“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”: Shackleton’s South

In “What the Thunder Said,” The Waste Land seems to dissolve into a chorus of anxious voices and to flicker into and out of a series of landscapes. Narratives in this section of the poem are more identifiable in Eliot’s notes and in the source material than they are in the poem itself. In his note on line 360, for example, Eliot tells us a story and mentions, casually, what its source may be: “The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted” (CP 74–75). The Waste Land lines to which he refers sound like this:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you? (WL 360–66)