Unreal city
This section begins with an allusion to the French poet Charles Baudelaire, and ends with a direct quotation. The 1861 edition of his collection Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) contains these lines:
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
(Swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where ghosts in daylight grab the passers-by!)
Eliot saw a connection between Baudelaire's vision of a haunted, dream-state Paris and the walking dead of Dante's Inferno; in The Waste Land, he transposes this image to London.
There is a callback to the image in part three of the poem:
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
where London is a scene of delusion and moral decline; and in the final part, where it represents the collapse of civilisations:
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
(Swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where ghosts in daylight grab the passers-by!)
Eliot saw a connection between Baudelaire's vision of a haunted, dream-state Paris and the walking dead of Dante's Inferno; in The Waste Land, he transposes this image to London.
There is a callback to the image in part three of the poem:
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
where London is a scene of delusion and moral decline; and in the final part, where it represents the collapse of civilisations:
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
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