Abstract
Tucked into the opening dozen lines of “The Fire Sermon” is a sentence that blends a verse from the Old Testament with a detail from Eliot’s own life: “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…” (WL 182; ellipses are Eliot’s). Captive Israelites weep by a river in Psalm 137, and Leman is a Swiss lake to which Eliot had personal connections. In 1921, he suffered some kind of nervous breakdown: “I was aware,” he later wrote his friend Sydney Waterlow, “that the principal trouble was that I have been losing power of concentration and attention, as well as becoming prey to habitual worry and dread of the future: consequently, wasting far more energy than I used, and wearing myself out continuously” (19 Dec. 1921). A specialist in London prescribed three months of solitude, “alone and away from anyone”; he was not to “exert [his] mind at all” (“To Richard Aldington” 3? Oct. 1921). Eliot thus spent a month at Margate with his wife (Margate is mentioned in “The Fire Sermon,” line 300) and toward the end of November traveled alone to Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was under the care of Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Roger Vittoz.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Copyright information
© 2015 Allyson Booth
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Booth, A. (2015). “By the waters of Leman”: Eliot and Lake Leman. In: Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137482846_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137482846_26
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-69583-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-48284-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)