Part 3: Explication: The Fire Sermon

     The third section of The Waste Land is called the Fire Sermon, which is something a Buddhist councils his followers to conceive an aversion for the burning flames of passion and physical sensation, and thus live a holy life, attain freedom from earthly things, and finally leave the cycle of rebirth for Nirvans. This section is about LUST vs. LOVE.      In the beginning of the first sestina, the narrator talks about the river –“the river tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymhs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.” The song refers to a marriage song of nymphs that are described as ‘lovely daughters of the flood.’ The land is brown, deserted, marking the waste land. The nymphs are gone – the river gods have departed leaving it with a lack of life. “The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends or other testimony summer nights,” all of these things would mean that there’s life still present at the river. There’s no garbage, nothing left forgotten, no sign of human life. The psalmist describes a weeping for their land – “by the water of Leman I sat down and wept…” The poem, To His Coy Mistress is alluded to from the line “but at my back in a cold blast I hear.”--- (poem) ‘but at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”
     The ‘gashouse’ in London is their major source of power- it’s smutty and doesn’t help their ‘wasteland’. “While I was fishing in the dull canal” gives the narrator, or the Fisher King, more of a well-rounded atmosphere. “Missing upon the kind my brother’s wreck and on the king my father’s death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground and bones cast in a little low dry garret.” People are dead on the side of the trenches – the Tempest is referred to again.
     “Twit twit twit jug jug jug jug jug so rudely for’d Tereu” is the nightingale song that sets up the third part of this section. The nightingale song, like in The Fire Sermon, is hinting at a rape – “rudely forc’d”. A woman wouldn’t be singing to this however, but more yelling or screaming.
     In the Unreal City of London, a Smyrna merchant ‘with a pocket full of currents’ tries to seduce the narrator, the Fisher King by asking him to lunch and a weekend away in Metropole. The merchant doesn’t even know the narrator yet tries to seduce him anyways - theme of lust vs. love. Taro cards are present again; like in the first section of the Waste Lands it foresees something, and in this instance it’s the merchant. The merchant seducing the Fisher King alludes to Dante.
     The next speaker is Tiresias – he’s a blind seer like the fortune teller earlier on in the poem. He talks about his apartment – and then about a man who arrived at a woman’s house. After the meal ends, the man assaults her as she is not able to put up any defense – she was drugged making her weak and tired. He rapes her willingly and again refers back to the theme of lust vs. love where there is obviously no love present at all. The man is spiritually dead and the woman in a way is too – “Well now that’s done; and I’m glad it’s over.” She accepts it and doesn’t seem to feel…anything that a normal person would. Perhaps living in the Waste Land people were just okay with the things going wrong with and around them.
     The final part of the section has a setting of a lower class fisherman lounge probably sometime in the afternoon where music is being played. The song essentially sums up all of what was discussed throughout this section – the river that ‘sweats oil and tar’, the rape and the overall theme of lust vs. love. “Weilalala leia Wallala leialala” is used to show when someone is crying. Dante is referred to “Richmond and Kew undid me” – (Dante) ‘Siena made me, Maremma unmade me,’ a reference to her violent death in Maremma at her husband’s hands. “Burning burning burning burning” alludes back to section 2, the Buddha’s Fire Sermon (BUT the line isn’t quoted from it). The song is used to bring everything together.