’.Ī reference to the crowd of commuters walking across London Bridge at dawn, on their way to their office jobs, this quotation suggests the emotional and psychological scars left by the First World War.

Is he suggesting that such wars are nothing new, and have been a continual feature of all empires and all civilisations?

Eliot even refers to one of the battles from the Punic Wars, the Battle of Mylae, in the ‘Stetson’ section towards the end of ‘The Burial of the Dead’.

The waste land and other poems