T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is definitely the most painfully confusing pieces of poetry I’ve ever had to read. The fragmented structure and my dislike for most Modernist pieces does not set me up well for an easy reading experience. Luckily, I was placed in the group that required me even before I read it to regard it as a retelling of the Fisher King and the Holy Grail Quest. After reading the poem a couple of times and discussing its features in class, I believe this lensed view best fits the poem even though the other explanations are clearly interrelated.

In Eliot’s very first footnote, he outright says the poem was inspired by the classic tale; the Fisher King is injured in a way that makes him sterile, which is mimicked to his land as well as it becomes a barren wasteland so the search for the Holy Grail of Christ begins to bring back fertility to both land and king. Eliot tells his readers that he used Jessie L. Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance that is based of the Grail quest and recommends the readers use that book if they wish to “elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my [his] notes can do,” (1317). The authors frank acknowledgement that much of the poem is based of this old legend makes it difficult to not read the poem with this theme in mind. From the beginning of the poem to the end, much of Eliot’s symbolism can be traced back to the Fisher King and the Grail quest.

Throughout the poem Eliot clearly illustrates a barren, desolate land, as this is what happens to the Fisher King’s land once his health deteriorates. The depressing setting is described with earnest in many of the sections. Section one lines 19-30 really hit home as to how dry and dead the land with phrases like “the dead tree gives no shelter,” “dry stone no sound of water,” “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” (1318). There are other references to the dying land in other sections but not as emphasized as it is in the first and last sections. A major part of the last section is about the lack of water in second and third stanzas, which means little to no life for the land nor a chance for it to regenerate (1325). The infertility of the dry land is referenced as well in many places. The most distinct example is in the first section where the speaker asks his friend, Stetson, if “the corpse you planted last year in your garden,” has sprouted (1319). We assume it has not been a fertile planting because the speaker offers gardening tips on how to get it to grow. This and other instances show that the land is not entering fertile and is dying off just as the legend of the Grail states, but the land’s infertility is not the only support for this theme’s prominence in the poem.

In the first section in stanza three, a fortuneteller does a Tarot card reading. This reading mentions a “man of three staves” and the “Hanged Man” during this stanza (1319). Two of footnotes are very crucial to this section and create a direct link to the Quest. In footnote 11, Eliot admits he is not an expert in Tarot cards but associates the “Man of Three Staves with the Fisher King himself” (1318-1319). I took the lines 54-55 “I do not find/ The hanged Man,” to be a reference to the missing knight of the Quest, as no one (even though the Fisher King waits for someone) comes to complete the Quest to find the Grail that would heal him and the land (1319).

We know no one has come to seek the Grail in the last section of the poem. Lines 386 through 395 describe the “Chapel Perilous” that is disturbed by no one. This chapel is from Weston’s book and is described in the first footnote as part of terrifying obstacles that would test the “knights courage” as he completed his quest, but as the Eliot’s poem describes no one is there and no one comes to aid the Fisher King (1326). Part of the legend also states that the Fisher king stays by the river and fishes while he waits for the Grail, which is exactly what is described in the poem. Lines 424 and 425 state, “I sat upon the shore/ Fishing, with the arid plain behind me” (1326). The speaker here is clearly the Fisher King doing what legend says—fishing in his dying land according to Weston’s book as Eliot references in his footnote 9 (1326).

In the direct mention to the Fisher King’s role in the poem, the constant portrayal of a dying, infertile land, and many references to the story of the Fisher King and The Holy Grail Quest there is no room for argument that The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot has this quest as a vital theme to understanding the poem.