I’m very, very fond of ruins, ruins I love to scan
You’d say I’m very fond of ruins if you saw my old man
This week, I’ve been thinking about a strange line from The Waste Land again. Or, rather, a strange word in a famous line. It occurs in the final passage of the poem:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
And it stands out as the last “original” line — a comment, by the poet, on the many-tongued rubble of allusion heaped around it:
Rhythmically, as an iambic pentameter among much irregularity, it also stands out. So the strange thing about this famous line is that it’s hard to remember. I’ve confirmed this with two people who also know the poem well — it’s a classic line to quote when teaching The Waste Land. But we all tend to recall Eliot saying
These fragments I have shored against my ruin
until we check and see the missing “s”.
I began to think about this while browsing the paperbacks shored in a charity shop, where I found a reprint of Poetic Diction (1928) by Owen Barfield — influential friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. What made me decide to buy it was a chapter on the poetic evolution of the word “ruin”.
Barfield asserts that, when “ruin” comes into fourteenth-century English from Latin ruo (“rush, collapse”), its earliest meaning is an action rather than an object: the fall of something. “It has as yet no solid associations to give it weight […] It is simply a useful Latin word.”
But by the fifteenth century we start to see “plural use with a definitely material reference—ruins”. Once Spenser, Shakespeare and others get hold of it, says Barfield, the word begins to acquire “a soul”. By the time we reach the Romantic poets, “it is irradiated with some of the massive quiet of deserted Gothic masonry”.
As this shows, Barfield has a Romantic eloquence of his own. But his taste in poetry seems to have stopped short of modernism. Despite the fact that Poetic Diction was published in 1928 by Faber — where Eliot was an editor — Barfield does not mention The Waste Land (1922) in his discussion of contemporary poetic use of the word, preferring instead the rather less modernist example of E. L. Davison (“The ruin of thy soft, bewildering name”).
But Barfield’s little history illuminates Eliot’s “ruins”. The plural form makes the metaphor both more concrete and less explicable: an image rather than simply an abstract condition (“a ruined man”). In his recent “biography” of The Waste Land, Matthew Hollis dramatizes the moment that Eliot wrote the final lines:
London Bridge collapsing into the tradition of Arnaut Daniel’s “Ara vos prec”, collapsing into Dante’s Purgatorio, collapsing into the Vigil of Venus in Latin Rome, collapsing into the Aquitaine prince and his ruined tower, collapsing into Elizabethan drama — the great driver of the poem — “mad againe”. These fragments I have spelt into — no, he would quickly alter that — These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
The manuscript of the poem shows Eliot making this revision, along with others:
So the line as it first came out seems to have been:
These fragments I have spelt against my ruins
But I wonder if this is quite right. “Spelt into” is a self-consciously writerly reflection: I have arranged these incomplete pieces of text into a representation of my own despair. “Shored against” is more three-dimensional, deriving as it does from the name of a prop — of iron or timber — used to support a structure such as a wall. The “fragments” are no longer verses rearranged on the page; they have been stood upright, with a purpose.
Did the change of verb suggest a modification of the noun? Look again at the manuscript, and you’ll see that hard-to-remember “s” tilts away from the rest of the word, in its own little grid square, as though added afterwards. Did “shored” suggest “ruin s” — which are often propped up for public safety?
Or was it thinking about the physical meaning of “fragments” that led Eliot to alter the whole line? Reading Barfield led me to pull down another charity-shop find: Glorious Norfolk Ruins (1987). This happily-named piece of local antiquarianism features a map on the back — where, as you’ll see, “Ruins” denote a “Major” site of medieval remains, to be distinguished from “Minor Fragments Only”.
Whatever the process by which Eliot arrived at the line, the thought that Barfield has left me with is this: in its ancient, solid way, “ruins” is a word of the British landscape. The first time Eliot used it as a poet was in America, at the end of “A Fable for Feasters”, a comic tale for his school magazine about gluttonous monks:
We
Got the veracious record of these doings
From an old manuscript found in the ruins.
There were no stone ruins of the old, monk-haunted sort in America. So for the modernist poet who would increasingly express his reactionary love of an imagined Old England — declaring himself in 1928 “royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” — the word already had a certain “soul”, to borrow Barfield’s term. And this means that the line itself isn’t simply an expression of despair, as commonly assumed by commentaries on the poem — and by anyone who misremembers it — but a gesture towards the work of preservation, the propping up of scheduled monuments.
Yes, it’s the fragmentary poem of a man diagnosed in summer 1921 with a “nervous breakdown” (as Paul Muldoon observes, one friend aptly described Eliot as “going to pieces”). But it’s also that of a poet who, in May 1921, campaigned against the Church of England’s proposal to knock down some of Christopher Wren’s London churches. “My ruin” suggests complete loss; “my ruins”, something to be saved.
NOTES
Robert Crawford, in his biography Eliot After The Waste Land (2022), makes a connection with “One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit”, a song Eliot mentioned in his tribute to the London music-hall star Marie Lloyd, who died in the month that The Waste Land appeared (October 1922).
The punning opening lines of the song are quoted at the top of this post. Crawford comments on Eliot’s line:
Here, as in Marie Lloyd’s song, the “ruins” might be those of physical stonework, but they are also the ruins of a person — “my ruins” — and suggests that the “I” here is a ruined self.
My point, though, is that you wouldn’t say “my ruins” if you simply meant “my ruin”. By choosing the plural form, as his long poem of cacophony and catastrophe ends, Eliot implies that it too has “the massive quiet of deserted Gothic masonry” (as well as the deserted music hall).
I wrote about another strange line from The Waste Land here: